ASTORIA, Ore. — When it sells, a weary-looking, three-bedroom house on Bond Street could help bring more housing to Astoria.
The nonprofit Friends of the Unsheltered purchased the house in 2020 to provide low-cost, temporary housing to people emerging from homelessness and trying to rebuild their lives.
Nelle Moffett and Rick Bowers, the couple behind Friends of the Unsheltered, bought the house because they were frustrated by local discussions about homelessness and official responses that they felt, at best, only circled the problem.
When they opened Friends House on Bond Street, representatives with Clatsop Community Action said it was a first for private citizens in the community — rather than an agency — to step up and provide housing in this way.
Now, Moffett and Bowers are selling the house and dissolving the nonprofit. They informed their tenants early in 2023 that they were getting ready to sell the house.
But the proceeds of a sale and the nonprofit’s remaining assets are set to go to another nonprofit that also aims to increase housing options through a project downtown: Copeland Commons. The proposal on Marine Drive would renovate a former hotel and build an additional building on the lot next door, creating 62 to 64 lower-cost and affordable apartment units.
Bowers and Moffett are negotiating a sales contract on Friends House. If it goes through, the sale could bring more than $300,000 to Copeland Commons at an important time as the group gears up for major state and federal funding requests.
Exit strategy
For Moffett and Bowers, who now live in Arizona, it’s a welcome exit strategy.
They still believe in the mission of Friends of the Unsheltered, but said they were burned out. Operating the house was far more difficult and draining than they had anticipated. They ran the operation themselves along with a few other board members. They couldn’t afford to have a full-time manager on-site.
There was the pressure of administrative tasks like the reporting required by the IRS. There was the challenge of maintaining the house. Then there were the complicated and often still unsteady lives of the residents themselves.
Most of their tenants came to them through Helping Hands, which runs reentry programs and a shelter in Uniontown. The graduates from Helping Hands often struggle with drugs or alcohol or both.
One of the board members for Friends of the Unsheltered had been homeless in Astoria and still had connections with people who were or had been homeless. She knew who was doing well, who was running in darker circles, who was rumored to be in the middle of a relapse. She helped Moffett and Bowers vet people for Friends House, occasionally saying “absolutely not” in cases where they may have been tempted to say “yes.”
“I’m not qualified to determine if somebody’s using or not … and we’re not doing urine tests,” Moffett said. “We both refused to do that. So we were doing the best that we could and hoping for the best — that they’d gone through the program and were coming to us ready for the world, so to speak. And that wasn’t the case for every person.”
“We had some success stories and some,” Moffett paused, thinking, “not so fun.”
In some cases, Bowers said, it was “a nightmare.”
The Copeland Commons workforce housing project, while different in its scope and focus, aligned with the couples’ interests and hopes for the community.
“So that feels really good,” Moffett said, “where we’re not abandoning our mission, or Astoria for that matter. But we are getting ourselves out from under it.”
Pitch
Whether Copeland Commons will launch remains to be seen.
The group behind that project is collaborating with Innovative Housing, a Portland-based real estate developer specializing in affordable and lower-income housing. Innovative Housing orchestrated the transformation of the dilapidated former Merwyn Hotel next to City Hall into the 40-unit Merwyn Apartments.
On Friday, Julie Garver, of Innovative Housing, pitched the Copeland Commons housing project at the Astoria Downtown Historic District Association’s community meeting. Garner and the Copeland Commons board are hoping the downtown association’s board will sponsor the project for a $400,000 Main Street Revitalization grant.
“As you may or may not know, the road to affordable housing is long,” Garver said. But she noted that Copeland Commons would serve a number of Astorians who work common jobs in the city and who might struggle to find housing.
Copeland Commons will cost around $22.5 million to complete. The project already has more than $1 million raised — in hand or promised. This includes $125,000 of federal American Rescue Plan Act dollars pledged by Clatsop County. The Board of County Commissioners is expected to authorize the handing over of that money at a meeting this week.
The money Copeland Commons has now is paying for predevelopment work — studies, evaluations and explorations — so advocates can present a strong case for state and federal funding requests and then move quickly once funding is secured.
Bill Van Nostran, secretary for the Copeland Commons board, was part of the original church group that purchased the hotel. Given the mix of feelings and opinions around developing lower-income housing in Astoria, he saw the Friday presentation to the downtown association as a last-ditch effort for the Main Street grant.
“I hope that the naysayers will be swayed,” he said. “You really shoot yourself in the foot if there’s $400,000 available for your community and you let the opportunity go by.”
“I really think that with all the progress that’s being made and the vibrancy that has come back to the downtown corridor, we just can’t afford to have vacant buildings or holes in the ground,” he added, digging at longstanding debates over a city block at Heritage Square where there is, in fact, a large hole.
The downtown association’s board expects to discuss the Copeland Commons pitch at its meeting Tuesday. Quinn Haase, executive director for the association, said they have already discussed the project several times, but the board has not reached a consensus.
Supporters of the Copeland Commons project see it as one way to help address Astoria’s housing problem. No one expects it to solve homelessness. Nor will it fill a major gap in transitional housing, the kind of housing that Bowers and Moffett were trying to provide with Friends House.
But even for groups with far more experience, expertise and resources in working with homeless people, the thinking around transitional housing has changed.
Chronic homelessness is still on the rise and, in some cases, people’s stories have become more complicated, said Alan Evans, the founder and CEO of Helping Hands Reentry Outreach Centers.
“There’s always a concern about how we’re going to get a person from being homeless to a structured living situation,” he said, noting that stays at Helping Hands facilities have become a lot longer because it is more difficult to find a place for people to move to next.
Evans said they’ve found they can’t rely on a person necessarily being able to take care of themselves. Instead, Helping Hands is becoming more reliant on partnerships with other groups to help guarantee a person’s ongoing success
He said he was not directly familiar with the work Moffett and Bowers did through Friends House.
But, he said, “It’s always a tough day when beds provided in our community have to shut their doors because it’s hard for agencies and people to do this. Every bed we lose is a bed that’s needed.”