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Address: 725 NE 100th Ave.
Year built: 1975
Square footage: 12,852
Market value: $4.2 million
Owner: David Douglas School District
How long it’s been empty: 7 years
Why it’s empty: Dwindling Elks membership and a lack of school funding
For more than two decades, city planners and developers have had grand plans for a stretch of land east of the confluence of the Gateway Transit Center and Interstates 84 and 205.
Their vision: an East Portland community hub to rival downtown.
This could be “a place you’d have heard of before you got there, like the French Quarter or South Beach or Soho,” developer Ted Gilbert told a reporter for the Mid-county Memo in 2005. Gilbert had just purchased land near Northeast 102nd Avenue and Pacific Street, steps from transit lines at the heart of the planned redevelopment.
Seventeen years later, Gilbert still owns 5 acres of property on that corner. It lies vacant, as does a neighboring 5-acre lot that contains an abandoned Elks lodge. The lodge closed in early 2015 due to declining membership. The David Douglas School District bought it.
Today, tents and other ramshackle shelters ring the two properties. Trash dots the sidewalks. The walls of the 12,852-square-foot lodge are covered with graffiti.
The air smells of fire; a burned-out shell is all that remains of an abandoned medical office building on the corner. It burned only a few weeks ago, Gilbert says, after squatters broke in and set up camp.
Neighbors say the area is unsafe, particularly at night. One, who had lived nearby for 15 years, casually pulled a knife and a can of Mace out of his pockets. He declined to give his name. He said things were better when the Elks were still around.
Gilbert’s dream, however, is not dead—although plans to raze the lodge and replace it with a new school are on hold, Gilbert says, a casualty of rising building costs.
Gilbert wants to build a high-rise “modern elementary school” on the lot, with affordably priced “workforce housing” next door. He says he’s signed a contract with a developer to figure out the details.
David Douglas School District, which purchased the lodge in 2015, says it has no immediate plans to develop the property, although the district “hope[s] to be able to do that fairly soon, if we can find the funding for it,” spokesman Dan McCue tells WW.
The estimated cost of building the new 600-student school ballooned from $55 million in early April to $66 million in May, McCue says, at which point the district dropped plans to include the spending in its upcoming bond measure.
Meanwhile, Gilbert has hired security guards to patrol his half of the property at night, while the school district admits it has struggled to keep up its half of the property. “It can be difficult to keep pace with the rate at which it gets degraded,” McCue says.
Every week, WW examines one mysteriously vacant property in the city of Portland, explains why it’s empty, and considers what might arrive there next. Send addresses to newstips@wweek.com.