A Northeast Portland building that for years hosted a complex of adult entertainment businesses is undergoing demolition. An affordable housing facility to be built in its place is the result of years of work by Cully neighborhood residents and nonprofit organizations to transform the site into a positive community asset.

Located on a triangular lot at the intersection of Northeast Cully Boulevard, Killingsworth Street and U.S. Route 30, the site was formerly home to the Sugar Shack strip club, which was a haven for prostitution and human trafficking.

A team of community nonprofits, including Hacienda CDC, Habitat for Humanity Portland/Metro East, Verge and the Native American Youth and Family Center, formed a coalition called Living Cully and purchased the property in 2015. Hacienda CDC bought the property from the partnership two years later and is planning to redevelop the site with a 140-unit affordable housing complex.

Much of the building’s interior has already been demolished: Oregon Tradeswomen Inc. used it in years past to teach hands-on demolition skills to pre-apprenticeship students. Before structural demolition commenced last month, the ReBuilding Center held a community giveaway for salvaged materials and furniture reclaimed from the site.

General contractor LMC Construction is overseeing the demolition. Abatement contractor IRS Environmental of Portland removed asbestos roofing and interior materials, and demolition contractor Lauzon Contracting last week began structural demolition work.

The 67-year-old building’s exterior walls are made of 18-inch-thick cast-in-place concrete formed with dimension lumber.

“It’s actually a pretty stout old building,” said Art O’Leary, a project superintendent with LMC Construction.

The 26,000-square-foot building will be taken down to the slab by next week. The new affordable housing project is still in the development phase. Salazar Architect is designing a four-story, 140-unit apartment building with three floors of residential units over at-grade parking, community space and residences. Plans also call for food cart vendors involved in Hacienda CDC’s Micro-Enterprise programs and an urban plaza/green space.

In an effort to honor women and bury the exploitive nature of the site’s past, the new development will be named Las Adelitas in homage to a group of women who participated in the Mexican Revolution as soldiers, medics and spies.

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Commissioner Chloe Eudaly‘s office is crafting a policy that would give tenants, and then the city of Portland, first right of refusal on the sale of any rental units.

The intent is to give low-income renters the chance to own a home. Details remain to be fleshed out by an informal committee of advisers, and written into code language by city attorneys.

The policy proposal may advance to hearings in two to three months, said Jamey Duhamel, Eudaly’s policy director.

“It really made sense to us,” Duhamel said. “We recognize that achieving homeownership for low-income tenants is even more difficult than it’s ever been historically.”

Under the policy, any seller of a rental property would need to give the city 90 days’ notice of intent to sell. Tenants would have 60 days make an offer. If the tenant or tenants decline, the city would have 30 days to weigh acquiring the property.

As currently envisioned, the policy would apply to all types of housing, from single-family homes to large apartment complexes.

City officials are under pressure to meet a goal of translating $258.4 million approved by voters in last November’s housing bond into 1,300 affordable housing units.

“We wanted to be able to give that bond as much bang for the buck as possible,” Duhamel said.

After the 90-day period ends, tenants and the city would have 72 additional hours to match any offer made on the open market.

Duhamel said the policy would give the city more time to consider purchasing affordable housing. As it is now, the city often learns of available properties only after a buyer is in place, she said.

“The city was learning about potential opportunities way too late in the game,” she said. “Sometimes the deals had already been made.”

Multifamily brokers were aghast at news of the under-discussion policy, which was first reported by the Portland Mercury.

“It’s another thing that will end up doing more harm than good, but it’s kind of true to form,” said Greg Frick, a partner at HFO Investment Real Estate.

Eudaly, who was elected in 2016 after a campaign in which she pledged to protect tenants and bolster affordable housing, has earned the ire of developers, brokers and others in Portland’s for-profit housing sector. Eudaly championed the city’s relocation policy, which requires landlords to pay tenants when issuing a no-cause eviction.

Frick said there’s a misperception that institutional investors are to blame for Portland’s housing crisis.

“They’re not driving rents,” he said. “What’s driving rents is demand for rentals, not demand for investments.”

The policy is inspired by a similar ordinance in Washington, D.C., Duhamel said. It was first advanced by Living Cully, a coalition of Northeast Portland community groups, and taken up by Eudaly’s advisory committee.

It’s likely to meet fierce opposition.

“Our attitude is it’s another one of her proposals that’s not founded in any real knowledge of the market,” said John McIsaac, spokesman for Multifamily Northwest, a trade group for landlords. “It’s a dream. It doesn’t make any sense. It might sound cool or romantic, but it’s not practical.”

Tom Brenneke, president of Guardian Real Estate Services, said a right of first refusal provision on any property makes it less attractive to potential buyers.

“Frankly, even talk of this kind of thing impacts markets,” he said.

Adding controls on the housing market is not the answer, Brenneke said.

“(Eudaly’s) borrowing pages out of the San Francisco playbook, and none of it works,” he said.

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Designing environments that promote equity and diversity is a big concern of landscape architects, so they’re holding an event on just that topic.

The American Society of Landscape Architects‘ Oregon chapter on April 9 will host a symposium at the University of Oregon’s White Stag Building, from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Oregon ASLA spokeswoman Rebecca Wahlstrom said the keynote speaker, landscape architect Diane Jones Allen, is a leader in designing for diversity and equality.

Allen was featured in the November issue of Landscape Architecture magazine for her work to convert empty lots into green community spaces in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward. She has also performed pro bono work on plans for restoring Claiborne Avenue in New Orleans, once a tree-lined boulevard that separated minority communities when it was replaced decades ago with an elevated freeway.

Allen is a principal of DesignJones LLC, a landscape architecture and urban planning firm based in New Orleans and Baltimore. Her talk is titled “Bridging Community, Practice and Academy to Create Equitable and Resilient Environments.”

Other speakers include Gabriel Diaz Montemayor of the University Texas at Austin, Nolan Lienhart of ZGF Architects, Joy Alise Davis of Design+Culture Lab and Tony DeFalco of Living Cully.

Wahlstrom said the symposium will also include a panel discussion. Attendance costs $165 for ASLA members, $200 for nonmembers and $30 for students. The symposium is co-sponsored by the John Yeon Center for Architecture and the Landscape at the University of Oregon.

The symposium will offer continuing education credits for landscape architects and also provide valuable information for people outside the profession, Wahlstrom said.

“They would be able to hear really diverse speakers and people who will touch on this topic of environmental justice and equity,” she said. “It’s something that we as landscape architects and as a culture don’t touch on enough.”

To learn more and register for the symposium, visit .

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After a nonprofit coalition bought the former Sugar Shack strip club in the Cully neighborhood last year, more than 1,000 residents showed up at a community meeting to discuss future plans for the property, which totals approximately two acres.

Anna Gordon, outreach coordinator for the Living Cully group, knew then that plans should be up to the residents, so she gathered neighborhood kids to participate in the design process.

Living Cully was formed in 2010 as a collaboration of four nonprofits: Habitat for Humanity Portland/Metro East, Hacienda Community Development Corp., Native American Youth and Family Center and Verde. Living Cully, according to its website, “reinterprets sustainability as an anti-poverty strategy by concentrating environmental investments at the neighborhood scale and braiding those investments with traditional community development resources.”

Gordon said no decision has been made about the existing building on the property, but plans were sought for 20,000 square feet of the site. She engaged Alex Salazar of Salazar Architects Studio to oversee the design – but with input from around 40 kids.

To begin the process, Gordon said, Living Cully held four planning workshops with students in neighborhood after-school programs.

“They had kind of a brainstorm and voted on top ideas and then came back and did design charettes,” she said. “We placed different elements on the site and then came back and modeled what the final design would look like.”

Portland Parks & Recreation also helped, Gordon said, by arranging a field trip for the students to five area parks.

“The director of parks (Mike Abbate) came with us and interacted with the kids,” she said. “It was a great opportunity to learn about landscape architecture, and Alex talked about being an architect, giving them exposure to career opportunities.”

Salazar, who has been in practice in Portland for about a year and a half, was point person working with the students, he said. He has taught architecture at schools including Portland State University and the University of California, Berkeley.

“My task was to determine what we could do with the site and involve the kids in the process,” he said.

Salazar also involved the Center for Public Interest Design at PSU. Its staff helped run the design charettes.

All students, including a group of skateboarders in the parking lot, were invited to participate. The students, mostly from middle schools and high schools, didn’t agree on everything at first, Gordon said, but they learned to compromise.

“A big group wanted a skate area and another group had wanted a basketball court for a long time, so there was a little bit of tension,” she said. “But we incorporated them in the design and they collaborated.”

Some of the girls in the design charette also wanted a garden area, and that was incorporated as well, Gordon said.

“I think it was a great community-building exercise for them, and they learned to respect each other,” she said.

Living Cully bought the Sugar Shack property at 6739 N.E. Killingsworth St. after a successful crowdfunding campaign last year that raised $54,000 and helped secure financing for the $2.75 million purchase.

No money is available for construction yet, Gordon said, but eventually plans will be finalized and work will take place in phases.

“We don’t have money to build this, and it will be baby steps at the beginning,” she said. “It’s not a done deal, but this has been a great project, a need in the community and it’s been great to have an opportunity to (involve youths in the) design.”

To help publicize the effort to design the small park, Gordon said the entire process involving Salazar and the students – including their tour of city parks – was recorded. The video will be shown to community groups and others who want to help the redevelopment project.

“It’s still tentative, what came out of the youth workshops, and (the final design) might not include all those things, but it’s been a great design process and we’ll be showing it to people who might be able to partner with us,” Gordon said.

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Alex Mays’ son is eight months old. He’ll know his mom as an electrician, she said.

“That’s the route we’re going down,” said Mays, 28.

Since high school, Mays has worked primarily as a caregiver for her mother. But Mays said she wants to provide a better life for her son, so she enrolled to learn the basics of construction in a seven-week, female-only program offered by Oregon Tradeswomen Inc.

Mays’ story was one of 13 represented Thursday at a vacant complex in Northeast Portland – the one-time home of a notorious cluster of adult entertainment businesses – where OTI‘s current crop of Pathways to Success students learned demolition skills on an active jobsite. Some were transitioning from lengthy careers in retail or the service industry. Some were young Midwestern transplants. Others were college graduates who wanted to learn skills and earn more.

The current class will return to the site several times to finish clearing out drywall and ductwork. Along with demolition skills, the pre-apprenticeship students are gaining a basic understanding of the construction industry, touring labor union halls and fabrication shops, and receiving instruction in jobsite etiquette and physical fitness.

Though OTI graduates go on to work in disparate fields, much of their training here involves carpentry.

“Because whatever you end up doing, you’re going to have to know how to measure and cut,” OTI construction instructor Amy James Neel said.

Jobsites like this are run as close to professional as possible – all safety gear is required, and there is no standing around.

“We’re tough on them,” Neel said, “because the industry’s tough on them.”

Yolanda Sandoval came to America from Mexico City at age 6. She’s now in her 30s and has worked primarily in the nonprofit sector. Without citizenship, she wasn’t able to pursue a trade in the U.S. for much of her life. Heavy cultural pressure is placed on women to stay home and cook for their husbands, she said.

“All my life I’ve wanted to do this,” she said.

Growing up in Northeast Portland, Sandoval said she knew not to get too close to the complex at Northeast Killingsworth Street and U.S. Route 30, where she was chopping down walls on Thursday.

“I remember there was a lot of drugs going around over here,” she said. “As a youngster, I was not allowed to come down here. Human trafficking was the word going around.”

Gutting the ex-Sugar Shack strip club is a fitting project for OTI, Neel said.

The property was purchased this year by a coalition of nonprofits intent on turning the lot into something positive. The Living Cully Plaza project is in its preliminary phase. Program coordinator Tony DeFalco said the coalition is identifying uses for the 26,000-square-foot building and how it will pay back its large public loans, which it will have to start doing soon.

“It’s a challenge, given the time frame,” he said. “But we have a good team in place, and we’re certainly interested in partnering with people in the community.”

Neel said gutting a formerly notorious strip club to make way for a community center gives her students a sense of pride.

“We know what was going on behind these walls,” Neel said. “So yeah, this feels good. There’s something poetic about it – I mean, this building was used to disempower women for years. There was prostitution, all kinds of stuff. Now to have a project that will benefit the community and give women an opportunity to learn a trade and be able to earn a good living – there’s nothing more empowering than that.”

Students said they enjoy working around and being taught by other women. They expect the experience to help them make the jump to a field long dominated by men.

Having now mentored students in dozens of classes, Neel sees her former pupils all around Portland. They’re often working on buildings and bridges, as flaggers in traffic.

That’s a good feeling, she said.

“It’s amazing.”

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A series of Hacienda Community Development Corp. projects in Portland’s Cully neighborhood are moving ahead this year as part of the nonprofit’s efforts to help low-income families in the area.

Crews from Colas Construction in November broke ground on a $3 million project to build a two-story office building, designed by Scott | Edwards Architecture, near the corner of Northeast Killingsworth Street and Cully Boulevard. The 11,280-square-foot building will house Hacienda CDC‘s headquarters, ground-floor retail space, community meeting space, property management space for affordable housing tenants and other direct services to the mostly Latino clients it serves.

The Portland-based general contractor and architecture firm also are teaming up with Hacienda CDC to improve two of its affordable housing complexes nearby. Many of the existing apartments don’t have enough bedrooms to adequately house families, and the complexes lack outdoor spaces where children can play, said Lisa McClellan, a principal with Scott | Edwards Architecture.

“All of their housing is really for families,” she said. “They have a lot of children running around. One of the things we’re trying to do is provide more open space.”

A $2 million renovation under way will upgrade the 24-unit Vista de Rosas, at 6936 N.E. Killingsworth St., with new siding, windows, interior finishes and a laundry building. Directly behind Hacienda CDC’s new office, the organization is planning to replace 108 units at the Villa de Clara Vista, 6706 N.E. Killingsworth St., with a new 146-unit development that includes three- and four-bedroom apartments, a community center and courtyards for families.

Scott | Edwards Architecture staffers have already done preliminary site planning for the estimated $30 million project, and will likely move into design this spring. Initial plans created during a design charrette this past June call for breaking up the housing units into a series of smaller buildings that face single-family homes on the Northeast Emerson Street side of the approximately 3-acre property and building denser development on Cully Boulevard, which has more of a commercial presence, McClellan said. The increased density on certain parts of the site will help maximize the amount of open outdoor space, she said.

When complete, the Vista de Rosas, Villa de Clara Vista and Hacienda CDC headquarters projects will greatly improve the Cully neighborhood, McClellan said.

“They’re a nonprofit that’s really rooted in one area of town and having a tremendous impact on that neighborhood,” she said. “You’ll see that this is transformative, these projects that they’ve undertook, all three of these projects. This is a gateway to the neighborhood. We just see this as a way to create a new, more positive face to the neighborhood.”

As Hacienda CDC has expanded, its staffers have been spread out among three offices, said Catherine Kes, the nonprofit’s housing director. The new office building under construction in Cully will consolidate operations on the one place where the organization’s services are needed most, she said.

“We decided we really wanted to be in the Cully neighborhood, where the majority of our services (are offered),” she said.

The office building design will feature a tile mosaic art installation on one corner of the building and accents of the colors in Hacienda CDC’s logo – pale blue, deep blue and orange. Scott | Edwards Architecture also designed a portion of the second story to hang over the parking lot to maximize space.

“One of the challenges was how we fit their program into the building and provide parking without a parking structure,” McClellan said.

Along with its own projects in Cully, Hacienda CDC has teamed up with three other nonprofits – Habitat for Humanity Portland/Metro East, Verde and the Native American Youth and Family Center – to purchase and redevelop the nearby Sugar Shack strip club, at 6729 N.E. Killingsworth St. The nonprofits, through a coalition called Living Cully, launched a successful crowdfunding campaign that raised $54,000 to help secure financing for a $2.75 million purchase of the two-acre property. The sale is in negotiations and could be finalized as soon as this spring, said Tony DeFalco, Living Cully coordinator for Verde.

Redevelopment ideas for the property include a community center, affordable housing, a gym or a grocery store, he said.

“The community has long been trying to purchase this property for nearly 20 years,” DeFalco said. “It’s been a blight to the community.”

Working together with Hacienda CDC on projects to improve the Cully area has been an incredibly rewarding experience, McClellan said.

“The Cully neighborhood … it’s very interesting the way a lot of people are banding together to help it,” she said.

Renovations to the Vista de Rosas apartments are scheduled to finish in April. The Hacienda headquarters will open in September. Depending on financing, ground is likely to be broken on the Villa de Clara Vista project in summer 2016. That project will require at least two years to complete, Kes said.

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