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Address: 1485 NE 128th Ave.
Year built: 1952
Square footage: 1,000
Market value: $280,000
Owner: Portland Community Reinvestment Initiatives
How long it’s been empty: At least three years, but a neighbor says nearly 20.
Why it’s empty: There’s no money to redevelop it.
The decrepit ranch-style house with a collapsing garage, peeling teal paint, a moss-covered roof, and boarded windows looks tiny on its 7,000-square-foot lot. The home, situated in the deep East Portland neighborhood of Hazelwood, has been owned by Portland Community Reinvestment Initiatives—a nonprofit that develops, maintains and rents affordable housing—since 1992. Because of its 501(c)(3) status, PCRI pays no property taxes on the lot.
Nuisance complaints investigated by the city over the past 22 years include trash littering the land, suspected squatters, and a collapsing garage.
Kymberly Horner, executive director of PCRI, tells WW the nonprofit is amid a plan to build, rent and sell 1,000 properties in 10 years, and adds this property is included in that plan: “Right now we don’t have the timeline set, but we do know we want to get some of our vacant properties under construction within the next two years.”
Horner did not say how many of the 1,000 units have been made available since the program launched in 2018, and funding for the project remains unclear.
Horner says PCRI “applies for funding streams all across the board, we ask banks to donate to our organization, we’ve received funding from Meyer Memorial Trust, but it’s very expensive to develop housing...we’re constrained by financial resources to develop.”
The house in Hazelwood was one of hundreds PCRI purchased from a predatory mortgage broker and real estate company called Dominion Capital that went bankrupt in 1990. PCRI agreed to maintain the homes as deeply affordable housing—a costly endeavor that’s resulted in a number of PCRI-owned homes sitting vacant for years.
Horner declined to say when the home was last occupied, adding she could not answer WW’s questions by deadline because “as a smaller staffed non-profit organization, time and resources are never plentiful.”
According to the most recent filings with the federal government, PCRI has net assets of more than $20 million and its executive director at the time was earning $189,000 a year.