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Developers of a 15-story, mixed-use building in downtown Portland are preparing for construction of the foundation. They received the go-ahead from the Portland Design Commission earlier this year.

Sky3 Place 鈥� spearheaded by Las Vegas-based Molasky Group of Companies in partnership with Portland-based E&F Properties LLC 鈥� will feature 196 apartments (including three penthouses), 96 underground parking spaces and 10,615 total square feet of retail space on the ground floor and mezzanine levels.

Plans for the building indicate that the ground floor will hold five separate retail spaces each between 1,110 and 2,100 square feet. The mezzanine level will have one retail office space nearly 1,400 square feet.

The building will be a mix of concrete and prefabricated steel panels, according to Abe Samani, project manager with Puyallup, Wash.-based Absher Construction Co., the project contractor. The two below-grade parking levels and the first two floors, including the ceiling of the second floor, will be concrete. Upward from there, prefabricated steel panels will be used, Samani said.

鈥淭his method saves quite a bit on cost and scheduled construction time,鈥� he said. 鈥淚nstead of bringing the materials to the construction site and erecting them there, they’ll do the fabrication off-site and we assemble the panels.鈥�

Demolition crews in August razed an existing half-block structure on Southwest Jefferson Street between 11th and 12th avenues to make room for Sky3 Place. If all goes according to plan, the building should be delivered sometime around late March 2016.

Portland city code limits wood-frame buildings to five stories, so using metal framing allowed the architects to increase density on the site without making construction too costly. But Samani said the technique presents some unique challenges.

鈥淎ny time you have prefabricated panels it’s important to make sure it fits,鈥� he said. 鈥淚t takes a tremendous amount of engineering before you get the panels on site to make sure it’s built correctly.鈥�

Construction with prefabricated components allows less room for error, Samani said. The goal is to have as few on-site modifications as possible.

This will be Ankrom Moisan Architects‘ first prefabricated metal-framed project in Portland, but it has designed two in Seattle. The firm found it cuts construction costs on midsize buildings (between 12 and 16 stories) from about $220 per square foot to between $160 and $170 per square foot.

The Portland City Council in May approved an application by Sky3 Place developers to participate in the city’s Multiple-Unit Limited Tax Exemption program. Via MULTE, building owners are exempted from paying an estimated $690,000 in real property taxes during the first year of operation. The exemption will continue for 10 years and may be extended thereafter if the building owners are willing to reserve 20 percent of the units as affordable housing, meaning tenants would make less than 80 percent of the area’s median family income.

Sky3 Place is located just around the corner from The Jefferson, a mixed-use building constructed in 2008 with 80 apartments reserved for households making at or below 50 percent of the area’s median family income.