Article by Todd Matthews

It's safe to say David Allen has learned the ropes inside the Winthrop Hotel. He minds his own business, keeps his fourth-floor one-bedroom apartment tidy, and stays away from some of the trouble that has branded the 81-year-old, 194-unit low-income high-rise downtown.

"There are a couple of people of ill repute on my floor," explains Allen following an early-morning meeting Monday between developers, contractors, affordable housing advocates, and Tacoma residents who want to see the Winthrop renovated into a four-star historic hotel. "I know who they are. I don't do drugs. I don't mingle with them or associate with them."

Lately, Allen has taken to daily walks to get some extra exercise. It's what he sees on those walks and outside his apartment building that concern him most. "If I'm in the building, I don't feel threatened or afraid," he explains. "But when I walk over to the park area, that's a different story." Allen is referring to Larry L. Frost Memorial Park, across the street from the Winthrop. "There are gangs from the eastside there. People get off the bus from all different parts of Tacoma. They come over here, do all their gang stuff, do drugs, whatever." He sees a cycle: people score drugs using a corner phone booth, get high in the park, and buy snacks and cigarettes at a nearby market. "It's one stop shopping," he adds.

Despite his grim depiction of the area, the Winthrop and its neighborhood (which is close to bus lines and social services) has been a lifesaver of sorts for Allen. Disabled for a decade now, medical bills bankrupted him. He lived at the Winthrop 10 years ago, then moved to Michigan for a while, before returning in 2005. Disability checks and Section 8 housing at the Winthrop have ensured Allen has a roof over his head.

Simply put, the Winthrop is home.

But that could change if two Pacific Northwest developers, Tim Quigg and Chester Trabucco, purchase the building and renovate it into a historic hotel. The pair has formed Citizens Hotel LLC, and is staring at an Oct. 19 deadline to meet due diligence requirements to purchase the building from AF Evans, another developer that has a purchase agreement with the building's owner.

If the hotel is built, Winthrop residents stand to be displaced. But in a surprising twist, affordable housing advocates have embraced the concept -- largely because the development could expand and improve the city's affordable housing portfolio. Quigg and Trabucco have created a dual-track development plan that they say will deliver a four-star hotel to Tacoma while providing 250 additional units of affordable housing for current Winthrop residents.

"These developers are talking about how they are going to build more affordable housing, not in one place, but break it up around town," says Winthrop resident Glenn Grisby, also an attendee at this week's meeting. "I'm for that." Like Allen, Grisby has been showing up to these meetings for several months. "I would just like to see a smooth transition into new housing. That's why I'm here. I don't have a lot to give other than me being here and being a face on the low-income side of this project."

To be sure, it's the low-income housing piece that has piqued interests of the city's affordable housing community.

"To Tim Quigg's credit, he has emphasized both the housing and hotel parts as linked together, and one will not happen without the other," says Michael Mirra, executive director of the Tacoma Housing Authority (THA). "His vision to develop a hotel while at the same time build 250 additional units of affordable housing appeals to those people who regard that building as an essential part of the city's affordable housing portfolio. Right now, that building is in poor repair. Two-hundred-and-fifty new units is better than 190 present units in their current shape."

To that end, Mirra and other affordable housing advocates have come to the table to provide expertise in financing, construction, development, and management of this type of housing, and lend a voice to the issue.

Last week, the city's community and economic development department hosted a meeting to unite private and non-profit developers in the hopes of forming partnerships that would lead to new and rehabilitated low-income, affordable housing for Winthrop residents who would be displaced.

This week, those discussions continued.

On Sept. 25, Jeff Robinson, chair of the Tacoma/Pierce County Affordable Housing Consortium steering committee, read a letter expressing the group's support for the Citizens Hotel plan. "We believe downtown has a win-win-win situation for the residents, for the city and economic development objectives, and for this community," said Robinson. "We commend the leadership of the Quigg/Trabucco team in realizing that for this project to be truly successful, there must be a meaningful solution to the permanent housing of the current residents."

Moving residents out of the Winthrop could put an end to a housing model that many advocates say is broken.

That's another reason advocates have stepped forward in support.

"As far as affordable housing itself goes, the model of putting 170 people in one building is not necessarily considered a best practice today," says Connie Brown, Executive Director of the Tacoma/Pierce County Affordable Housing Consortium, during an interview Monday in her office at Catholic Community Services.

Brown says Housing and Urban Development (HUD) studies show that a high concentration of low-income affordable housing in one building doesn't work. The model, she says, can create public safety concerns and fail to integrate low-income families in with the rest of the community. "The big projects and the big complexes that were built back in the 1960s and 1970s have not always been maintained or managed well," she says. "People were crammed into small spaces. And the common spaces turned out to be dangerous. With so many people coming and going, it's hard to determine who should be there and who shouldn't. We see an opportunity here to break up the units into smaller packages."

Still, that goal faces a hurdle from HUD. Though its own studies show that high-density housing like the Winthrop are dysfunctional, HUD's current policy mandates that displaced Winthrop residents would have to be moved into a comparable building with an equal amount of high-density low-income housing.

"You take a project like the Winthrop and transfer it to another property, it has to be like for like," explains Brown. "[Tenants] would have to go into one other building."

But Mirra is currently working with HUD to modify that policy. "HUD has been very helpful in figuring this out, although we're not there yet," he says. "We need flexibility in moving those contracts. We don't want another 170-unit building. We want to move tenants into two or more buildings. We want flexibility to parse out that contract as necessary to account for where we find units. We would like the units to be dispersed. Parsing them out will help that. Getting this done requires going through various HUD channels which we are starting to figure out."

Mirra says the decades-old contract -- which HUD no longer grants -- had its advantages. It lowered rents on units so they were affordable for low-income households, and created income streams for building owners -- a valuable development tool.

Still, Mirra and Brown hope policy changes result from Mirra's meetings with HUD.

"If Quigg moves forward with the four-star hotel project for the Winthrop, the affordable housing community is advocating that HUD allow the 170-unit contract at the Winthrop be split into three to five [projects] so that each of these pieces can be integrated into the community in various locations," adds Brown. "We want some downtown, some out of downtown, perhaps some out in the county. We want people to have more choices than living in the Winthrop."

For Quigg and Trabucco, relocating tenants into new housing isn't new. This summer, Trabucco purchased the former Morck Hotel -- an 82-year-old historic hotel in Aberdeen, Wash., that served for decades as low-income housing for 30-50 residents. Trabucco plans to restore the building to a historic hotel with improved commercial spaces -- a plan similar to the Winthrop. He is currently working with local housing agencies to find new homes for displaced tenants.

According to Rob McDermott, a project manager with Aberdeen Development LLC -- Trabucco's group developing the Morck Hotel -- he partnered with Coastal Community Action Program (CCAP) to find housing for residents displaced by the renovation.

"We wanted everybody to have equal, or more importantly, better housing than they had at the Morck," explains McDermott.

Before a deal closed on the building, McDermott says he went to CCAP to see about working together. "Our first interest was the people," he says. "We asked CCAP, 'Would you partner with us?' That was their expertise. They were delighted."

McDermott and CCAP Chief Financial Officer Craig Dublanko put together a team to work with the apartment manager and 42 leaseholders on a case-by-case basis. In most cases, Aberdeen Development provided rents, deposits, and moving expenses for tenants. In one case, McDermott and CCAP representatives drove 180 miles to find a dog kennel for a tenant who wanted to relocate to Westport with his pet.

"We wanted any one of those people to be contacted and say, 'Those developer folks were great.' I'm 100 percent comfortable we reached that goal. I think we did what was the right thing to do because we are going to be in town for a long time."

CCAP CFO Dublanko confirms this account.

"The big concern in the community was what's going to happen to these folks," he says. "We had a meeting with Aberdeen Development, and their opinion was, 'We would love to partner with the experts in this. We don't want anybody to feel like they have been kicked aside. And maybe in the end tenants could have better housing than before.'"

Most tenants have found permanent housing, says Dublanko. For those tenants who haven't, Aberdeen Development has footed the bill for transitional housing in the interim.

"We are aggressively looking for a perfect fit for these residents," says Dublanko.

As broken as the Winthrop model is, THA's Mirra is quick to point out that -- for better or for worse -- the building has been a crucial part of the city's affordable housing profile. According to THA statistics provided by Brown, 3,257 people in Pierce County were on a waiting list for Section 8 housing in August; 3,958 were on a waiting list for public housing (the numbers aren't mutually exclusive, and individuals could appear on both lists).

Says Mirra: "A loss of the Winthrop as affordable housing is not something we can all witness with any complacency."

This article originally appeared in the 12 October 2006 edition of the Tacoma Daily Index