Alumni
Portland Magazine
February 21, 2020
By Marcus Covert '93, '97
Photos by Sheldon Sabbatini
FOR THE PAST 10 YEARS, Rob Justus ’87 has been building homes for low-income residents in the Portland area. He’d be the first to tell you that he can’t build them fast enough.
Then he’d likely want to specify that he works in the affordable affordable housing industry. The repetition is intentional, and you’ll often see him putting his hands up into air quotes while discussing the more conventional affordable housing industry, because those rents are often still too high for individuals living on a fixed income.
As of the end of 2019, Home First Development, the company Justus co-founded in 2009, had completed 512 affordable affordable apartment units, with 244 under construction and 320 in the predevelopment stage. Rent in Home First buildings can range from $450 to $900, lower than rent in some government-funded units and significantly lower than the Portland average.
“The bottom line is, we have to reduce the cost of building affordable housing, so we can build more housing,” he says. “We need units now.” With an estimated 13,000 to 14,000 affordable units available now, Portland is indeed falling short. According to some estimates, as many as 48,000 units are still necessary to meet the need.
Justus has worked with people facing housing insecurity and homelessness since his days at University of Portland. Spending time with this population has become his calling, the specific way that he aims to stand in solidarity with marginalized and oppressed people.
At UP, he learned about the tenets of liberation theology from his spiritual director Fr. Richard Berg, CSC, and his theology professor Russell Butkus gave him a copy of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. “It introduced me to the idea of ‘Profound Dialogue’—what it means to really listen to people and to be in solidarity,” he says. He finally had a framework behind the work he was called to do.
Volunteering at St. Francis Dining Hall gave Justus his first interactions with Portlanders who were living on the streets. He eventually started a service organization, JOIN (Justice, Outreach, Immersions, Networking) in 1992, and he made Pedagogy of the Oppressed required reading. “The experience of homelessness is one of alienation,” he says. “The program’s goal was to reconnect homeless people to a supportive community, family, and a network of services to help them successfully end their homelessness.”
JOIN’s philosophy was to get people into stable housing first, then to work to get them services—and JOIN was implementing this practice before the “housing first” initiative had really been accepted broadly. “We found at that time that private landlords were willing to take JOIN clients while publicly funded programs were not,” he says. “By using private landlords, we could attach our services to the clients themselves, not the housing units.”
Seeing an increasing need for affordable housing and fewer landlords willing to rent to his clients, Justus left JOIN and co-founded Home First in 2009 with retired PGE executive Dave Carboneau. They knew they would need a unique business model.
By starting out with a truly affordable rent figure, Carboneau was able to work out how much money each project would need to spend. For a minimum wage earner, that would mean around $600 per month. Home First used that formula, along with private financing, to keep project costs and debt service payments as low as possible. For the past two years Home First has tapped into State of Oregon subsidies and has still maintained a lower cost per unit than traditional affordable housing developers. They keep the average cost per unit at $125,000, even as they aim to increase the quality of their units by adopting Earth Advantage building standards. “Compare that figure to those built by nonprofits that take large developer fees, utilize high-end consultants, and use large general contractor companies, which can cost $250,000 to $307,000 or more per unit,” Justus points out. Home First also charges a flat developer fee as opposed to the 10 to 15 percent charged by most nonprofit developers.
If he sees that costs are going up without the interests of the tenants in mind, Justus can get, well, vocal. He can’t abide profit on the backs of poor people. There are those at City Hall and at developer conventions who know Rob Justus—and his perspective—well.
He keeps making his case, and he keeps building.
After first building in outer East Portland, where lower land values helped keep costs down, Home First is starting to work in Portland, Salem, Burns, and Vancouver. Home First is also helping Portsmouth Union Church, just down Fiske Avenue from the UP campus, navigate the many hurdles they must clear to build an affordable housing complex on their property.
For all his frustration with the systemic side of things, Justus makes it clear he finds great joy and hope in his work, and that joy and hope is always attached to the people he has met throughout his career.
One of his clients is a senior citizen on a fixed income, who had been staying on her daughter’s couch. “She moved into one of our units, and she could actually afford the rent,” he says. “She told me, ‘Not only do I now have a home, but I also know where I’m going to die.’”
He also recalls helping a previously homeless veteran move into one of his units. “He turned on the hot water and burst into tears. A simple thing like that. Having stable housing transforms people’s lives. The joy for me lies in maintaining these genuine relationships.”
MARCUS COVERT ’93, ’97 is the associate editor of Portland magazine.
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