The concept of an accessory dwelling unit may be straightforward, but that doesn’t mean development is a simple process.

The city of Portland’s Bureau of Development Services, on its website, defines an ADU as “a second dwelling unit created on a lot with a house, attached house or manufactured home.” Such a unit can take the form of a converted garage (or other house section), an addition or a separate building. ADUs often are used to house aging family members or yield income through rents. But appraisers say the structures raise significant questions that remain to be answered.

“The idea seems simple enough, but the practice of actually getting an ADU built, financed and appraised is very complicated at this point,” said Taylor Watkins, owner and principal appraiser of Watkins & Associates, a Portland-based residential appraisal firm.

Watkins recently teamed with Martin Brown, a freelance writer, researcher and ADU advocate, to conduct a study that they hope will shed light on some of these challenges.

“A lot of professionals within the real estate industry – brokers, appraisers and lenders – don’t understand what (an ADU) is. When it comes to buying or selling properties that have them, they really don’t know what to do,” Brown said. “The confusion in that regard contributes to a lack of ADUs being developed.”

Funded in part by a $10,000 grant from the Appraisers Research Foundation, Watkins and Brown set out to compare two different ways of valuing homes with ADUs. Their hypothesis was that the existing method undervalues the properties. Because so few ADUs exist, appraisers struggle to use the standard valuation method –comparing to similar properties nearby that sold recently. So Watkins and Brown used an approach commonly used in commercial real estate called “valuation by income,” which creates a value for a property based on potential rent.

The study looks at the actual sale prices of 18 recently sold, single-family homes with ADUs in Portland, and compares them to valuations based on potential income through renting. Watkins and Brown expect to finish their analysis in the next month and then publically present their findings.

“What everyone would really like to know is how having an ADU affects the ultimate sales price of a property,” Brown said. “If our systematic estimation of value ends up differing from the sales prices we observed, it will be helpful to all sorts of real estate professionals, and eventually filter down to homeowners.”

Meanwhile, appraisals of ADUs become more difficult because of design and construction innovations. Dan LaJoie, architect and owner of Departure Design, said that one of his clients is considering using manufactured housing as an ADU because of construction cost savings.

“It’s an intriguing approach,” LaJoie said. “But we are stepping back and looking at whether this is the right thing to promote as a firm. They would be built in factory conditions, but within a 500-mile radius, which is a good thing.”

Since Jan. 1, the Bureau of Development Services has received 75 applications for ADUs.

These days, an increasing number of contractors are looking to build the structures. Joe Robertson, owner of Portland-based Shelter Solutions LLC, has constructed ADUs since 1998. He advertises his expertise on the company website, noting that he will help clients navigate the approval and permitting process, which can be “confusing and overwhelming to the inexperienced.”

“I’ve noticed a lot more competition – it’s a good little market, and remodeling is getting tighter and tighter, so more of those types of contractors are moving into the ADU market,” Robertson said. “And I welcome it because I think the more, the better. As soon as one gets built in a neighborhood, I get three or four other inquiries.”

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I recently took a tour of Bud Clark Commons – a center for the homeless – with a group of architects and contractors through American Institute of Architects Portland. Our guide was project manager Dave Otte with Holst Architecture.

The questions that came up over and over from Otte’s peers were about the materials. “Why do you have a flat wall here, where someone could draw on it?” “Why did you line the halls with Douglas fir?”

One attendee told me that he wished he had “such faith in human nature.”

I caught up with Otte a few days later to see if these were reactions he had expected. They were.

“Many people in the general public will have a guttural reaction to giving needy people beautiful things,” Otte said.

The Bud Clark Commons is a three-part building: there is an open-to-the public day resource center on the first two floors, a 90-bed men’s shelter on the next floor and 130 apartments for the most medically vulnerable homeless population of Portland on the upper floors.

Otte and his team consciously selected “beautiful” materials instead of lowest-common-denominator durable ones, he said.

“We were charged with providing a beautiful building and a dignified space,” he said.

In the public resource center, the Holst team used design and materials to address concerns about sight lines for safety and to prevent drug dealing. But on the floors where people would live and occupants would be a “known quantity,” Otte said the team looked more for beauty and dignity in materials.

He told the AIA tour group that, in its research, the project design team found that people in shelters tended to respect and take care of their own spaces. They took that idea one step further.

“People don’t want to damage something that’s beautiful,” he said. “It’s part of the collective consciousness.”

“Of course there will always be instances (of graffiti or vandalism). But if we always design to the lowest common denominator, we’ll end up with concrete bunkers and no beauty,” he said.

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I recently took a tour of Bud Clark Commons – a center for the homeless – with a group of architects and contractors through American Institute of Architects Portland. Our guide was project manager Dave Otte with Holst Architecture.

The questions that came up over and over from Otte’s peers were about the materials. “Why do you have a flat wall here, where someone could draw on it?” “Why did you line the halls with Douglas fir?”

One attendee told me that he wished he had “such faith in human nature.”

I caught up with Otte a few days later to see if these were reactions he had expected. They were.

“Many people in the general public will have a guttural reaction to giving needy people beautiful things,” Otte said.

The Bud Clark Commons is a three-part building: there is an open-to-the public day resource center on the first two floors, a 90-bed men’s shelter on the next floor and 130 apartments for the most medically vulnerable homeless population of Portland on the upper floors.

Otte and his team consciously selected “beautiful” materials instead of lowest-common-denominator durable ones, he said.

“We were charged with providing a beautiful building and a dignified space,” he said.

In the public resource center, the Holst team used design and materials to address concerns about sight lines for safety and to prevent drug dealing. But on the floors where people would live and occupants would be a “known quantity,” Otte said the team looked more for beauty and dignity in materials.

He told the AIA tour group that, in its research, the project design team found that people in shelters tended to respect and take care of their own spaces. They took that idea one step further.

“People don’t want to damage something that’s beautiful,” he said. “It’s part of the collective consciousness.”

“Of course there will always be instances (of graffiti or vandalism). But if we always design to the lowest common denominator, we’ll end up with concrete bunkers and no beauty,” he said.

The post Designing for dignity in the Bud Clark Commons shelter appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

The Bud Clark Commons, formerly named the Resource Access Center, is “a triumph of perseverance,” Portland City Commissioner Nick Fish said.

“There are probably people out there who wondered if we were able to pull it off,” he said.

The Northwest Portland building is set to open to the public on Thursday, and services will begin in staggered fashion over the next month. The facility will provide 130 permanent housing units for the most medically vulnerable and chronically homeless people in Portland, 90 temporary housing units for men, and a ground-floor day resource center expected to serve approximately 400 people per day with showers and connections to community resources.

The $46.9 million project was in limbo for two years while grassroots organization Friends of Urban Renewal challenged the city’s use of urban renewal money. During the dispute, urban renewal dollars, which accounted for $29.8 million of project funding, was frozen. The project resumed when an appeal to the Land Use Board of Appeals was dropped in September 2009.

“I would have preferred that we were opening (the building) sooner,” Fish said. “But in retrospect, the additional time has allowed us to rethink the project a bit.”

The building had been conceived as a full-block, two- and three-story building with wood construction, but it was revised to become a half-block, seven-story concrete structure. The smaller footprint reduced the cost of land acquisition, and the greater height is closer to the maximum allowed on its site – a better fit for the city’s density goals, Fish said.

The Bud Clark Commons will be the first building in the country to co-locate temporary and permanent housing with a daytime resource center, Fish said, and he hopes it will serve as a model.

“Increasingly, the thinking in government is to co-locate all of the core services under one roof,” Fish said.

The building and the permanent affordable housing apartments will be managed by Home Forward, formerly known as the Housing Authority of Portland. Home Forward spokeswoman Shelley Marchesi said that the first 30 tenants for those units were identified, and will begin moving in at the end of the month. Home Forward will have 14 full-time and six part-time staffers as well as contracted staffers working at the building.

The day resource center and 90-bed men’s shelter will be managed by Transition Projects, which will move its existing resource center and transitional housing from existing locations on Glisan Avenue to the new building around June 10.

“The project is trying to encapsulate the entire cycle of homelessness, from right off the street to having a permanent home,” Holst Architecture project manager Dave Otte said. This is part of the city’s “Housing First” policy – providing immediate permanent housing for as many people as possible.

“The city has found that we are more successful in helping the homeless when we give them housing first (and) then resources,” Otte said. The goal is for the building to allow self-sufficiency, with housing available and then counselors and resources designated for the residents there.

Each of the building’s three parts will have a separate entrance, Otte said.

“All three entries are serving separate populations,” he said. “It’s important that (for example) the men going to the transitional shelter are not sharing the same door as anyone right off the street.”

The new building at Broadway and Northwest Hoyt Street is designed to give a feeling of individuality rather than institutionalism, Otte said.

The city built a new building instead of using an existing one because “what we were trying to accomplish didn’t exist,” Fish said. The structure fits specifications and is “built to last,” he added.

“That’s one of the hallmarks of this building,” Fish said.

The goal is for the Bud Clark Commons to receive Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design platinum certification. Many of the windows in the 300-square-foot apartments are off-kilter and framed with eight hues of green, to reference a tree canopy, Otte said.

“We wanted to create an environment that is hopeful and lively,” he said. “So many (facilities) can be dreary.”

Fish and others were scheduled to officially open the building to the public at a ribbon-cutting ceremony this morning. The facility is named after former Portland Mayor Bud Clark, “the first Portland mayor who placed ending homelessness at the center of the city’s agenda,” Fish said.

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With $3.3 million in federal stimulus money coming its way for Old Town/Chinatown’s Resource Access Center, the Housing Authority of Portland can now spend some of its own money for other low-income housing projects.

HAP had planned to use some of its own general funds to pay for the eight-story, $46 million project that will provide shelter and counseling to the city’s male homeless population, said Michael Andrews, HAP’s finance manager.

But now, that money can be diverted to Hillsdale Terrace, an existing subsidized housing project that HAP considers one of its dingiest and most deserving of renovation.

The six-acre property, on the boundary between Multnomah Village and Hillsdale in Southwest Portland, needs several million dollars in renovation work. Previously, HAP received a Hope VI grant, which was set aside for that project. Hillsdale Terrace will be the agency’s first large-scale renovation project since Humboldt Gardens, which started in 2005.

HAP was one of 35 housing authorities nationwide to receive federal stimulus money. In addition to the $3.3 million, the agency previously received $11.9 million from the stimulus package that will allow HAP to proceed with projects that were negatively impacted by the recession and stricter lending standards.

At the national level, the grant is part of an additional $1 billion in Public Housing Capital Funds designated by the Recovery Act to be awarded competitively.

Grant applications such as HAP’s had to fit into four funding categories, according to the federal government’s Web site: improvements that either addressed the needs of the elderly or people with disabilities, provided gap financing or created energy-efficient, green communities.

HAP applied for the grant after making changes to the Resource Access Center’s design to save money.

“We had to reset a number of our assumptions on (the project) because of how the economy looked,” Andrews said.

For example, the project went from being a full-block building to taking up only half of a block. Walsh Construction will break ground on the project in November, when the housing authority plans to hold community events to celebrate the project.

Shelley Marchesi, spokeswoman for HAP, said the project will keep dozens of construction jobs in Portland. Once constructed, it will be an integral part of the city’s 10-year plan to combat homelessness, she said.

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