Placing the homeless (or anyone) in a condemned building with asbestos would be a P.R. disaster. I'm guessing the PPH posted the photo expecting some controversy so that they could "sell more newspapers." It's de facto shoddy reporting. I think homelessness and people in need of housing (asylum seekers) has become the new normal, or now that Portland is talked about as the place to go. I've said this before, that bringing together a few of Portland's top architects to discuss creative ideas to address this serious and pressing problem is a good start. A few years ago, Kaplan Thompson built the Friends school in Yarmouth in the Passivhaus style, and it has won not only design awards, but the Going Green feel-goods too. The cost of that school was only $4 million. What is the usual or today's projected cost to build a school? $30 million or more? Give a good architect a problem, and he/she will fix it. It's what they do. The housing should also have a business attached, one that can employ people part time with minimal skills and the city and state and Uncle Sam should mandate an exemption for asylum seekers so that they can also work here. Otherwise, people without a daily school or work structure often turn to drug use and consequently, crime (to feed the habit). The city needs to wake up and be proactive, instead of reactive.
Totally agree. Portland needs its own Pine Street Inn organization like Boston.
The issue with building residential with attached commercial (where you are expecting the renters to work) is that it isolates them from the rest of the community and they fail at integration into society. It's no better than the Jewish ghettos of Europe and elsewhere.
Yes, good article. Better architecture, or the kind that prioritizes the user experience rather than aesthetics, can work wonders for a city in regards to public housing. The worst example would the housing projects in American cities built in the 60s and 70s. I could write a thesis on what went wrong with that.
Aesthetics IS part of the user experience. They are inseparable. Aesthetically pleasing architecture = positive user experience.
Correction (and I was there when Auto Europe renovated it and moved in in 1996): it's 39 Commercial. I mentioned a dormer at the time (that fifth floor goes all the way up inside; it feels like a basketball gym), but AE wasn't the kind of place that needed a showcase conference room and there may have been HP considerations as well. (Considering that I still pray for the health of the guys from ServPro who went in and cleaned up 2 decades of shuttered-building-on-the-waterfront mess, I I can vouch that there hadn't been any preservation going on before we got in there.)
CSS refers to it as 29 Commercial - whether correctly or incorrectly - for those interested in watching/digging in further.
I'll be interested in seeing the floorplans for the hotel. There are certainly some architectural challenges posed by this building that you wouldn't expect seeing it from outside.
I'd love to see this project happen. Who wouldn't. But a *public* television station studio on the waterfront a block away from a building that sold a rooftop condo last year for $4.5 million? Anyone taking bets here?
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We are getting the food ready for the grills.I am always amused by how quiet this forum is on days when people typically aren't working
From someone whose 6xgreat-grandfather's nephew lost his home on King St. thanks to the bombing by Capt. Mowatt, Happy Independence Day!