Tim Ramis

By Mark O’Donnell

TIM RAMIS – Tim was instrumental in creating Specialized Housing Incorporated

April 4, 1950 – October 13, 2021 Specialized Housing, Inc.

I enjoyed a 45-year relationship with Tim Ramis. We were great friends and law partners for over 25 years, business partners at the time of his death, and I am the Godfather to Will and Kelley.

David Brooks writes about resume values and eulogy values. Tim’s resume values couldn’t have been any more exceptional. He was recognized as Oregon’s outstanding land-use and municipal lawyer. I could write pages about Tim’s accomplishments for his clients. Tim was a lawyer’s lawyer, a master strategist, and a man who identified with his clients.

Tim’s eulogy values exceed his outstanding resume values. Tim was instrumental in creating Specialized Housing Incorporated, a nonprofit organization (“SHI”). In the Spring of 1981, few facilities in Oregon provided housing with integrated services for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (“100”). Tim was one of the early Board members who saw the need in the community and was committed to creating something out of nothing.

SHI dedicated itself from the start to providing handicapped people with housing and services specially designed to meet their physical, social, and psychological needs. It also promoted their health, security, and happiness with a firm belief in their capacity to live long and productive lives as full members of the community.

Tim’s skills and knowledge as an extremely talented land-use and municipal lawyer played a key role in SHl’s early years. He helped get critical approvals to build 5- and 10-bedroom group homes, back then a new concept, in neighborhoods where the first response was often “not in my backyard.” Tim’s efforts helped pioneer the idea that people with profound disabilities could live together in housing indistinguishable from their neighbors if their requisite service needs could be met onsite.

Tim’s bold idea was that people with disabilities deserved access to high-quality residential settings and living environments rather than being forced to live in nursing homes or state institutions. The Board of SHI, including Tim, purchased their first house and renovated it into a 5-bedroom group home in 1983.

Over the next 10 years, SHI would go on to purchase and renovate 30 houses into group homes. They created partnerships with dozens of community-based groups that provided the services that residents needed and that complimented SHl’s focus on the acquisition ofland, public entitlement, and real estate development, all professional activities squarely in Tim Ramis’ wheelhouse.

As an SHI Board Member, Secretary, and President during the period 1982 to 2021, Tim was also involved in SHl’s development of 70 units of HUD apartments for the frail elderly and people with mental health handicaps. He helped oversee the development of three affordable housing projects that provide apartments to three hundred seniors, families, and children.

Oregon’s method of providing housing and medical services to individuals with I/DD emerged from a long and troubled history. The center of that history is Fairview Training Center located on a 300-acre agricultural campus on the southern edge of Salem, Oregon. Until its closure in 2002, Fairview, for over a century, was the primary state institution in which people with I/DD were committed. At its maximum, 3,000 people lived and worked there. Fairview Training Center closed in 2002 after litigation and investigation that disclosed a variety of civil, constitutional, and human rights abuses.

Starting in 1987, SHI became the largest community integration project developer in Oregon, building 64 new facilities. Together with the 30 group homes that SHI created out of renovated homes and the 64 new buildings it constructed from the ground up, Tim Ramis was a key part of SHl’s efforts to provide specialized housing for 470 people with disabilities.

Before his death in the fall of 2021, Tim Ramis was still on his 40-year mission to create service-enriched housing. He was still providing his considerable expertise and insight into plans for Felida Park, a new 72-unit service-enriched senior housing project underway in Vancouver, Washington, in his thoughtful, caring and humble manner to help SHI create something out of nothing for the benefit of everyone in the community.

John Kasich, former Governor of Ohio and Presidential candidate, responded to a reporter as to why he, as a Conservative Republic Governor, was allocating substantial funds to social programs such as job training, addiction treatment, work release, etc., and he stated:

We are all going to see St. Peter and he is going to ask us what we did down here with the talent(s) God gave us. I have an answer. Do you?

Tim Ramis surely had an answer.