Development of Rockwood Rising in east Multnomah County has been a long slog.

But now that construction is finally under way some 15 years after planning began, progress seems to be happening at a rapid rate.

In fact, crews recently topped out the first of three buildings at the Gresham site between East Burnside Street and Southeast Stark Street, and Southeast 185th and 187th avenues.

General contractor LMC Construction is building the project, designed by YBA Architects, for developer RKm Development. The Gresham Redevelopment Commission owns the property and is responsible for implementing the plan for the city’s Rockwood-West Gresham Urban Renewal Area, and Rockwood Rising is a key part.

Many sets of eyes are on the project at present, and LMC Construction is on track to substantially complete work by July 2020.

“It’s going well; we’re meeting the schedule,” April O’Neal, a project engineer with LMC Construction, said during a recent site visit. “In December we’ll start putting the windows in and doing the roofing.”

A redesign of ground-floor storefronts has delayed some work briefly, but temporary walls will allow the building to be dried out as roofing takes place this month. Framers from Timberland Inc. are working near the top of the four-story building, which will have a structural system of glulam beams and columns.

Other subcontractors currently working on the project include Polaris Electric, Centurion Fire Protection and Tapani Plumbing. All are performing rough-in work on the building’s ground floor and second floor.

“We’re just waiting for the third floor to get a deck on it so they can move up safely,” O’Neal said.

All underground utility work for this portion of Rockwood Rising is done, and the parking area for the office building was paved just before Thanksgiving.

“We’ll start doing the landscaping (soon) and go ahead and put everything in and make it pretty,” O’Neal said. “A lot of the plants do better when they can winter over.”

The post Rockwood Rising building coming together quickly appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

A burglary of a contractor’s jobsite trailer might cause gnashing of teeth, but it’s hardly likely to significantly slow a project expected to kick-start revitalization in Gresham’s Rockwood neighborhood.

“We’re under way, and it’s been three years of writing schedules and preparing for the job,” Art O’Leary, jobsite superintendent for general contractor LMC Construction, said Monday at the Rockwood Rising project site in Gresham.

O’Leary surveyed the trailer’s interior following a break-in. After years of delays because of financing difficulties and other issues, it was merely one more hurdle for the team that last month broke ground on the three-building mixed-use development.

“It’s been a long road to get here,” Gresham Redevelopment Commission Executive Director Josh Fuhrer said Wednesday during a ceremony at the project site. “We had urban renewal starting in 2003. The city bought this site in 2005. It’s been 14 years that a project at this site has been in the works at various stages and forms. And that’s a long time for a community to stick with a project.”

The 5.5-acre property, near the junction of Southeast Stark and Burnside streets, formerly held a Fred Meyer store; it closed in 2002. Years of debate over the site’s future followed. But site work and excavation has finally begun for the first building. Crews from Lauzon Contracting are performing site work alongside employees of TerraCalc Land Surveying, Tapani Plumbing and Whitaker Ellis.

The $70 million project designed by YBA Architects is intended to drive further development in Rockwood, which is one of the youngest, most diverse and least affluent areas in the region.

“This is all about an economic engine,” said Roy Kim, president and CEO of RKm Development, which has worked on the project with the city of Gresham and other public partners. “Some of the obstacles seemed insurmountable. We had to overcome those. But eventually these buildings will come alive in 13 short months. With the organizations that are here, they’re going to help train each other, they’re going to help each other; it’s an economic engine that will be revved up.”

Building A, the Innovation Hub, is now under construction and will feature four wood-framed stories over a slab-on-grade foundation. The ground floor will have retail and restaurant space, and the top three floors will have offices and classroom space.

The five-story Building B will feature commercial space on the ground floor and around 100 affordable housing units on the upper floors.

Finally, Building C will have a food hall and micro-retail food space.

A public plaza is planned for the middle of the property, and 175 vehicle parking spaces also will be created.

Substantial completion of Building A is scheduled for July 4, 2020, O’Leary said. Ground is to be broken on the other two buildings before that date.

The post Finally, construction is under way in Rockwood appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

In this short video Gresham Redevelopment Commission Executive Director Josh Fuhrer gives a brief overview of Rockwood Rising, a long-awaited plan to redevelop a key property in the impoverished Gresham neighborhood of Rockwood. Once an unincorporated area of the county between Portland and Gresham, Rockwood has remained behind the development curve in spite of the region’s red-hot housing market. This has left plenty of room for enterprising developers to seek out public-private partnerships like Rockwood Rising, which has seen RKM Development team with the city of Gresham to make the project work. Check it out here:

The post VIDEO: Rockwood Rising aims at lifting east Multnomah County appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.