Area has identity struggles

GENTRIFICATION • Suddenly ‘close in,’ Foster-Powell is changing

By peter korn

The Portland Tribune, Jun 26, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009

JIM CLARK / PORTLAND TRIBUNE

Donovan Pacholl and Carrie O’Callaghan bought their 100-year-old house on Southeast Bush Street near 60th Avenue two years ago. Their son, Thatcher, was born four months ago, and the couple aren’t sure they’ll remain in the area.

he view through the three high windows in Donovan Pacholl’s living room often looks distorted. The glass is old and from the right angle produces wavy fun-house mirror images.

Pacholl is especially fond of the windows because when he and wife Carrie O’Callaghan bought their 100-year-old house in the Foster-Powell (map) wedge, they didn’t know the windows existed. The windows were covered by Sheetrock.

On a warm evening in late May, Pacholl likes the unfolding story he sees out the windows of his house on Southeast Bush Street near 60th Avenue. The people moving past are not the same people he saw when he bought the house two years ago.

Young people in their 20s and early 30s predominate now, many pushing strollers, others trailing children on small bikes. Some of the houses they’ve bought and fixed up also are in plain view – over there is a yellow bungalow with a couple who recently moved here from New York. To the south of the yellow house sits a two-story that another couple has restored.

But the house behind Pacholl has graffiti all over a fence, and a police officer has told him that some of the neighborhood tags are gang-related. Across the street heading west is a 1960s ranch that used to be a meth house. The couple has woken up to find tire marks scarring their front lawn.

And, Pacholl points out, “there are still houses where cars sit in the front yard.”

Maybe it’s those cars, maybe it’s his conscience, but Pacholl still can’t quite see enough to put his mind at ease. His windows allow him to view everything but the future.

Pacholl, 33, isn’t a man afraid of taking risks. He and O’Callaghan, 29, have traveled the world. They lived in Africa a year and a half running a hostel and leading hikers up Mount Kilimanjaro. Yet nearly every night Pacholl wonders if this is the neighborhood where he wants to put down roots.

Foster-Powell wasn’t the couple’s first choice. Pacholl, who works as an adventure travel specialist, says he and O’Callaghan started their search in the Mississippi and Alberta neighborhoods.

They put a full-price offer in on one fixer-upper in the Alberta area the day it came on the market and lost out to a higher bidder. He says he saw the house for sale again a few months ago for more than twice what they had bid. They almost bought an old house in Mississippi area that failed its inspection.

“We wanted something close in, in the $200,000 range, and this is all we could get,” Pacholl says. “Everybody was going over there (Northeast Portland), and we came over here.”

Others have followed. “Now all we’ve seen are more and more people who fit our profile,” Pacholl says. That profile, he explains, is young families with children. Pacholl and O’Callaghan have followed suit – O’Callaghan gave birth to a boy, Thatcher, four months ago.

Pacholl says the comfort level with his new neighbors is about more than age or income bracket. It also, he says, is about liberal politics and people who bike to work, as he does, and people who value travel or have moved here from other cities. And that’s when the conversation becomes about the word that makes Pacholl uncomfortable – gentrification.

Pacholl wants neighbors who share his values. He wants a block where all the houses are well-maintained. He admits he wants his property to become more valuable. But he also says he doesn’t want to be “the poster boy for gentrification.”

Change comes slowly

Tracy Gratto, co-chairwoman of the Foster-Powell Neighborhood Association, isn’t sure that what Pacholl is hoping for is gentrification at all. Maybe, Gratto says, gentrification – with its negative connotation – is less about who arrives than who leaves.

“Every time a house sells in our neighborhood there are folks who have been here a long time whose jaws drop,” Gratto says. But the neighborhood, she points out, isn’t being transformed quickly, and that slower pace, she says, means people are not being displaced without warning.

There haven’t been any reported 30-day- and-you’re-out notices for longtime renters in Foster-Powell. In fact, Pacholl says his block is full of renters.

Foster-Powell has never had a large black community, so racial displacement is not an issue. It’s never been known as an edgy, artsy neighborhood, so wealth pushing aside creative types doesn’t come into play.

The neighborhood has in recent years contained a sizable population of immigrants from Asia and Eastern Europe in those small rental houses, but Pacholl says many remain, and the reason may be the same reason that explains why Foster-Powell isn’t revitalizing faster.

Pacholl recognizes it every time he walks his neighborhood and sees that most of the houses don’t look like his. There are three small rentals across the street from Pacholl’s home, one of which is built of cinder block – not exactly the stuff of a gentrifier’s dreams. Foster-Powell has a lot of 700- to 800-square-foot homes.

Meanwhile, O’Callaghan wants a second bathroom and another bedroom. Pacholl would like a new garage. Remodeling the back of the house would give him all that but would cost as much as $40,000. Pacholl says he doesn’t know if the investment would be worth it.

“I still don’t know if this neighborhood will move in that direction,” he says. “And unless people who gentrify neighborhoods want to move into a ’70s ranch home, I don’t think that will come.”

Pacholl should put his fears aside, according to Nick Krautter, a residential and commercial broker with Keller Williams Realty. Housing, Krautter says, is a simple matter of supply and demand, and the supply in Portland is almost gone.

Supply and demand rules

Krautter says there are plenty of young home buyers willing to purchase those 800-square-foot ranch houses, mostly because there is nothing else left for them. And in time, Krautter says, others will knock down the small houses and build larger homes or row houses.

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