A building update

I wanted to write a quick update on the building situation. Last week I spent more than my share of hours looking into the building that I wrote about in the North Pearl district. I talked with PDC (Portland Development Commission), the city, the owner rep, and the architects. It was quite a week. What I found out from the city is that in order to have a school in any building, it has to have an ‘E’ use classification, this refers to the building code and what the building has to have in terms of fire safety, ADA, seismic rating, etc. The Pearl building currently has an F and S use. What I found out from the architects is that this particular building has non-reinforced concrete walls, which means that in order to bring the building up to an E use, we have to seismically upgrade the building’s walls. What does that mean to us? $750,000.00 worth of rebar and concrete reconstruction of the building’s exiting walls, apparently. Needless to say this made my heart sink; perhaps this building would not work for us after all.

Not giving up yet. I called the owner rep and passed this info on to him. Apparently he was well aware of this and told me that PDC has all sorts of money available to offset these costs. So, being the diligent researcher that I am, I called the PDC. I had no idea what they really do down at the PDC, but now I do. They provide gap loans mostly. This means that when you want to upgrade a building (say seismically for $750,000), and you have say $300,000 and the bank is willing to give you $300,000 and you are still $150,000 short, you can apply to PDC for a loan to cover that $150,000, but you have to pay it back. Okay, well that still requires me to come up with a serious amount of capitol to put into the building, which I don’t currently have. Strike two.

PDC also has granting programs. For example we can apply for a grant to make “storefront improvements” to make the building look pretty on the outside (doesn’t really help us). Or they also have a DOC program which gives money to help with the design and concept development of a redevelopment project. That could be useful. However, this building sits in the River District Urban Renewal Area and apparently there is a “cloud” over the funding for this district and these grants would only be available to us if we applied and for them by the end of October! Strike three. All this seems to make it not really worth the effort given the whole scope of what needs to be done to this building in order to bring it up to snuff for our use. Three strikes, you know what that means, the search continues…