The Vancouver Housing Authority has proposed a 30-unit apartment building called Lincoln Place, directly across the street from Share House on West 13th Street; in late April, the Washington Housing Finance Commission approved letting VHA sell low-income tax credits to underwrite much of the estimated $4.7 million cost.
Lincoln Place will be what’s called a “wet” building. The residents will not have to live clean and sober lives. They’ll just get a roof over their heads — and offers of help with their problems.
Proponents insist that this plan makes excellent sense: it’ll clean up downtown streets and at least point the desperately downtrodden in the direction of services and sobriety.
“People who have been homeless for a long time in the downtown area will be targeted,” says a VHA fact sheet.
Opponents argue that the plan makes no sense: it’ll attract more poverty and blight to a downtown that needs redevelopment of a different sort. People inclined to invest in and visit a waterfront full of cheery green spaces and upscale restaurants aren’t going to be any happier with a nearby building for homeless addicts than they will with incoming shipments of crude oil.
“The whole point of this waterfront project is walkability downtown,” said Eileen Cowen, co-chairwoman of the Hough Neighborhood Association. “If people don’t feel safe walking down there from the neighborhoods, because of a troubled area they have to walk through, it’s going to have an impact.”
Furthermore, Lincoln Place is only one of several proposals to bring new facilities for the needy to the west side. Fish of Vancouver, a busy weekday food pantry that’s spilling out of the church site where it’s operated for years, is raising funds to buy its own building on Harney Street. Open House Ministries recently bought a dilapidated apartment building that it wants to raze and replace with a new community resource center. One Life, another food pantry, recently moved from east of Clark College into a different church near Hough Elementary School.
Leah Jackson opened Angst Gallery on Main Street in downtown Vancouver in 2008, then took over a neighboring space two years later with Niche, a cozy wine bar next to the Art Deco-style Kiggins Theatre.
Jackson and Kiggins owner Dan Wyatt were among the small business owners the Vancouver City Council wanted to recognize — and encourage more of — when it unanimously voted Monday to designate an arts district downtown.
The idea of an arts district has been around for years. The growing popularity of the Vancouver’s Downtown Association’s First Friday has established one, whether it had been on a city map or not.
Jackson spoke Monday at the Vancouver City Council meeting for a proclamation declaring May 11-16 “Small Business Week,” which Vancouver Mayor Tim Leavitt read at the start of the meeting.
Jackson cited the camaraderie among small business owners as one reason she’s been happy to be part of a downtown revitalization effort.
“I look forward to being involved for many more years,” Jackson said.
Washington took another step closer to launching its one-of-a-kind marijuana industry on Friday, issuing a list of the top candidates who will wade into the sector’s untested waters.
But even as the state made public the ranking of pot retail applicants based on lotteries, no one, including the landlords of the proposed retail shops, their investors or the entrepreneurs themselves, could predict with certainty the outcome of state-regulated recreational marijuana sales.
“There’s a lot of confusion out there,” said Brandon Brock, chief executive officer of Mary Jane’s House of Marijuana, who said he felt a huge sense of relief when he learned his sales application for a store in Washougal was ranked No. 1 in the lottery for that city.
At this point it looks like Clark County’s only marijuana shops will be within the city limits of Vancouver and Battle Ground, unless the other cities and the county reverse moratoriums on the outlets.
If he’s awarded the license after the state review process, Brock said he hopes to work with Washougal to end that city’s ban on retail locations.
“I’m from Washougal, I have several businesses here, I’m eager to work with the city,” he said.
The safety of gun lockers issued by the Clark County Sheriff’s Office is being raised as a campaign topic by one sheriff candidate, even as another continues a lawsuit against the office alleging that a faulty firearms locker he was provided resulted in the death of his son.
Republican candidate Chuck Atkins promised Friday he would conduct a comprehensive safety review of gun lockers within his first 90 days on the job, if elected. Such a review, the campaign said, would require the involvement of bargaining units whose members store department-issued firearms at home.
All four of the candidates for sheriff have said they support a closer inspection of the lockers. Former Deputy Ed Owens, who’s running for sheriff as an independent, is suing the sheriff’s office and the lockers’ manufacturer. His lawsuit, filed in Clark County Superior Court in July, alleges the sheriff’s office and Illinois-based manufacturer Stack-On falsely represented that the lockers could securely store firearms, even after the company recalled 1,320 safes manufactured between 2003 and 2004 because of defects identified in the safes’ locking mechanisms.
Owens’ 3-year-old son died after gaining access to the safe and accidentally shooting himself.
Not against Tyler White. Not against his Union High School baseball brothers. Not against the baseball community and the softball community. Not against all of his family and friends.
“I just didn’t know what to think. I cried. I did,” White said upon hearing the diagnosis — Hodgkin lymphoma — in late December. “I just had to accept the fact I was dealt this and that it was going to make me the person I’m going to be in 20 years.”
White took a day or two to withstand the initial blow, then it was go time.
Word spread faster than any cancer — Join Tyler’s Team.
A meal train was set up, so the family would not have to worry about dinner plans around Tyler’s chemotherapy sessions. Bracelets and T-shirts have been sold, raising money for the family. Last week at baseball and softball games around Southwest Washington, teams wore purple — the color representing the fight against Hodgkin lymphoma — in honor of Tyler.
“It’s definitely really humbling that everybody is there to help me,” White said. “It means a lot.”
