Developer Jordan Schnitzer was having lunch at a downtown Portland seafood restaurant weeks ago when he ran into Multnomah County Commissioner Loretta Smith.

The conversation turned to the Wapato Jail, and Smith told Schnitzer a public use should be found for the long-vacant county property, Schnitzer recalled. He agreed and began to look into purchasing it himself.

Now Portland developer Marty Kehoe has sold a controlling interest in the Wapato Jail property to Schnitzer’s Harsch Investment Properties.

Schnitzer said he accepted fee title on the limited liability company controlling the property Friday. Kehoe is remaining on board the project as an adviser, Schnitzer said.

Yet, in keeping with the comedy of errors in the Wapato Jail’s history, Kehoe and Schnitzer appear to have differing visions of the property’s future.

Schnitzer said Tuesday he will meet next week with Portland developer Homer Williams, founder of the nonprofit Oregon Harbor of Hope, to discuss using the jail building as a homeless shelter with associated social services.

“If anyone can help figure this out, it’s Homer,” Schnitzer said.

But Kehoe said the property would not be used as a homeless shelter.

“All I can say is that’s not the plan,” he said. “That’s never been the plan.”

It was only last week that Kehoe completed the purchase of the Wapato Jail from Multnomah County for $5 million after he’d submitted an initial $10.8 million offer that tied up the property for months. Schnitzer said he purchased the property from Kehoe for $5 million. The two had arranged a transaction before the sale from the county closed, Schnitzer said.

“We entered into a transaction with him that if he did it, it would basically transfer with us,” Schnitzer said.

Williams was also bidding for the Wapato Jail at the time. He submitted a $7 million purchase offer that county commissioners opted not to entertain.

Now all three developers are involved in deciding Wapato’s future. Williams will have the “first shot” at finding a public use for the property, Schnitzer said.

“He is a brilliant real estate dreamer and developer,” Schnitzer said of Williams, pointing to his experience developing projects in the South Waterfront District and the Pearl District. “Now he is devoting his life, he said, to help the homeless, and I admire that. The first crack is yours.”

Schnitzer left the door open to other uses for the 18.24-acre property zoned for industrial use.

“If we can’t find a public purpose for it, we’ll try to repurpose the building for record storage or other use,” Schnitzer said. “If we can’t find a way to repurpose it, we’ll tear it down.”

Oregon’s Land Use Board of Appeals rejected a past attempt to use an industrial-zoned property as a mass shelter.

During the time Multnomah County owned the property, county officials – with the notable exception of Smith – were skeptical it could ever be used as a homeless shelter. They cited the jail’s physical layout, operating costs and distance from transportation and service agencies in Portland’s core.

In 2016, the county’s Department of County Assets evaluated the potential use of the Wapato Jail as a homeless shelter. The county report found doing so would have a start-up cost of $950,000 and ongoing costs of $140,000 a month, including the need for five full-time-equivalent staff members.

The report noted it was unknown if the building’s physical systems would perform at full operation.

County Chairwoman Deborah Kafoury did not immediately respond Tuesday to a message seeking comment.

County commissioners “did the best thing in terms of stopping the drain of dollars,” Schnitzer said. The county was paying $300,000 a year in maintenance costs.

Schnitzer said the Wapato Jail purchase is part of his family’s legacy in giving back to Portland.

“All of us, it breaks our heart to see all of these homeless folks,” he said. “It also hurts to see them on doorsteps hurting merchants who need their business to survive.”

The post At Wapato Jail, three developers vie for role appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Portland Development Commission is searching for a reset on Centennial Mills, a downtown waterfront property that has seen a series of false starts.

On Wednesday, the PDC hosted an open house to give an update for industry professionals and neighbors.

CBRE is representing the city agency as the listing agent with brokers Cara Nolan and Graham Taylor. The property most likely will be marketed for four to six weeks, followed by a call for offers, Nolan said.

Multifamily and office development could be the best fit, but at this point, backers are open to ideas.

“We’re going to let the market decide,” Nolan said.

The project has been in limbo since November, when the PDC pulled out of a memorandum of understanding with Jordan Schnitzer‘s Harsch Investment Properties.

Matt Johnson with KPFF Consulting Engineers said everyone involved in redevelopment of the property is waiting for a developer to come through with the right solution.

“It’s a chance to try again, step up again and see what can be done,” he said.

Mark Edlen, a PDC commissioner and chief executive of Gerding Edlen Development, said plenty of enthusiasm exists for a Centennial Mills project.

“Obviously, there are a lot of competing interests,” he said. “Our job is to sort through those and come to the best decision.”

The PDC also wants public space as part of the mix, including a possible Greenway Trail connection.

Neighbors who attended the evening open house said they were tired of the drawn-out process and resulting uncertainty.

“I’m disappointed PDC has been on again, off again so many times on this,” said Steve Young, who lives in Waterfront Pearl.

Young also served on the citizens advisory committee for The Fields Neighborhood Park. He is among residents who are keen to enhance public access to the river, as well as the views from their windows.

“I trust that the heights will be in keeping with the stepdown idea, where the highest building isn’t right at the water’s edge,” he said.

Centennial Mills’ second act has faced long delays. The PDC acquired the property in 2000 from ADM Milling Co. A framework plan was completed in 2006. A first phase of selective demolition is under way; warehouse and elevator structures are being dismantled.

Eric Foster, another Waterfront Pearl resident, said he’s been watching the demolition since he moved in. He agreed that the process was too drawn out, and Wednesday’s meeting didn’t appear to move things forward.

“We’re disappointed,” he said. “We thought a developer would be presenting us his ideas, and the PDC would be telling us about the options.”

A looming question is whether the site’s historic stone buildings can be preserved. The PDC estimates that redevelopment of the flour mill at 45,000 gross square feet would cost $19.7 million, while redevelopment of the feed mill at 21,500 gross square feet would cost $10.8 million.

The ongoing demolition is leaving those buildings alone for now.

Johnson said that both concrete buildings have fared best among those on the property, but they’re in poor shape nevertheless.

“It would take an extraordinary effort to save them,” he said.

The post PDC readdressing Centennial Mills appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

After the city of Portland let expire a memorandum of understanding for Harsch Investment Properties to develop the abandoned Centennial Mills site, the firm’s president, Jordan Schnitzer, complained that the city didn’t hold enough public meetings. So now Schnitzer has decided to hold one of his own.

Schnitzer will be at Pure Space, at 1315 N.W. Overton St., on Jan. 21 to speak about the “redevelopment opportunities and potential for Centennial Mills.” Pearl District Neighborhood Association President Patricia Gardner and historian Chet Orloff also will speak at the public event, which is slated to start at 6 p.m.

The Portland Development Commission bought the five-acre Centennial Mills site in 2000. After several failed redevelopment attempts, the city last year began demolition of five warehouses and three grain elevators.

The PDC backed out of the MOU with Schnitzer in November. He said he was “profoundly disappointed in (the) PDC and the mayor.”

“The need for political vision and leadership is imperative as Portland struggles to maintain and restore our treasured historical sites,” Schnitzer said in a statement.

Susanne Orton, spokeswoman for Harsch Investment Properties, said that at the event Schnitzer will show illustrations and talk about the different development concepts for Centennial Mills. The presentation will be followed by a public discussion, she said.

“We are hoping to have a lot of public participation and attendance,” she said.

The post Public meeting to focus on Centennial Mills appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

When Harsch Investment Properties President Jordan Schnitzer in 2013 pursued an opportunity to redevelop the vacant Centennial Mills site in Northwest Portland, he considered the effort a way to give back to the city.

Last week, the Portland Development Commission withdrew that opportunity when it decided to let a nonbinding memorandum of understanding with Harsch – a precursor to a potential binding disposition and development agreement – expire.

Now the only activity taking place on the property is demolition. Harsch’s plans to add multifamily housing, office space and retail space are essentially dead.

“I’m just so profoundly disappointed in PDC and the mayor,” Schnitzer said. “I made it clear all along that I wasn’t doing Centennial Mills because I needed another project. It was really more of a civic endeavor because I think it’s such a special, magical, important place. In essence, you had a developer who was putting legacy above profit. You have an agency who put an RFP out, took lots of people’s time, and has now broken that contract.”

PDC Executive Director Patrick Quinton explained in a letter to Schnitzer last week that the project planned in 2013 is “no longer practical.” The PDC, he stated, now wants to look at other options – public development, in particular.

Centennial Mills is very complicated, PDC spokesman Shawn Uhlman noted.

“I can certainly appreciate (Schnitzer’s) passion for it,” he said. “Something we need to bear in mind is that as everyone has said, this is a very challenging site.”

Schnitzer said he believes the PDC has not worked closely enough with the public.

“The PDC would not allow us to have any public meetings,” he said. “Why didn’t they ask the public for input? Why were they afraid of asking for a public meeting? I believe they were totally afraid. They were afraid that the public might ask for things and they would be in a dilemma.

“The thing that really disappoints me is that what this has basically done is thumb their nose at the public. PDC works for two million people in the metropolitan area. That’s who they serve. My view was when we took this project on, that was then who we served. This wasn’t a site to buy that we’d just buy and put up an office building.”

Uhlman disagreed with Schnitzer’s perception of public engagement for Centennial Mills.

“(Central City Manager) Lisa Abuaf has been going to the Pearl District Neighborhood Association every month and providing updates to them,” Uhlman said. “We’ve certainly kept what we have been doing in the public eye and we’ve been very public about the work that’s been going on.”

Harsch’s preferred development plan for Centennial Mills would have cost $115.8 million, with the company paying $77 million and public subsidies covering the rest. Harsch has already invested $1.3 million, Schnitzer said. Some of that money went into design work. Meetings took place with architects from the Portland area and elsewhere in the U.S., and seven proposals were created. Schnitzer’s favorite was one that preserved the Feed Mill and Flour Mill buildings and transformed the rest of the site into a public park with docks to let people access the Willamette River.

“After a 20-minute presentation (to the PDC) in October of 2014, we were never called back, never asked to explain all of our seven different plans,” Schnitzer said.

The PDC hasn’t eliminated the possibility of a different private development for the Centennial Mills site, but Schnitzer didn’t say whether Harsch would opt to participate in a new project. He said Harsch will probably take action to recoup much of the money it invested.

Schnitzer also wants light shed on exactly what happened.

“I thought this morning about writing a letter to the mayor,” he said. “What I’m probably going to do is maybe have a meeting with the (Pearl District) Neighborhood Association (and) invite all of the press in, because it’s a fascinating story. It’s peculiar and most of all tragic.”

The post Schnitzer ‘profoundly disappointed’ appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

The city of Portland has pulled the plug on Harsch Investment Properties‘ redevelopment plans for the Centennial Mills site in Northwest Portland.

In March 2013, the Portland Development Commission and Harsch signed a nonbinding memorandum of understanding that the two parties would work toward successful negotiation of a binding disposition and development agreement for redevelopment of Centennial Mills. That MOU expired earlier this year, but was being renewed on a month-to-month basis.

On Wednesday, PDC Executive Director Patrick Quinton sent Harsch President Jordan Schnitzer a letter informing him that the agency had decided that the MOU would not be renewed again.

“As you well know,” Quinton wrote in the letter, “the landscape and development options and budget have dramatically changed during this time. Now that we have a better picture of the demolition costs, the plans for the Mounted Police Unit site and the size of the remaining public resources available for the project, the original development concepts both you and we had in 2013 are no longer practical.”

Schnitzer was not immediately available to comment.

The Harsch team’s preferred plan for redevelopment would have cost $115.8 million. The company in October 2014 proposed covering $77 million of that amount, and relying on public subsidies totaling $38.8 million. That project had called for revitalizing the 4.75-acre site to hold 120,000 square feet of multifamily units, 80,000 square feet of office space and 24,000 square feet of retail space. Of that total, 50,000 square feet would have been in the only two buildings that could be saved – the Feed Mill and the Flour Mill.

The PDC acquired Centennial Mills in 2000. Bruce Wood, real estate and construction services manager for the agency, said that Wednesday “was just another day in the progression of decisions that will determine ultimately what’s going to happen here. The decision yesterday was to basically say that the project has changed. If you read the MOU, it describes a very, very, very different type of project. What we know at this point is that that project is not going to move forward.

“We’ve been working on Centennial Mills for quite some time. It’s not like decisions are made at the spur of the moment. There has been 15 years of process as this very complicated project works toward whatever its ultimate outcome is going to be.”

The decision to let the MOU expire was announced at the PDC’s board meeting on Wednesday. Also at the meeting, an update was given on the estimated costs to preserving/demolishing the Feed Mill and the Flour Mill buildings.

The Feed Mill, a five-story, 25,000-square-foot building with a basement, was built in 1920. The cost to demolish it was approximately $57,113, while the cost to renovate it was approximately $8,334,350. The Flour Mill, a six-story, 44,000-square-foot building with a basement, was built in 1910. The cost to demolish it was estimated at $1,134,726, while the cost to restore it was estimated at $14,586,560.

In July, Mayor Charlie Hales requested that the PDC investigate the costs and feasibility of preserving more structures.

“It’s really generated a lot more questions than answers,” said Irene Bowers, senior project/program coordinator for the PDC.

City staffers announced at the PDC board meeting that Phase I demolition of warehouses A, B, C, D and F as well as elevators A, B and C began the first week of October and will conclude in June 2016. Demolition crews have witnessed several instances of structural collapse and accelerating deterioration. Non-demolition personnel are no longer permitted on the property.

Whatever happens with Centennial Mills, it is not certain that Harsch, or another developer will not be a part of it.

“We have not abandoned the possibility of a private development on the site,” Quinton wrote to Schnitzer. “If we ultimately reach a decision to pursue a substantial private development component on the site, we will come back to you to see if Harsch is interested in leading a private development effort.”

Wood, who has worked for Harsch, said he expects the PDC and the development company to be on good terms moving forward.

“We’ve worked well with Harsch,” he said. “We’ll work well with Harsch in the future.”

The post PDC halts Centennial Mills redevelopment appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Harsch Investment Properties President Jordan D. Schnitzer had just enough time to sneak in a half hour workout on Monday morning.

“Forty-five minutes would’ve been better,” Schnitzer said. “How much weight do I need to lose?” I’d say 10 pounds would be great, but …” Schnitzer trailed off, laughing.

While Schnitzer would not mind his own waistline shrinking a bit, he is thrilled that the waistline of his company is growing so robust. Schnitzer said Harsch has added around $100 million in acquisitions to the portfolio in the last six months.

“Our objective is to try to dramatically increase the size of the company in all six of our regions in the states we’re in,” Schnitzer said.

The latest acquisition for the Portland based company is the Northgate Business Park in Natomas, California, a suburb of Sacramento. The property is a 12-building, 153,791 square-foot industrial flex space with direct access to interstates 80 and 5. With more than 63 tenants, the park is 92 percent occupied.

Schnitzer declined to identify the exact cost of the property

“Put this down in a quote,” he said, laughing again. “‘Paid more than we should and less than we wanted to.’”

Harsch has earned a reputation for acquiring properties with strong demographic markets. Schnitzer said Natomas fits the mold given that after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reevaluated the condition of levees around the country, including those in the area of Natomas. As a result of that study, there had been a prohibition on any development in Natomas for the past five years.

“They’ve now worked through those issues,” Schnitzer said.

The newly purchased property isn’t Harsch’s first investment in Natomas. The firm previously had purchased 800,000 square feet nearby, but the newly purchased cluster of buildings is on a major street with more traffic and will allow Harsch to put a small office in Natomas.

Schnitzer sees Sacramento as “a solid, steady” market.

“It got hit pretty hard during the recession,” he said. “It hasn’t had the kind of rebound that Seattle, Portland, San Francisco have had.

“Our whole view with Sacramento is that it’s not a quick-buck town. But, we like to go into our markets and become a part of the community, and work hard and serve our tenants.”

Part of serving the tenants in the park will include spending roughly $1 million on new roofs, a new HVAC system and paving.

“We look at each one of our tenants – and we have almost 4,000 in the portfolio – like it’s our own space,” Schnitzer said. “It’s like inviting people into your living room. Therefore we take maybe a little extra effort to make sure every tenant’s space is a space we’d be proud of having our family and friends in.

“Sometimes we don’t maybe get as much return as others on the front end, since we spend a little more, but since we’re long-term owners, everything seems to work out in the end pretty well.”

The post Harsch adds to California property portfolio appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Harsch Investment Properties‘ plan to grow significantly in the next decade took a healthy step forward earlier this week with the company’s announcement that it had acquired the 735,073-square-foot Parkside Business Center in Beaverton.

Harsch purchased the business center, which is at Southwest Hall Boulevard and Oregon Route 217, for an undisclosed sum, from RREEF Property Trust, which had owned the property for two decades on behalf of the Los Angeles County Employees Retirement Association.

Jordan Schnitzer, president of Harsch, said his firm had waited several years to purchase the business center, which sits near Washington Square. Jones Lang LaSalle brokers Buzz Ellis and Paige Morgan serve as listing brokers for the business center.

The Parkside property currently is 93 percent leased and serves 218 tenants. With its mix of light industrial, office and mini storage spaces, the property is a type that Harsch knows well, according to Steve Roselli, the company’s senior vice president and Portland regional manager.

The Parkside acquisition kicks off the start of Harsch’s strategy to double in size during the next 10 years, Schnitzer said in a press release. The addition of the Beaverton property brings the company’s Portland holdings to more than 3.5 million square feet. Harsch’s entire corporate portfolio totals 22 million square feet.

The post Harsch buys Beaverton business center appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Most of Centennial Mills is going to be pulled off the Willamette River before it falls in.

The Portland Development Commission on Thursday adopted a resolution to exempt the Centennial Mills project from the required competitive low-bid process and expedite the hiring process to conduct “selective demolition work” at the unstable site.

“In October we started seeing (ceiling) beams collapse, and just last week began a cascade of events that were unforeseen,” said Bruce Wood, senior project/program coordinator with PDC. “It’s reached a point of critical failure, and we need to start deconstruction of certain elements as soon as possible.”

The commission announced plans to remove everything but the six-story Flour Mill and five-story Feed Mill, including the wharf. PDC plans this month to issue a request for proposals and intends to award the contract award at a Feb. 2015 meeting. Selective demo could begin in the second quarter of 2015 and is expected to take six months.

As part of the expedited process, the Portland Police Bureau’s Mounted Patrol Unit, which is headquartered at the site, will have to vacate by March 1.

PDC made their decision without receiving public input and without entering into a development agreement with Harsch Properties, which didn’t sit well with some.

“I am flabbergasted about this meeting because at the last meeting (in October) you talked about public process,” said Patricia Gardner, president of the Pearl District Neighborhood Association‘s board. “Where are you going on this site? Where is the public involvement? That you’re going to tear down 80 percent of the site is hard to swallow and completely disheartening.”

Jordan Schnitzer, president of Harsch Properties, criticized the board for dragging its feet.

“The complaint of citizens who say there hasn’t been public input is completely valid,” he said. “As the developer, until we get a development agreement, we can’t start that process. We’ve been waiting since April. We expected one in November. Now it’s December and we still haven’t seen it.”

Schnitzer in October presented the board with his team’s “preferred plan” for the site: a $115.8 million development with plans for a pedestrian bridge spanning Naito Parkway, river access, open public space, multifamily units, and retail and office space.

Harsch Properties committed $77 million to the project and would like the public to invest in the remainder of the cost. In October, Schnitzer stressed to the board that the next step would be to hold public meetings to gauge what amenities people wanted in the development and how much they’re willing to spend on developing the site.

At Thursday’s meeting, Nathan Ingraffea, a principal at KPFF Consulting Engineers, testified that after assessing the site, his team concluded that extensive roof failures have allowed water inside buildings, exacerbating deterioration. Wharf columns are shifting toward the river, he said, which could lead to structural collapse of the wharf and other integrated buildings.

Schnitzer’s team also conducted extensive site surveys and concluded that the Flour Mill and Feed Mill were the only buildings worth saving.

“As so often happens in life, you can look back to yesterday and figure out what you could have done better. In hindsight, if we would have known then what we know now, we could have covered the roofs,” Schnitzer said. “My preservationist heart hurts that more of this site has deteriorated.”

While the commissioners called circumstances leading up to deterioration “unforeseen,” not everyone agreed with that assessment.

“You guys knew in 2000 that the building needed to be taken care of,” Gardner said. “You’ve got us all backed into a corner of emergency for something we all knew was going to happen. That’s just bad policy.”

Gardner and fellow PDNA member Richard Graham both testified that beginning site demolition without a development agreement or plan is an unwise choice and wondered why the process is taking so long.
“What is holding this process up from happening in an orderly way?” Graham asked. “The cart is coming before the horse here. It doesn’t make sense not to have a development concept or any notion what to do with the site and start tearing things down.”

The post PDC approves selective Centennial Mills demolition appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Redevelopment of the Centennial Mills site along the Northwest Portland waterfront may have some big-name designers and architects attached if developer Jordan Schnitzer, president of Harsch Properties, gets his wish.

Plans for the $115.8 million project call for a pedestrian bridge spanning Naito Parkway, river access, open public space, multifamily units, and retail and office space.

Last month, Schnitzer met with Vietnam Veterans Memorial designer Maya Lin to gauge her interest in designing the bridge. He recently announced that his family foundation would contribute $1 million to bridge a funding gap in Confluence, a series of six public art installations – designed by Lin – at significant points along the Columbia River system in Oregon and Washington.

Schnitzer also has been in talks with Frank Gehry, designer of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, and architect Moshe Safdie, designer of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark.

“This is a legacy project for our community,” Schnitzer said. “In 50 years I want people to look at it and say, ‘Those folks sure did the right thing for this site.’ ”

Harsch Properties is prepared to invest $77 million in the project and would like the remaining $38.8 million to come from public subsidies. Schnitzer said the project is important enough to him that he’s willing to invest more if necessary.

“It shouldn’t just be a bridge; it should be a work of art,” he said. “With our civic hat on I’m sure our family fund would be willing to contribute a significant amount of funding for some aesthetic addition to this.”

Site redevelopment has been in the works for more than a decade. In 2006 the Portland Development Commission hired Costa Mesa, Calif.-based LAB Holding to develop a culinary hub for food purveyors, but later shifted its project preference to require at least 50 percent of the development to include office space. As a result, LAB Holding aborted its project.

Patricia Gardner, president of the Pearl District Neighborhood Association‘s board, said she hopes that the planning phase will be more transparent this time around.

“(PDC officials) chased away that developer because they changed the rules,” she said. “LAB got killed behind closed doors. This time there needs to be meetings where they ask the public, ‘What do you guys want?’ ”

The PDC on Dec. 11 will discuss possible next steps for the century-old Centennial Mills site at a public meeting, PDC spokesman Shawn Uhlman said.

The PDC is waiting to make any decisions until KPFF Consulting Engineers finishes a survey of the site to determine which buildings are salvageable and which need to be razed. Uhlman said he expects the firm to report its findings during the first week of December.

“This is one of the last chances we have, as a city, to connect with our history,” Gardner said. “I’ve wondered if there’s a plot that … the building will fall down if they wait long enough.”

At the Oct. 29 PDC meeting where Schnitzer announced his firm’s preferred development plan, the commissioners talked at length about the buildings’ rapid deterioration and about the possibility of demolishing those too run-down to preserve.

“It’s like they think, ‘We own the building, so we can just start tearing down parts of it,’ ” Gardner said. “How can you do that without a true vision of what it is you’re tearing down?”

Uhlman said the PDC is hoping that KPFF will provide it with an assessment of which buildings are most at risk.

“The key piece is learning from the structural engineers how quickly we need to act,” he said. “Selective demolition could prove to be a challenge because the buildings are all sort of integrated.”

Schnitzer’s plan calls for preserving the four-story Feed Mill and the five-story Flour Mill. He said his firm has already brought KPFF staffers on site, and they determined that the 10 other existing structures are beyond repair.

“It’s a tragic circumstance,” he said. “There’s so much damage to some of the buildings that we’d be tearing them down and rebuilding them to look like they were. We’re preserving the best of the buildings … In our opinion, the cost of trying to recreate the others isn’t worth it.”

Harsch Properties spent more than a year meeting with citizens and professional firms to consider every option for the site.

“We came up with a scheme we suggested as a preferred plan,” he said. “What’s most important is that we go through a public process to meet with anyone and everyone so we can hear every voice in this community and answer every question they have.”

The post Conceptualizing ‘a work of art’ appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

The redevelopment plan for Centennial Mills, in Northwest Portland, calls for creating open space, capturing history and establishing a focal point for the waterfront.

Jordan Schnitzer, president of Harsch Properties, on Wednesday introduced the Portland Development Commission to his team’s preferred plan for redevelopment of the 4.75-acre site into 120,000 square feet of multifamily units, 80,000 square feet of office space and 24,000 square feet of retail space. Of that total, 50,000 square feet would be rehabilitated space in the only two salvageable buildings.

“The good thing about this is no one has a monopoly on what happens,” Schnitzer said. “We want input from everybody.”

The development team considered several options – ranging from clearing the whole site and leaving it open space ($18 million) to restoring additional structures, and building an arena and other amenities ($207 million). Schnitzer’s team said its $115.8 million “preferred plan” includes the best of all ideas.

Harsch Properties is proposing to cover $77 million, and rely on public subsidies totaling $38.8 million.

Schnitzer’s team envisions a common area and a covered events center similar to downtown’s Director Park, a pedestrian greenway along the water, a pedestrian bridge over Naito Parkway and a dock that allows access to the river and moorage for boats. The result would be a “lyrical, fluid” waterfront, Schnitzer said.

“How we came up with the events center is we were thinking: Why are people going to be coming down here?” he said. “With the success (Portland Parks & Recreation) has had with Director Park … it shows that there’s a thirst from people who want to come to events that are covered.”

Schnitzer described a glass-covered area where people could attend summer evening movies, car shows or other events.

“We wanted to evoke the design of the wharf buildings that are no longer going to be able to be preserved in the line of the events center,” he said.

Just two of the existing 12 buildings are in a condition that allows for preservation, Schnitzer said. The Flour Mill Building would be incorporated into a new office and retail space. The Feed Mill Building would be converted into a restaurant with a “family price point.”

“A restaurant where people could drive up in their boats to come,” he said. “It would get that area activated.”

Schnitzer outlined a building schedule that calls for the design and permitting process to continue into early 2016, with construction beginning in the second quarter of 2016 and finishing in the third quarter of 2018.

But Schnitzer and the PDC seemed to agree that reactivating a 100-plus-year-old former mill site that has sat vacant for more than a decade will require some immediate repairs.

“Having walked through it today and having walked through (it) two and three years ago, I was really struck by the deterioration,” Commissioner John Mohlis said. “I have some concern about waiting until 2016, just from a public safety perspective, because it’s pretty shocking what’s happened over the last few years.”

The roof of the Flour Mill has partially collapsed, the roof of the Feed Mill has localized areas of damage, and many wharf pilings are completely rotten.

“There’s got to be some way we could go to the City Council and get a declaration of emergency,” Schnitzer said. “Because if half that building falls into the water it’s not going to be good for any of us.”

On a site tour – hard hats and flashlights required – on Friday, the deterioration was evident: visibly listing support beams, gaping holes in the ceiling and standing water pooled on the concrete first floor of the six-story Flour Mill.

“I was just here (three days ago) and already I can see changes since then,” said Susanne Orton, vice president of marketing and communications for Harsch Properties.

The PDC didn’t make any decisions at Wednesday’s work session, but agreed that something needs to be done to stop deterioration, salvage what can be saved and keep the project from becoming more complicated by starting demolition as soon as possible.

The next step, Orton said, will be to hold public meetings to get feedback on what people want to see on the site and how much they want to spent on development. No meetings have been scheduled yet.

(Click here to view photos from a recent hardhat tour of Centennial Mills)

The post Time ticking for Centennial Mills appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.