Willamette Week| News| Environment

Linda Murphy and her neighbors are not model environmentalists. They don't recycle or compost. If they take the bus, it isn't because of global warming--it's because they can't afford to fix their cars.

Still, they are about to make environmental history. As soon as the signs are finished, their 15-unit apartment building in outer Southeast Portland will be known as Johnson Creek Commons, possibly the nation's first project to combine sustainability with affordability.

Rosemarie Cordello is the executive director of Sustainable Communities Northwest (SCNW), a new nonprofit agency formed to bring green practices to affordable housing. The group bought the Commons in November and is just beginning work to rehabilitate it.

Cordello says that while Habitat for Humanity has built "green" housing and many urban projects have community gardens, no one has attempted to integrate all the concepts in a low-income housing project before. "It seemed like a lot of people were talking about it," she says, "but no one was doing it."

The concept of sustainable living hatched from the Whole Earth Catalog crowd and has spread to some upscale developments and communal housing around the country. The goal is simple: development for the present that doesn't environmentally compromise the future. This means that the environmental impact of a project should be given as much weight as its economic cost.

SCNW has joined with ROSE Community Development (Revitalize Outer Southeast Portland) to transform a dumpy low-rent housing complex in the Brentwood Darlington neighborhood into Johnson Creek Commons.

SCNW got around $900,000 in low-interest loans and grants from the Portland Development Commission and Shorebank Pacific to buy the property from a private owner.

The building, which was constructed in 1973, needs a lot of work. Dry rot is visible on the siding, and some of the units have been taken over by mold. Over the past few weeks contractors working for SCNW have installed vinyl windows. Soon they will begin insulating all the walls, ceilings and floors and replace the existing wood siding with material made from tree-friendly concrete.

And that's just the beginning. Each unit will get a green facelift, and all building materials will be natural and toxic-free. The paints are non-solvent, the kitchen flooring is marmoleum (made from linseed oil and cork), and the carpets are made form recycled pop bottles. Additionally, the laundry room is getting high-tech and energy-efficient appliances, and the apartment appliances will be replaced with environmentally sound models as needed.

Other changes are more experimental. The parking lot for the building is going to be redesigned so storm water runoff can be filtered on site and allowed to seep into the water table rather than going into the city sewer system. There are also plans for an earth-friendly organic garden in the middle of the complex.

According to Cordello, the benefits of sustainable living--reduced energy costs, cheap home-grown food and healthier indoor air--will convince residents who might be skeptical about a bunch of earnest activists descending on their building.

"Part of what we hope to do is to build community in that apartment complex," Cordello says. "I really take a long view on this. I don't have any expectation that all the things we hope to accomplish will be done in six to nine months."

Resident Melissa Schaefer says that while the new owners wax poetic about the benefits of organic cilantro, there's a dryer in the laundry room that needs a new vent. "All they talk about is the garden, which I don't think is going to work anyway," she says. "All these people who say they're going to help, I don't believe they will take care of it."

For her part Murphy is keeping an open mind. Raising two kids while working more than 70 hours a week at Glamour Northwest, she hasn't had much time to read up on the latest theories about sustainability, but she has been intrigued by some of what she's heard. And she's already seen one of the benefits. Thanks to the new vinyl windows, the wind no longer blows through her apartment.

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Willamette Week | originally published January 6, 1998