The core stays public. By law, not by promise.
Concept visualization — retained-core variant by Sarif Consulting.
Three legal safeguards that outlast any board.
The homes around the core are mixed-use. Some of them are permanently affordable social housing, and some are market homes with shops and workplaces. The Stewardship Trust is what protects it all.
The mission lock
An Oregon stewardship trust under ORS 130.193 — a form the legislature created precisely so a purpose can outlive the people who set it. The trust holds consent rights over the decisions that would end the mission: sale of the core, privatization of the public realm, dissolution of the affordability structure. Oregon law allows these trusts to be enforced beyond ninety years. Permanence is a legal fact here, not a figure of speech.
The public realm, recorded
A recorded public-access covenant covers roughly 450,000 SF of civic interior — the Commons Spine, the indoor promenade, the atrium, the rink. It protects the civic function, not just the physical structure: a future board cannot “save the building” while quietly discontinuing the commons. A historic conservation easement under ORS 271.715 runs alongside it. Both are held by third parties, and both survive the Foundation's own failure.
The land around the core
Most of that land would be leased for a long term, under covenants written in the trust itself, including the affordability rules. Some of it can be sold, and only by a supermajority vote plus the consent of the easement holders. The civic core is never sold, and it is never pledged as collateral. A future board cannot give those powers to itself.
Where this idea comes from.
Lloyd Commons and the Albina Vision Trust are not the same project, and they are not affiliated. Albina’s history is its own. This site does not borrow it.
The precedent is the Albina Vision Trust itself: a Portland nonprofit that holds land for public use, with a seat for the people who live nearby, and homes that stay affordable because the land is not flipped. Albina One is one result of that work, not a substitute for it: 94 homes, all of them affordable, opened in September 2025, co-developed with Edlen & Co.
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No entity exists yet. The instruments are designed, not formed. What exists today →