Now that the baby boomers are beginning to qualify for senior
discounts, I expect that edgy rock concerts at old folks’ homes will
become a relatively common occurrence, and things like Boy Eats Drum
Machine, Magic Johnson, World’s Greatest Ghosts, and the Prids playing
a show on the grounds of the Baptist Manor retirement community out on
NE 81st near Glisan—as they are on the evening of Friday, August
14—will cease to surprise.

However this particular show has nothing to do with octogenarians,
as Baptist Manor shut down years ago. Rather, this strong sampling of
local music represents only the first night of the interdisciplinary,
free, all-ages Manor of Art festival running August 14-23 at Milepost
5, the intentional community catering to artists and creatives that
consists of over 150 live/work, exhibition, and commercial spaces now
occupying the former digs of Baptist Manor and an adjacent defunct
elder-care hospital built in the 1960s [see this week’s feature].

The result of a partnership between the Portland Affordable Housing
Preservation Trust and Beam Development, Milepost 5 was conceived as
the first of a potential series of artists’ communities around the city
designed to be sustainably and affordably priced by virtue of
mechanisms such as sales-profit caps to discourage property flippers on
the condo units in the former hospital building (now dubbed the Lofts)
that went on the market in 2008.

Twenty local bands will play at the Manor of Art fest, over the
course of two weekends, in the courtyard and erstwhile Baptist Manor
chapel, but one wonders—given the noisy nature of their art, will
musicians be welcome at Milepost 5 not as festival participants, but as
tenants alongside the visual artists more traditionally targeted for
live/work situations when the monthly rental units in the former
Baptist Manor (AKA the Studios) open next year?

Brad Malsin of Beam, who has recording studios as tenants in several
other Portland properties, says they will: “Our goal is to include
musicians to live and work and practice in our facilities. Part of the
intention of an intentional community is to create a certain level of
flexibility and the kind of adaptation and tolerance to your neighbors
that you wouldn’t get in a typical housing or potential live/work
scenario. You’re obviously not going to eliminate every sound (with
soundproofing), but we think we can eliminate 90 percent of it.”

While Malsin is optimistic about the prospects for music making at
Milepost 5, he acknowledges the challenges involved, as well as the
possibility that Studios residents might ultimately have the right to
put the kibosh on it. Milepost 5 is a forward-thinking endeavor
designed to guarantee desirable space for working artists in a growing
city by moving faster than the rate of gentrification, but only time
will tell if it will help to protect local musicians in particular from
the dangers of displacement attendant to rising property values. Cheap
basements and marginally legal practice spaces are the incubators of
the current golden age of Portland music and it’s not hard to imagine a
post-Great Recession future in which these structures are replaced by
up-market condos. The time is now, then, for developers, architects,
and city planners to devise a solution to this problem before it
descends by creating specialized work and live/work spaces that are
expressly for musicians and defended from the negative consequences of
growth.