Hoopla Went Overboard For Housing Project
Public dignitaries, government officials, representatives of social services agencies, bankers and developers gathered by the dozens recently at the old Commercial Hotel in downtown Spokane.
The occasion was the dedication of a $2-million project to house half a hundred homeless persons at a recycled old Skid Road rooming house in the 1100 of West First Avenue.
What a bang-up turnout. The list of figureheads was as long as your arm.
Evidently, every bureaucrat and politician ever remotely associated with the plan, long years in the pipeline, took the morning off to celebrate and accept congratulations.
Consider just the following two sentences from a press handout:
“Development of the project’s first phase,” reads the release, “was funded through a public/private partnership involving local, state, and federal organizations.
“Principal funding sources include $250,000 from Otis Associates Limited Partnership; a $746,240 below-marketrate loan from U.S. Bank of Washington; a $254,600 grant from the Federal Home Loan Bank of Seattle’s Affordable Housing Program, a portion of which subsidized the interest rate on U.S. Bank’s loan; a $147,000 low-interest loan from the Spokane Downtown Stabilization Program; a $65,000 low-interest loan from the Spokane CD Downtown Neighborhood Steering Committee; and $120,000 in weatherization grants through Spokane Neighborhood Action Programs.”
See what I mean? At the big selfcongratulatory to-do, all these many factions were abundantly represented, and then some. Which is OK, I guess, if that’s what it takes to get the job done.
To be sure, this is a worthy project. Nobody disputes that. It will help provide much-needed affordable housing for the down and out. It will recycle some slum. And it will help chip away at a no-man’sland of drug dealing, soliciting for prostitution, and general mayhem that divides downtown from the Browne’s Addition residential district.
But that such a multiplicity of governmental departments and do-gooder organizations and social service agencies spent so many years planning and producing just one project is disturbing.
By contrast, entrepreneurs Ron and Julie Wells of Wells & Co. have accomplished 10 times as much in the same neighborhood as all these agencies combined with no big official hullaballoo.
More to the point at present, they have just finished redoing another old hotel a couple blocks west on First, for which they were accorded no public recognition from the government housing hierarchy whatsoever. None.
The 1910-vintage Upton Hotel, remodeled in the late 1930s or early 1940s and renamed the New Grand Coulee Hotel, also boasts half a hundred dwelling units, as does the Commercial Building.
In their just-completed rehab, the Wellses added bathrooms and kitchens to some units lacking these amenities. They did it without government subsidies.
They bought the property for $565,000, and spent $450,000 on renovations. Their total of just over $1 million is half the cost of Commercial Building project.
They did it without government pushing and hauling and cajoling and squawking. And, unlike the public housing bureaucracy, they did it without a big showy choreographed reception to call attention to their accomplishment.
It must be emphasized here that the Wellses refuse to criticize the Commercial Building.
Anything good for the neighborhood is a godsend as far as they are concerned. It’s easy to see why. In recent years, Wells & Co. has acquired, refurbished, and assembled an ever-growing portfolio of formerly derelict and neglected old hotels and rooming houses in the most extensive reserve of historic architecture still standing in Spokane.
Anyway, the above sentiments are mine - not theirs.
The showboating by hangers-on at the Commercial Building reception. The long time-lags between getting anything much accomplished. The tedious self-serving political posturing by the public housing establishment. This doesn’t sit well.
Assuming there are future projects, as the kids say in the TV commercials “Just do it.”
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