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ADDRESS: 1819 NW Everett St.
YEAR BUILT: 1909
SQUARE FOOTAGE: 25,436
MARKET VALUE: $101,940
OWNER: Northwest Neighborhood Cultural Center
HOW LONG IT’S BEEN EMPTY: Since September
WHY IT’S EMPTY: Vegas, baby, Vegas.
A former Christian Science church on the National Register of Historic Places is without an occupant—save for the occasional houseless person who manages to circumvent the fence surrounding it and finds respite on the front steps.
A Las Vegas development company has pledged to purchase the 25,000-square-foot building in Northwest Portland’s Alphabet District from the six neighborhood associations that collectively own it. But the developers face mounting costs and lenders with cold feet; the sales agreement was recently extended for a third time in a year. The new closing date: Jan. 31, 2024.
Meanwhile, the 114-year-old building is getting battered.
For over a week, workers with a restoration company have lugged damp carpet, wooden boards and siding out the back door of the building. Two of the workers, smoking cigarettes under a tree last week, said a massive party in the building set off the sprinkler system. “Must have been one heck of a party,” one of them said. (City officials said they’re not aware of a party.)
The damaged building is testament to what happens when a well-meaning group of people purchase a property they can’t afford to maintain—and the resulting difficulty of financing the preservation of aging infrastructure in Portland before it’s too far gone.
“This was done by idealists that didn’t know what they were getting into,” says Dan Anderson, a former two-time chair of the board for the current neighborhood owners group. “Warren Buffett said, ‘When the tide goes out, you find out who’s swimming naked.’”
The building now known as the Northwest Neighborhood Cultural Center, at Northwest 18th Avenue and Everett Street, was built by Chicago architect Solon Beman in 1909. For decades, it was a Christian Science church.
It was registered as a historic building in 1978. The applicant wrote that the church’s “exterior details and interior finish work convey a simplicity and restraint consistent with church doctrine.”
By that time, Christian Scientists had shrunk in number and the church’s members had scattered. So six Northwest neighborhood associations decided in 1977 to form a legal entity—the Northwest Neighborhood Cultural Center—and buy the church to operate as a community center of sorts.
Nonprofit organizations and social services moved into the building in the 1970s after the neighborhoods purchased it, aided by a burst of federal funding for public sector jobs. Meals on Wheels, for example, operated a commercial kitchen in the basement of the church.
But Anderson says Reagan-era government spending cuts sent the nonprofits packing. “The board had an unrealistic business model and unrealistic expectations. For better or for worse, owning and managing a piece of real property is a task,” Anderson says. “There’s a few right ways to do it, and there are many more wrong ways to do it.”
The Northwest Children’s Theater moved into the building in 1993 and moved out in September 2022. In the 30 years it occupied the building, the theater nonprofit made at least two attempts to buy the building, in increasingly hostile negotiations. The theater tried to buy the building in 2006, and the NNCC board narrowly rejected the offer. Again, in 2017, the theater offered to buy the building, Anderson says, this time for just $1. The board again declined.
The NNCC doesn’t pay property taxes because it’s a nonprofit organization. But if the building isn’t home to a charitable purpose soon, the nonprofit loses that protection.
Because the building is listed on the Historic Register, whoever takes it on must take painstaking measures to preserve particular parts of it. “The dirt has significant value. The building on it arguably has negative value,” Anderson says. “Monetizing that is difficult.”
Las Vegas-based Founders Developments came along in the summer of 2021. The private investment group is led by Tanya Toby, 53, and Max Sass, 27. Both live in Vegas, but for more than five years Sass has purchased and revamped apartments and condos in Portland and has lived here part time.
The NNCC is Founders’ only current project, Toby says—and the first it’s done that involves a historic building.
Toby and Sass envision an 80-room luxury hotel built on the existing parking lot, with all amenities, including a library, a wellness center and a speakeasy lounge, housed in the church.
Sass says Founders seeks to fill a void in Portland for luxury hotels with attractive amenities: “To me, Portland is lacking a hotel that actually attracts locals and gives the renter the overnight stay and actual amenities.” The price for an overnight stay, he says, will be “well under The Nines and the Ritz-Carlton, and in between Hotel deLuxe and Hotel Lucia.”
In one of the firm’s PowerPoint presentations to the building’s board this spring, the firm said the twin hotels would remediate the “lack of high-end hospitality product in the city with an exceptional experience” and asserted that “Portland has high demand and low supply of rooms.” (In fact, the hotel occupancy rate for the first six months of this year was 58.6%.)
The sale has been pushed back three times since Founders first entered into a sales agreement in the spring of 2022. Meanwhile, Founders deposits $50,000 each month into the board’s bank account, like micro-down payments. That makes it difficult for Founders to back out of the project.
In a January email to then-board chair Anderson, Toby wrote that securing lenders was difficult. “We have been through two rounds with lenders at this point, and after spending months of completing the loan approval process and outrageous expenses associated, the lenders back out after understanding the building condition, of the seismic upgrade necessary and little or no tenants suitable.”
Anderson wrote to his fellow board members that month, encouraging the sale extension but proposing the board add language to the agreement to make it harder for Founders to back out of the deal if the NNCC were to suffer a similar fate as the downtown Portland Korean Church that burned down in an arson fire just days before, an incident that Anderson wrote “weighs on my thinking.”
Now, Toby tells WW that Founders has secured the financing for the construction loan, and permits from the city are moving forward.
The building, however, is in dismal shape.
Because the NNCC is one of 1,650 Portland buildings with unreinforced masonry, seismic upgrades are likely to cost north of $5 million. It’s filled with asbestos. The external siding is flaking off. Portland Fire & Rescue has responded to nine calls at the building within the past year; in recent weeks, the fire bureau responded to a Molotov cocktail thrown at the building, multiple homeless-related fires, and a sprinkler system that current NNCC board chair Ginger Burke says drenched the building’s hallways.
A car burned up in the parking lot in the wee hours of June 15. Shortly thereafter, Founders erected a chain-link fence around the property, eliminating what had become an all-hours hangout and occasional chop shop in the parking lot.
Once the building sells, the money will flow into a grant fund controlled by a new advisory committee appointed by the six neighborhoods that own the building. “If this sale falls apart, we could then again be subject to paying taxes, which are very expensive,” Burke says. “But I think we’re all very comfortable now with Founders’ ability to complete this project.”
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.