A strong turnout greeted three candidates seeking to serve as master developer of the Broadway Corridor, a 32-acre site in Northwest Portland with potential for more than 3.8 million square feet of development, on Wednesday.

A public forum hosted by Prosper Portland was held at the Leftbank Annex, drawing local developers, architects, planning professionals, union workers and nonprofit advocates. About 300 people showed up to hear the developers boast of their past projects and commitments to diversity.

Audience members repeatedly asked the developers questions about diversity within their own firms and projects, commitments to communities of color where they build and disability access.

The developers pointed to similar multi-block projects they’d led in the past. In describing their own values, they sometimes lapsed into business jargon.

“The number one product we have is synergy, which is energy in alignment,” said Chad McWhinney, CEO of Denver-based McWhinney.

The forum was an opportunity for the public to meet the developers vying to transform the Broadway Corridor. The area includes the 14-acre U.S. Postal Service site, Union Station and several other publicly owned properties in a broad swath bridging the Pearl District and Old Town Chinatown.

Prosper Portland in early March named three companies as finalists. Besides McWhinney, Related Cos., a New York-based developer represented by its San Francisco office, and Continuum Partners, another Denver-based developer, made the cut.

The three developers have jockeyed to line up local partners. McWhinney is working with Portland hotel group Sage Hospitality, nonprofit housing provider Hake Development and former Portland Development Commission executive Bruce Wood. Local advisers include Beam Development for project entitlements and Mortenson for construction planning. The James Beard Public Market is also on board with McWhinney.

Related California has enlisted Portland commercial real estate heavyweight Melvin Mark and nonprofit housing provider Central City Concern.

Continuum Partners has not publicly announced any local partners. The group pointed to its experience remaking Denver’s Union Station, the Belmar shopping center in suburban Lakewood, Colorado, and a 26-acre university-owned site.

Related California CEO Bill Witte garnered some of the little applause of the night when he said his firm “beat out Donald Trump for the Time Warner Center project in New York.”

Frank Cannon, Continuum Partners’ development director, said Prosper Portland’s “tremendously aspirational” goals may come into conflict with each other and will require careful balancing by the master developer.

“It starts with an open and honest dialogue with the community about your goals and objectives,” he said.

Maurice Rahming, co-owner of O’Neill Construction Group, praised Prosper Portland for bringing the developers in front of the public. He wrote a letter in support of McWhinney’s bid.

“This is refreshing,” he said. “In the past, a lot of this happened in a vacuum and there wasn’t a lot of public vetting.”

Prosper Portland has also done a good job clearly laying out the expectations for diversity, Rahming said.

“As far as the teams, some of them were stronger than others, but they have a good idea of the expectations,” he said.

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One of the challenges in building a hotel is the larger-than-usual number of interested parties. In the case of the AC Hotel Portland at 888 S.W. Third Ave., at least five groups have a stake in the $50 million design-build project:

• Design-build contractor Mortenson had the initial idea to build a hotel at the site, and has had its designers involved from the earliest stages.
• Marriott International owns the AC Hotel line. Marriott is partnering with Sage Hospitality for development of this and two other U.S.-based AC Hotels.
• Developer McWhinney, out of Denver, has invested considerable capital.
• And because the Portland Development Commission sold the land for the project at a premium, it has set targets for minority participation and sustainability.

“You do end up with a lot of opinions,” he said. “But they all wanted this one to stand out and be a different kind of hotel than the standard traveler.”

A long-term hold

The full quarter-block lot at the corner of Southwest Third Avenue and Taylor Street had been grass for two and a half decades before the PDC’s board voted in 2014 to sell it to Mortenson for $2.5 million. The Minnesota-based builder has a large Seattle office and a growing Portland one.

The new hotel has been identified by Sage and Marriott as a long-term investment.

“The targeted cycle is 20 years,” Ervan said.

Sage already operates two successful downtown hotels. The AC will feature its art program and kitchen services by its Sage Restaurant Group. The kitchen will serve a range of tapas plates, in keeping with the Spanish theme.

There are 204 guest rooms and 1,600 feet of public meeting space. The structure is post-tension concrete with minor steel inside the elevator core. The exterior is white brick with some composite metal panels. The brick was insisted on by the Portland Design Commission, Ervan said.

Mortenson has a complete mock-up of an AC room in its temporary office on Southwest Third Avenue. This practice helps in testing out minor tweaks to the finishes, and in informing new tradespeople as they arrive on site.

“Any time you have a repeat of hundreds of the same situation, a full mock-up is very beneficial,” Ervan said. “The Marriott flag requires it, and it’s become kind of an industry standard in hospitality, and a little bit in health care.”

Design details

There are five room plans, though they all feature the same neutral colors and sleek, legless furniture (the pieces do have tiny, hidden legs, Sage spokeswoman Amber Evans said). Mostly the rooms differ by sleeping arrangement. Each floor has a “corner king” unit, located along the white, storefront lantern pattern along the southwest-face corner – each with a distinctive 180-degree view.

Rooms will be priced according to the usual factors, with view chief among them. Other price-affecting forces include the time of year and vacancy around town. Rates for an average room at the AC Hotel will probably run between $150 and $250, Evans said.

Much design mojo has gone into selecting lighting and earthy, complementary tones as well as features to meet Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design silver standards. The units have deep-dark laminate, vinyl-plate flooring – floated for soundproofing. The vinyl covering that coats the concrete walls – made of recycled materials – aids with sound capture, as well as by contributing LEED points. Other soundproofing measures include sound board in the bathrooms. Most of the rooms also have double-layered drywall with an acoustical channel running between the two, pulling drywall away from the studs to form a kind of false wall.

The industry standard soundproofing rating (STC) for rooms is 45-50. Here, the team is working toward a rating of 58, the standard for Sage Hospitality (Marriott’s acceptable STC score for rooms is 52).

Quietude is very important to travelers, Evans said. Lack of it is consistently ranked as one of the biggest complaints at hotels. The view is critical too, as is wireless Internet.

“Anything above the eighth (story) has a phenomenal view,” Evans said. “The east-facing rooms have a phenomenal view of the Willamette River and Mount Hood. The west-facing have great views of the city.”

To fit a professional aesthetic, coloring on the three art pieces that will adorn the rooms – procured from local artists via Instagram – has been dulled somewhat. Evans said the hotel is targeting the “entrepreneurial, spirited younger traveler who has an appreciation for finer things.”

The 13 stories bump right into the allowed setbacks and all five adjoining buildings. The height of 130 feet is about all that’s allowed for the site under Portland’s height restrictions, which drastically decrease heading toward the Willamette River, starting about at the site.

The hotel is basically like any other AC Hotel around the world. But the lobby as well as the public and meeting spaces are where the interior designers attempted to bring in elements of Portland, Evans said.

“We don’t want people to go through the hotel – we want people to come to the hotel,” she said.

Room boom

The project is part of a hospitality boom in Portland.

Notable other hotel projects at various stages of development include the Hyatt Regency at the Oregon Convention Center, the Cornelius-Woodlark in downtown, the Canopy by Hilton, the Porter Hotel Curio at Southwest Second Avenue and Jefferson Street, the Hi-Lo Hotel at the former Oregon Pioneer Building, the Grove Hotel on Burnside Street, the Hampton Inn and Suites in the Pearl District, Hotel Chamberlin on Southeast Grand Avenue, the addition at the Northwest Portland Hostel, the Toyoko Inn at Third Avenue and Oak Street, and the expansion of the Jupiter Hotel.

Mortenson is also developing a hotel at the United Way site in downtown.

Mortenson hopes to hand over a fully-functional building by Christmas – everything down to the sheets on the bed. The hotel operations team should begin training employees, establishing networks in the building and adding furniture and dishes, etc. While other projects around downtown have languished as a result of the construction labor shortage, material delays and other issues, a tower crane at the AC Hotel has gone up and come down.

Despite the team’s consistent pace, Ervan thinks the project could have moved faster.

“It’s definitely been difficult,” he said. “It’s been the labor shortage, as much as the project size from a floorplate standpoint; both have been constraints to how fast we go. But also through the cash flow, as it’s drawn out, we’ve had to close out parts of the project. That’s important too.”

AC Hotel Portland

Address: 888 S.W. Third Ave.

Size: 120,000 square feet

Cost: $50 million

Owner: Marriott International

Construction start date: September 2015

Scheduled open date: Jan. 23, 2017

Design-builder: Mortenson Construction

Construction architect: SERA Architects

Key subcontractors: KPFF Engineering (structural), Cochran Inc. (electrical), TCM Corp. (mechanical)

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