Housing, by Harvey Rice’s standards, is the foundation to a strong community.
“You have to have a roof over your head and be stable in order to get the education and in order to be neighborly,” Rice said. “I think people have to know each other in order to understand each other — and when I say understand, I’m talking about getting along.”
Rice is the chairman of the board of directors for Sabin Community Development Corporation, and his work in the community stretches back decades, through his church and various health and educational organizations.
It’s in his honor that Sabin announced plans for Harvey Rice Heritage project in August, a two-building development in Northeast Portland that will provide housing for communities of color.
The buildings will carry the namesake of two Black Northeast Portland artists, Isaka Shamsud-Din and Charlotte Lewis.
The Isaka Shamsud-Din building will be an expansion of Sabin Community Development Corporation’s nine-unit property on Northeast Killingsworth and 14th Place, Estates Plaza, into 29 units.
The Charlotte Lewis building is slated for a site where a single-family home sits on Northeast Cully Boulevard and 72nd Avenue. The lot borders a community garden. The house’s former owner wanted the property sold to an affordable housing organization. The house will be demolished to make way for a 41-unit apartment complex that includes 12 two- and three-bedroom family units.
“(Rice) just embodies what we hope this project will represent, which is the ongoing competent regular support of building a sense of community and really showing up,” said Sabin executive director, Mary Schoen-Clark.
Rice also sees his namesake project as a way to reverse displacement.
“My project will give a lot of those people the chance to come back to the neighborhood,” Rice said.
Due to the pandemic slowing progress on the project, groundbreaking is slated for January 2022, and the development will be completed a year later.
Combating gentrification
This project is meant to combat the displacement of communities of color from Northeast Portland, a neighborhood that was once predominantly Black.
Urban revitalization projects, from the development of Emanuel Hospital in 1967 to urban renewal in the 2000s, led to both forced displacement and such skyrocketing housing costs that low-income Black residents were priced out of their historic neighborhoods. Even today, Portland is consistently ranked among the fastest-gentrifying cities in the country.
“We have felt that our main purpose was to keep these properties affordable and available to primarily people of color as they were originally intended to be,” Schoen-Clark said. “So we really are working hard to make sure that that happens with this project. To be sure that people of color are not passed over as this area continues to increasingly become gentrified.”
Sabin works to provide long-term affordable housing to low- and moderate-income renters. It focuses on serving Black households, with 76% of its residents identifying as Black or multi-racial.
“We’re really excited about Sabin’s proven track record and proven relationship with the Black community specifically,” said Cameron Herrington, program manager at Living Cully, a partner with Sabin on the Charlotte Lewis building. Living Cully is a coalition of four nonprofits united to improve the lives of low-income residents and residents of color in the Cully neighborhood. “This will be a project that will draw on those relationships and that credibility that Sabin has in the African-American community,” Herrington said.
The project has also garnered $2.8 million from Oregon Housing and Community Services. The state agency now requires that all project partners enter into a diversity, equity and inclusion agreement. It also operates the LIFT program, which provides funds for housing specifically for communities of color and rural communities.
Housing post-COVID-19
While housing is already an acute need for many low-income folks, COVID-19 has exacerbated the situation.
Living Cully has raised and distributed $90,000 in pandemic rent relief to Cully residents, and that need seems to only be intensifying, especially with the impending end to the eviction moratorium, Herrington said.
“There’s really a demand for more of that (nonprofit) housing, because people understand the stability that comes with it, and kind of takes away that constant threat of the next rent increase, the next kind of abusive action by a landlord or active discrimination or retaliation that is going to force them out of their home, out of the neighborhood,” Herrington said. “There are people waiting for these kinds of homes.”
While the goal is for the development to be complete in just under two and a half years, COVID-19 raises a question mark, not only when it comes to barriers to timely construction, but also to creating spaces that will foster safe community-building.
“We don’t know really what’s going to happen with COVID, what these neighborhoods are going to look like in the next five to 10 years,” said Sabin Community Development Corporation’s Housing Director Loulie Brown.
While the organization is making adjustments to its existing buildings to allow for safe interaction, there is room to develop the Harvey Rice Heritage properties with COVID-19 safety in mind. One aspect of this, Schoen-Clark said, is maximizing exterior space, such as with picnic tables, vegetable gardens and other outdoor features that can build community.
Sabin will also work with Living Cully to hold community engagement sessions to gather feedback.
Centering vulnerable communities
Sabin Community Development Corporation is working with two other key partners on this project – Iron Tribe and Community Vision.
Iron Tribe is an organization that does outreach into prisons and works with people transitioning out of the prison system, providing family-based housing and working to reunite children with formerly incarcerated family members. Four of the new Harvey Rice Heritage units will be reserved for folks that Iron Tribe serves.
“We know that historically the African-American community has been disproportionately impacted by incarceration, so by providing housing opportunities to stabilize folks, we know that that’s going to continue to help the African-American community that will be residing in this project,” said Kenny LaPoint, spokesperson for Oregon Housing and Community Services.
Sabin is also working with Community Vision, an organization that provides support services and education to folks with disabilities, to ensure that the units are as adaptable as possible, meaning that they can be easily converted to meet different needs of people with disabilities.
Linda Gheer, who uses a wheelchair and receives services from Community Vision, is a big advocate of independent living for people with disabilities. At one time, she was institutionalized, and then lived in a group home for several years. As of 1990, she has been in her own apartment.
Inaccessible housing for people with disabilities can be a huge barrier, as well as money, Gheer told Street Roots. According to an analysis in 2009 from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 1 in 3 very low-income renter households are non-elderly people who have a disability.
“Some people can’t afford the rent they have to pay, and I don’t think that’s right,” Gheer said. “I believe it’s a quality of life just to be out on your own.”