A Cook Street Village four-plex slated to be demolished to make way for a controversial condo project will instead be barged to Port Townsend, Washington, next week for reuse as affordable housing there.
Affordability was one of the key issues as Victoria councillors debated last December whether to approve a 53-unit condominium to be built by Urban Core Ventures at Cook Street and Oliphant Avenue where the four-plex now stands.
Ultimately, one of the conditions of approval for the Urban Core project was that 17 units be rental and nine of those be kept at 10 per cent below market rates for 20 years.
Fairfield resident Sid Tafler said Port Townsend seems to have figured out what local officials haven’t — that the most affordable housing is the housing already in place.
“They [Port Townsend] have figured that out. This is a cheap way to get [affordable housing]. This building was just sitting there,” Tafler said.
Instead, the cost of housing in the Cook Street Village area is being pushed out of reach with redevelopment, he said.
Coun. Pam Madoff, who voted against the Urban Core development, agreed, calling the future use of the four-plex for affordable housing a “bitter irony.”
“People often say that in terms of affordability the only relatively affordable accommodation is existing accommodation and when sites are redeveloped, you never get near those kinds of rents again,” Madoff said.
But Leonard Cole, president of Urban Core Ventures, said moving the four-plex to Port Townsend rather than to a local site is simply a matter of location and logistics.
“It’s not the kind of building you can just move anywhere. It’s a big building,” Cole said.
“You need to get it to the water. As soon as you get to the water you can move it anywhere effectively, but you need to have another spot on the other side of the water that can house it,” Cole said. He said he searched for local sites before agreeing to give it away for $1 to the Olympic Housing Trust.
Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps said she is “very disappointed” and “baffled” that the building is headed out of the capital region. In the future, the city should consider a rezoning condition where if a building is being moved, it must be within the capital region, she said.
Madoff said she’s worried the city will see more requests to demolish older multi-unit apartment buildings. “When you start looking at all the buildings that were built in the 1960s that are the basis of our market of affordable units, I think we see them under threat. To me, it’s almost the point of no return unless we take some action.”
Victoria Coun. Geoff Young said with the skyrocketing prices of land in the city, requests for densification have to be expected.
“There are a number of properties throughout the city where the land value greatly exceeds the building value and we see redevelopment. Sometimes, buildings can be saved and sometimes they can’t.”
U.S. officials estimate that even with the cost of the renovations, moving the Cook Street building will cost less than building new.
The cost to relocate the building is $205,000 and the foundation and site work is about $170,000, said Port Townsend city manager David Timmons.
Port Townsend council quickly made available a city-owned Cherry Street lot and approved a $250,000 bridge loan to the Olympic Housing Trust to secure the building.
Timmons called the opportunity to re-use the four-plex “pretty unique.” He said he was tipped to its availability by a contractor who has moved other homes from the Victoria area. Port Townsend officials had to act fast because the building was slated for demolition. They had it inspected and found it to be in good shape.
Port Townsend has a vacant lot close to the water, making relocation viable, he said.
The two-storey building has four two-bedroom, one-bath apartments. The plan is to expand it by placing it on a basement where four studio apartments will be constructed.
