The Whale Responds!
Kinda.
As Dissenters might recall, your writer attended a community PR session recently, offered by the developers of one of the county’s new “affordable” apartment complexes at 74th Ave. and Glisan St. The headline was…
In the Belly of the Beast
..which, while not poetic, certainly stated the size of the “complex.”
There will be 137 units on that half-block (with 56 parking slots…but, hey, there’s a big bike storage room—if you trust the neighbors). Who knows how many people will cram into the units, 41 of which are for the homeless, leaving 96 apartments, which will be doled out to people making, variously, either 60% or 30% of the median family income…
This is part of the county’s feckless effort to build its way out of its self-proclaimed “housing crisis,” mostly by doling out tranches of $258.4 million in general obligation bonds which Portland’s whifty voters approved in 2016. Props to the county for being fast-moving.
The project won’t be winning any architectural awards…
…and it will be dumped into a community of mostly single-family homes built back when Portland architecture might be called “charming,” as opposed to “Stalinist Moderne.”
Persistent questioning of the developer’s representative at the meeting wrung out a cost (to property taxpayers, ie., the neighbors) of $53-million.
This sounds like a lot of money—but not for the developers, Related Northwest, a subsidiary offshoot of the world’s largest privately-held real estate development company, which goes in for massive high-rise projects such as…
The centerpiece of a plan to reinvigorate downtown Los Angeles, The Grand LA is designed by Frank Gehry…
There were other questions—but the representative suggested that it would be so much better to send an email. Tidier. Easier.
And so the email was dispatched. The wait began—must be some terribly complicated stuff for the developers to parse.
You decide. Here’s what came back…
So let’s not scratch our heads about the parts of the reply that were, to put it nicely, “get lost” evasions.
How about that dollars-per-square-footage number? Even if it’s “aprox” (and the actual number of square feet isn’t mentioned in any of the projects documents), it seems rather high-end, since one estimate (for 2021) averages typical multi-family construction in Portland at $262.50 per-square foot. And most of those dollars are going to commercial projects with much higher “finish”—which makes it a heavy lift to see how an “affordable” project with a top-end rent of $1300 a month qualifies.
Another way to calculate costs is on a per-unit basis. There will be 137 units of various sizes; a little arithmetic gets us a per-unit average of $386,861.
Which is about what you would pay to buy a sixth floor one bedroom condo with a river view at The Pinnacle in the Pearl.
Let’s move on to the curious comments about the “various services” attached to the project. The developers blandly note that, “Services are provided to help stabilize vulnerable residents.”
If I happened to live next door to the project, that word, “stabilize” might cause me to consult my local Real Estate professional. Plus, there is every indication that—typical of progressive plans—there’s no end date for this “stabilization.” Good news for non-profits; not so hot for Montavilla, which already has its share of the “unstabilized.”
(Memo to the mayor: here in Montavilla the tents are back next to the freeway exits, joining the beggars who like to stand in the middle of busy-busy Glisan and the fast-growing RV favela on Burnside…just to name a few other developments.)
As for the raft of “stabilization” services…neighborhood types need not apply. Tenants only. They’’ll have to get their “food stability” elsewhere.
Then we come to the 41 units in a detached building on the site, where “people exiting homelessness” will be lodged. Let’s forget for a moment that 41 “homeless” will hardly make a dent in the total number of street-sleepers, meth-maniacs, drug-zombies, down-on-their-luck drifters, beggars, and “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose” folks disgracing our streets and parks—and attach the question: how come the neighborhood gets to be the host for these folks? How about spreading the joy of giving to Alameda?
The sharp-eyed might also note that these population-bombs are being dropped in not only Montavilla, but in hapless St. Johns, which also has more than its share of housing for the downtrodden, including a prototype of Commish Dan “Ten Feet” Ryan’s Safe Rest Villages, which neighborhood people avoid on their dog-walks.
Then ask the question: what if the homeless don’t “exit?” Portland takes a rather dim view of evictions. And how do you suppose the very nice people from Catholic Charities will contend with what might be a triumph—or a “Viradiana” on steroids?
Well, someone’s got to pay the price for the progressive failure to get real about the “homeless” crisis as well as the gross inflation of housing prices in a town trapped inside Metro’s growth boundaries. Great for farmers and realtors working the 6-percent commission; bad for the rest of us.
As for the whale; it’s going to be an interesting social experiment. And $53-million buys you a lot of human test tubes.
"Thar she blows!"
I live near the Louisa Flowers apartments on Grand & Holladay. This affordable housing project shows in its own short history the problem with airbrushing away criminality in service of woke idealism. Those problems include murder, drug dealing, and random violence. The virtuosos of social work even put insanely uncomfortable benches in front of it to honor the woke hysteria from 2019 that apartment buildings be forced to include resting places for the homeless.
There are low-income workers living there but the more typical resident is someone with a diagnosed disability such as mental illness or maybe a neurological condition of some kind. Once you're in the system, Section 8 housing vouchers are easy to obtain. In truth, there is some intrinsic merit in these diagnoses. Few of us are perfect but the amount of dysfunction among the impoverished is disproportionately high.
The idea that if we simply build enough housing for the dysfunctional all their other problems will self-correct is a perennial delusion on the woke left. The sad truth is that their concentration in certain Portland neighborhoods makes those areas less attractive to the sane and functional. The entire Lloyd District is now threatened to become a huge dumping ground for these "victims". And if there's one thing we have learned about the left's victimology, it's that there is no nobility quite so pure and admirable as a marginalized person of color or gender dysphoria having to live near white racists. But you need more than approved thoughts or even those yard signs you might see in Irvington to compensate. Fortunately, a dispensation is available to "anti-racists", so get Kendi and DiAngelo on your reading list pronto.
The merry wokesters of Portland shall not rest until complete equity has been achieved, either in this lifetime or the next. In the meantime, we oldtimers need to give up our nostalgia for a saner past. If it's Portland's fate to become one hot mess of a once-beautiful city, so be it. Someone has to pay for 1619 so it might as well be us. But the morally superior angels on the woke left still can't explain is who's going to pay the costs of this runaway train to the promised land. Once Portland becomes Oakland, there simply won't be enough rich people left to pay that freight cost.