Housing prices drop

to lowest level yet -- free

By JOHN FORTMEYER
CNNW publisher
     VANCOUVER, Wash. — What has proven to be a big challenge for Matt Burton could turn out to be a huge blessing to some Christian ministries in this part of the Northwest.
     Through two different projects —first in Portland and then in Vancouver — during the past three years, Burton found that today’s market is not a good one for relocating large numbers of older houses and finding new occupants for them.
     So the second of the two projects has been whittled significantly. Instead of trying to eventually relocate more than five dozen homes from several city blocks surrounding a Vancouver hospital, Burton’s company Homes Worth Keeping is for a very brief time offering for free to qualified non-profit Christian agencies 11 of the single-story, three-bedroom ranch-style homes.
     “We have these 11 homes set aside and have decided to bless non-profits with these homes by giving them away to be used as group homes, shelters, classrooms, offices or whatever would best benefit the organization, its mission and those they serve,” he said. “There are costs related to relocating the homes, which include incurred and final moving costs, site costs and any remodeling costs based on any updating they want to do.”
     The houses had been located near Southwest Washington Medical Center, which was contemplating expansion. But the hospital itself recently merged with the Bellevue, Wash.-based PeaceHealth medical chain and its long-range plans for growth are uncertain, said Burton. Nevertheless, these 11 homes have been moved to a temporary site in Clark County and are awaiting their next uses.
      Starting in 2008, Burton and his company attempted to assist his alma mater, Concordia University in Portland, with relocating more than three dozen pre-World War II bungalows next to campus so as to allow the university to build a new library, dormitory and athletic fields. Burton’s thinking was that relocating the bungalows as a group would not only save the historic homes, preserve the city’s stock of affordable housing and prevent thousands of tones of construction debris from heading to a landfill.
     The following spring, Burton entered into an agreement with the Vancouver hospital for a similar project. Both efforts followed the lead of a much-publicized effort George Fox University made during the late 1990s to relocate and give away about a dozen old homes next to its Newberg campus to allow expansion, although Burton said he had not heard of the George Fox project until after he started his efforts for Concordia.
     At any rate, in both the Portland and Vancouver projects, the challenge proved more than daunting in the current economy, said Burton.
    “Between the market going down, and the ability to find land and make it work, that is the crux of what we’ve been struggling with on both sides of the river,” he said. “In some ways, it couldn’t have been a worse time to take it on. We knew a while ago that this wasn’t going to be a highly profitable thing.”
      Fifteen of the houses were moved by early this year to the short-term site; Burton and the hospital agreed not to move forward at this time with relocating any other homes.
     Four of those 15 houses were eventually turned over to another company. That leaves the 11 that Burton wants to see utilized in ministry. A Portland-area native who became a Christian in 1992, he attended Warner Pacific College and then Concordia, earning a business degree. For several years he operated an outreach to youth on Native American reservations called Extraordinary Young People.
     Burton acknowledges that giving the homes to ministries isn’t going to boost him financially. “We’re not going to make any money doing this,” he said. “It’s not about benefitting us. It’s about fulfilling the mission that God called us to do.”
      Burton said the 11 homes are all “in really good condition” and are sturdy. Most of them have single-car garages; a few have double-car spaces. Most of the houses are rectangular, so are not hard to move, he said.
      The houses average 1,100 to 1,200 square feet. The largest is about 1,500 square feet, and the smallest is a little less than 1,000. If moved within Clark County, estimated cost of relocating each house is about $50,000, not counting the land, Burton said.
     Should the houses need to be moved into Oregon, they would have to be barged across the Columbia River because of restrictions on moving structures across bridges, he said.
      Burton urges any interested ministry agencies to contact him immediately at homesworthkeeping@hotmail.com. “Our goal is for all the houses to be spoken for and moved by Dec. 1,” he said.
     “I’m excited to see what happens, when these houses are put to ministry work, what God is doing through them,” said Burton. “That’ll be our payoff.”