NAYA is developing its second Portland apartment complex, Mamook Tokatee, with a gallery next door
Portland’s Native American Youth and Family Center broke ground on a 56-unit affordable-housing development Tuesday. The project, called Mamook Tokatee, began just a week after the nonprofit closed on a deal allowing it to turn the parking lot on the corner of Northeast 42nd Avenue and Going Street into an apartment building for Native artists.
The development will sit adjacent to a gallery, housed in the former Delphina’s Bakery, where works of art made within the apartment complex will be sold.
The project is an expansion on the success of Nesika Illahee, a first-of-its-kind Native housing community that opened last year, less than a mile away on Northeast 42nd Avenue and Holman Street.
“‘Mamook Tokatee’ is a Chinook phrase that basically means ‘make beautiful,’ or ‘make beauty,’” said Sami Jo Difuntorum, executive director of the Siletz Tribal Housing Department.
“The tribe has been looking for ways to provide affordable housing for people for a while,” she said. She’s worked with Paul Lumley, now the executive director of the Native American Youth and Family Center, or NAYA, to bring housing to Native communities for many years. Lumley was formerly executive director of the National American Indian Housing Council in Washington, D.C.
Difuntorum said meetings with tribal members in Portland have revealed a consistent request. “They don’t want to live in private rentals,” Difonturm said. “They want to live in a Native community. They want to live around other Native people. They want to have cultural activities available.”
The target opening date of the new development is at the end of next year.
Prioritizing Native families
Mamook Tokatee will reserve 20 units for Native tenants, prioritizing Siletz tribal members and artists. For the remaining 36 units, Natives will be given priority, with first priority going to Siletz tribal members.
The project is a collaboration of NAYA, the Confederated Tribes of Siletz, and Community Development Partners. The three also worked together on Nesika Illahee, which was proof-of-concept for a unique financing model that allocates tribal funds to reserve units for Native families.
“We’re basically contributing Indian Housing Block Grant funds to secure 20 units with Indian preference, with Siletz households having first preference,” Difuntorum explained. The building will gather Native residents near NAYA and Nesika Illahee.
“Nesika was the first time that the Indian Housing Block Grant funds have been used off reservation and paired with low-income housing tax credits,” said Lucy Corbett, development manager at Community Development Partners. “Low-income housing tax credits, to begin with, are a complicated structure, so to add this component is even more complicated.”
But it allows them to reach a uniquely underserved population.
Multnomah County reports that 11.6% of local houseless people are Native, despite Natives making up only 2.5% of Multnomah County’s population. This makes Natives the most overrepresented racial or ethnic demographic in Portland’s houseless community. Corbett said this disparity prompted Community Development Partners to partner with NAYA in the first place.
“Part of our model is to partner with organizations like NAYA. Oftentimes, they are focused on communities of color,” she said, “and the intent there is to find a partner that really knows the population and we feel like is going to be much better suited than we would be to both provide resident services, but also inform the development so that it’s culturally specific.”
At Mamook Tokatee, NAYA will provide cultural services within the building to keep residents connected to the Native community.
“One of our big goals is to really bring affordable housing opportunities to the Native community in a setting that is close to NAYA,” said Oscar Arana, NAYA’s director of community development.
The location of the new development is a short, one-bus ride to NAYA’s 10-acre, two-building campus, giving families easy access to culture nights and powwows, child care, Native arts markets, educational services and community support.
Indigenous placekeeping
Nesika Illahee was designed around recovery, in partnership with the Native American Rehabilitation Association.
“It’s an alcohol- and drug-free apartment building. It was really about wellness for Native people,” Difuntorum said.
Mamook Tokatee will be different.
“The focus of this development is art,” she said. “The overall vision is to have more like a colony of artists, preferably Native artists.”
Difuntorum was partly inspired by the Santa Domingo Heritage Arts Trail in New Mexico. It’s a 1.5-mile art walk built by the Kewa Pueblo, connecting a new affordable-housing community with the old Pueblo. The art walk and housing were designed on the idea of Indigenous placekeeping, which the University of New Mexico’s Indigenous Design and Planning Institute defined as “a strategy shaping the physical and social character of a tribe by animating its community spaces in a manner that improves its economic and social viability.” This remedies assimilation, the institute says, “by giving more direction and building capacity for tribes to take control of their design and planning efforts.”
Difuntorum recalled meeting with some of the Santa Domingo Heritage Arts Trail’s design team when it was visiting Portland.
“This really just kind of lit a light bulb in me,” she said when she heard about the idea of Indigenous placekeeping. NAYA sits on the land that was a Chinook village called Neerchokikoo for most of human history. NAYA, Nesika Illahee and Mamook Tokatee create a pathway from the old Neerchokikoo, down 42nd Avenue. “It’s kind of like reclaiming a little piece of an urban area for Native people,” Difuntorum said.
Commercial space to enrich the neighborhood
The apartment building, designed by Carleton Hart architects, will meet Earth Advantage green building standards. “We’re kind of between gold and platinum right now,” Corbett said.
It will feature a rooftop patio, lofted live-workspaces with concrete floors for artists, a community art studio, a courtyard and public art by local Natives. Difuntorum said they wanted to put galleries on the ground level, but zoning restrictions and fees made it difficult. NAYA found another solution, by reaching deeper into the neighborhood. They now have plans to move into commercial property management, too.
“NAYA recently became the fiscal sponsor of Our 42nd Avenue,” Arana said, “a very small nonprofit focused on economic development opportunities along 42nd Avenue.” He said the nonprofit, which incubates and supports neighborhood small businesses, initially approached NAYA.
Through Our 42nd Avenue, NAYA now manages the commercial property that used to be Delphina’s Bakery, next door to the future site of Mamook Tokatee. NAYA plans to use the old bakery building to create job and business opportunities for Mamook Tokatee residents. Right now, it has one vacant commercial space.
“We’re trying to get ourselves in a position where we can lease that space as a potential art gallery or art store for the artists who are going to be living at Mamook Tokatee to be able to sell their work in that building,” Arana said.
Cully isn’t the only neighborhood making space for Native artists. Last month, the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation announced it will move into the Buckman neighborhood on Southeast Belmont Street, after the Yale Union contemporary arts center gave the foundation its $5 million building.
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Mamook Tokatee arrives at a time when Portland’s opportunities for Native artists are expanding.
“It’s a big project. We’re really excited,” Arana said. “When we were originally moving forward with Nesika Illahee, we were cautious about how we communicated the project, just because we were nervous about how we’re going to make it work, whether we would be able to meet our goals.” He said the success of Nesika Illahee has made them less apprehensive about pushing forward with new projects.
Difuntorum said the Siletz tribe is looking to replicate the housing model in other parts of Oregon where there are needs for tribal housing. NAYA is partnering with NARA and Community Development Partners again for a third housing project in Portland next year, Hayu Tilixam (“Many Nations”), on Northeast Prescott Street.
The date of a second ceremonial groundbreaking at Mamook Tokatee has not yet been determined.
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