Project at 8629 N. Crawford St.
Cathedral Park neighbors have been closely following a new multi-lot development near the intersection of North Burlington and Salem avenues.

Three-story multifamily condominiums with two or three bedrooms each will be going in at 8629 N. Crawford St., according to Jerry Offer, a planner for Otak Architects. Offer referred additional questions to the Otak architect on the project, Sinan Gumusoglu, but Gumusoglu did not respond to The Sentinel’s request for details.

A total of three lots and 18,000 square feet of land at the location are listed as belonging to East Coast-based M&T Bank and Chesapeake Holdings West, LLC. There is as yet no name for the project.
Barbara Quinn, chair of the Friends of Cathedral Park Neighborhood Association, heard that Otak is simply designing the condos for the out-of-town owners. She hopes that Otak will answer neighbors’ concerns at the next association meeting. With permits still pending, she feels there’s time to make sure the designs fit with the neighborhood.

At a Concordia Neighborhood Association meeting last month, residents expressed their concerns about crime, squatters and especially abandoned houses. The neighborhood’s January newsletter cited a statistic that Concordia ranks fifth out of Portland’s 95 neighborhoods in 211 calls about foreclosures (see below).

Belinda Clark, co-chair of the association, thinks that the reality could be worse than the statistic suggests.

“A lot of what we hear from the public is, ‘We don’t know who to call,’” Clark says. “There were a lot of people here who were not reporting it because they didn’t think anything would come
from it.”

Officer Wayne Schull of the North Precinct Neighborhood Response Team thinks that Portland’s perception of the problem may be greater than the reality.

By Raymond Rendleman

Remember when St. Johns Booksellers sent out an earnest plea for help just before the holidays, saying they needed to make $6,000 in a couple weeks or shut their doors?

Well, more than a few folks must have gotten the memo, because the independent store reached its goal. That $6,000 was the bookstore's accumulated shortfall over the entire year, according to owner Nena Rawdah.

“A lot of other merchants in St. Johns are all having the same problems because we’re noticing almost zero foot traffic,” Rawdah says. “People are definitely spending less money these days. My most reliable customers are people on fixed incomes, because it seems those incomes are the only ones that haven’t gone down.”

In any even partially complete survey of last year’s activism, we’d be remiss not to include the oldest business group in North Portland. Especially this year.

Founded in 1926, the St. Johns Boosters recently voted in a whole new board. Fierce election campaigning in 2008 yielded few fresh faces, but the epic tally of Dec. 7, 2009, ended the reign of several executives who had served since the ’90s.

The organization’s membership has also skyrocketed in the past two years from about 12 to 83 members. After long sharing a space with the Cathedral Park Jazz Festival on North Alta Avenue, the Boosters are gearing up to announce a new, larger space.

Proposals for the St. Johns Brownfield Project have finally been submitted, but they exclude the indoor tennis court owned by Portland Parks & Recreation. 

The St. Johns Racquet Center, adjacent to the former site of a gas station, has posted continued financial losses, and caused a stir last year when it was blamed for scaring away bids from potential brownfield developers. Portland’s Bureau of Environmental Services had to adjust the requirements for the brownfield at North Lombard Street and Baltimore Avenue.

When the center became an optional portion of this year’s second round of bidding due Dec. 4, the three development teams that submitted proposals opted out of confronting the hot-button racquet center issue. All proposals involving the building would have necessitated a public-private partnership, maintaining recreation there while also facilitating green building improvements and mixed-use development requiring both market-rate and affordable housing units.

Persistence has paid off for a group of African American women from North and Northeast Portland.

It has been a longtime dream of the Portland Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority to transform a derelict former gas station site near Peninsula Park into a green, “living building” that would benefit the entire neighborhood.  The planned community center will be on a site wholly owned by the sorority, which at press time had its fingers crossed for a Jan. 4 construction start date. 

“We got the permits finally, so we’ll be starting construction,” says Chris Poole-Jones, Delta Sigma Theta’s project coordinator and spokeswoman.

Here's another sneak peek from next month's "Best of North Portland" street edition. Sentinel contributor Raymond Rendleman shares his favorite Fifth Quadrant hidden treasure: Pier Park's "Hobbit house." (Actual photo of said structure coming to a news box near you Jan. 6.)

Anyone who’s played a round of disc golf at Pier Park has seen the biggest hazard of the entire course, a ramshackle structure that’s almost completely enveloped in vines, moss and ferns. Nestled in Portland’s densest canopy of evergreens outside of Forest Park, its low sloping roof is perfect for trapping an errant throw.

Among North Portland disc-golf junkies, the fabled peril has been nicknamed the “Hobbit House,” and legend has it that the hermit who lives there sells captured discs on the black market to survive.

It’s that time of year again when newspapers all over the city print their favorite list of nonprofits. Each year, we open them up looking for our favorites. But each year, the most beloved organizations of North and Northeast Portland get passed over in favor of the larger charities with nicer downtown offices.

So it’s time for The Sentinel to do something about the under-appreciation of our neighborhood groups. While they keep modest headquarters north of the Willamette, these nonprofits extend their helping hand to residents throughout the five quadrants and even beyond city limits. Many of them have been around for more than a decade doing great work without more than an offhand thank you from the city at large.

But most of all, these groups are made up of real neighborhood people who must put in the long hours and lower pay typical of nonprofit organizations. These guys and gals all work tirelessly, not for financial gain or sane schedules, but for the satisfaction of having made a difference in the lives of other local folks. 

If you call the Community Youth Hotline these days to ask about the presence of Hmong gangs in North and Northeast Portland, you’ll get an unflinching, cool-headed response. Not what you might expect from the person who’s only been answering 503-823-GANG since Sept. 15.

In the short time that Imani Muhammad has held the hotline responsibility at the Northeast Coalition of Neighborhoods, she has revolutionized the position. Muhammad prefers to call herself the youth coordinator to shift the focus from gang prevention to life enrichment of young people. With every caller to the hotline, her goal has been to enroll each into an after-school program, whether in sports, a study hall or a chess club. She thinks that our city has too long targeted certain groups, such as foster homes, for special treatment.

A newly created PDC Cultural Liaison Team has contracted independent consulting firm Northwest Ideas, LLC, to study the issues. After conducting extensive interviews with 46 stakeholders from North/Northeast Portland (including Sentinel publisher Cornelius Swart), the study’s authors have concluded that these communities have the potential to forgive the past if PDC can focus on addressing core livability concerns.

“Now is the moment for PDC to break through the cynicism encouraged by past actions,” said Lew Frederick, Northwest Ideas co-owner. “This is a tipping point for people to see whether their information is going to be used respectfully.”