Razing and rebuilding Hillsdale Terrace is still a bad idea

Hillsdale Terrace is the "X" and "O" at the bottom center of this aerial photo.
The Mittleman Jewish Community Center is at the top right quadrant.

Last year I opposed the Housing Authority of Portland’s application to receive federal money ($16.5 million) deemed essential to razing and replacing the deteriorating, 40-year-old Hillsdale Terrace project here in our community.

If you don’t know where the Terrace is, it’s because its 60 units are hidden away in a moldering, soggy, isolated gulch.

Now HAP is reapplying — this time for more federal money ($18 million).

The project is still a bad idea. The site remains isolated, residents would have to be displaced for up to three years and demolition and extensive site work drive up costs.

As I urged the first time around, HAP should pursue different approaches. Both involve getting rid of Hillsdale Terrace but keeping its residents in Hillsdale and Multnomah.

One idea would be to sell the Hillsdale Terrace project to a developer and buy a new, community-connected, easily build-able site. If HOPE VI funds can't be used to build on a new site, as HAP maintains, find different funding and scale back the project, which currently would double the current number of units from 60 to 122.

(UPDATE: I e-mailed HUD, which distributes the funds, about HAP's claim that HOPE VI can only be used to develop existing sites, not new ones. Late Friday, HUD spokesperson Donna White wrote back to say the HOPE VI money can be, and has been, used for off-site developments. I've asked HAP to respond. Stay tuned.)

The other would be to seek "Section 8" federal funding that would set folks up in local housing with rent subsidies. (The argument that property owners won’t rent to the poor seems lame in light of HAP’s relying on local rentals for residents displaced during the proposed reconstruction of Hillsdale Terrace.)

Math alert: I’m about to share some key numbers. Two points are worth noting.

We are talking about a total figure of $45.1 million poured into an grossly deficient site. How might that money, or even half that amount, be better spent to help the poor in our neighborhood?

2) HAP may quibble with my math, but I’ve tried my best to work with the agency’s numbers. If they disagree with my calculations, I welcome their critique.

HAP’s cost figures show that site-related expenses (demolition, relocation, site work) come to $7.27 million. Tack on to that $2.1 million in “HOPE VI administration costs” and, say, another $3 million for what HAP might get by selling the 6-acre Hillsdale Terrace property and you get more than $12 million in costs associated with the site alone.

That’s before you figure in the actual cost of “hard” construction.

By the way, I have left out $3.1 million, the HAP budgeted amounts for support services for children and residents (who are generally undereducated, unskilled and steeped in poverty). That money will be needed whatever happens.

Now add in the actual cost of construction, $32.7 million, to the $12 million mentioned above.

Divide by 122 units and you come up with $370,000 per unit.

In this market, you could buy a handsome house (including land) or a South Waterfront condo for that amount. To say nothing of how much rent that would subsidize through the Section 8 program.

And remember, the figure still allows for $3.1 in social services for a population in desperate need for help.

A final point: the cost per unit figure doesn’t factor in what HAP plans to spend to buy and demolish three duplexes on SW 26th — just so motorists on Capitol Highway can get a fleeting glimpse of a project that should never have been built in the first place.

The New Journalism: Wall-to-wall opinion?

The Housing Authority of Portland’s campaign to spend $40.5 million to raze and rebuild Hillsdale Terrace in a dank, nearby gully is troubling enough.

Even more troubling is how the story was covered in The Oregonian. Or I should say, how it wasn’t covered.

Instead the story “broke” in an Oregonian Op-Ed opinion piece opposing the project. The “Guest Column” was written by former HAP Commissioner Ray Hallberg. His strong opposition to the project was the opening volley in a ping-pong match of biased rebuttals and letters to the editor.

The Oregonian was satisfied to let advocates and critics thrash away at the issue from their opposing and biased perspectives.

On the paper’s web, OregonLive, the back and forth continued, but without the writers’ own conflicts of interest ever being revealed.

The Oregonian offered nary a story about Hillsdale Terrace. Zilch. No neutral voices, no experts and no Hillsdale Terrace residents were heard from. In essence the issue was treated like some kind of bloggers’ dust-up or TV chat show shouting match.

If the Hillsdale Terrace boondoggle (my bias) is worthy of so much space on the Op-Ed page, doesn't it deserve some real reporting and a story?

Is this kind of “coverage” we can expect from the journalism of the future?

Vancouver, B.C. housing approach worth trying

A story in today's New York Times about a Vancouver development shows how mixed public/private housing project might work here in Southwest Portland.

The described project is particularly relevant to our southwest Portland neighborhood of Hillsdale. We have been debating whether the Housing Authority of Portland should proceed with its plans to raze a public housing project, Hillsdale Terrace, and replace it with one twice as large on the same site.

Unfortunately, the site is in a dank, isolated gully. The plans will ensure that the new project will remain "out of sight, out of mind" just as the old one has been for the past 35 years. The project's architects use words like "demanding" and "challenging" to describe it. It is also expensive to develop, driving costs up to between $200,000 and $335,000 per unit depending on how you do the numbers.

The site also has severe access problems that planners and architects have so far not addressed. Also, building on the old site requires the disruptive and expensive relocation of residents during reconstruction.

As chance would have it, just a couple of miles away on the banks of the Willamette River is an opportunity that looks a great deal like the Vancouver project. Near to downtown Portland, high-rise apartment buildings in the new South Waterfront development stand partially filled.

The obvious question is this: Why can't the Housing Authority simply spend the $40.5 million it plans to spend on 120 Hillsdale Terrace units to purchase units in existing, largely vacant South Waterfront buildings?

Hillsdale Terrace plan slammed

Ray Hallberg, a former Housing Authority of Portland commissioner, nailed it today in the Oregonian in an opinion piece about the wasteful, bureaucracy-driven plan to raze and replace the Hillsdale Terrace housing project in our neighborhood.

Hallberg's words, and those who have comment on-line, echo my own at last week's Hillsdale Neighborhood Association. Throwing $40.5 million at an demeaning, isolated ghetto-like site is an outrageous waste of taxpayer money and an insult to the poor.

At the HNA meeting, I ended up on the short end of a 10-to-2 vote. Five folks abstained. I wish Hallberg had attended the meeting. He might have at least persuaded the abstainers to get off the fence and vote.

Earlier in the day the Portland City Council made matters worse. Not only did the commissioners back the cock-eyed plan, they kicked in $5 million to the ill-conceived project.

Hallberg goes me one better in his column. Rather than build another housing project elsewhere in Hillsdale, as I recommended, Hallberg believes the money is best spent on Section 8 housing. As Hallberg explains, the program "allows qualified low-income clients to find suitable private housing in neighborhoods of their choice."

My hope is that they would find Hillsdale suitable.

P.S. Some of Hallberg's numbers are wrong, but the thrust of his argument is right. The proposed project is for 120 units, not 100. And the cost per unit is closer to $200,000, not $400,000.

Eyeing the news from afar

I’m here at the beach where I made the mistake of buying The Oregonian this morning. It doesn't help that the paper costs an outlandish $1.25 here in Manzanita.

Even free, on-line, today’s news is not making me a happy camper.

Your R/x dollars at work

First Pfizer has been fined a mere $2.3 billion (that’s a “B” but it’s small change for Big Pharma) for its latest role in the Great American Healthcare Charade. This particular song-and-dance has the drug giant bribing doctors with vacations, golf dates and massages to get them to prescribe Pfizer drugs. What’s a billion or so to an outfit like Pfizer? We are about to find out.

Worse, than jollying the docs with our insurance premiums, Pfizer is telling them it’s fine to use its pills for purposes unapproved by the FDA. All the better to run up those profits and to stuff those executive millionaires.

Yet the Oregonian reports all this in a vacuum.

Is the major event of these dwindling summer months not healthcare? And are the drug companies not a major player in sabotaging healthcare reform? And could it be that some of the payoff for the bribing of the medical profession is a few hundred million to lobby Congress and spread lies?

And just what are our health insurance premiums being used for. Golf at Pebble Beach? Back rubs?

And why, dear Oregonian editors, is this story on the business page, while valuable front page real estate is turned over Boise’s frenzy about the home team’s butt-heading with the Oregon Ducks tonight?

Priorities, priorities.

I suppose we should be grateful. At least the story made the paper.

Caling Nick Fish!

So did another, barely. This one was tucked away at the bottom of page C5, also in the business section, just before the classified ads.

The headline, miniscule as it is, reads, “Affordable housing plan put aside again.” The story should be read in the context of the Housing Authority of Portland’s proposing to spend $44.5 million to build 115 units (roughly $370,000 per unit) as it teas down and rebuilds the Hillsdale Terrace public housing project in its existing site. It’s an isolated, demeaning drainage gulch at the headwaters of Hillsdale’s Stephens Creek.

Meanwhile, (ALERT, ALERT!) apartments in South Waterfront high-rises will be auctioned off starting at $175,000 each later this month. They should be worth a bid from HAP.

But this little, buried story tells us that affordable housing in South Waterfront is being “pushed back” because the Portland Development Commission has determined that having affordable housing in South Waterfront is “too risky.”

Attention City Commissioner Nick Fish, a former member of the HAP board and now the councils’ housing guy.

Where’s the risk when HAP is ready to spend $370,000 per unit in a market where, at auction, South Waterfront apartments may fetch a mere $200,000, if that?

If Portland’s public housing's left hand, the development commission, had any idea what the right hand, the housing authority, was up to, the two agencies would rush to redirect the Hillsdale Terrace money to South Waterfront.

Good housing intentions go bad in Hillsdale

The Housing Authority of Portland (HAP) is throwing itself headlong into a public housing project that's a good idea gone bad.

The good idea is creating new affordable and public housing in Hillsdale. The agency is applying to the feds to get about half the money needed to build it.

Here’s where the idea goes of the tracks. The agency wants the public housing, a "new" Hillsdale Terrace, in the same, obscure, hard-to-access gully where the old, smaller and decaying Hillsdale Terrace is now.

Why there? The project manager says the site is so bad that the Housing Authority can’t sell it.

I've suggested in The Hillsdale News that the highest and best use for the old real estate might be as a city-owned dog run. A swap with the parks bureau, which has assigned Hillsdale Park to the dogs, offers an obvious solution. Build the new housing in the park, which is behind Robert Gray Middle School, and direct the dogs and their owners to a new "Hillsdale Gulch" park.

Right now, a new complex on the existing site is estimated to cost $44.5 million for roughly 120 apartment units. I assume the cost estimate includes housing the present tenants of 63 units elsewhere for 18 months while their old, moldy, crumbling home is being demolished and replaced by one nearly twice as large.

If my calculator doesn't fail me, this approach will cost $367,000 per new apartment unit.

In this depressed real estate market, you could buy a pretty attractive house and lot for that.

Meanwhile the new high-rise South Waterfront properties have plenty of vacant apartments begging for buyers at that price.

Alas, at this point, a November 17 federal grant application deadline and bureaucratic myopia are driving the project.

Still, there's still a chance to put forward reasonable and more affordable alternatives.

HAP is holding a meeting on the project next Tuesday, August 18, at 5:30 p.m. at the Hillsdale Terrace community room. That’s at 6775 SW 26th. The entrance is across the street from the Mittleman Jewish Community Center.

Once you are down in the gully, you will see why the place has great promise as a dog run. The Hillsdale Terrace complex is to the right.