Centennial Place Apartments makes the housing-health connection in East Portland. Watch the video!
Without a safe, secure place to call home, “it’s pretty impossible to feel healthy,” says Cascadia Behavioral Healthcare CEO Derald R. Walker.
That statement is true for school kids and their families, and for individuals experiencing serious mental illness. Cascadia’s Centennial Place Apartments will offer deeply affordable homes and supportive services to both resident groups, using an integrated housing approach that will improve health outcomes for all. HDC is providing project management services for Centennial Place Apartments, which broke ground in East Portland’s Centennial neighborhood in June.
Did you know that more than 200 students and their families were experiencing homelessness in the Centennial School District, by a recent count? And in the 97236 ZIP code area where Centennial Place Apartments are being built, fully 23% of families live below the poverty line and 67% are housing‐cost burdened. Centennial Place will address the needs of Centennial neighborhood families who struggle with housing instability, providing deeply affordable family-sized apartments. Cascadia will partner with the district and with its McKinney-Vento Homeless Services program to market the homes to housing-insecure families in the Centennial area and to connect Centennial Place residents with essential services.
People with serious mental illness experience high rates of homelessness and face barriers to housing stability. Eighteen of the 71 units at Centennial Place will have a rental preference for people with serious mental illness and will be priced at levels they can afford. Moreover, residents at Centennial Place who experience serious mental illness will have access to voluntary supportive services—including Cascadia’s whole health care services and Multnomah County’s mental health services—to help them achieve personal goals and stay stably housed.
HDC is excited to be a part of Cascadia’s latest project that makes the connection between holistic healthcare and hard-to-meet housing needs—collaborating with the same team that developed the Garlington Place housing community in 2014-2018: Cascadia, Scott Edwards Architecture, and Colas Construction. We’re collaborating to deliver creative solutions to meet community needs, from a finance strategy that will keep rents deeply affordable to a design-construction approach that prioritizes clean energy (the development will eliminate gas service and use solar energy to contain utility costs).
Hear more from the development team and Centennial community leaders in the video above. And read an in-depth story about the Centennial Place project and SEA’s ongoing collaboration with Cascadia at seallp.com.