Good-Bye, Felony Flats

“When I first started coming here, this
neighborhood was more or less a meth capital. Methamphetamines were
rampant, especially on 65th and Foster.

“Right here, you could
get meth,” Kenny Sadler said as he straddled his mountain bike and
gestured to the intersection a few feet away. “You could get whatever
you needed. It was just a mess. Dealers would come down the street and
sell you drugs. There were five, six drug houses here not more than
two, three years ago. They were just rampant.”

Sadler has been a
daily visitor to the Southeast Portland neighborhood for five
years—now for the daily Narcotics Anonymous recovery sessions in
the nondescript Foster Meeting Hall on SE 65th.

“Sometimes it was
really hard for people to stay clean and come to this meeting,” he
recalled.

Describing himself as “retired from cooking,” Sadler’s take on
the recent history of SE 65th Avenue is shared by many others with
deeper stakes in this neighborhood, becoming known in some circles as
SoFoPo (South Foster-Powell). The community has significantly improved
since its worst days as the gateway to Felony Flats—but nothing
has been forgotten.

AN UNSAFE HARBOR

Pointing out the structures
one by one to the south of his home, Steve Winney gave a sweeping
rundown of the street: “From down there to here were at least half a
dozen serious drug houses,” remarked the jovial husband and father, who
operates a modern custom blacksmith shop. Winney lives in a
well-landscaped, 2,500-square-foot house he shares with wife Debi, a
futures trader, and their three young children.

Turning his attention
up the block to the north, Winney continued, “This house—it was
kind of an issue house. The duplex was filled with drugs, and had a
tent city in the yard. And that place across the street was filled with
drugs, too.”

He wasn’t finished pointing: “But the biggest problem has
always been that huge place—the Harbor House.”

Only two
doors to the north at 4824 SE 65th, the multi-unit single-room
occupancy building now doing business as the Sunrise Lodge has until
recently been a major focus of attention.

“It’s kind of been a mecca
for drugs. People would get kicked out and move right into a duplex in
the area, because it was all connected,” Winney noted. “They’d be
selling or buying or giving each other signals. People living in the
duplex whistling, and people come running out picking something back
up, and going back up into the Harbor House. Oh, I saw open-air deals
out in front of the Harbor House many, many times.”

The malaise on the
street was oppressive.

“There were dead cars all over the place,”
Winney recalled. “We’d call and get these cars towed away, but there
was a van out in front of our house with people living
there—throwing their needles out on the ground.”

One neighbor
even threatened to shoot him, though no gun was brandished: “He
told me he was going to pop a cap in my ass.”

“There was no fear,”
Winney said of this former meth focal point. “There were kids dealing
on the corner of Foster and 65th—standing there, dealing drugs.
Openly. Now I believe that, in hindsight, this area was a central meth
operation. At the time, I was a little blind and naïve.”

NEVER
EVEN CLOSE TO A NORMAL STREET

Crime statistics (supplied by Portland
Neighborhood Associations as reported by the Portland Police Bureau)
fortunately show a decrease in crime overall in the Mt. Scott-Arleta
neighborhood (where SE 65th is located) since a high-water mark in
2002. From a major crime peak of 95.3 year-to-date incidents per 1,000
population in 2002, that number then decreased each year to a rate of
70.2 in 2006. The corresponding numbers of reported major crimes fell
from 689 in 2002 to 510 in 2006, a 26 percent dive. Major crimes
include murder, rape/sodomy, molesting, robbery, aggravated assault,
residential/commercial burglary, arson, motor vehicle/bike theft, and
vandalism.

Some of the economic roots of recent problems go back for
decades. Eileen Edmonds has lived near the south end of the street for
36 years. She put it this way: “No, it was never even close to a normal
street, because almost everything were rental [houses] in those days.
And people would come and go, and come and go.”

A retired waitress,
Edmonds does not shy away from describing her surroundings.

“We had
drug houses, all right. Two were across the street.” And the former
Harbor House always loomed large. “Oh my gosh,” she said, eyes
widening. “Cops would be down there on average five, six times a week.”
Edmonds said problems at the former Harbor House go back to when it was
called the Watkins House, which served as a halfway residence for
addicts.

Mick McPartland of Portland, the owner of the former Harbor
House—and now doing business as the Sunrise Lodge—does not
disagree with most of what’s been said about his facility. But he also
faults meth’s popularity in the neighborhood for past problems at his
24-unit single-occupancy building, which he’s owned for about four
years.

“The neighborhood had two or three meth houses,” he said. “There
were abandoned cars on the street, and people walking up and down the
street from Foster and in the back alleys all night long.”

McPartland
continued, “My place was a problem that had to be solved. I was
continually having my residents—who were very
vulnerable—get a hit of meth from someone in the neighborhood.
And then they’d go nuts. They could step out the front door and find
it, between Foster and the Arleta School. A couple houses on the corner
(across from my building where Schiller meets 65th) were meth houses.

“The street was a dingy place. There were a lot of police calls, and
the cops were coming to my place because we were calling ’em. Our
managers were trying to get these [drug users] out of the building.”

Explaining the difficulties associated with evicting drug-related
renters in Portland, McPartland said it took nearly three years to
finally rid the building of drug users and find the right live-in
manager. It can take from 30 to 90 days to evict drug users, and
at least one former manager was a drug user himself, McPartland
noted.

“I was probably evicting two people a month,” he said.
“There’s a lot of trial and error.”

Things did not really turn around
until the owner found current live-in manager Evelyn Powell.

“It all
has to do with having an in-house manager who likes their job. And
Evelyn is that person.”

WE’RE NOT GONNA TAKE IT

Portland Police Officer
Todd Teats from the Southeast Precinct said this block of SE 65th
Avenue probably reached its low point “where it was really bad” during
a five-year stretch that ended about five years ago. “It started
improving a lot in the last three years, with noticeable improvement in
the last year.”

Teats, the neighborhood response team officer for the
area, credits the transformation of SE 65th to “people moving in that
cared and wanted to make a difference.

“Rather than step back and watch
things happen, these people actually organized,” Teats said. “The
neighborhood association would meet with owners of places, make certain
demands, and get the police involved. They finally took a stand and
said ‘We’re not going to put up with it anymore.’ New neighbors kept
moving in, fixing up their houses and people saw improvement. Those
people weren’t going to put up with it anymore.”

The improvement on the
street really took off after a core of neighbors started combining
their efforts, Teats explained. There was never a code of silence among
residents on the street—simply a lack of coordination and
follow-through.

“Oh, they called,” Teats said, “but nobody organized.
They’d put out the spot fire: Call, tell us what was going on, have the
police come in, and we’d deal with it for the night. But nothing
permanent would get accomplished.”

That approach started to change for
the better within the last few years, Teats recalled, crediting five or
so local residents with the bulk of the efforts. He agreed with the
description of the overall push to improve SE 65th as a genuine
grassroots effort that was determined to no longer tolerate the parade
of drug-related activities.

NO SEX OFFENDERS, PLEASE

Shawna Fuller,
president of the Mt. Scott-Arleta Neighborhood Association, credits
most of the turnaround on SE 65th to the neighbors themselves.

“There’s
a lot of good, cohesive neighbors over there,” said Fuller, now in her
fourth year of neighborhood association leadership. “I think everyone
realized they can get a lot more accomplished if everyone’s working
together.”

The most important neighborhood success to date is a direct
result of those combined efforts. Fuller explained that the Mt.
Scott-Arleta Neighborhood Association played an instrumental role in
developing a formal neighborhood agreement between the association and
the Sunrise Lodge. Some of the major provisions of the agreement
included new fencing, security cameras, no active drug use by
residents, and no resident sex offenders at the Sunrise Lodge.

About two years ago neighbors notified each other that predatory child
sex offenders were apparently living at the Sunrise Lodge.

“The
economics of the area have changed. We have a lot of homeowners living
here who are very concerned about the safety of their children,” Winney
said, recalling the neighborhood gathering. “So when we rounded the
neighbors up for a meeting, all of a sudden you had 50 people sitting
in a room on your side—along with the police liaison and the
chief of police.”

Winney says the people in question were soon evicted.

In addition to the residents themselves, Fuller also gives much of the
credit for the area’s rejuvenation to rising property values, claiming
prices have more than doubled in the 10 years she’s resided on SE 64th,
just about two blocks from the south end of that stretch of SE 65th.

“The whole neighborhood… the whole area is improving. People are
putting a lot more time and money into their houses. There’s a lot of
small houses that are getting spruced up, and many lots are
being divided and built on. We were sort of slow to catch up, I
think, with the rest of the development going on across Portland.”

AN OPEN-DOOR POLICY

Back at the Sunrise Lodge, McPartland said he has
invested at least $50,000 in the facility and continues to work on
improvements such as landscaping, handicap accessibilities in the
bathrooms, and interior decorations. All potential residents are
subject to background checks, along with a more restrictive check of
any recent activity with the Portland Police Bureau.

The Lodge owner
visits his facility three to four times weekly.

“I’m really aware of
any unusual activity,” McPartland said, “because I don’t want my
people being blamed. It used to be that anything going on in the
neighborhood sort of defaulted to ‘It must be Harbor House’—which
wasn’t even the name anymore. But that’s no longer the case. There’s
nothing going on there. We have an open-door policy for the
neighborhood and the police. Just come over, knock on the door, and
come in. Take a look at what we’ve got going on here.”

The upgrades
have been getting attention.

“You won’t believe how much this
neighborhood has changed (during my 36 years here),” Edmonds
offered. “There was robberies, there was break-ins. No one was safe
from nothing. Now even the Sunrise Lodge is so much better. I can
see the improvements [manager] Evelyn has done, just by driving
past.”

Officer Teats agrees that the police calls to the Lodge have
dramatically decreased. He credits McPartland with being very
responsive and on top of things.

“Every time I called him with an
issue, he already knew about it,” Teats noted.

A NICE PLACE TO
LIVE

Having gone through so much drama on SE 65th, Winney is glad
for many reasons he and his family have remained. At one time
early on he considered moving his family due to neighborhood
troubles—but realized his home’s asking price (about $160,000)
wouldn’t allow him to break even.

Things have obviously changed. His
property was recently appraised at nearly $325,000. Even Winney gives
credit to McPartland for his efforts at turning around the Sunrise
Lodge.

“Before there was an attitude that this place was Felony
Flats—especially among the absentee landlords,” Winney said.
“It’s not called that anymore, because you can see normal, nice,
manicured lawns. A lot of gardening going on. A lot of people are
concerned about the way their places look. That’s what it is now.

“I’m
happy we stuck it out,” he said, looking around his street. “I’m really
happy we stayed here. It’s also one of the friendliest neighborhoods
you’ll find. Everybody’s out front all the time chatting. We
all know each other really, really well. Almost too well.”