Block’s fate focuses Old Town tensions

Dispute over homeless center seems to pit social services against upward mobility

By todd murphy

The Portland Tribune, Dec 14, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (24 Reader comments)

JIM CLARK / TRIBUNE PHOTO

A city-proposed homeless services center on the block where Blanchet House now stands is dividing Old Town/Chinatown, some of whose residents feel their neighborhood has been made a “dumping ground” for Portland’s underclass.

They call it Block 25.

And the unimaginatively named and haggard-looking block, north of downtown at Northwest Glisan Street, between Third and Fourth avenues, symbolizes Old Town/Chinatown in a lot of ways.

Home to a couple of decades-old buildings but otherwise vacant, the block is more than a little rough around the edges. And it still somehow represents neighborhood dreams for the future.

The problem with Block 25 is that two groups of people are seeing two very different futures for it. And the tension in those visions came to a head this week.

On one side are Portland city Commissioner Erik Sten, officials with the Portland Development Commission and Transition Projects Inc., an Old Town/Chinatown-based social service agency serving the homeless, one of many such agencies in the neighborhood.

They all see Block 25 as the future base for a major component of the city’s “10-year-plan to end homelessness” – a modern “access center” that would provide homeless people with a place to get off the street, receive government and health services, and help lead them into permanent housing.

They also see the building as home to a number of affordable housing apartments above the ground-floor access center.

On the other side are Old Town/Chinatown residents and business and neighborhood leaders, some of whom say they are weary of being a “dumping ground” for the city’s services for the homeless, drug addicted and mentally ill.

They see Block 25 as an ideal place for commercial development that could help spur a revitalization of Old Town/Chinatown.

After months of discussion about three possible sites for the homeless access center, they say they were blindsided by a recent, sudden city decision that Block 25 is the only possible site – and the site where the center will be built.

“We need to stop the process,” said Gloria Lee, executive director of the Portland Classical Chinese Garden, which is owned by the city and operated by a nonprofit organization. The garden property is less than a block from Block 25.

“I believe there was no transparency in how these decisions came down,” Lee said, adding that neighborhood leaders have worked for years on a city-funded vision plan for the neighborhood that “has been completely ignored” in the homeless center siting process.

Idea has been around block

The homeless center has been talked about for years, as has the idea that the new center would be run by Transition Projects, the nonprofit group that runs a crowded homeless center in a decrepit building a block from where the new center would be.

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