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?

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.

Limbo Land along the Willamette

I got most of today’s 10,000 steps in walking along the Willamette Greenway Trail. I started at Willamette park headed north for the surreal South Waterfront cluster of high rises.

I had business to do at Umpqua Bank, which has a pleasant urban outpost tucked under the new, convex and angular skyscrapers.

More condos and apartments are on the way, although it was apparent most of the completed ones are vacant, as are the storefronts along the deserted sidewalks.

The whole place looks in limbo. It’s an un-happening scene that, remarkably, continues to expand in a rapidly contracting economy.

I asked the bank’s assistant manager how things were going. He seemed moderately up-beat until I asked him about whether there are plans for a grocery store. No, he said, not enough people live in the “neighborhood” to support one, at least not yet. Then again, he added, one of the problems with attracting new residents is that there’s no supermarket.

“Sounds like ‘a chicken and egg’ problem,” I observed.

“Exactly, ‘chicken and egg,’” he said as though he had used the phrase to describe the problem before.

To be exact, the place, which is boldly calling itself a "neighborhood," has a ‘supermarket and residents’ problem. Until it is solved and until the sinking economy resurfaces, the place will have the look of a 21st Century Stonehenge. "What did they do here?" future generations might ask? "Where did they buy food?"

Walking back under a towering crane that was heisting concrete up and then lowering it to yet another foundation, I had a strange sensation of doom. “Could this be the way it ends? Building luxury apartments for people who no longer can have the luxury of — luxury? Could this be the final urban tableau? The real estate flippers' inevitable, colossal flop? Is South Waterfront the place where the last light switch gets wired, the last Italian imported tile gets laid, the final oak door shuts — never to be opened again?”