Beige elephant

If you want to see how crazy Portland City Hall has become, a trip to the corner of Northeast 33rd and Broadway would be worthwhile. There the city government has spent Lord-knows-how-many thousands of dollars painting the decrepit, old Gordon's Fireplace Shop building several lovely shades of beige.

This covers over many years of graffiti that had coated the entire exterior of that crumbling wreck of a structure. But with nothing done to stop the graffiti from returning, which it surely will, all the city has done is given the mentally ill people with the spray cans a fresh canvas on which to display their problems. And once they're in the neighborhood in the middle of the night with no one around, they'll hit the nearby freeway interchange and any other surfaces they can find with an extra tag or two for good measure. Gordon's is a magnet for trouble.

The futility of the whitewash is silly enough, but just as remarkable is that the "cleanup" is being done at taxpayer expense. The city even sent a guy out to brag about it for the TV cameras. The building is privately owned. Well, gosh, my house needs a fresh coat of paint. If I turn it over to the graffiti crowd for a few years, will the city come out and repaint it for me?

But when it comes to stupidity, last week's paint job may turn out to be just the tip of a very large iceberg. Everyone's still nattering on about how the building may be renovated in a few years into some sort of housing for the homeless. The property is going to be flipped to one of the city's precious nonprofit money dispensers, and it's being suggested that some contractor might be paid beaucoup bucks to make the building safe and habitable. And where would the nonprofit come up with that kind of jack? Well, the only source I can think of is Portland taxpayers.

Does it make any sense to try to covert those ruins into housing, rather than tearing them down and starting over with new construction? The place is in such bad shape that the city has adorned it with one of its scarlet "U" signs, which is there to warn firefighters to think twice about going in. The prospect of rehabbing it reminds me a lot of that hideous flophouse conversion downtown, championed by former city council member Carmen "Chainsaw" Rubio. The cost there was estimated to be something like $1300 per square foot, and that was what they were admitting to. I shudder to think what the tab would be at Gordon's.

That building, an eyesore and a human tragedy waiting to happen, should have been torn down a decade or two ago. It should be torn down now, not repainted. But this being Portland, where no project is too expensive if it enriches certain favored residents of the West Hills, it could wind up being yet another big money pit.