Razing a neighborhood to save it

Huge North Portland development won’t be ‘McMansions or ghettos’

By Janine Robben

The Portland Tribune, Apr 25, 2003, Updated Oct 30, 2009

This is the first of two stories on the redevelopment of North Portland’s Columbia Villa.

• Today Ð How the redevelopment of Columbia Villa may affect the concentration of poverty and access to public services in North Portland

• Friday, May 2 Ð Show me the money: How the Housing Authority of Portland intends to pay for Ñ and sell Ñ the $150 million redevelopment of Columbia Villa

In 1942, with wartime shipyard workers flooding into town, the brand-new Housing Authority of Portland threw up a public development in North Portland to shelter them.

No one cared that the 82-acre development Ñ called Columbia Villa Ñ did not look like its neighbors; when the war was over, the expectation was that the development would be demolished.

But more than 60 years later, Columbia Villa is still there, a vast public housing project cut off from the rest of North Portland by its poverty, lack of public facilities and a layout that literally turns its back on the surrounding neighborhood.

All that will change this year, when the villa’s 1,200 existing residents are relocated and the entire site is knocked to the ground.

In its place, by December 2006, will be New Columbia, a $150 million mixed-use, mixed-income redevelopment intended to make the site’s public housing and tenants blend into the Portsmouth neighborhood.

The housing authority and its partners Ñ which include the city and private developers Ñ expect to relocate all of Columbia Villa’s residents by September, then raze the villa’s World War II-era duplexes and fourplexes. They will be replaced with a mix of public housing, “affordable” rental and homeowner-occupied units, and market-rate single-family residences. There also will be a central area with a small commercial area, a new park and sites for a library and elementary school.

“This is a huge piece for our community,” says Allison Couch, principal of nearby Clarendon Elementary School and a member of New Columbia’s citizens advisory committee. “It has the possibility of really changing the face of North Portland.”

But not everyone thinks the change will be for the better. Some North Portland residents, accustomed to villa residents having to leave the site for school and other activities, are concerned that New Columbia will draw public facilities away from them. Others fear that the increased number of housing units Ñ 850 versus the villa’s 462 Ñ and doubled population will further concentrate poverty in an area of Portland whose median income already is well below the city’s average.

Howard Shapiro, chairman of the housing authority’s board and a veteran of neighborhood concerns about public housing, believes that the change will be good.

“What we have now is an island of dormitory-style housing falling into disrepair with Ñ almost Ñ a moat around it,” Shapiro says. “The idea is to take that wall down. At the end of the day, there won’t be McMansions or ghettos. There will be a much more balanced community that is truly, truly representative of North Portland.”

Like Shapiro, longtime Columbia Villa resident Susan Franks has high hopes for New Columbia.

“In August 1988 a Columbia Villa resident, Joseph ‘Ray Ray’ Winston, was murdered in the first drive-by shooting in the state,” Franks wrote to the federal government in 2001 in support of a Hope VI “revitalization” grant for the villa. “Ever since that date, Columbia Villa has been fighting an uphill battle against a reputation it can’t seem to leave behind. Hope VI will allow this community to leave this tragic event where it belongs, in the past.”

Unlike Shapiro and Franks, North Portland library advocate Miriam Linder is not happy about all of New Columbia’s plans.

“We’ve been outspent, outgunned and outmaneuvered by bureaucrats and politicians and developers who are focused on this one area,” says Linder, who has worked for years to get a new Multnomah County branch library on North Lombard Street.

Instead, on April 3, Linder heard the county commissioners Ñ led by her commissioner, Serena Cruz Ñ vote to pursue siting the library in a building that the housing authority plans to erect on New Columbia’s main street.

“Of course they (the housing authority) want a library,” Linder says tearfully. “They want to sell market-value houses to middle-class families. But they’ve just sucked up the one bright light this community could see.

“It’s not us versus Columbia Villa,” says Linder, who lives in the Arbor Lodge neighborhood, immediately southeast of Portsmouth. “What we’re trying to do here is see the library be successful. I think they’re taking a terrible chance siting it in this remote (New Columbia) location. It’s too far from a main thoroughfare. It’s not on the way to anything. It’s simple geography.”

The library is not the only public facility that could be located at New Columbia. The housing authority and the Portland school district have begun discussions about a new elementary school that probably would replace the neighborhood’s existing Ball Elementary School. And the complex’s design includes a nearly 4-acre park that the housing authority envisions ceding to the city, which would operate it.

Looks are deceiving

On the surface, Columbia Villa doesn’t look like a stereotypical public housing project, a term that the housing authority doesn’t like. Its density is considerably lower than that of the adjoining Portsmouth neighborhood, and broad, well-kept lawns separate its tidy clusters of duplexes and fourplexes.

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