Residents take advantage of diverse housing market

Downtown Corvallis is everybody’s neighborhood.

No matter what part of town you call home, chances are you find yourself coming downtown on a regular basis.

Perhaps you’ve got some books to take back to the library or some business to take care of at City Hall. Could be you’ve got a yen to sip some java at a local coffeehouse or a hankering to ride your bike on the riverfront path. Maybe you’re looking for a nice restaurant, a friendly bar, a good bookstore — or just a cool place to hang out.

You’ll find all these things and more downtown.

But for some Corvallis residents, this part of town is home — and many of them say they wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.

To get a sense of what it’s like to live where the rest of us shop, work or play, the Gazette-Times interviewed a number of full-time downtowners. Here’s what they told us about their neighborhood.

Safe and quiet

Walking into Laura Burright’s little one-bedroom apartment in the Julian Hotel is like walking into a vest-pocket museum. Every square inch of shelf, wall and floor space is occupied by her colorful collections — hummingbird and fairy figurines, candles and seashells, old tin crackerboxes and vases full of dried flowers. More space is given over to bins of art supplies.

Somehow, though, Burright still found room to squeeze in a small plastic desk and chair for her granddaughter, Annabelle.

“Santa gave it to me and we do pwojects on it and I have my own little place to eat now,” said Annabelle, a self-possessed 5-year-old who has a little shelf of her own to hold her snow globe collection.

Burright, a small, birdlike 60-year-old with hummingbird tattoos on her ankles, takes care of Annabelle five days a week while the girl’s mother is at work. The three of them shared a house until about three years ago, when Burright was approved for Social Security disability benefits and qualified for an apartment at the Julian.

The old hotel at Southwest Second Street and Monroe Avenue has been converted to a subsidized housing complex. Residents pay about 30 percent of their income toward rent, according to the building manager, and the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development pays the rest of the tab.

Burright likes her third-story apartment.

“I feel very safe here, and it’s always been quiet except for the Peacock,” she said. The bar’s customers tend to get pretty rowdy around closing time, she said, but the new managers are working with neighbors to ease the problem.

“I really like all the little shops downtown, (although) I really miss Albright & Raw,” she said. “I can walk to Safeway for groceries. ... I have a little cart I can put my bags of groceries in, so it works out.”

And there’s plenty of things to do with her granddaughter. When they’re not busy at home with “pwojects,” they’re off to the library or the riverfront.

“Annabelle and I do a lot of duck-feeding down by the boat landing,” Burright said. “Annabelle gets on her scooter, and we just go.”

The Julian is showing its age, with fading paint and worn carpet in the halls, but Burright says the owners have talked about sprucing it up and renovating the spacious lobby, which still hints at the building’s heyday.

She had a chance to move to another subsidized housing project but decided to stay downtown. About the only thing her apartment lacks, she decided, is a yard.

“I’m really a country girl,” Burright said. “The one thing I miss here is dirt.”

Sharing their pride of ownership

Jennifer Kraus and Rich Lague have a lot invested in downtown Corvallis.

In 1992, Kraus bought a rundown 1930s bungalow next to a warehouse on the south end of Second Street and began fixing it up.

“I couldn’t afford much, so I was looking at low-end houses,” recalled Kraus, now 51. “It seemed like a chance to make a difference.”

The Highway 34 bypass wasn’t finished then, the city parking lot was a ragged-looking patch of weeds and asphalt, and a grassy field stood where the skate park and basketball courts are now. Her two young daughters, Stephanie and Phoebe, used to ride their bikes there.

“It was a much different neighborhood than it is now,” Kraus said. “It was a sleepy backwater.”

A few years later Lague moved in. The couple bought the house next door about six years ago and put the other one up for rent.

There’s nothing pretentious about either bungalow from the street, but both have been extensively renovated. The yards are well cared for, and in the fall Kraus and Lague make a point of raking up all the leaves on their block.

It’s pride of ownership, and they’d like to see more owner-occupied housing on their end of downtown. They feel safe in their neighborhood, but there are occasional problems with transients congregating in the area and drinking.

“It’s not unusual to see the police,” said Lague, 56.

Still, they love where they live. In the summer they’ll raft or canoe down the Willamette from Peoria, pulling their boats out at the Marys River confluence within sight of their front door. Lague paddles his kayak year-round, taking short trips up to Willamette Park and back to stay in shape.

“The river corridor is full of wildlife,” he says, “especially if you paddle up the old east channel across from the Crystal Lake boat ramp.”

Both are musicians, and they relish all the opportunities to see live music in neighborhood bars and restaurants. They’re frequent visitors to the Beanery and the library and make lots of trips to the Farmers’ Market and the First Alternative Co-op. They see movies at the Darkside, buy their home-improvement supplies at Robnett’s Hardware and do all of their Christmas shopping downtown.

As the girls got older, they found their house was a popular gathering spot for their friends, a place to meet before embarking on downtown adventures.

“It’s a base where they can hang out to go downtown on foot,” Kraus said.

Stephanie, now 19 and a student at the University of Oregon, has moved out of the house. But for Phoebe, a 17-year-old senior at Corvallis High who still lives at home, it’s still a convenient base.

“I like it cause it’s close to stuff,” she said on a recent afternoon as she and classmate Ivy Farrell, also 17, prepared to walk to work at the Dairy Queen on Fourth Street.

“My favorite thing is never feeling stranded at my house. I can always just walk to stuff.”

A lot has changed downtown in the 15 years since Kraus decided to take a chance on a fixer-upper on a rundown street. There’s been a resurgence of the area in recent years, most notably the Elements Day Spa and the Renaissance on the Riverfront, two multimillion-dollar midrise buildings nearing completion just down the street.

While they don’t want to see the district lose its historic character, Kraus and Lague would like to see more investment — and more pride of ownership — in their neighborhood.

“I’m hoping the presence of wealthy people in the neighborhood will have an impact, an impact in a positive way,” Lague said.

“We like to see lots of activity downtown, and I think having more people living downtown — especially people who have some means — will add to that.”

Expanded downtown housing opens options

Ever since Ron Naasko moved to Corvallis from Colorado in 1990, he knew he wanted to live downtown. But the housing stock was limited, much of it old, and no matter how hard he looked, he couldn’t find a market-rate apartment that could accommodate his wheelchair.

“There was no housing downtown that would work for me,” said Naasko, a 59-year-old Vietnam vet who lost his legs in the war.

He had a house built on the southwest side of town, but he never gave up on the idea of moving into the downtown core. He just had to persuade somebody to build the kind of housing he needed.

“I started trying to get people to do something in ’92 or ’93,” Naasko said. “I contacted property owners, but nobody would do it.”

In those days, new construction — especially housing — was a high-risk proposition that scared off potential investors.

Then, about three years ago, Naasko saw an opportunity and seized on it.

Endex Engineering was renovating an old industrial building on Northwest Second Street into a four-unit apartment block, and Naasko approached project manager David Livingston about designing an accessible apartment on the ground floor. To sweeten the deal, he invested some of his own money in the project.

The result was a spacious one-bedroom unit with everything Naasko needed to be comfortable and self-sufficient, from wider doorways to lower cabinets and countertops. Now he’s living downtown and loving it.

Riverfront Commemorative Park and Great Harvest Bakery are part of his daily routine. He goes to the Farmers’ Market when it’s in session, attends government meetings and gets together with friends at New Morning Bakery every Saturday for coffee and conversation. Sometimes, he says, he doesn’t drive his car for a whole week.

It’s not perfect — the fences around outdoor seating areas at a number of downtown bars and restaurants make navigating some sidewalks in his wheelchair impossible, Naasko says, and he can’t get city officials to do anything about it.

He’d like to see some more modestly priced restaurants, and a playground for the kids who gather around the fountain at Jackson Plaza in the summer.

But he’s encouraged by new developments such as the Renaissance, a seven-story mixed-use project that’s bringing 28 condominium units to the south end of the riverfront. In fact, he was the first to reserve a condo in the new building.

He saw it as a good way to invest the money from the sale of his house, and after all the years he spent lobbying for new housing downtown, he says he would have felt “a little bit dishonest” if he hadn’t bought a Renaissance condo.

“I would have bought earlier if that was an option,” he said. “Hopefully, there will be more now.”

Drawn to downtown’s urban feel

Jack and Nancy Van de Water have been living in Eagle Crest for three years, but they’re ready to trade in the Central Oregon sunshine for a condominium in downtown Corvallis.

“It’s a nice place, but it’s a resort,” Jack said. “It’s not a community.”

That sense of community is one of the things the couple missed about Corvallis, where they lived for more than 30 years before their last move. Both had worked for Oregon State University, and Jack took a job developing international programs for OSU’s Cascades Campus in Bend.

But now Jack, 66, and Nancy, 64, are retired, more or less, and eager to come back to their longtime home, where they still have many friends. And they’re eager to move into their new condo, a fourth-floor unit on the southeast corner of the Renaissance development at Southwest First Street and Washington Avenue.

It’s not quite finished yet, but it’s easy to see the possibilities. The 1,700-square-foot unit has two bedrooms and two bathrooms, but much of the space is left open to make the most of big windows facing east and south.

“We have a nice view there on that corner, all the way from Marys Peak over to the Cascades,” Jack said.

They like the urban feel that’s beginning to develop along the Corvallis riverfront, a district Nancy likens to “a little Portland.” They also appreciate the sense of being in the midst of things that come with living downtown.

“We’ve lived in cities before. We lived in Amsterdam, and we lived in London,” Nancy said. “One of the things we like about living in the center of the community is being able to walk out the door and get a cup of coffee, go to a restaurant or grocery-shop without getting the car out of the garage.”

And they like the feeling that, maybe, they’re playing a role in something bigger than themselves. The Renaissance on the Riverfront, they believe, could signal the start of still more redevelopment downtown.

“We always thought that the riverfront had a lot of potential, but nothing ever seemed to happen until the last couple of years,” Jack said.

“We’re hoping other investors and other developers will take this as a beginning and run with it,” added Nancy. “We’re excited about being a part of that.”

Area parking can pose a challenge

Mary Burger grew up in Corvallis, but she never lived downtown until a few weeks ago, when she moved into a studio in the Cascade View Apartments at Northwest Fifth Street and Monroe Avenue.

It was largely a practical decision — the rent was reasonable, and the building was within walking distance of her job at Red Horse Coffee Co. But the 22-year-old barista has been surprised at how much she’s enjoying her new neighborhood.

All her friends work downtown, and her apartment has become a place to hang out and a jumping-off point for nights on the town. She’s got a view of the courthouse from her window, and there’s lots of things to do close by.

“It’s nice to go shopping. I pooch around at all the little stores,” she said. “I’ll go walking over by the riverfront.”

She enjoys not having to drive everywhere, but she’s not ready to give up her car entirely, and with no dedicated spaces at Cascade View, parking can be a serious challenge.

“Where are the 12-hour meters? Seriously,” she says. “My tip money goes to laundry and parking meters. I’d really like to put that to better use.”

Perhaps more than anything else, however, living downtown has made her appreciate her hometown in a whole new way.

“This is the first time I ever really felt a part of Corvallis. It’s odd how that shift happens,” she said. “People should probably pay more attention to what we have.”

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