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Hungry developers, city officials and property owners all have contributed ideas about how to transform Portland’s largest undeveloped urban site.

Now, a group of six Portland State University graduate students have come up with their own plan for the 22-acre Con-way site in Northwest Portland as part of the Building Owners and Managers Association summer workshop.

Not all of the students’ 3.76 million-square-foot proposal will come to fruition, but both the property owner and the architect working to develop the site believe some elements definitely are possibilities.

The site includes 16 city blocks bordered loosely by Northwest Thurman and Pettygrove streets and 20th and 22nd avenues. Con-way, a publicly traded transportation company, uses 408,000 square feet of office space on the site; the rest is used for parking.

“The idea of redeveloping the site actually came up in a conversation I was having with the CEO about four years ago,” said J. Craig Boretz, vice president and chief tax officer for Con-way. “Given the state of the economy at the time and the location, we saw it as a great opportunity.”

That’s why Will Macht, the adjunct professor leading the workshop, chose the site. In years past, the workshop has focused on notable sites in Portland such as the Rose Quarter properties, the U.S. Postal Service blocks and Lincoln High School.

“We look for a site of regional significance that has the potential to be developed,” Macht said.

The students suggest anchoring the Con-way development with a Target store, a New Seasons grocery store and a 12-screen cinema. The team would then add 400,000 square feet of leasable office space, 100,000 square feet of retail space and 75,000 square feet of restaurant space. Con-way’s existing 408,000 square feet of space would be renovated. The concept also calls for 2,250 rental units, 200 condominiums and 250 hotel rooms.

“This is a really interesting site because it’s not like the South Waterfront; it already has context and a sense of place being surrounded by the Northwest Neighborhood and the Pearl District,” said PSU graduate student Susan Poss, a project team member, during a presentation in front of nearly 200 Portland business people. “But at the same time the sheer size of the site makes it its own place and destination.”

The six-person team suggested turning the street grid into a network of street parks. The concept eliminates curbs, creating a zone between building faces that could accommodate vehicular traffic, parking, pedestrians, bicyclists and landscaping. Vehicles would be parked perpendicular, rather than parallel, to building faces.

The end result would be 275 percent more street parking as well as the potential for about 300 percent more building density than offered by typical on-street parking. The per-space cost would be about 80 percent less than construction of similar spaces in a multilevel parking structure.

Trees would be planted on both sides of the parked cars, effectively slowing traffic.

“They’ve taken a suburban office parking model and transformed it into an urban model,” Boretz said. “The idea creates a great sense of place, and it’s doable, so I was pretty impressed.”

The development would need more than 3,000 spaces, so on-street parking would be supplemented by one level of underground parking operated by the city. The team also suggested the buildings feature a tenant mix that would support different uses at different times of the day.

Boretz said the team’s phasing strategy also caught his attention.

In consideration of the economy’s instability and the 10 to 15 years required to finish the development, the team proposed starting the project by laying out the street grid on the site’s perimeter. This would create an identity for the development and serve as a catalyst, said Jason Clough, a PSU graduate student and a project team member.

The first phase also called for adding a Target store.

Phase two would consist of building the underground parking structure, finishing the shared park street concept and building out the perimeter commercial spaces and residential units.

The final phase would focus on development of the remaining commercial space in the core, with a plaza at the center.

“The two biggest issues in this project have been the parking and the phasing,” Boretz said. “And the team did a really good job of examining both and coming up with great ideas.

“The idea of having developers set the tone by developing the fringe properties is definitely something we are interested in doing.”

Both the city and the property owner are eager to develop the site. The Portland Development Commission has earmarked the site for inclusion in the planned Central City Urban Renewal Area.

“We’re talking to developers all the time,” Boretz said. “Our hope is to have something coming out of the ground by this time next year.”