The Joint Office of Homeless Services announced today that Multnomah County and CareOregon are kicking in a combined $100,000 to pay for a year’s worth of rent assistance, case management, and housing placement services for the Lincoln Hotel’s 31 residents, who face eviction from their long-time home next month.
The residents, many of whom are elderly and disabled, received 90-day eviction notices on Dec. 21, and have to move out by March 31. The evictions were triggered by the retirement of the building’s long-time managers and the decision of the building’s owner, Goritsan Investment Properties LLC, to close the Lincoln.
Street Roots broke the news of the eviction and hotel’s pending closure in early January.
Northwest Pilot Project, a social-service agency that provides housing assistance to senior citizens, will be contracted to provide the services. The agency is already working with many of the Lincoln’s residents and has been doing so since the agency’s service providers first heard news of the eviction.
Denis Theriault, the Joint Office of Homeless Services’ spokesperson told Street Roots that some of the building’s 31 residents have already found new homes. But the additional funding will make it easier for the remaining residents to afford the monthly payments of their new housing.
“It buys some time,” Theriault said, for Northwest Pilot Project to find housing and identify any subsidies or programs for qualifying residents.
Multnomah County is providing $80,000, which comes from unspent funding in the Joint Office of Homeless Services’ budget. CareOregon, which provides medical care to Portlanders on the Oregon Health Plan, is contributing $20,000.
“Stable housing is critical to the whole person health that CareOregon works to provide to members of the Oregon Health Plan,” said Eric Hunter, CareOregon's chief executive officer, in a press release released by the Joint Office of Homeless Services.
Wherever each tenant of the Lincoln moves to, it will be undoubtedly be more expensive than the downtown “hotel,” which rented single rooms for between $450 and $550 a month, making it one of the cheapest places to live in Portland.
The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Portland is $1,132, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s “Out of Reach” report. A report by ECOnorthwest, released last year, found that 56,000 households in the Portland region are at risk of homelessness on any given day due simply to high housing costs.
The Lincoln, located at Southwest 10th Avenue and Morrison Street, is a single-room-occupancy hotel, or SRO, that has rented to low-income Portlanders for the past 30 years. Tenants live in small, individual rooms, and each of the two floors has a shared bathroom.
There isn’t a communal kitchen or any other communal spaces, but the Lincoln’s residents spoke adoringly of the building’s sense of community, including a free table where residents would leave plates of cookies and other food, annual Thanksgiving potlucks, and a tradition of the building’s managers to give each resident a Christmas card and tin of holiday cookies.
The infusion of cash and services is due to Multnomah County chairwoman Deborah Kafoury. On Jan. 10, Kafoury briefly met with Marc Jolin, the director of the Joint Office of Homeless Services, and Shannon Callahan, the interim director of the Portland Housing Bureau, and directed both of them to develop a plan for providing assistance to the tenants of the Lincoln Hotel.
At that time, Kafoury told Street Roots that it was “not acceptable” for the residents of the Lincoln to face homelessness due to the high costs of the housing market.
“We can’t step in every time we learn about a building at risk. Without real resources from the federal government, we have to weigh each dollar carefully,” Kafoury said in statement on the funding released from the Joint Office. “The next best thing we can do is to make sure we protect as many vulnerable tenants from homelessness as we can.”
Dozens of SRO hotels like the Lincoln have closed in the past two decades due to building owners’ decisions to sell their property, and this is not the first time during the housing crisis Portland currently faces that local government has stepped into to provide additional money to prevent the forced eviction and probable homelessness of low-income Portlanders.
In 2017, Kafoury approved nearly $50,000 to ensure that families living at the Normandy Apartments, an apartment complex in northeast Portland whose new owner suddenly increased the building’s rent by 100 percent, could continue living in the building until the school year ended.
In September, the Portland Housing Bureau announced the purchase of the Westwind Apartments, a 70-unit SRO building on Northwest 6th Avenue and Flanders Street, which was a long-time home to low-income residents. The bureau purchased the building for $3 million using funds from the city’s $258.4 million housing bond, which voters passed in 2016 to preserve existing affordable housing and build additional units.
In June 2016, the housing bureau also purchased the Joyce Hotel for $4.2 million dollars.
The Joyce, an SRO hotel on Southwest 11th Avenue and Stark Street with 69 rooms that rented between $19 to $50 a night, was the last hotel in downtown Portland that offered weekly stays and was low-barrier, meaning managers accepted people who were intoxicated or under the influence of drugs.
Tenants received a 90-day eviction notice on Dec. 31, 2015, when the building’s owner, Dan Zilka, decided to sell the building.
The Lincoln’s tenants are also receiving between $2,900 and $3,300 to help pay for the cost of moving and paying move-in costs, as a result of an ordinance the Portland City Council last year, which mandates that landlords who issue no-cause evictions or raise the rent by 10 percent or more in a year provide tenants with relocation assistance.
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