[jyl]

We aren’t a HOA that has actual authority over neighbors.

We are an old fashioned neighborhood association, a group of volunteers who do community-building things. Examples include maintaining our local park, cleaning graffiti from some historic arches and statues, organizing neighborhood picnics, pressuring the city to cleanup and remove homeless camps in our neighborhood and deal with dangerous intersections and crossings, holding a giant annual neighborhood garage sale and an annual neighborhood cleanup, fund raising for the local school, etc. We also have an emergency team that is supposed to be ready for a natural disaster (read: earthquake) with an emergency medical and radio station and about 40 folks trained and organized as first responders (that’s all set up as a city-coordinated program). In recent years we got our neighborhood designated a historic district, which in Oregon only means that it is harder to demolish a historic house and there are some tax benefits for restoring historic houses. When Covid hit we organized volunteers to help old folks with grocery shopping and errands (that was early on when masks weren’t available and seniors were afraid to go out). Various programs like that. And we have a newsletter.

This may sound weird, but it is a small, distinct, and pretty close knit neighborhood. Lots of people have lived here for 50 years, or grew up here and came back to raise their kids here, etc. I think the association really became organized in the 1960s when the city was going to run an 8 lane freeway right through what was then a bunch of old houses from the 1910-1920s that the planners didn’t care about; that never happened, thanks to a lot of neighborhoods getting organized and fighting back. (We seem to be in that time again, now the planners want to see this and similar neighborhoods replaced with apartment blocks.)

Whether we actually need more income is a good question. There are programs we’d like to do that will require some budget. Elderly neighbors on fixed incomes, our neighborhood school and the needy kids there, our large park that gets almost no city tending, etc. In theory the city and other public agencies are supposed to do all this stuff, but in practice they do less and less, and it’s going to get a lot worse now.

What I find is that the people who want to step up and volunteer their time to help out tend to have the least money to contribute, while the people with money are willing to donate for a one-off project but not a continuing program. A couple years ago we raised $70,000 in neighborhood donations in just a few months for a specific project, but that can’t happen more than every several years. So, if we could get a modest continuing income stream from this property, that would be very useful.

I don’t know if we could receive and sell the building. Have to study the title documents. However, it would have to remain much as it is - for various reasons, we wouldn’t want to sell it for demolition and redevelopment. It was built in 1912 (?) as a neighborhood “club” - apparently was quite the happening place for dancing, tennis, dining and society, back in the day. The building is basically a ballroom and stage plus kitchen, offices and utility areas, and some large lawns. It really isn’t useful for anything but a venue, entertaiment, meetings, dining.