The Joyce Hotel, a downtown hostel that long housed some of the city's poorest, will reopen.



The Portland Housing Bureau has agreed to purchase the shuttered building at Southwest Stark and 11th Avenue for $4.22 million, city officials announced Wednesday.

Twenty people have continued living in the Joyce, though it officially closed more than a month ago.



Central City Concern will take over managing the hotel this week but they won't accept new occupants just yet. Instead, they will partner with city workers to upgrade the building to address any safety issues.





The Joyce Hotel

The beds sagged. The windows rattled, and the walls stayed sticky. But for 90 people, the Joyce Hotel was home.

Before it closed, reporter Casey Parks and photographer Beth Nakamura spent time inside with the longtime residents.

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Poor people have been staying at the Joyce since at least 1965, when the owners began advertising furnished rooms for $32 a month. (In 2016, that would be just $242.) The 104-year-old building was another cheap lodge, the Hotel Treves, before that.



Occasionally, travelers booked a night at the Joyce. Men newly released from prison stopped by on their way to freedom. But mostly the hotel attracted longtime transients too picky to stay in shelters or on the streets.

By the time it closed in late April, shared rooms went for $19. A private space cost about $40.

The Joyce was more expensive than a regular apartment. Even with a weekly discount, tenants paid more than $1,000 a month to occupy the modest rooms. But the owners accepted anyone with an ID -- prison-issued included -- and they let guests stay, even as their IOUs swelled to hundreds of dollars.



"Most of us aren't in this position because we're the best ants in the forest," resident Arnold World said earlier this year. "We don't really put money away that well. Hotels work really well for people who work on a day-to-day basis because you can put your finances together in a more short-term duration."

The building's owner announced last December he planned to sell the building. The company that managed the hotel told residents they had three months to leave.

City leaders tried to buy the property in March. The eviction couldn't have come at a harder time, they said: Last fall, with demand for apartments sending rents surging, the Portland City Council declared a housing emergency.

"All the providers, the county, the city were scrambling, trying to figure out what was going to happen to a lot of vulnerable people," Sharon Fitzgerald, assistant director of supportive housing for Central City Concern, said earlier this year. "This is really last resort housing for many of them."

But building owner Dan Zilka turned down the city's offer of $5 million then.

In April, as the property management company vacated, turning off the Internet and cable, most of the residents moved out. Central City Concern workers found apartments for some residents. Others moved to more expensive hostels or began living outside again.

Some people just never left.



The city continued to try to buy the building. In a statement, Commissioner Dan Saltzman said he was pleased with the decision. Saltzman oversees the Portland Housing Bureau.



"As a compassionate city, we must continue to prioritize our resources to invest in the social safety net for Portlanders who are most vulnerable and at risk," Saltzman said.

Fitzgerald said crews will go in soon to assess the state of the building. Some rooms have leaky ceilings or floors that need repairing. The elevator has not worked in 15 years.

Central City Concern won't begin accepting new tenants until after those assessments are completed, she said.

"Our longterm goal is to absolutely open the housing back up to the very vulnerable, hard-to-house population it was serving before, hopefully with some lower rents," Fitzgerald said. "They were paying pretty extraordinary rents there, but many people didn't want to go. It's location was convenient, and it's home."





-- Casey Parks

503-221-8271

cparks@oregonian.com; @caseyparks