Vinyl windows cause drama for Northwest Portland condos
POSTED: Wednesday, December 7, 2011 at 04:26 PM PT
BY: Angela Webber
Daily Journal of Commerce
The developers of a condo project in Northwest Portland this year have accumulated fines totaling $9,060.81 – and that amount appears likely to grow.
JB Equities replaced existing wooden window sashes with vinyl ones when it converted the Carlton Court building’s apartments into condominiums in 2007. But the building sits within a historic district – and the developers did not seek historic design review. The developers were informed that the windows need to be replaced; however, they are still seeking an affordable solution that the city would approve.
Carlton Court, at Northwest 17th Avenue and Everett Street, was one of several “vintage” buildings that Benjamin Stutz and Jeff Mincheff transformed into condos a few years ago, said Peter Finley Fry, a consultant working for the developers. But when the project was done, Portland’s code enforcement office was notified of the building’s new, bright-white vinyl windows sashes.
The building is a “secondary contributing resource” in the Alphabet Historic District, so major exterior modifications are subject to historic design review. City planners told the developers that there’s no chance that vinyl windows would pass that review, and so the project entered the city’s code enforcement process. The developers appealed at every level up to the state Land Use Board of Appeals, but in October 2010 they exhausted their last appeal.
Then the city in January began assessing a monthly fee of $1,282.60 for the code violation. That fee won’t go away until something changes, according to Mike Liefeld, code enforcement manager for the city.
“Their options were to replace the vinyl windows with original wood windows, or start the design review process to get something else approved,” Liefeld said.
Installation of wood windows would be too expensive, Fry said. He estimated that the developers spent $80,000 to replace the several types of windows with vinyl ones; use of wood windows would have cost $300,000 to $400,000 more.
“If they’d have known they had to do wood windows in the first place, they wouldn’t have done the project at all,” Fry said. “(Neglect) would have caused the building to rot.”
However, the city contends that the vinyl windows have a big effect on the building and its contribution to the historic district.
“They have a lot of impact on the character of the building,” said planner Dave Skilton, who works in the land use services division of the city’s Bureau of Development Services. “We’re striving to get back a modicum of the (building’s) original character.”
One solution Fry has suggested is to paint the bright-white vinyl of the window sashes a darker color, so the impact isn’t so jarring. But Skilton said that solution “is not likely to work.”
The vinyl window issue is complicated by the fact that it’s a condo building, Fry added. The 37 units are titled separately, so each window change would require approval from each individual owner, he said.
The Carlton Court homeowners association is planning to discuss the issue at an upcoming meeting, according to its president, Michele Mather. She said the association hadn’t asked its members yet if they would allow their vinyl windows to be switched out with wooden ones.
“It’s just our hope as the HOA that this comes to an approved situation quickly and that it’s something all our owners can feel good about,” Mather said.
Fry said he received permission from the Carlton Court homeowners association to at least submit an application for historic design review on its behalf. But he doesn’t know yet what that application will include.
“We have two options – one is to work with the city for a solution that will work with everyone,” Fry said. “The other, if it’s not possible to reach a realistic compromise … I would have to propose something and we would have to fight it out (with the city). I haven’t got to the point of that decision. We’re in an intractable situation.”
http://djcoregon.com/news/2011/12/07...rtland-condos/
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