Revitalizing Rose Village

A big volunteer painting crew turned out in early August to spiff up two Rose Village houses. (Photo courtesy of Mark Maggiora)

Rose Village isn’t exactly the Street of Dreams. But maybe it can be.
The older central Vancouver neighborhood is frankly about as downscale as the city gets. Redevelopment and rising real estate prices never bolstered Rose Village the way they did Hough, Arnada and other venerable neighborhoods just across Interstate 5.

“You know what this neighborhood looks like — it looks like a place where you don’t want to be,” said resident Mark Maggiora.

So it’s exactly where Mark and his wife, Patti, went to set down roots and make changes. About three years ago the energetic couple — he’s a business and networking consultant with a background in redeveloping rural communities devastated by the departure of logging, she’s an assistant manager for Safeway — bought a little house on Y Street that needed reclaiming and remodeling from top to bottom.

“The place was trash, the yard was trash, the family was dealing meth,” Mark said. “We moved here because wanted to be in the place where we were looking to create transformation.”

The couple registered with the state a new nonprofit agency, Americans Building Community Inc. It’s a community development corporation that will seek donations and grants in pursuit of economic development and affordable housing in the Rose Village area. And it will strive to connect the social service agencies and area churches that are plenty busy in Rose Village but don’t have established relationships.

The Maggioras also joined the ongoing public-private Fourth Plain Revitalization Task Force and volunteered to lead its housing push. They found inspiration for an inaugural project in a southeast Portland Paint-athon that sees hundreds of brush-wielding volunteers improving senior citizens’ houses every year.

“We decided to find 20 homes and paint them to start transforming what this neighborhood looks like,” said Patti. The Maggioras went looking for manpower at the same Rose Village Neighborhood Association meeting where Gary Schneider, outreach director for the Memorial Lutheran Church, happened to be looking for deserving projects for a bevy of eager volunteers. Fred Meyer quickly got on board with paints and supplies.

In early August, dozens of volunteers from several local churches — Crossroads Community, New Heights and Memorial Lutheran — as well as Pacific Lifestyle Homes and Pentecost Painting got busy transforming two houses.

“We’re just tickled to death,” Dennis Church said a couple of weeks after his home got its much-needed facelift. “In your whole lifetime, you just don’t expect something like this.”

Church, a corrections officer, is 66, and his wife is 50. They are working hard and saving for retirement, he said, but right now that’s nowhere in sight.

“I make a decent living for a working-class person, but I don’t have thousands of dollars in my account to spend painting my house,” he said. “We try not to let it look run down, but it’s just my wife and I here. It’s just there’s a lot to do. And not enough time and money.

“It needed a little uplift, I admit that,” he said.

Ultimately the Maggioras are looking to create something they like to call the Affordable Street of Dreams, pulling together all the resources they can — government grants, entrepreneurship, community services and lots of residential volunteerism and sweat equity — to create a menu of options, and a network of resources, for Rose Village residents who want to better their circumstances and the neighborhood as a whole.

Look for more house painting, and a more formal launch of an Affordable Street of Dreams project — perhaps focusing on one block or small area — in the coming months.

“The Street of Dreams mindset can really take hope away from folks,” Mark said. “They could look at those high-end homes and say, ‘We can never own a home like this.’ But the point of this is to come together with skills and resources and expertise and realize people’s dreams.”