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- ADDRESS: 310 NW Flanders St.
- YEAR BUILT: 1913
- SQUARE FOOTAGE: 14,250
- MARKET VALUE: $691,370
- OWNER: Cascadia Behavioral Healthcare
- HOW LONG IT’S BEEN EMPTY: Since 2020
- WHY IT’S BEEN EMPTY: The owner doesn’t have the money to renovate it.
For 20 years, the Royal Palm Hotel in the heart of Portland’s Old Town provided transitional housing to people who were either mentally ill, addicted to drugs, or both, and would otherwise be living on the streets.
But in 2017, social services nonprofit Cascadia Health shut the rooms down because the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development had stopped funding them. Cascadia spokeswoman Stephanie Tripp says HUD wanted transitional housing scattered across neighborhoods rather than concentrated in a single building.
Until 2020, Cascadia continued operating its outreach program from the bottom floor and rented the second and third floors to Central City Concern for its recuperative care program, which provides housing to discharged hospital patients who are seriously ill with nowhere to go. But everyone left in 2020, and since then, the Royal Palm has stood empty.
Cascadia says it has no good options for what to do with it next.
That’s partly because the hotel sits in a national historic district, making certain external renovations of the building markedly more expensive and complicated. Cascadia also can’t easily demolish the hotel because it’s attached on two sides to a commercial building owned by Michael Menashe.
And, perhaps most importantly, Cascadia can’t find a tenant or buyer that can meet the city’s requirements for the use of the building. Per the city’s agreement with Cascadia, the owner of the building must only accept tenants that make 30% or less of the area median income, until 2063. Cascadia can only get out of that agreement with the city at the Royal Palm if the nonprofit creates similar units at another property.
“At minimum [Cascadia] would be required to provide similar units at some other acceptable location under similar covenant conditions,” Tripp says. “We have been unable to identify a facility to operate these units in an alternative location.”
The Portland Housing Bureau says it can release Cascadia from the agreement, but bureau spokesman Gabriel Mathews says it “rarely” exercises that authority. “In the case of the Royal Palm Hotel, [the bureau’s] new executive leadership team is getting up to speed on the current status of the building and considering potential options.”
To pour salt in the wound, Cascadia had to start paying property taxes again on a portion of the building beginning in 2021. That’s because, after decades without a property tax bill on the building due to its nonprofit status, Cascadia was no longer providing services out of it. Since then, it’s paid $55,000 in property taxes.
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.
Clarification: A previous version of this story stated that renovations made to buildings in historic areas are expensive due to city regulations. Historic building regulations are only applied to certain external renovations, not internal renovations.