Cathedral Park Cohousing is a mixed-income cohousing development in North Portland that was recently awarded $1.4 million in Oregon State Lottery Bond funds. Along with $2 million in funding previously awarded by Oregon Housing and Community Services and other funding sources, the project is expected to break ground early next year. In cohousing developments, residents typically own their own units but share common areas and participate in decisions affecting their community.
The nonprofit Our Home Inclusive Community Collaborative has spent several years working to secure the funding and partnerships to develop Cathedral Park Cohousing as an inclusive, mixed-income community. Fourteen units are being set aside for affordable home ownership, which people earning 80% or less of the area median income would typically qualify for. The other nine units are being sold at market rate. Priority is also being given to people who have intellectual and developmental disabilities, a group that often struggles to find housing options that meet their needs.
Alicia DeLashmutt is the president and founder of Our Home Inclusive Community Collaborative. Shane Boland is the development consultant on Cathedral Park Cohousing and the development director of Owen Gabbert, LLC. They join us for a discussion, along with Abby Braithwaite, a future owner of a market-rate unit at Cathedral Park Cohousing.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. We turn now to plans for what’s being called Portland’s first mixed-income cohousing community. Cathedral Park Cohousing is planned for North Portland. It’s being led by a nonprofit called Our Home Inclusive Community Collaborative which has a particular focus on inclusivity for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The idea is for Cathedral Park Cohousing to have residents that span generations, disability levels, and income levels. Alicia DeLashmutt is the president and founder of Our Home Inclusive Community Collaborative. Shane Boland is a development consultant for this project and a development director at Owen Gabbert, LLC. And Abby Braithwaite is a future owner of one of the market rate units at Cathedral Park. It’s great to have all three of you on the show.
Alicia DeLashmutt: Thank you. Great to be here.
Abby Braithwaite: Nice to be here.
Miller: Alicia, to start with you, what prompted you to start this project?
DeLashmutt: About 13 years ago, I started thinking about what does housing and community look like for my daughter, who’s now 24. She experiences disability and what are the options for people with intellectual and developmental disability in true community, not congregate living or institutions or group homes.
Miller: If my math is right, so she was around 11 when you were thinking about this. What did the options look like for her? What did it seem like when she was going to be 18, 19, 50? What options did you see?
DeLashmutt: Right. After school, there’s often a cliff that happens with people with IDD, where you’ve been included in community up until then and then there’s not a lot happening. So, as far as housing and community, a lot of group homes, a lot of congregate living, things that don’t include people with and without disability and so looking for a fuller life than that. I also had a grandma who was looking at maybe assisted care, kind of grouping people based on deficits and needs rather than gifts and strengths, and how do we all come together and form something that has more excitement and reciprocity and more inclusion of people of different walks of life?
Miller: My understanding is that you had or have a background in landscape and interior design and as an inclusivity advocate. Did you have experience as a developer?
DeLashmutt: No, I did not. I’m a mom working out of my kitchen nook. So I pulled some really smart people around me, talked to a bunch of families that are similar to my family, and reached out to other people that knew what they were doing. It lets us dream the dream and move, be the engine that moves it forward. And then there are folks around us that help things with the more particulars of development.
Miller: Were there models you could look to, to just copy in a sense, or at least largely emulate, that had a kind of similar combination of cohousing, affordable housing, housing for people with and without intellectual and developmental disabilities. Has someone done what you’re trying to do?
DeLashmutt: No, they hadn’t, and that’s what was really confusing. So this is sort of cutting edge common sense.
Miller: It’s funny to think of those two things as together.
DeLashmutt: Right. And so this is how community is. This is a true sampling of what’s around us. So bringing these folks together, cohousing comes together on shared values. That’s how they form their community, and we’re bringing people together that have those values of inclusivity and diversity.
Miller: Shane, it’s been a number of years now, but we’ve done at least one show from a cohousing cluster in Northeast Portland, but it’s been a while and we’ve talked about it over the years, but not for a while. So in general, what is cohousing?
Shane Boland: Yeah, so generally, when a new project building is being put together, there’s a developer who goes and assembles land and raises funds and then sells or rents those units. In cohousing, a group of individuals who want to live in community come together and then hire the rest of the team to help facilitate their vision of what their living arrangement and community can be. So in this case it’s community led and I, as a developer, am helping to figure out how to make a building that meets the needs of that community.
Miller: And am I right that one of the big differences is this is not, say, a condo or a set of conjoined town homes where everybody has only their own space, but there’s intentionally from the beginning, there’s some version or versions of shared spaces, indoor and outdoor?
Boland:That’s right. The intent of this project, and one of the many intents is to have a space in which the entire community come together. So, there’s a massive, large shared indoor space that has a collective communal kitchen, as well as outdoor areas for gardening and gathering and assembling. So it puts together a lot of pieces that might not be what you would bring to bear in a market rate development if you were just being driven by economics, but when it’s driven by community, the choices that get made and the resulting spaces and buildings that get built are a lot different.
Miller: As Alicia said, there’s no direct model for someone who’s done all these different pieces together, but is this project at all similar to anything you’ve worked on?
Boland: The pieces are all similar to other pieces I’ve worked on, but it’s bringing a lot of disparate pieces together. So we have a lot of history developing affordable housing both for rent and for sale. We have experience developing market rate housing. We’ve experienced developing these types of buildings, but haven’t put them all together on the same project before.
Miller: As I mentioned, Abby Braithwaite is with us as well, a future homeowner at Cathedral Park Cohousing. Abby, why did you want to be involved in this?
Braithwaite: Well, when Alicia was just getting started, my daughter with Down syndrome was 7, and I was lucky enough to know Alicia as one of my many mentors as I moved through building an inclusive and full life for my kiddo. And when Alicia started talking about this, I was just initially interested on an intellectual level. I think community is really cool and I think building inclusive communities is something I’m really passionate about. And so I was just sort of one of the families she talked to early on.
And then the more I got to learn about it, the more I wanted to get involved and help out. So then I was making soup, pre-pandemic, for her original gatherings at Daybreak Cohousing where we could borrow their space to bring people together to talk about this. And then the more my husband and I learned about it, the more we realized this might be a really cool option for our daughter in actuality, not just in theory. And so we joined as really early members and came on pre and just as the pandemic was getting going, for 2020, we came together and purchased the land, with the idea that maybe someday our daughter will move into this space.
Miller: Your daughter and just her or you as well? I mean, what is your thinking about how your family collectively will live there or not?
Braithwaite: Yeah, well, to live there or not is a good question. When my younger daughter was 11 and she was [saying], “What is this co-housing thing you’re talking about?” And we said, “Oh, it’s, we’re securing a place where your sister can live when she’s ready to move out.” And my 11-year-old in all her wisdom said, “Shouldn’t she get to decide where she lives?” And I said, “Absolutely she should, but if we don’t jump in and help make this happen, it won’t be an option for her and for other people in her situation.”
We definitely hope she lives there. We live rural in Southwest Washington, so her ability to move through the world on her own will be limited. We don’t have public transportation. She has an electric trike she rides, but she probably won’t be able to really get herself to the grocery store on her own. So the idea of creating a space for her where she could live in a walkable community, nested in a neighborhood of people who are living next to her on purpose, who understand her strengths and who also can give her a little extra natural support, it was really exciting. So we’ll probably stay in Ridgefield, and hope that one or both of our daughters will want to move into Portland.
Miller: Alicia, so as we’re hearing there from Abby, one of her daughters said, wait, shouldn’t you include your other daughter as part of this, in terms of where she’s gonna live. I’m curious how much input broadly you’ve been getting in this process from people with intellectual and developmental disabilities in terms of what this development, this project should look like, what it should be like for them to live there.
DeLashmutt: So in the design process, we’ve included people with and without disabilities in the entire design process, both in the conceptualization of this. Is this something that you are looking for? I did a tour throughout Oregon and asked people, what does the word home mean to you? And it was a place that people could ask people to come into their space or ask them to leave. It was some place that they were living with and without people with disabilities. It was an option for them to be their full selves. It wasn’t a place that they were put. It was a place that they could choose who they lived around and who they lived with. And so all of that went into how we started the initial development of what we’re doing here.
Miller: As you’ve just been going through that list, that seems to me to be a kind of universal definition of home. Did you hear meaningful differences when you ask those questions to people with and without intellectual or developmental disabilities?
DeLashmutt: You’re exactly right that it’s a universal definition of home, because there is really no difference between us that do or do not have neurodiversity or differences. We’re all looking for a sense of belonging and people that know us and have our back. So that’s what this community is about, whether you have a disability, whether you’re aging, whether you’re raising children, whether you’re a single person, it’s how do you have people that are there with you?
Miller: Shane, when we’ve talked to developers in the past about affordable housing, I’ve always been struck by how complicated it can get very quickly in terms of piecing together this stack of financing and the different requirements that come from different kinds of money. I try my best to understand it, but I find it truly complicated. Can you give us the simplified version of how you’ve been putting funding together for this unique project?
Boland: I’ll do my best.
Miller: Thank you.
Boland: This primary funding source for a lot of affordable housing comes from Oregon Housing Community Services, which is the state-based agency. We have received funding from them for a portion of the units that are affordable. Cohousing comes with a much more robust built environment that also has bigger units, more shared spaces, and unsurprisingly, probably a little more cost than maybe a very efficient town home that would be the primary applicant and recipient of these Oregon Housing Community Service funding sources.
Miller: Has that made it challenging at a time when the state is already way behind, nowhere close to the governor’s housing goals? Are they interested in giving money to a project with noble ambitions, but that’s gonna be more expensive per unit just by virtue of the cohousing nature of it? Are they wary of giving money to that?
Boland: I don’t know. My hope is that they see, as we do, the value in having a variety of options for folks aiming to participate in affordable homeownership. In the affordable rental world, there’s a higher subsidy per unit than there is for affordable homeownership opportunities, and you see a wider array of offerings. What folks who are looking to participate in affordable homeownership can access is often much more limited. And so our hope is to kind of expand that offering, allow folks who experience intellectual and developmental disability, folks who want to be in inclusive housing and have peer support to also experience that and access homeownership instead of having a strictly most units per dollar spent approach to homeownership.
DeLashmutt: Another thing that this does is it builds resiliency to the community. So you’re not just buying a unit where you are by yourself. So this is a hub in a larger community that has, say something happens, the earthquake happens, fire happens, we have each other that we can lean in around. So people aren’t isolated in their own homes. They have a community around them. It builds a resilient hub, so it reduces the system’s dependency and the need to help out a single family that doesn’t have anybody else around them.
Miller: Abby, I’m curious what community means to you and what you think the future residents of this project: all the residents of different ages, different income levels, different levels of disability, what they’ll get from living together.
Braithwaite: For me, community is shared need and reciprocity. Growing up in rural Vermont and now living in rural Southwest Washington, you actually often need your neighbors on a daily basis in a way that you don’t always need them in an urban environment. And so if you’re not in a relationship with somebody, they might not be the person who’s there to pull you out of the ditch when you go off the road in the snow, for example, a fire in the middle of the night, who’s gonna show up at your door.
So, it’s really that kind of richness of interdependency is what I see cohousing creating, and giving people who want that, but who might want to live in an urban environment, might want a smaller space, not be responsible for land to take care of, but still have that ethos of living next to somebody who may bring you a bowl of soup when you need one and may be there to receive your bowl of soup when you have time to make extra. I think the layer for our community is that people with intellectual disabilities are often seen as the recipients of service and aren’t given a place to bring their strengths to bear in a community.
So again, for my daughter, if she chooses to live there, she’ll have neighbors who want to get to know her, who want to know what she has to offer and not just help her, but maybe let her walk their dogs. Let her do whatever it is that she does for them. And I think the richness of that sort of diversity of skill set is what makes for a good community. If we’re lucky enough to be in community, if we’re lucky enough to know people who are different from us, so building that on purpose is pretty exciting.
Miller: Shane, we got, I think, only as far as one piece of the money stack before I interrupted you. So apologies for that. But just briefly, where else is the money coming from for this?
Boland: Yeah, so we had an initial grant from the Fairview Trust to kick off the design development process for this round, paying for architecture and other consultant services to kind of bring together the vision and put together a building design that we could also then go out and price and make sure was real and tangible and able to move forward. Additionally, we received legislative funding to help subsidize the project.
I think as you were alluding to, all of these funding sources come with their own set of complications and the legislative funding allowed us to increase our affordability, adding more affordable units to the development, but also that comes with added costs. So it’s this kind of interdependent level where you add some funding, it creates new gaps, and you go and try to respond to that, but each level of funding adds depth and value to the project as you go along. So it’s an ongoing puzzle to be sure.
DeLashmutt: We’ve also received funding from the Cooney Foundation in the early days, Metro and OCF. And private donations as well, as well as community members are putting down payments on their units. So they’re helping with part of this financial stack as well.
Miller: As we were talking at the beginning, there was no real model that you could just take off the rack for this. But now it seems like you’re creating some blueprint for a potential model for the future. Have other people been reaching out to you in Oregon or elsewhere to say, “Hey, we’d like to do something similar?”
DeLashmutt: Absolutely. We’re a part of the Inclusive Houser Network, which is a nationwide group of people trying to do inclusive and diverse housing. We’ve also heard from a lot of the local CDCs of, we’ve been wanting to do mixed income housing, go do it so that we can show it to our board and it’s not scary anymore. Go make a model so that we can recreate it. And that’s the whole point of this is this is not a one and done community. It’s a perfect thing for the people that are going to be living there and the broader community around it, but it’s replicable and can take off once it’s created.
Miller: Shane, once it’s created, that’s where we’ll end. So what is the likely, not super hopeful, but most likely timeline for this project to be finished?
Boland: Yeah, we’re hoping to get our permits submitted towards the end of the year and then, assuming that goes smoothly, start construction, spring, summer of the following year with a 14-month construction window, so coming online summer of the year following.
Miller: Shane Boland, Abby Braithwaite, and Alicia DeLashmutt, thanks very much.
DeLashmutt: Thank you very much.
Braithwaite: Thank you.
Boland: A pleasure.
Miller: Shane Boland is the development consultant for the Cathedral Park Cohousing project. Abby Braithwaite is one of the initial investors, equity investors in this cohousing development. Alicia DeLashmutt is the president and founder of the nonprofit Our Home Inclusive Community Collaborative.
“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.
