FHA 75th Anniversary Discovery: Oregon's First Two FHA Multifamily Loans (and a LOT more).

I have posted an updated 75th FHA Anniversary Celebration document (PDF) HERE which now has lots of Oregon specific FHA multifamily information added to the prior Oregon single family and the national multifamily and single family information previously posted.

The most notable addition was my discovery of the first two FHA Multifamily loans in Oregon (both in Portland). Much more is available in the PDF, including newspaper stories; video, photo, and panoramic photo links are found on the last page of the PDF file.

Here's a summary of some key bits about these two properties:

Vista Avenue Apartments was the FIRST FHA multifamily loan in Oregon, in Portland, in June of 1940. A map link to 810 SW Vista is HERE.


Parkview Apartments followed in August of 1940. A map link to 1760 NE Irving is HERE.

Both projects are in BEAUTIFUL condition and continue to operate as rentals. I urge you to take a look at the project websites and my videos and photos in the PDF, but ALSO to visit them yourself. They are both within 10 minutes of downtown.


The architect for Vista Avenue Apartments was Pietro Bellushci, the world renowned architect whose other Portland area designs include the Commonwealth building and the Oregonian building. [Irony--the new Portland Housing Division (PDC+BHCD) will be in the Commonwealth building, with HUD directly across the street].


The developer of Parkview Apartments was Ralph Lloyd, of Lloyd Center fame.

Parkview Apartments is on the National Register of Historic Places.(Nomination materials are in the 75th Anniversary Celebration PDF).


These two projects were built prior to the start of WW II, before there even was a housing authority in Portland, but pre-war expansion was starting to create demand for more rental housing that would culminate a few years later with the building of the massive Vanport public housing project.


GREEN before Green was hip! Vista Avenue has several 140 year old redwood trees on site; during a site visit at Parkview I was told that an arborist has said that some of the trees on that site are 135 years old.


Surrounding the Vista Avenue Apartments are several other previously FHA insured loans on King's Hill; those are shown in a separate worksheet in the Excel FHA MF database.Together the 5 former FHA projects I have located on the Hill add up to close to 1,000 units.


Immediately adjacent to Parkview Apartments is a recent (1990's) FHA /OHCS risk sharing project, Buckman Heights.(Buckman is just South of NE Gleason)

UPDATED: First Ever National FHA Multifamily Insured Excel Database Includes 50,000+Projects, 5.7 Million Units from 1935-2008.

UPDATE June 16, 2009: 5 Oregon Specific worksheets have been added to the national database as part of the celebration of the FHA 75th Anniversary in June 2009. Link below has been corrected to new version of the database; file is about 20 MB's in size.

Downloading tip: File is in Excel 2007 format. Some users report file appears with a .zip extension when downloaded. I recommend you download the file to you PC, and if zip file extension is present, change it to .xlsx extension and THEN open with Excel 2007.
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2009 marks the 75th anniversary of FHA and also the 15th anniversary of the Portland HUD Office endorsement of the first FHA FastTrack FHA insured loan in the country.(FHA Fastrack processing reduced HUD multifamily loan processing costs by as much as 50% and shortened loan processing time by 60-75%; as started in Portland, FHA FastTrack also provided a money back guarantee of timely loan processing).

To help celebrate these events, I have created the first ever national database of FHA insured multifamily loans in Microsoft Excel; it contains data for 50,444 FHA insured multifamily projects insured from 1935 through FY 2008. The Oregon Housing Blog FHA Multifamily Insured Loan Database 1935-FY 2008 includes geographic specific information, FHA financing details and the current loan status of FHA insured loans covering more than 5.7 million housing units.(The Excel database is about 21 MB's in size and is in the Excel 2007 file format).

Several individual worksheets also break out financing details of notable FHA insured loans in the database:

1.The FIRST FHA insured loan made in 1935, Colonial Village Apartments in Arlington, Va., a property that is on the National Historic Register. (see worksheet #4 for project details, including a Google maps street view of the project and link to historic register documents that describe the project and the beginning of the FHA multifamily loan program);

2. The FHA insured loan for the apartments in Hawaii where President Obama lived with his grandmother while he attended high school in Hawaii. Note: September 2009 will also mark the 45th anniversary of the initial endorsement of the FHA insured loan for that project. (see worksheet #5 in the workbook for financing details for Punahou Circle Apartments, including a picture of the project);

3. The first FHA FastTrack project initially endorsed by the Portland HUD Office in 1994 was Courtyard Apartments (now called The Benchmark Apartments) in Boise, Idaho (see worksheet #6 for details about the FHA insured loan for this project, including a picture);

4. What I believe to be the first FHA insured Low Income housing tax credit project in the country, initially endorsed by the Portland HUD office in June of 1988. Autumn Park Apartments (144 units) in Wilsonville, Oregon was subsequently refinanced/preserved with a FHA insured Oregon Housing and Community Services FHA risk sharing loan in 2004, receiving a second round of LIHTC in conjunction with this tax exempt bond loan. (see worksheet 7 for financing details and pictures).

Go HERE to download The Oregon Housing Blog FHA Multifamily Insured Loan Database, 1935-FY 2008.

More about What's in the Database.

With a total of 38 data fields for each project, there are more than 1.9 million data elements in the Oregon Housing Blog's FHA Insured MF Database, 1935-FY 2008. Data elements in the database include key dates, units, mortgage amount, principal and interest payment and the remaining principal balance as of Sept. 30,2008.

For some of the 30 data fields pulled from HUD records, I substituted values for codes found in the database. I then added 8 data fields to make it easier to analyze the data. These added fields include a status field that make it easy to see whether a project loan is active or was terminated; a fiscal year data field that allow users to locate origination and termination dates by HUD Fiscal Year; and a field that includes the HUD region indicator for the property.

An important feature of the Excel database is the addition of a Pivot table worksheet that allows an infinite variety of ways of extracting and organizing information from the database.

A non inclusive list of questions like this can be answered using the Pivot table:

* How many loans were made by geography (zip code, city, state, HUD region)?
* What was the dollar amount of these loans? (Per Project and Per Unit)
* How many of these loans are still active?
* What type of loans were they? (Preservation? Senior? Health Care?)
* What lenders made these loans?
* If active, what is the remaining principal balance of these loans?
* What is the principal and interest payment per unit?
* What is the remaining principal per unit?
* What was the monthly debt service per unit?
* How many of these loans have been terminated?
* How many of these loans resulted in claims, and of what kind?
* How did loan volume change annually?

(The database does NOT include information about HUD assisted units in these FHA insured projects; a supplement is planned that will focus on this subset of FHA insured MF properties as of Sept 30.2008).

How Was the Database Built?

1. The database began with the combination of data from two separate FHA insured MS Access databases from HUD, one for terminated loans and the second for active FHA insured MF loans.
2. Because data fields were not uniform in the two databases, it took substantial time to merge the data from the two databases. I also created formulas to substitute names for difficult to decipher codes in several data fields to make the data easier to understand.
3. I then 8 additional data elements to make it easier to analyze the data.(all 38 data fields are listed in worksheet 3 of the workbook).
4. Once the values for these fields were calculated I added a Pivot table. This creates opportunities for an infinite number of ways of viewing the 50,000+ projects in the database.
5. I added a READ ME worksheet to help users understand and navigate through the features and worksheets in the workbook. (It includes an automatic countdown clock showing the days left to FHA's 75th anniversary).
6. As a bonus I added several worksheets that display specific information for several notable projects (discussed above).

Future Updates

My current plan is to update the database twice a year(likely June if March 08 data is available), with any updates on a future HUD assisted FHA insured projects supplement occurring only once a year, after the completion of HUD's fiscal year. (This would like be December/January ).