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.”

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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.

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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:

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Rockwood Rising may not be an architectural or engineering wonder. But the $70 million project in Gresham can serve as a prime example of the public-private partnership development model that some companies choose to follow.

For Matt Brown, principal and co-founder of YBA Architects of Portland, this is definitely the case. Brown’s firm has existed just five years, but from his experience with Rockwood Rising it’s safe to say that YBA is more or less sold on the concept.

“I would say people at the firm, myself included, have worked on a number of public-private partnerships, but as a firm this is our first significant one,” Brown said. “We’re really thrilled to get engaged in something like this.”

The multiuse development at the crossroads of Stark and Burnside streets in east Multnomah County has been a long time coming. The 5.5-acre property was vacated in 2005 following the closure of a Fred Meyer store. The city of Gresham purchased the property a year later for $8.1 million. A number of redevelopment ideas have since been bandied about, but nothing has stuck.

Now, Portland’s RKM Development is preparing to break ground later this year on a three-building project that will provide 108 new housing units along with new health care facilities, job training opportunities and small business space. Without the ability to bring both public and private needs together, however, the project would never have gotten off the ground.

“I guess, just from a purely architectural and design standpoint, I don’t think that there are particular features that are pioneering in terms of construction of the building,” Brown said. “However, the whole proposition of putting a town center in that location and the amount of community engagement and outreach that was done is pretty pioneering and obviously has been done with what are very good intentions and I think by and large yielded very good outcomes.”

RKM Development and owner Roy Kim already have a strong track record in this arena, having put together the celebrated Bethany Village community just west of Portland back in the 1990s.

“The owner of our development company has acquired an interest in doing projects in depressed areas, so that’s kind of what interested him,” said construction manager Jeff Oberst of Central Bethany Construction, a subsidiary of RKM Development. “This will be our second go-round with the partnership with the public sector.”

This was exactly what the city of Gresham was looking for in a developer when it began the latest round of planning in 2014. This came five years after previous planning efforts were abandoned in the Great Recession.

“I want to say we had over 150 community engagement events of all different sizes,” said Josh Fuhrer, executive director of the Gresham Redevelopment Commission – the city’s urban renewal agency.

Part of the process even involved bringing in residents to serve as paid consultants during planning. These individuals represented different community groups and ensured the widest range of voices possible would be heard during this process.

“We paid them as consultants to give us feedback about the types of things they’d like to see in the project,” Fuhrer said. “And then we brought those constituencies into larger roundtable meetings for a kind of give-and-take conversation about what this project should be about and whether it’s going to serve the people of Rockwood to the maximum extent possible. So, really, the community engagement was not an afterthought; the idea of community benefiting from the project wasn’t some piece of lipstick we put on after the fact. It’s really baked into the DNA of the project.”

The project consists of three planned mixed-use buildings on a parcel of property squeezed between East Burnside and Southeast Stark streets on the north and south and running from Southeast 187th to 185th streets east to west. Each building will be unique in size and composition, but the overall thrust of the project will be food-themed in recognition of Rockwood’s designation as a food desert, a U.S. Department of Agriculture term indicating at least 33 percent of the area’s residents live one mile or farther from a supermarket.

Then there is the financing for the project, which has a current budget of some $70 million.

“We haven’t done a lot of public-private projects this way, where you bring on a development partner and you partner to sort of co-develop the project together,” said Fuhrer, who went on to praise the city’s experience in working with RKM Development.

Roughly $9.5 million in city urban renewal money is going into the project, along with $2 million from a state grant. Another $8 million in net tax credit equity completes the public piece, with the remainder, around $50 million, being fronted by the developer in the form of both debt and tax equity. It’s a big risk, but one that could pay off handsomely down the road.

Still, because public financing is involved, some of the potential risk is mitigated for the private side, Brown said.

“The reality of the finances is, because the city is engaged and is putting up funding for it, it’s helpful,” he said. “The market is an interesting place. Construction costs are high and seem to continue to rise with all the commercial work that’s going on.”

Brown added that he feels Portland’s inclusionary zoning policy may have helped slow development of mixed-use projects in that jurisdiction. The result, he said, is that suburbs can benefit.

“Cities like Gresham, the satellite cities,” Brown said, “are benefiting from the hesitation that developers in Portland seem to be exercising as they wait for the inclusionary housing policy to become clarified, especially in recent months where we’ve seen volatility in what the policy will be and what benefits will be offered.”

Fuhrer noted, however, that while Gresham does not have an affordable housing policy similar to Portland’s inclusionary zoning regulations, Rockwood Rising nonetheless is using the latter as a blueprint to bring affordable housing units to the county’s least affluent sector.

Of the 108 planned studio, one- and two-bedroom apartments planned for Rockwood Rising, 20 percent will be allotted to families making less than 80 percent of the state’s median family income.

“That’s consistent with Portland’s inclusionary zoning,” Fuhrer said. “It’s actually out of their playbook, so we’re trying to be consistent with that even though this is the city of Gresham.”

Fuhrer said Rockwood has seen virtually no market-rate housing built over the past 20 years, despite a burgeoning population. At the same time, that population has not generally been able to keep up with metro-area rents in recent years.

“We know the importance of having more market-rate housing,” Fuhrer said. “But we also know there are a lot of families that need affordable products, so we’re trying to meet both of those needs through a strategy that has a mix of housing types and a mix of price points, and some that are actually capped at 80 percent. That’s part of our anti-displacement strategy.”

The city has tried to be mindful of that last aim, he said, despite accusations from some quarters that Rockwood Rising is little more than a gift to developers.

“It’s a big, big problem in a lot of places,” he said, “and we wanted to be very mindful of not creating a development that was going to push people in Rockwood out somewhere else, but really give them an opportunity to really put roots down and not treat Rockwood as a transitional place.”

The rising rents elsewhere make avoiding the same trend in Rockwood a challenge, Brown said.

“The rents generally have a ripple effect,” he said. “They’ve been highest in the center of the city and have been rippling out from there.

If new development adds both housing and jobs, Fuhrer said, than perhaps some of the problems of displacement seen in other parts of the metro area can be avoided.

“What we need to see is more development, more production of housing across the entire income spectrum,” he said.

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It’s not often that a community has so many hopes wrapped up in a single project. But in the impoverished community of Rockwood, in east Multnomah County, ground is poised to be broken soon on a mixed-use development known as to reinvigorate an area known more for poverty and crime than for its diverse population and culture.

“Rockwood Rising is a project we’ve been working on for almost nine years,” Gresham Redevelopment Commission Executive Director Josh Fuhrer said. “It’s intended to create an economic engine in the heart of the neighborhood of Rockwood, and it’s really a project that came about because of the deep community engagement we did trying to understand what the challenges were on a daily basis, what their aspirations were for themselves and their families.”

As envisioned, the project will consist of three new multiuse buildings on a parcel of property bordered on the north by Burnside Street and on the south by Stark Street. The parcel reaches from Southeast 188th Avenue on the east to 185th on the west, forming a rough trapezoid.

Plans call for inclusion of an urgent and primary health care clinic in an existing building that formerly held a Gresham police station. A new public plaza between the four buildings will tie the development together. There will be space for job training and apprenticeship programs, as well as public media space.

Finally, there will be 108 new housing units – either studios, or one- or two-bedroom apartments. At least 20 percent of those units will be affordable and be made available to families making no more than 80 percent of the state’s median household income.

“I wouldn’t say we’re breaking any construction boundaries with this,” said Matt Brown, a principal with YBA Architects, the firm responsible for design. “But in fact the game has been: How do we build this as economically as possible but still create remarkable buildings that will still be groundbreaking in the feeling of care in the design and sensitivity toward people while working within considerable economic constraints and trying to build things very efficiently?”

The project has an overall price tag of approximately $70 million, and has at times raised eyebrows among some citizens worried about the ongoing displacement of lower-income residents throughout the Portland-metro area.

The city of Gresham will provide some $9.5 million in urban renewal tax increment financing funding, along with $2 million in state grant funding. The project also is benefiting from $8 million in New Markets tax credit equity.

The balance, close to $50 million, will come from debt and equity financing via RKM Development, the private developer in charge of construction through its subsidiary Central Bethany Development.

RKM Development previously worked on on the western outskirts of Portland in the 1990s. Now the company is taking that expertise and applying it to an underserved community on the other side of the metro area.

“The owner of our development company (Roy Kim) has an interest in doing projects in depressed areas, so that’s kind of what interested him,” said Jeff Oberst, a Central Bethany Development construction manager working on Rockwood Rising. “We haven’t done any new development out there, but we own some property out there for future development.”

The three new buildings will consist of a larger mixed-use structure with a retail component, a four-story office building and a food-oriented structure, Oberst said.

“We’re calling it the market hall,” he said. “There will be an open-air market with micro restaurants, some small ethnic grocers, maybe a meat market. This area is considered a food desert, and there’s not a lot of places for people to shop out there.”

The public plaza will essentially link the three new buildings together.

“It’s kind of a gathering area for the community for events,” Oberst said. “It’s a public space that will be utilized daily.”

From the outset, Brown said, Kim challenged architects to design each building in a distinct fashion.

“He wanted all the buildings to look (like) they were each designed by different architects,” Brown said. “That was a really interesting and cool challenge, and our result was to develop clear concepts for each building and then hold onto that concept all the way through.”

That wasn’t enough, however. Kim also wanted the project to feel unique to the entire metro area.

“There was often a refrain that they don’t want this to be cool in the way the Pearl District is cool,” Brown said. “We want it to be cool for Rockwood, which was awesome for us. I think the output will be unique, and hopefully it will inspire people and be well received.”

The current iteration of Rockwood Rising is a far cry from its original form.

The city of Gresham purchased the property with $8.1 million in urban renewal funding in 2006 following the closure a year earlier of a Fred Meyer store. A year later the city contracted with Williams & Dame Development, but after 15 months all that resulted was a proposal to put a YMCA on the property. In 2009 the city ended that relationship.

Now, 12 years since the city purchased the land, little has transpired. In the meantime, grocery stores have closed. Health care also is not easily accessible; the nearest hospital, the Legacy Mount Hood Medical Center, is nearly four miles east of the Rockwood Rising site.

“It’s not just Fred Meyer,” Fuhrer said. “We’ve had six of the seven major chain grocery stores in and around Rockwood close in the last 20 years at a time when the population is increasing … So, we’ve really tried to create a place in the heart of Rockwood town center where people can come and do their weekly grocery shopping and they can come get grocery staples, paper towels, dish soap and that kind of stuff.”

The entire project, Fuhrer added, is about creating opportunities – housing, employment and health care, in particular – and making them available to Rockwood residents.

“We’re going to create a cluster of uses in this project that is going to be unique to the Portland-metro area,” he said. “Our whole project is about creating opportunities for people to start businesses, providing the wraparound services to give entrepreneurs the resources they need to be successful to start a new business.

“We’ve really tried to be mindful around a strategy that doesn’t displace people, but still allows them to experience the revitalization that the area so desperately needs.”

Rockwood Rising time line:

2005 – Rockwood Fred Meyer closes its doors

2006 – Ex-Fred Meyer property purchased by the city of Gresham for $8.1 million

2007 – City contracts with Williams & Dame Development to create a plan for the property

2009 – City ends relationship with Williams & Dame Development

2014 – Gresham Redevelopment Commission begins public outreach on development ideas

2015 – Community outreach continues with Rock the Block and other events and meetings

2015 – City selects RKM Development to oversee Rockwood Rising development

2016 – Public outreach efforts continue as the plan takes shape

2017 – Ground-breaking event delayed because of financial issues related to tax credits

2018 – Ground expected to be broken in spring or summer

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The Rockwood Rising project passed another milestone Wednesday, gaining unanimous approval from the Gresham Design Commission. The team leading the $30 million development, planned at 18535 S.E. Stark St., will now be able to apply for its first series of permits.

“It went as we expected – no real surprises,” Matt Brown, a principal at YBA Architects, said of the hearing.

Design commissioners did express concerns over minor details, Brown said. Those included the look of sidewalk paving and the inset of the residential entrance to the apartment building.

“The concerns were nothing that was fundamental with the scheme,” he said.

The project’s size and complexity required two Design Commission hearings. The first part of the project went before the commission on April 19.

“They would be looking to break ground in August with Building B at the corner of Burnside (Street) and 185th (Avenue),”said Josh Williams, senior development planner at the Gresham Department of Urban Design and Planning.

That first building will include 108 apartment units above ground-floor retail space. Two other buildings and an open courtyard also are in the works.

The development team of YBA Architects, RKm Development and the Gresham Redevelopment Commission hope Rockwood Rising will inject new life into the area. Rockwood has been long known as one of the Portland-metro area’s most ethnically diverse and economically challenged areas. Designers wanted to allow the community to influence the development’s design.

“We have been working hard to create a lattice, so that the community can weave its own identity into the place rather than being too heavy-handed with the design,” Brown said.

An arts panel will be created to review proposals for art throughout the complex, he added.

“In the plan, there are lots of murals and chances for retail tenants to have a control over the look of their buildings,” he said. “This way there is some process to vet art projects in the complex.”

Neighborhood involvement has been a key part of the design process. During the past year, planners have held sessions with stakeholders to assess what was most needed in the community.

“We had to find out what were the key priorities,” Gresham senior project coordinator Emily Bower said. “We found that they needed access to healthy food.”

Multiple grocers, including Fred Meyer, have come and gone from the site. Now, the closest grocery store to Rockwood is more than a mile away. The project team plans to attract a variety of food vendors through a large food hall in the courtyard.

“One of our missions is economic empowerment through neighborhood stabilization,” Bower said.

Another big issue in the area is education and job opportunities.

“We want the project to provide pathways to living-wage jobs,” Bower said. “We want people to have the chance to be in that community and stay there for the long term.”

While the process has spanned more than a year, changes to the project have largely been cosmetic, such as the color of the building.

“It’s going to be a real jewel for the community out there,” Brown said.

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A $45 million development in Rockwood, one of Gresham‘s most diverse and poorest areas, promises to create a neighborhood center, provide multiple services and space for 40 businesses, and create jobs.

Josh Fuhrer left Gresham City Council in 2013 to become executive director of the Gresham Redevelopment Commission, which is overseeing the project named Downtown Rockwood. The long-term plan, he said, is to bring new life to the neighborhood that currently lacks a central community center and is underserved.

The city and the community have worked on the project for a long time, Fuhrer said.

“Even before I took the position, it’s been 10 years of work,” he said, “and getting to this stage is a real milestone. And even though it’s exciting, I’ll exhale when the project is built.”

Downtown Rockwood will be constructed on 5.5 acres of land bordered by East Burnside Street and Southeast Stark Street, and 185th and 187th avenues. Three buildings with a total of 260,000 square feet will be constructed around a large, public courtyard that will be available for concerts, theatrical performances, farmers markets and festivals.

RKM Development is developing the project in partnership with the city of Gresham, and YBA Architects is handling master planning and design. A general contractor has not been selected yet.

The development will “create a vibrant town center and commercial nucleus for this long-marginalized community,” YBA Architects principal Matt Brown said.

Rockwood is one of the “most socio-economically challenged” communities in the Portland-metro area, and one of the most ethnically diverse where “88 languages and counting” are spoken, Brown added.

“We hope it will be a model for a more socially sustainable approach to injecting new development into an undervalued community,” he said.

Brown said that above all, he wants the design to reflect the diversity of the Rockwood community and make it “a little bit scrappier” than what developers expect for high-end developments in the Pearl District, for example.

“We want to create great architecture but also to create architecture so they can make it their own, to paint and adorn storefronts and allow individual tenants – the businesses and residents – to apply their own personality to their spaces,” he said.

In the Pearl District, for example, people want designs that are “clean and crisp,” without anything on balconies, Brown said. But people who live in Downtown Rockwood apartments will be encouraged to give their spaces a lived-in look to reflect the different cultures and thus reflect Rockwood.

At the heart of Downtown Rockwood, , will be the public plaza. At about 140 feet by 180 feet, it will include areas for recreation and shopping as well as a food-oriented market hall expected to accommodate activity 18 hours per day.

The market hall will include a public commissary kitchen, Fuhrer said.

“It can be used by anybody in the community who needs a prep kitchen to make food for large groups or for small businesses,” he said. “It is commercially-rated, which they can use without having to have their own kitchen.”

Around the edges of the plaza will be the market hall, a four-story office and retail building and a five-story building with housing units, a medical clinic, several restaurants and retail spaces.

Although the design has not received final approval yet, Fuhrer said the project will include a tech shop featuring carpentry equipment, a metals lab, 3-D printers and other devices for high-tech manufacturing.

“That will allow folks to use equipment to make a physical thing themselves or use it to start a business,” he said. “Or they can take classes to use machining and manufacturing equipment that makes them qualified to get living-wage manufacturing jobs.”

Also, WorkSource Oregon will relocate to Downtown Rockwood from its office on 194th Avenue, and Mt. Hood Community College‘s Small Business Development Center will move its office to the site from downtown Gresham, Fuhrer said.

A major determining factor for what would be included in the development came from community input, which Fuhrer said is ongoing.

“We had over 300 community outreach meetings and received hundreds and hundreds of feedback (submissions) from community members, and we’re planning to do more,” he said.

Potential tenants for Downtown Rockwood are being recruited, he added. More details are available .

The design of Downtown Rockwood has been approved by the Redevelopment Commission, Fuhrer said, but several more bureaucratic hurdles must be overcome before final approval can be given by the Gresham Planning Commission. He hopes that will occur no later than early 2017.

“We’re looking to start construction in the spring with completion in 2018,” he said.

Downtown Rockwood

Location: between East Burnside Street and Southeast Stark Street, and 185th and 187th avenues

Cost: approximately $45 million

Anticipated construction start date: spring 2017

Anticipated construction completion date: 2018

Owner: city of Gresham

Developer: city of Gresham and RKM Development

Architect: YBA Architects

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