Some Courtyard Village residents face moving day

Another choice the family was faced with: holiday cheer or painful reality?

“We had to decide, do we sacrifice Christmas or something else?” she said. “We kept Christmas. We did presents. But the spirit of it was broken.”

Toby Price and his fiancée also faced a tough Christmas: they skipped presents for their two sons, he said, while saving their dollars and getting ready to move to a rental house in Longview, where life is less expensive. They are paying their own moving expenses, he said, but they got some crucial help, too.

“We’ve been really fortunate. The Council for the Homeless is paying all our deposits,” he said. “But I’ve got two kids who really didn’t get any Christmas.”

When the new owner of the property, a subsidiary of Beaverton-Ore., developer Metropolitan Land Group called Parc Central, bought the complex at 2600 T Street in Vancouver and notified a first wave of residents that they’d have to leave, the Council for the Homeless began amassing a fund to help ease their way to new apartments. That fund has now been built up to nearly $20,000, according to Council for the Homeless executive director Andy Silver, thanks to community support including a benefit run, church collections and many other private contributions.

People being displaced from Courtyard Village can apply to the Council, via Washington Elementary School’s Family Community Resource Center, for help with the ancillary costs of moving, such as damage deposits and first and last months’ rent payments.

“There are 15 households in this first wave,” Silver said by email on Tuesday. “Of those 15 households, eight have contacted us for assistance. We have helped complete three moves and are still working with the other five. The five we are still working with all have extensions to the 15th and we have several good leads for them.

“Other than that, we have seen what we expected, which is that it is tough but not impossible to find something out in the market these days,” Silver said.

Silver has said housing agencies, homeless advocates and government officials will engage in some serious problem-solving regarding the lack of affordable rental housing in Clark County in the new year.

‘It’s been hell’

Price said he gets work through a temp agency and his fiancée, a certified schoolteacher, works for an auto auction business while looking for an education job. He said they’ve been living at Courtyard Village for a year and a half, landing there after more or less the same misadventure in central Vancouver: their rental home was purchased by a church planning an expansion. In that case, he said, they were given two months to leave.

“They should have given us more than 30 days,” he said about this latest displacement. “Everybody is in financial trouble. It’s been hell for everybody in this building.”

He rolled his eyes at the new owner’s offer to let displaced tenants apply to shift into different units in the complex. They have to go through a whole new qualification process, he said, and their rent will rise — even to stay in an unimproved, as-is unit that they’ll have to leave again anyway.

“They are not helping anybody,” he said.

Neka McCollum and her son will move in with her mother-in-law, she said. “I think it’s good” that the very dilapidated Courtyard Village is getting an upgrade, she said — “but it’s just wrong” that some residents got a single month’s notice to move.

Natalia Mosley, who works at the Northwest Regional Training Center as a receptionist and CPR instructor, scored a two-week extension on the Dec. 31 deadline to vacate — but still doesn’t know where she and her two young daughters will go, she said. That’s because of a problem with her credit that will make it “twice as hard to get an apartment,” she said. Mosley said she signed a lease on an apartment years ago for a relative who then stuck her with the bill. She didn’t realize it was still an unresolved problem until now.

“I think my best option is to move in with anyone who will take me,” she said. “I have time working against me.”

Parc Central has said it plans to renovate the large and notoriously blighted complex of buildings in phases over the coming year, and will require everyone to vacate their current units. Rents will go up and current residents will have to reapply for tenancy, just like anyone else.

On Wednesday morning, John O’Neil of Parc Central and Metropolitan Land Group said The Columbian’s e-mailed questions about the renovation schedule would be answered by the on-site management company. That did not happen by press time Wednesday.

“What exactly are they going to be remodeling and when?” wondered resident Bill Judd — who has not gotten a notice to vacate yet. “We can’t get clear answers.”