Pia Hansen: Affordable condos replacing care center

The activities calendar on the bare cinderblock wall reads “April 2003.” In another room, a huge poster announces a round of “Safety Bingo” to be held later that week. Stacks of gowns, sheets and towels line the shelves in the linen closet I peek into. In a third-floor dayroom, a white teddy bear and a plastic doll are left among a bunch of other toys.

Garden Terrace Manor was a nursing home until April 2003 when state officials closed it, citing abuse, neglect, unnatural death and failure to carry insurance, among many other nightmare-inducing issues.

Since then, the building has been sitting like a freakish four-story time capsule on a forgotten block between Stevens and Washington streets, south of Lewis and Clark High School.

“If you need a year’s supply of adult diapers, we got it,” Chris Venne, development finance manager for Community Frameworks, said as we walked the empty cinderblock hallways.

Community Frameworks is turning the failed nursing home into condos.

Yes, that’s correct.

Now wipe up the coffee you just spit out – there is great sense behind what may seem like insanity.

Last week, residents at the Commercial Building downtown were given an eviction notice as that building turns from low-income housing to high-tech business, a scenario that’s likely to repeat itself with greater frequency as gentrification washes through downtown.

The low-income echelon is finding itself increasingly evicted and homeless – again.

“The tenants in the Commercial Building all got housing vouchers,” Venne said, “but that doesn’t help much when there’s nowhere to go with the vouchers.”

Though it’s not rentals, the cinderblock building that was Garden Terrace Manor will help out the low-income housing market.

When fully remodeled as Pioneer Park Place in fall 2008, it will hold 28 condos, two of which will be 1,700-square-foot penthouse units with their own rooftop gardens, and most of which will be affordable for low-income workers and their families.

Of 28 units, seven including the two penthouse units will be sold at market rate; six will be sold as work-force housing to people who make between 80 and 120 percent of the local median income; and 15 units will be sold to low-income families who make 80 percent or less of the median household income. The plan is for the penthouse and market-rate units to carry a large share of the cost of remodeling.

There is a gaping hole in the housing market downtown between the granite-tiled luxury condos and the frayed-around-the-edges traditional apartments – and as more of the older buildings turn from depression to deluxe, this housing gap is growing bigger.

There is no current, accurate housing inventory for the downtown area, but there seems to be general agreement that we need more work-force housing and low-income housing.

Private developers are saying it’s next to impossible to finance work-force housing downtown. Low rent rates don’t match the debt service needed on an extensive remodel or a new building.

“It’s tough. It’s difficult to make it work out financially – but we are confident we can pull it off,” Venne said. “In this situation it’s to our benefit that we are nonprofit. We won’t make a lot of money on this, but we don’t have to. We fill a hole in the housing market, and if this one works out, we’ll be looking for a new property soon.”

I hope it works out.

Actually, I think it’s a pretty brilliant project.

For low-income folks, Community Frameworks offers sound yet creative financing solutions including deferred mortgages. Developments like Pioneer Park Place also offer a chance for asset building – something very difficult to achieve when one’s life is steeped in poverty.

I am telling you, these people got it going on.

“Homeownership stabilizes people’s lives,” Venne said. “It’s a good thing, also for the neighborhood that surrounds us here.”

Until then, what does one do with four floors full of hospital equipment?

One gives it away.

Cancer Patient Care, The Spokane AIDS Network, The Salvation Army and Community Detox are just some of the organizations that are hauling beds, desks, guardrails and wheelchairs out of the building through Saturday morning.

“We thought, let’s flip this around,” Venne said. “Instead of us always asking the community to support us, let us support something in the community – that’s why we are giving all the stuff away.”

There is no such world as a perfect one, but sometimes we get darn close.