There goes the neighborhood

44 vintage Concordia bungalows need a new home – and soon

By Christian Gaston

Pamplin Media Group, Oct 16, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009

JONATHAN HOUSE / PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP

Matt Burton points out some of the 44 homes in the Concordia neighborhood he purchased for $1 each and hopes to relocate and refurbish. Concordia University will raze the homes to make way for a major expansion project if the bungalows are not moved before March 2009.

You could call it the deal of a lifetime.

In April, Portland developer Matt Burton became the proud owner of 44 prewar bungalows for the princely sum of $44, transforming him overnight into a real estate mogul for the price of a couple of pizzas.

The houses, which currently occupy the Northeast Portland campus of Concordia University, boast two or more bedrooms, vintage bath fixtures and wooden floors – amenities that should appeal to Portland’s retro aesthetic.

There’s only one hitch. Burton has to find a new home for the houses – all 44 of them – before the university knocks them down.

Every Thursday morning, on his weekly jog around the Concordia campus, Burton runs past a pink bungalow on Northeast Junior Street with rippled siding that looks like a gingerbread house, and whispers a prayer.

Burton’s got plenty to pray for. In March 2009, Concordia is scheduled to break ground on an ambitious $35 million expansion plan, the largest in the school’s 103-year history.

The plan calls for a new library, dormitory and athletic fields on four blocks adjoining the current campus. Unfortunately, to make way for the new construction, the university has to do something about the 1930s and ’40s bungalows that currently occupy the site.

Denny Stoecklin, the university’s chief financial officer, was trying to come up with some way to avoid razing the homes, which served as housing for generations of married students, and which are in generally good condition.

Then Stoecklin ran into Burton, who graduated from Concordia in 1997 with a business degree, at a university board meeting.

After Stoecklin described the dilemma, Burton, founder of a Christian youth ministry, Extraordinary Young People, proposed a radical solution.

Instead of demolishing the tiny neighborhood, Burton suggested, why not simply pick it up and move it somewhere else?

Relocating the bungalows would save the historic homes, preserve Portland’s precious stock of affordable housing, and prevent thousands of tons of construction debris from heading to a landfill.

“The thought was, let’s not destroy these houses,” Burton says. “Let’s recycle them.”

Stoecklin agreed to sell the houses for $1 each. Then came the tricky part – figuring out where to put them.

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