Jolenes First Cousin
this is part of the article collection Village Buildings.
Address: 828 SE Gladstone St, Portland, OR 97202. Google Maps.
Description from Guerrilla Development:
"Homelessness is an endemic problem in Portland and the numbers are sobering. According to 2017’s Point In Time Count, there are as many as 4,177 people without permanent homes on any given night. Nearly 1,700 of those folks sleep on the street. While there are many contributing factors, skyrocketing residential rent looms large among them. In the last two years alone, rent in Portland has risen twenty times faster than the median income.
We owe it to our City and to our citizens to find solutions. Enter Jolene’s First Cousin. It’s Guerrilla Development’s way of using our tool kit (real estate, finance and design) to put a dent in Portland’s homelessness problem.
Jolene’s First Cousin is two two-story buildings on a single lot in the heart of the Creston-Kennilworth neighborhood. It has a total of six units: three retail spaces, two market rate lofts and one containing 11 rooms in a single resident occupancy (SRO) arrangement. The 100-SF SRO rooms will share amenities: fully-outfitted kitchen, living and dining room, private landscaped courtyard, showers, toilets, and laundry facilities. Each room will have its own bed, closet, and sink. SRO renters will secure their spot in Jolene’s First Cousin for $425/mo. The SRO unit is master leased by JOIN—a homelessness non-profit in Portland with 25 years of experience—who place houseless folks into the project. The SRO residents self-govern, establishing ground rules and operational systems.
The project is innovative on other fronts as well. We crowd-invested $300,000 of equity in Jolene’s First Cousin thanks to a Rule 504 Exemption of Regulation D (qualified by the State of Oregon) in less than 72 hours. Our offering created an opportunity for Permitted Oregon Purchasers and Accredited Investors an annual 5% preferred return and both the return of their principal and a percentage split of the proceeds of a refinancing event in Year 10. Our goal? To create an opportunity to participate in real estate investment with a tangible social impact. You can read more about this specific process here.
Guerrilla won’t stop at Jolene’s First Cousin. There will be Jolene’s Second, and Third, and Fourth... We will nestle these projects into every major neighborhood in Portland. They will bring jobs, beautiful market rate rental apartments, and housing for our homeless population, a handful of rooms at a time."
Media:
Westling, Dara. "Crowdfunding, Guerrilla-Style. Lessons From Jolene’s First Cousin." Locavesting, March 29, 2018. https://www.locavesting.com/crowdfunding/crowdfunding-guerrilla-style-lessons-from-jolenes-first-cousin/.
Willamette Week, 14 February 2018: "With Plans to Build Housing for the Homeless, a Portland Developer is Privatizing Socialism." ["Reason no. 16 to love Portland right now"].
Urban Land Institute. "Deal Profile: Jolene's First Cousin." ULI. https://casestudies.uli.org/deal-profile-jolenes-first-cousin/.
Park, Eileen. [2018] "Guerrilla Development's bold plan to end homelessness." by KOIN-TV, Oct 18, 2018. https://www.koin.com/news/local/multnomah-county/guerrilla-development-s-bold-plan-to-end-homelessness/1362079021.
Portland SRO (Single Resident Occupant) housing
"Portland banking on low-rent SRO hotels to ease housing problems." The Oregonian, April 27, 2019.
2016 - Portland Housing Bureau bought the Joyce Hotel SRO downtown. 1st publicly owned SRO in Portland?
2018 - PHB bought Westwind Apartments, in Chinatown. Will be torn down and replaced with new building.
PHB and state are contributing $4.5M to new Findley Commons, run by Do Good Multnomah.
Also contributed to a new $15M Central City Concern development with 40 SRO units.
LISAH - Low-Income Single Adult Housing - Transition Projects project with 36 SRO units, also 35 studio apartments in a separate building.
References
- Groth, Paul. Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6j49p0wf/. Full text available in UC Press E-Books Collection.
- Harbarger, Molly, and Elliot Njus (2019). "Portland banking on low-rent SRO hotels to ease housing problems." The Oregonian, April 27, 2019. https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2019/04/officials-look-to-sro-hotels-as-model-for-low-income-housing.html.
- Monahan, Rachel (2018). "With Plans to Build Housing for the Homeless, a Portland Developer is Privatizing Socialism." ["Reason no. 16 to love Portland right now"]. Willamette Week, 14 February 2018. https://www.wweek.com/culture/2018/02/14/our-developers-are-privatizing-socialism/.
- Park, Eileen. [2018] "Guerrilla Development's bold plan to end homelessness." by KOIN-TV, Oct 18, 2018. https://www.koin.com/news/local/multnomah-county/guerrilla-development-s-bold-plan-to-end-homelessness/1362079021.
- Urban Land Institute. "Deal Profile: Jolene's First Cousin." ULI. https://casestudies.uli.org/deal-profile-jolenes-first-cousin/. Undated, accessed 18 November 2019.
- Westling, Dara. "Crowdfunding, Guerrilla-Style. Lessons From Jolene’s First Cousin." Locavesting, March 29, 2018. https://www.locavesting.com/crowdfunding/crowdfunding-guerrilla-style-lessons-from-jolenes-first-cousin/.