Sketch of proposed Planned Parenthood building.
Beech Street Partners illustration

Over the course of seven years, Portland’s urban renewal department and private developers were unable to attract their first-choice tenants to a set of Northeast Portland parcels slated for urban renewal. Then they accepted Planned Parenthood.

Plans are advancing slowly for the site where abortion and other services will be offered, amid intrepid opposition from some residents and the pro-life community.

Starting in 2000, the Portland Development Commission courted a bakery headquarters, a call center and a senior rehabilitation clinic to come to a corner of Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard and Beech Street.

The city owned several lots and the developers an adjacent property. The idea was to combine the private and public parcels to bring in something big and good for the neighborhood.

“It is very difficult to attract people who want to come there. That area is very blighted,” says James Adamson, a Portland developer who with Tim Ray makes up Beech Street Partners. After purchasing the city lot and funding construction — all with the approval of the development commission — Adamson and Ray stand to make profits by collecting lease payments from Planned Parenthood over the long term.

Adamson helps operate about 60 healthcare facilities across the U.S. He has developed five other commercial sites on MLK and two on Burnside Street. Most sites have restaurants and other businesses, not abortion sites. Ray, who lives in Northeast Portland, has developed residential and commercial properties.

Adamson has faced controversy before in his work, but concedes that abortion is an issue more divisive than others. In meetings with the city, Adamson and Ray said the Planned Parenthood building could be designed to minimize the impact pro-life protesters might have.

The Beech Street project’s origins can be traced back about a decade. A study for Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard called for development that would bring jobs and services to a thoroughfare that had become more known for drug dealing, prostitution and unemployment. The city purchased lots and began looking for a major tenant.

In 2005, Adamson and Ray approached the development commission with the rehabilitation center plan. But owners of the center balked when they could not get guarantees on costs of implementing city labor policy, a requirement for those leasing civic property.

“Planned Parenthood came forward,” says Adamson. “They had been looking at MLK for a long time.”

Planned Parenthood says that more than 90 percent of its visits are over matters other than abortion. They treat sexually-transmitted diseases and offer general healthcare for women.

“In Tim’s and my mind, those are services we could support because there are a lot of people out there who need health care based on a sliding scale,” says Adamson, who adds that he is “not pro-abortion,” but believes people should be able to choose what the law allows. “PDC is not tasked with deciding whether Roe v. Wade is legal. Neither am I.”

Records show that the bulk of Planned Parenthood’s clinic income is derived from abortions, especially now that donations are dropping. In its 2005-2006 fiscal year, Planned Parenthood performed a record 265,000 abortions nationwide. That accounted for about a third of $345 million in income from clinics. The group reported it was almost $56 million in the black and received more than $305 million in taxpayer funding.

Sara King, the Portland Development Commission manager for the project, says Planned Parenthood was not a last resort, but was seen as a good candidate because of its ability to create a wide variety of jobs.

“We were in no hurry to dispose of the property,” King says.

The organization also agreed to city regulations, including building in an environmentally-sustainable way, maintaining labor standards and hiring minorities.

If all goes according to plan, the sale of property to Beech Street Partners will go through by mid-February.

King says the time for protest and appeal is past. But pro-lifers are keeping at it, hoping for a miracle.

Opponents of Planned Parenthood are critical mostly of abortion, but say the organization also ends up promoting promiscuity, part of a cycle that includes abortion and income for the organization.

“Kids will be getting information about sex, then getting pregnant and then going back to the place where they got the information for an abortion,” says Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers of nearby Immaculate Heart Parish.

Those who do not want Planned Parenthood in the neighborhood have been standing vigil at the site for months. They submitted a petition with 900 signatures to city officials and have sent letters to Mayor Tom Potter. They held a rally with 400 people early in November and are calling Walsh Construction and Ankrom Moison Architects to ask them to refuse to work on the project.

Alveda King, niece of slain civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., came to Portland earlier this year and said that her uncle would not want an abortion clinic on a street named after him.

Adamson counters that many local residents, including some Protestant pastors, have supported the Planned Parenthood project. He contends that many protesters are from other parts of the metro area. “Most who live around there want job growth and are not opposed to having Planned Parenthood there,” he says.

The proposed abortion site is next to a Muslim prayer site.

Adamson claims good relations with Muslim leaders, who he says were planning to move their growing congregation to another location in the neighborhood anyway.

“Their stance to us has been, ‘This is the law of the land so we are not going to protest it,’” Adamson says.

But some Muslims are upset over the development.

“It is an absolute abomination that they want to build a place to destroy life, and on a road named after Martin Luther King, Jr.,” says 57-year-old Assad Abdullah, who prays at the center.

Bill Diss, a teacher at Benson High School in Northeast Portland, leads the opposition to Planned Parenthood.

A member of St. Francis Parish in Sherwood, he says he is motivated by wanting to protect his students, who he says are trying hard to escape the cycle of promiscuity that has hurt their home lives already.

“It’s just not good to push sex services on kids,” Diss says.
Opponents now meet from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays at the current Planned Parenthood location at 15th and Fremont. From 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Wednesdays and Thursdays, they gather at the proposed site at MLK and Beech.

In a related issue, protesters are targeting a Portland Development Commission member who also sits on the board of trustees of Jesuit High School.

In debate over the Beech Street plan, Charles Wilhoite lauded the work of Planned Parenthood.

“Planned Parenthood’s ‘education’ is diametrically opposed to centuries of Catholic education,” Diss wrote in a letter to the Jesuit trustees, seeking Wilhoite’s dismissal.