Hacienda CDC battles for supportive housing in Northeast Portland
By Joanne Zuhl
Staff writer
It is not difficult to spot Hacienda CDC-supported housing. It is by design the most colorful housing in the Cully neighborhood — now 400 units strong — and it is emblematic of the diverse, multicultural population that has resided in this Northeast Portland neighborhood for generations.
Hacienda Community Development Corporation was founded more than 15 years ago by a group of Latino leaders — all volunteers -— who saw a growing need to address the lack of decent and dignified affordable housing for the Latino community in Portland. It began with the fundamental need for housing, but it has evolved to fill the larger infrastructure gaps in education, socialization, child care, workforce development and homeownership. Today, about 1,500 people benefit daily from the network of opportunities afforded through Hacienda’s housing management and culturally specific programs — including after-school homework sessions for youths, anti-gang intervention, adult education and a thriving food service micro-enterprise.
Pietro Ferrari became Hacienda’s executive director five years ago, at a time when funding for new housing developments was still invigorated by the economy. Today, the market has changed dramatically for supporting housing initiatives, and Hacienda is feeling the same economic pressures as other housing nonprofits, the backbone of affordable housing development for the poorest populations in Portland. Ferrari says there simply is no other organization like Hacienda in the Portland Metropolitan Area, and the financial crisis, coupled with the bureaucratic dam on stimulus funding, is jeopardizing the organization’s survival. In the face of these challenges, Hacienda continues its focus at the grassroots level, helping families at risk of homelessness stabilize their housing, direct energy toward education and economic advancement, and facilitate their move upward.
Hacienda has joined forces with other minority-focused nonprofits to leverage their voices and raise their concerns to bureaucracies in Portland and beyond. Hacienda, along with Portland Community Reinvestment Initiatives, and NAYA Native American Youth and Family Center, recently formed the Housing Organizations of Color Coalition, and together they hope to draw attention to the specific needs of Portland’s most vulnerable minority communities.
Joanne Zuhl: What were the dynamics within the Latino community nearly two decades ago such that people saw a problem and wanted to address it?
Pietro Ferrari: They saw a lack of support both in infrastructure and also disenfranchisement from the economy, city officials and everybody else. They organized and founded this organization to focus and specialize in the Latino community, providing cultural specific programs through the housing. But the first issue that they tackled was housing.
There was an opportunity to acquire an old complex that had 100 percent Latino families, but this whole complex, known as the Galaxy Apartments, was run by drug lords and gangs. Newspaper articles back then indicated that even the police were intimidated about going in cleaning out the place. So it took an organizing effort to take ownership of that and reclaim that part that was lost.
They felt like they were victims. And we’re talking about workforce housing for families that were vulnerable. Their kids were exposed to gang influences and the drug activity that was taking place in 200-plus units of housing. So overnight, the organization with no staff ended up owning this huge asset. Over the course of 15 years, they built a legacy of building new affordable housing. We have a portfolio close to 400 units. We have one under construction in Portsmouth. The philosophy is to provide and create the infrastructure through which people can stabilize their lives. And we equip each of these housing complexes with cultural-specific programs. We have an after-school program that is very active with the elementary and middle school children to keep them in a structured program focused on homework, but it is also a strategy for school retention. The Latino community in Portland is facing a 50 percent or greater dropout rate. One out of two kids drop out or don’t complete school. It is devastating. It is of epidemic proportions.
J.Z.: That’s a catastrophic rate. Why is it so high?
P.F.: It is alarming; it is also happening at a time that the Latino community does not have an organization like Hacienda focused exclusively on education. Five years ago there used to be one organization, the Oregon Council for Hispanic Advancement, but unfortunately due to economic hardship that organization no longer exists, leaving a vacuum in the high school age group. The alternative school that helped our students complete their GED no longer exists. So those kids were absorbed by other organization, but it left a void.
We believe that housing is a human right. Once you have your space, you can start organizing your own life.
So we have the program for the kids, and during the summer months we organize field trips. Many of the kids were exposed for the first time to the coast, the environment; we have partnerships with the Audubon Society, for example, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts programs.
J.Z.: Is this neighborhood historically Latin American?
P.F.: Yes it is. We house anybody who comes to us. We follow very strictly the fair housing law. The social services are culturally specific to the Latino community because that is where we have an expertise. About 8-10 percent are Somalian immigrants. We are experiencing folks from the African-American community having been displaced from the inner city. The Martin Luther King corridor, and Interstate. As that area got gentrified, we saw more renters coming into our portfolio creating a true mix of races and a very pluralistic community. We didn’t have that before. It was predominately Latino families. They continue to be the majority, but we are seeing more and more families that, as the MLK Jr. and other corridors were improved, they could not afford (those areas) anymore and were displaced.
J.Z.: So you have the African Americans being displaced coming into the Latino communities. Are we pushing each community even further out?
P.F.: Some stay and we create these multi-cultural, multi-ethnic communities that we have. Some others are getting pushed out, yes. They are getting pushed out to East County and Gresham, and that’s where we’re seeing the trends where the Latino population is growing. We get a lot of requests from the Latino community to build something in Gresham, Troutdale, Fairview, and further and further east.
J.Z.: How about your capacity to serve the people who knock on the door? Do you get more than you can help?
P.F.: Yes. They’re coming in two ways. We also have a homeownership program that offers classes, and the folks that we’re assisting more recently are those facing foreclosure. We have a HUD certified housing counselor on site. We’re the only ones, bilingual, offering foreclosure prevention help in Spanish to all of Portland. And our capacity is very limited — one person. And the rates of foreclosure are happening more intensely in Portland. It wasn’t like that only a few months ago. It completely reversed, the phone calls that we were getting from people who wanted to learn the ABCs of the process of first-time home buying.
Minorities, in disproportionate numbers have gotten into what they call high-risk loans. And they were victims of predatory lenders. So we organize once a year a Latino homebuyer fair. And at that forum we connect them with trusted realtors and trusted financial institutions and title companies and all of that. But then, we see that those that don’t know really how to navigate with and talk to the trusted individuals, they just pick up information from brochures and fall for high-risk schemes. Those are the folks who then come and knock on our doors and say, “I need help, I’m about to lose my house and my savings.”
J.Z.: How much of this are you seeing?
P.F.: We have 16 active cases of people in jeopardy of losing their homes. It used to be the opposite. There used to be a higher ratio of folks in here seeking assistance in how to buy a house. Now, the number of folks facing foreclosure is higher. It’s across the board, not just Hacienda, but the whole portfolios of the CDCs are solidly booked, basically, with waiting lists. Our next development is under construction, and we have no problem leasing out those 32 units. There are needs across the whole income spectrum. The housing and job equation needs to be in balance. But I think now there’s a new realignment. Even about how we design communities. And hopefully we are at the center of solutions for designing communities that are connected close to jobs and schools and keeping families together.
J.Z.: How secure is your organization’s work against the forces of gentrification? How are you measuring success?
P.F.: Our strategy is to promote homeownership and opportunities to families who have been here one or two generations and are rooted in the communities, to provide opportunities that allow them to stay and not get displaced.
At Hacienda, we don’t want to create a welfare society. There is a stigma out there that all minorities are dependant on the government. In our programming, one of the things that we celebrate and highlight is a micro-enterprise program with Latino women recognizing their inherent talent in preparing foods. Now 20 of them are selling tamales at the farmers’ market. Hacienda’s role has been to recognize that talent, see where the gaps were and the gap was that these low-income, disenfranchised women, who before never had the opportunity to talk and negotiate with the farmer’s market movement, and we became an advocate for engagement, and we incubated the individual business. Now, in its fourth year, that program is flourishing. The results have been outstanding, with a net increase of 25-30 percent of household income. The program creates a sense of self-sufficiency.
One of the early steps we’re focusing now on is adult education. We saw a great need for providing our adult population with an education, including GEDs. In Spanish, we have gotten the certification from the Ministry of Public Education in Mexico that would recognize a curriculum in Spanish that is done online. They can complete their primary, elementary school, GED, and work parallel on English as a second language. There are bi-national agreements, where GED in Spanish would be recognized by both countries. You have a highly mobile immigrant population, who abandoned school at an early age, at third grade or sixth grade. There’s such a high incident of dropouts. One (reason) is that parents need to be engaged and interested in the education of their children, but that’s not going to happen unless they understand the importance of education. Sometimes the parents are playing a role in making the children go to work, and sacrificing their education. Because that was how they were raised. That’s not a way to advance a child’s education. They need to be invested in their education.
J.Z.: What are the challenges that make your job difficult?
P.F.: Fundraising. It has changed dramatically over recent months. We’re losing funders. We’re one of the leanest CDCs around, but we restructured. For every dollar you donate to us, 92 percent goes to programs and 8 percent to administration.
This financial crunch has bankers who used to give more money now giving a lot less. For maintaining the housing, and even for construction of new developments, that has dried up. If it weren’t for the economic stimulus money coming from the federal government, it would all be at a standstill, because nobody wants to give you a penny even to buy a piece of vacant land.
J.Z.: Are the policies and the funds that are coming through the stimulus package going to help minority programs such as Hacienda? Is it being fairly distributed?
P.F.: No, it is not. I don’t think that there’s been recognition, or a strategy to really target investments out of what’s coming from the feds in a strategic way to preserve and strengthen the diverse organizations serving the community. And it’s unfortunate because it’s coming with such a broad stroke. In that scheme if you start with a system of inequality, if you’re a little guy you stand to lose your voice, yet you’re representing a growing constituency. And that is the case of Hacienda. We’re representing the largest minority population in Oregon, yet how many times have you seen the Latino community being really influential politically to say lets have these targeted approaches to preserving and supporting the minority community in Portland. The last effort by the city, under the last mayor, was a whole campaign to close the minority homeownership gap. There were 40 other stakeholders. Problem is that administration is gone, and when new leadership comes in, the whole thing gets abandoned or becomes a lower priority, and you have to start all over again.
J.Z.: And the gap gets wider.
P.F.: Or nobody does anything. It becomes inertia. And what’s happening now is this massive amounts of funding from the Obama administration to the state and on to the cities, is touching the city of Portland at it’s most disorganized time, when we have the Bureau of Housing yet to be formed, with no director on board, and without a plan articulated as to how those resources will be funneled very quickly. Because that was the message: get these funds out to the community.
The danger I see in this — and this is also a criticism in the way that they’re sifting this money — is that it gets filtered by the intermediary model. So it goes from the large infrastructure to well-connected intermediaries, and it’s a trickle down approach so that very few dollars will really come to a community level, the grassroots level where it’s needed.
We’re not seeing any of it. There’s billions of dollars coming in. Where is it going? By the time it hits the ground there may no longer be organizations like ours around. We can’t afford to wait. That is the challenge. The time is now, and I don’t think that elected officials locally realize the urgency. We see that daily. We count our pennies from week to week, wondering if we’re going to be alive next year, and in the meantime, somebody’s keeping that money. By the time it gets here and to the street, it’s too little too late.