Printer-friendly version Email story link

Stressed, but surviving: A community learning to cope

Folks around 50th and Division roll with the punches

By steve law

The Portland Tribune, Jul 16, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (5 Reader comments)

L.E. BASKOW / TRIBUNE PHOTO

Life around Southeast Division Street and 50th Avenue begins to slow down on a late weekday afternoon.

TRIBUNE SERIES:

Economic problems of the past year have extended across the globe.

But the real pain from those problems — lost jobs, lost businesses, lost homes — is felt locally. By people. By neighborhoods. By communities.

In trying to make sense of how the economic distress is being felt in Portland, the Tribune wanted to look more deeply — at just one small piece of Portland.

We decided to focus on the people who live and do business in the couple blocks around the corner of Division Street and 50th Avenue in Southeast Portland — an average Portland neighborhood full of people struggling to deal with the jolts of the past year.

We will tell some of their stories during the next four weeks.

• This week: Learning to cope

• Week 2: Looking for work

• Week 3: Businesses adapt

• Week 4: Thinking about tomorrow

**Here is the small part of the Richmond neighborhood where Tribune reporters will fan out during the next several weeks, to talk to residents and business owners about how they are dealing with the economy of 2009.

At Ace’s Quick Cash on Division Street near Southeast 50th Avenue, Portlanders can pawn a necklace to get spending money, then walk catty-corner to snag an 18-pack of Busch for $10.97 at Plaid Pantry.

Or folks can stroll a few doors down from Ace’s to dine at a fashionable French cafe, Petite Provence, then head a couple blocks east to lust over a $1,000 bike posted on the sidewalk in front of Lucky13 Bikes.

Like much of Portland, this slice of the Richmond neighborhood shows vital signs of the mid-2000s economic boom, alongside evidence of the punishing downturn that has followed.

A block north of Division near 50th, multiple homeowners have installed lush gardens and native plants to replace drab parking strips and grassy front yards. A block to the south, a storefront sits empty in a foreclosed three-story project built at the peak of the housing boom.

On the sidewalk of 50th Avenue, Matthew Jenkins, who is homeless, picks up cigarette butts, his meager belongings stashed in a shopping cart down the street.

Around the corner, on 51st Avenue, recent San Francisco transplant Erin Tarumi plays with her dog in the prim lawn of a recently converted condo project, anxious to begin training for a new waitress job.

TRIBUNE PHOTO: L.E. BASKOW • Customers and others mill around what has become a neighborhood gathering place — Taqueria los Gorditos on Southeast Division near 50th.

The area around 50th and Division, like much of the Rose City, doesn’t seem all that depressed, despite the most brutal recession to hit this region since 1980-82. In interviews with residents and merchants in a couple-block radius of the intersection, a team of Portland Tribune reporters found many folks scraping by, trying to improve their future job prospects, and coping reasonably well considering the dismal job market and epidemic of home foreclosures.

Above all, they seem to be adapting, finding ways to roll with the punches that an economic meltdown has inflicted on the world – and on this small corner of Portland.

“If you do right today, tomorrow will be better,” says Betre “Peter” Tesfu, who opened an Ethiopian restaurant on 50th, just south of Division, in the middle of the recession.

Going back to school

Shawn Gordon, who lives a block south of Division on 51st Avenue, lost his longtime job as a Nordstrom shoe salesman three months ago, and has accrued$19,000 in credit card debt. But Gordon, chatting on his front porch, says he’s staying current on his mortgage with the help of unemployment checks. The cheerful 40-year-old, sporting a few days’ beard, never earned a high school diploma, and is using his idle time to take Portland Community College classes that will help him cram for the GED test.

“I can survive, but I don’t have any spending money,” Gordon says with a smile. “I only have six bucks a day for soap and food.”

At the house across the street, two front window panes are broken and patched with duct tape, and the front yard is overflowing with weeds.

Dan Hack hobbles up from his basement office to answer the door. Hack, who walks with the aid of a cane, says he’s gotten steady work through the recession as a natural resources consultant. But the divorced father of two got into severe financial trouble because he lost his health insurance and has a chronic medical condition.

“It nearly wiped me out completely,” Hack says, adding that he managed to “claw back” financially.

“Now everything’s paid off,” he says.

Tarumi and her husband rent one of the Franklin Condominiums on Division and 51st Avenue. They moved here last November. She was getting frustrated seeking a waitress job. “You’ll show up for an open interview and there’ll be at least 60 people there,” says the engaging 28-year-old.

When a downtown waterfront restaurant recently advertised for an opening, Tarumi was one of 350 people dropping off resumes in two hours.

She lucked out and got the job.

Bryan Daniel, 45, was laid off June 1 from a concrete mason job lifting and stabilizing homes. Daniel, working in his front yard one recent morning, says he’s not used to change, after living in the same house on 51st and Division since childhood. But the lifelong construction worker is surprisingly calm about his recent misfortune.

“I live by three things,” he says. “You have to accept it, understand it, and deal with it.”

Daniel spends four hours a day looking for work, while living off savings and retirement money. He’s doing small jobs on the side.

Typical Portland

Residences around Division and 50th are neither posh nor dilapidated, a mix of Craftsman bungalows and other older houses, apartments, triplexes and recently converted condos.

Division has been dubbed an “up-and-coming” commercial artery since 1993, when Nature’s Fresh Northwest opened a natural foods grocery on Division and 30th Avenue. But that store closed in 2006, and Division’s predicted renaissance has come in fits and starts.

TRIBUNE PHOTO: L.E. BASKOW • A passerby shakes hands with a mechanical Santa as he passes the Bearly Worn Resale Store on SE Division near 50th.

Yet there are signs that hip, close-in Portland is expanding eastward to Division and 50th, an affordable area for young adults attracted by the city’s reputation as a progressive haven for artists, foodies, bicycle commuters and greenies.

Scoreboard Sports Pub, a life insurance agency and other old-line businesses near 50th and Division have been joined recently by a makeshift tacqueria, a wine bar, a piercing studio and North Bar, a focal point of the intersection.

North Bar and other trendy spots “are able to thrive because of a different kind of people moving in,” Hack says.

A few years ago, Hack recalls getting periodic notices of sex offenders moving into the Franklin Manor apartments on Division and 51st. In 2006, the brick complex was renovated and converted to the Franklin Condominiums, bringing a different breed to the area.

New blood

One factor driving up Portland’s unemployment rate – and stimulating the local economy – is a steady stream of newcomers, some arriving without jobs despite the recession.

Patrick Duffy, 28, who rents a house on 49th Avenue south of Division, moved here from San Francisco a year and a half ago. He quickly landed a production job at a small technology firm, but was laid off six months ago.

Duffy decided to go back to school, and enrolled at Portland State University. His credit card debt zoomed from zero to $9,000.

“I survived with financial aid and credit cards for six months,” he says from his front porch. In June, he landed a part-time clerk job downtown, under a federal work-study program.

Duffy paid $1,300 to rent his own studio apartment in San Francisco, but now shares a large house and $1,600 rent with two roommates, a buddy who relocated from the Bay area six months ago and someone recruited on craigslist.org.

“I wanted something on the West Coast that wasn’t more than half my paycheck to pay rent,” Duffy says.

“I love southeast Portland. Everybody seems very neighborhoody and community-oriented and friendly.”

All three of the roommates own cars, but ride their bikes most places they go. A steady stream of bicyclists rides downhill on 51st Avenue, a few blocks south of Division, to connect to the Clinton Street bikepath, a pedalers’ gateway to downtown.

Duffy often goes to North Bar for Monday quiz nights, and notices the shops are bustling. He knows people are hurting, but doesn’t see a lot of outward signs of the recession.

Tarumi and her husband also moved here from San Francisco in the midst of the recession, after he got a job managing a restaurant.

“We didn’t want to raise a family in apartments in San Francisco,” she says. There, you’re lucky to get a one-bedroom condo in an outlying suburb for $350,000, she says. They checked out Austin but it was too hot. Portland struck them as a more affordable version of Berkeley.

The two homes that sold this year within a few blocks of 50th and Division are in an affordable range for many couples. A two-bedroom condo sold for $199,790, and a four-bedroom home went for $205,000, according to the Regional Multiple Listing Service.

Tarumi and her husband, who hope to start a family, recently made an offer to buy their first home, near Northeast Fremont Street.

TRIBUNE PHOTO: L.E. BASKOW • Bete "Peter" Tesfu, left, shares a laugh with his sister, Bilen, who cooks up an order as his wife Gelila Tesfu does prep work behind them. They are surviving the recession at their new Bete-Lucas Ethiopian Restaurant, on Southeast 50th Avenue just south of Division Street.

Many local residents are still going out at night, despite the tight economy.

Since opening the Bete-Lukas Ethiopian Restaurant on 50th Avenue a year ago, Tesfu has hired three additional staff to work alongside himself, his wife and sister, and he’s in the process of hiring a fourth. People order one beer now instead of two, Tesfu said, or a glass of wine instead of a bottle.

Branching out

The deep recession is prompting residents near 50th and Division to do some soul-searching about their future livelihoods.

Gordon, who sold shoes for nearly 20 years, is pondering a career in computers or electronics, once he earns his GED.

Erin Tarumi, recognizing the limited value of her undergraduate theater degree in a recession, recently went back to school to take science and math classes. She hopes to then get into a nursing program at Oregon Health & Science University.

Patrick Duffy hopes to enter a masters program in political science, then seek a job in politics.

1 | 2 Next Page >>