Construction of one of the final projects within the Con-way master plan has begun in the Slabtown neighborhood of Northwest Portland.

Freewell, a 265,000-square-foot development, is being brought to market by Cairn Pacific LLC and Prometheus Real Estate Group. A seven-story building will host 192 apartments, ground-floor retail space and underground parking. A bridge will connect to a two-story pavilion building with amenities.

The project site is Block 291 East, at 2030 N.W. Raleigh St. Freewell will front a future park to be developed by the city of Portland.

The Portland Bureau of Development Services last week issued a $44 million construction permit for Freewell. However, construction costs have increased so much since a permit was sought nearly a year ago that they’re expected to be around $60 million, Cairn Pacific principal Tom DiChiara said.

Freewell is the eighth project for Cairn Pacific in Slabtown. SERA Architects designed the development – the firm’s third for Cairn Pacific in the neighborhood; Saltwood and Saltwood North are the others.

SERA also designed Greystar‘s Slabtown Savier, which was approved by the Design Commission in December 2021. That project will occupy blocks 261 and 262.

“T��� Con-way master plan provided a blank slate to design and develop an entire neighborhood from the ground up,” SERA Architects principal Kurt Schultz stated in a press release. “Our approach when designing at neighborhood scale is to design buildings that are unique but also in harmony with the surrounding context.”

Freewell will feature brick, wood and natural materials, and the pavilion building will be constructed of mass-timber. Materials were chosen as an ode to the neighborhood’s past, when it was filled with warehouses, Schultz stated.

The 20-acre neighborhood previously was owned by the Con-way trucking company. The master plan called for creation of a 24-7, mixed-use area for people to live, work and play.

There are 17 development parcels within the Con-way master plan, and projects for 16 of them are completed or in development. The remaining block, 292 East, is a Prometheus Real Estate Group property. At this point there is no project planned for 292 East, DiChiara said, but developers are hoping it will become senior housing or something other than multifamily.

Over the past nine years, Cairn Pacific and Prometheus Real Estate Group have partnered on five mixed-use projects in the neighborhood. Freewell, their sixth joint venture, will “add a finishing touch to the district,” DiChiara stated.

R&H Construction is the general contractor. Construction is expected to finish in spring 2024.

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Capstone Partners and Cairn Pacific have sold L.L. Hawkins and Slabtown Marketplace for $78 million to an institutional investment company, unloading the multifamily and retail assets that pioneered redevelopment in Northwest Portland’s Slabtown neighborhood.

L.L. Hawkins, 1515 NW 21st Ave., has 113 apartments in studio, one- and two-bedroom floor plans, along with 11,087 square feet of ground-floor retail spaces. Completed in 2015, the six-story project was the first apartment building in the area.

Slabtown Marketplace, which shares a block with L.L. Hawkins, is a renovated freight warehouse that was built in 1952 and made into a retail redevelopment, also in 2015. The 36,000-square-foot building at 2170 N.W. Raleigh St. hosts a New Seasons grocery store, Breakside Brewery and YogaSix.

L.L. Hawkins and Slabtown Marketplace were sold in a single transaction. The buyer declined to be identified, and the information was not yet available in Multnomah County records. Chris Nelson, principal of Capstone Partners, said the buyer was a “large institutional investor.”

The sale represents a successful exit for Capstone and Cairn Pacific, both local developers. “It was a good outcome, for sure,” Nelson said.

The projects jump-started the transformation of the Slabtown area from an industrial zone into a mixed-use neighborhood.

“It was kind of the first step in the evolution of a great neighborhood,” Nelson said.

Developers including Cairn, Prometheus and Guardian Real Estate Services have followed up with more projects that have begun to fill out the neighborhood. Greystar recently gained planning approval to build two multifamily structures totaling 363 apartments on Northwest Savier Street.

Capstone and Cairn Pacific partnered with a venture capital investor, who was not identified, on L.L. Hawkins and Slabtown Marketplace.

“It is bittersweet to sell this project,” Nelson added in an email. “T��� project was certainly a catalyst for the neighborhood, but we decided it was a good time to sell with the strong investor interest for core multifamily and grocery-anchored retail investments in A-plus locations.”

CBRE represented the sellers.

“L.L. Hawkins was the first multifamily property built in Slabtown and truly compliments one of the most desired locations within Portland,” Joe Nydahl, first vice president at CBRE’s Portland office, stated in a news release. “LL Hawkins is one of the highest-quality projects to trade in the Portland market, featuring desirable ground-floor retail as well as a pedestrian thoroughfare connecting Slabtown Marketplace, offering residents convenient access to high-quality retail including New Seasons Market.”

Nydahl, Phil Oester and Josh McDonald of CBRE’s Pacific Northwest Multifamily group and Philip Voorhees, Jimmy Slusher and Joseph Blatner of CBRE’s National Retail Partners – West group represented the seller in the transaction.

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The Portland Design Commission on Thursday unanimously approved a two-building multifamily proposal to add 363 apartments to the Slabtown neighborhood.

Greystar‘s development, designed by SERA Architects, includes a five-story, 149-unit building and a six- and seven-story, 214-unit building. The two structures will be split by Northwest Savier Street between Northwest 19th and 20th avenues.

The project, known as Slabtown Savier, on blocks 261 and 262, will neighbor U.S. Route 30 to the north and St. Patrick Catholic Church to the east.

Commissioners had seen the project in two previous design advice meetings and had few quibbles with the final design.

“T��� building’s looking great,” Commissioner Sam Rodriguez said. “From a public realm perspective, they nailed it. It’s a great infill building with very thoughtful articulation.”

Slabtown Savier is subject to the Con-way master plan, which was enacted in 2012. As such, the development is not required to provide rent-restricted inclusionary housing units.

Greystar and SERA worked with St. Patrick Catholic Church officials to ensure the development would not loom over the 130-year-old church, a landmark on the National Register of Historic Places and the oldest structure in the neighborhood. SERA did a “radical re-massing of the site to give St. Patrick Church more space and more breathing room,” principal Kurt Schultz said.

Slabtown Savier will be marked by a pocket park between Block 262 and the church, ground-level live-work units and front stoops. The brick exteriors will feature Juliet balconies on each side.

Some neighborhood residents had pushed for a taller building that would block views and noise from U.S. Route 30. But Chairwoman Julie Livingston said there’s nothing in guidelines to require that type of development. She called the project a “gigantic win for the neighborhood.”

“This development looks as if it really does have the potential to take back this street (Savier) and take back this neighborhood and restore some of the church’s dignity,” she said.

Greystar, based in Charleston, South Carolina, scooped up the property from Lennar Multifamily Communities, going under contract in March. Greystar’s Portland office most recently completed the Sawbuck Apartments next to Providence Park.

Slabtown Savier won exemptions from the Design Commission for building height, parking space widths and bicycle parking. Commissioners granted a modification for Block 262 to ascend to 83 feet, above the limit of 67 feet.

The project previously was the subject of two design advice hearings, in February and July.

Design commissioners praised the team of SERA’s Schultz and Lango Hansen Landscape Architects principal Kurt Lango.

“I would say Kurt and Kurt are the dream team,” Commissioner Zari Santner said.

Santner lauded the project team for “not just following, but listening and coming up with their own options to really respond to the core of the commission’s concerns.”

Doug Burges, Greystar’s director of development in Portland, said the firm wanted to honor the city’s process.

“We took the process seriously and used the process to better our design and get feedback along the way,” he said in an interview.

Greystar plans to break ground in October 2022, likely using its in-house construction arm, Burges said.

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Multifamily projects are continuing to pop up in the Slabtown area of Northwest Portland, including one at 2222 N.W. Raleigh St.

General contractor R&H Construction is building Raleigh Slabtown, a six-story mixed-use development that will cover three-quarters of a standard city block at the corner of Northwest 22nd Avenue and Raleigh Street. The project, designed by SERA Architects, is technically just outside of the Con-way Master Plan area. But the development from Cairn Pacific and Prometheus Real Estate Group will complement buildings being constructed within the area.

Raleigh Slabtown will have a total of 173 residential units, including a select few on the ground floor that will be accessible only from a landscaped courtyard.

The project team is employing the typical top-down construction for wood-framed buildings of this type. And right now, drywall installers and other interior tradespeople are dominating the job site.

The use of prefabricated wall panels and other strategies have combined to accelerate construction.

“Pretty much all trades are on site,” said Ted Rhodes, a project manager with R&H Construction. “We’ve got at least 100 guys here every day right now, and with 173 (residential) units you walk around and it seems sparse in some places. But yeah, there are over 100 guys here each day.”

More than 60 of those are drywall installers from Westside Drywall and Insulation. But the site also is populated at present with HVAC technicians with American Heating, sprinkler fitters with Delta Fire Protection, and ironworkers with Refa Steel Erectors who are erecting the steel canopies on ground-floor units. Another subcontractor with a large presence is B&B Masonry; its workers are busy laying brick masonry for the exterior.

Five wood-framed stories are atop a concrete podium and two levels of below-grade parking.

Builders broke ground in late 2018, and the first slab pour followed in January 2019. Now, completion isn’t far off.

“T��� project is going really well,” Rhodes said. “We’re on schedule and slated to finish at the end of July. We’re going to start our site concrete in the courtyard, where it wraps around. And then we have a west courtyard where there’s a mail room, but mostly it’s private patios for the ground-floor units.”

A Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design gold rating is being targeted for the project.

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The build-out of Northwest Portland is continuing apace, and general contractor Bremik Construction is doing its part for the six-story Saltwood North project.

The mixed-use development was designed by SERA Architects for half of a superblock in Portland’s Slabtown neighborhood. The six-story building will have 177 market-rate apartments above ground-floor retail space. There will be two levels of underground parking.

Bremik Construction is self-performing all structural concrete work, as well as installations of windows and wood siding.

Recently, LaRusso Concrete crews were at the site to assist with the largest single-day concrete pour Bremik Construction has carried out as a general contractor since it was founded in 2004. The pour of 1,700 cubic yards covered the first half of the building’s foundation slab; the second followed shortly thereafter.

“Kicking it off with the foundation obviously kicks off all of our vertical concrete and lets us go up instead of down,” Bremik Construction superintendent Josh Ring said.

Saltwood North is one half of the entire Saltwood project being developed by Cairn Pacific for owner Prometheus Real Estate Group on a Con-Way master-planned block bordered by Northwest 20th and 21st avenues, and Savier and Quimby streets. Saltwood South (with only one level of underground parking) is being constructed by general contractor R&H Construction and will rise on a nearly identical parcel.

In total, Saltwood will provide 354 new apartments and 17,000 square feet of commercial space. Saltwood North alone will feature a spa, a swimming pool, a steam room, a sauna and other amenities like a rooftop deck and a lounge.

Excavation and site work for Saltwood North began in August. Substantial completion is expected by winter 2021.

“It’s pretty exciting to be able to be involved with a good-sized pour like this,” Ring said. “We looked at trying to do this all in one whack, but it’s really tough to get all the variables to line up to work – weather being one of the most important. It’s got to time out.”

Work on the first concrete pour started at 2 a.m., Ring said, so that trucks would have easier access to the site. Crews poured about 290 yards per hour on average, which he called a really good rate.

“T��� challenge is if you try to pull this off on a weekday, the rush hour just kills you,” he said. “Having this dry November has been awesome. And from a concrete perspective we’ll probably be wrapping up about August with all the structural concrete. We’re just pumped right now to be able to start going vertical.”

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With so-called “Old Portland” disappearing amid a construction boom, some developers are now striving to make connections to properties’ pasts.

This is particularly true for adaptive reuse projects. One prominent example can now be found in Northwest Portland, where crews are stripping out the interiors of three large warehouses that until early last year housed Cenveo‘s Graphic Arts Center.

Now, general contractor R&H Construction is busy updating the campus – now named The Hopper – to serve as a hybrid commercial/industrial facility for project partners Winkler Development Corp. and Watumull Properties Corp. LRS Architects carried out the design work on the campus, which dates back to the mid-1960s.

“We knew,” Winkler Development Corp. principal Jordan Winkler said, “that we were going to take what was obsolete functionally, obsolete physically … and turn it into a modern industrial campus, and that’s what we’re setting out to do. It’s touching almost every surface here.”

The three buildings sit on 5.3 acres of property at 2000 N.W. Wilson St. Together they total more than 167,000 square feet, primarily open space. Tens of thousands of square feet of office space also will be created to potentially diversify the tenant base.

The first tenant will actually be R&H Construction itself. The contractor will set up its shop in 34,000 square feet of Building B, which sits in the middle of the block along Northwest Wilson Street between 20th and 21st avenues. That space will be used to store equipment and perform maintenance on vehicles and other gear. R&H also will occupy some 18,000 square feet of Building C to accommodate management, project engineers and other support staff.

“I would call it industrial chic in its existing state,” R&H project manager Kraig O’Connor said. “We are very much going to let the tilt walls talk a lot, but we’re going to paint them up. And for our office space, we’re certainly going with a stucco look and a big, pretty dramatic storefront. We’re really letting just the warehouse elements lead.”

A towering cyclonic paper separator that once was used to recycle waste paper from the Graphic Arts Center’s printing operations dominates the campus from its perch atop Building A. It’s known colloquially as a hopper, Winkler said.

“We just thought it was cool, so we kept it and named the building after it,” he said. “I wanted to name the building ‘The Cyclone,’ but it was deemed too aggressive.”

This particular building would probably best suit a retailer or other commercial tenant, Winkler added, mainly because it sits on the corner of the property most visible to passing foot and vehicle traffic.

For now, construction is being carried out in phases. Building B is already complete and in operation. Building A is next. It has been cleared, repainted and given a complete seismic enhancement featuring steel backing and other fixtures to better secure the roof and foundation to the concrete tilt-panel walls. All of the campus buildings will undergo similar upgrades.

“Primarily we’re looking at dealing with out-of-plane loading,” O’Connor explained. “So we’ve done a lot with steel, strong backing, we’re really trying to focus on diaphragm strengthening, so there’s been nailing and strapping of the roof and tying the diaphragm to exterior walls to get the load down to the ground.”

Winkler also sees plenty of room for growth in the neighborhood. For starters, two large planned transportation projects will bring significant changes. One calls for realignment of the Interstate 405 off-ramp at Northwest Vaughn Street. This would shunt drivers north to Wilson Street and past The Hopper to allow access to the huge Con-way Blocks development slightly south.

A second project, Winkler said, could potentially bring the Portland Streetcar much farther north than at present. That also would provide greater connectivity with the rest of the area.

“It’s not at all finalized,” he said, “but in every alignment I’ve seen it stops either at or very close to this property.”

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Breakside Brewery is searching for space for another production facility to increase capacity.

“We are looking into a handful of options,” co-owner Scott Lawrence stated in an email message. “Sauvie (Island) is one, but it doesn’t seem likely to work because of water and wastewater hurdles. (It) will be interesting.”

Breakside may consider closing its existing production brewery in a Milwaukie business park if another facility could be built, Lawrence stated. The local brewery also has its original pub on Northeast Dekum Street and a brewpub that opened last year in the Slabtown area of Northwest Portland.

“We’d likely eventually shut down (the) Milwaukie (location) and move that operation to the new facility in a couple years should we find a location that works,” Lawrence stated. “Dekum and Slabtown would stay as is forever, I’d hope.”

Industrial real estate has begun to show some signs of slowing after a recent burst of growth. A few projects in Greater Portland have delivered without immediate leases. Vacancy remained tight, at 3.8 percent at the end of 2017, according to Jones Lang LaSalle.

Breakside, founded in 2010, is one of Portland’s most well-regarded breweries. It’s known for its line of award-winning IPAs.

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The north end of the Pearl District is one of the last areas of central Portland to fill with high-density apartment buildings and offices.

As the Slabtown area grows to the northwest and the Pearl continues to see new development to the south, more developers are taking a chance on the industrial blocks in between.

“It’s kind of a transitional zone, like the Central Eastside, and that makes it interesting,” said Tom Cody, whose development firm project^ has several investments in the area.

Yet the neighborhood faces a range of challenges as it develops. The Interstate 405 overpass acts as a dividing barrier for pedestrians and traffic. It’s less proximate to downtown and isn’t served by light rail. And some believe public infrastructure, from parks to schools, has lagged behind private investment.

“It’s the last part of the Pearl to develop, but it’s kind of developing along with the Con-way site, so ultimately those are going to come together,” said Don Vallaster, a member of the Portland Design Commission.

The area near the interstate overpass bears the signs of an industrial past. Many of the buildings have loading docks, and long-disused railroad tracks stretch down 15th Avenue. The area has a grittier feel than neighborhoods to the north and south, where high-end grocery stores and exercise studios cater to wealthy residents.

“It is the in-between,” Cody said. “It has quite a bit of character. It’s not homogeneous like the Pearl. There’s older buildings. There’s newer buildings. There’s low-lying buildings. There’s taller buildings.”

As construction sites blossom with work, public infrastructure has not kept pace with private growth in the neighborhood, Cody said. Despite the millions of dollars generated in system development charges and related fees, there’s been little public work in recent years.

“You don’t see a proportionate level of infrastructure investment,” he said.

Troy Doss, senior planner for Portland’s Central City, said the city provided for today’s growth with earlier infrastructure improvements.

“T��� reality is the area was a railyard,” he said. “It had no parks. It had no streets, no water, no sewer. It had a viaduct that had to be removed. There’s been hundreds of millions of dollars of infrastructure improvements to get it to where it is today.

“It’s not like it’s behind,” he added. “We were ahead.”

Cody said the neighborhood needs other public investments, including parks. The Fields Park, the area’s newest park, at Northwest 10th Avenue and Overton Street, was completed in 2013.

Perhaps most acute is the situation at Chapman Elementary, a neighborhood school at 1445 N.W. 26th Ave. that has long experienced overcrowding. Last fall, as residential growth reached a crescendo, Chapman moved kindergarten classes off-site to the Ramona, an apartment building at 13th Avenue and Quimby Street, to give grades 1-5 more room at the original elementary buildings. The four kindergarten classrooms at the Ramona site are isolated from the rest of the school.

“T���re’s no mentorship anymore,” Cody said. “T���y’re not part of the school community anymore.”

Enrollment at Chapman grew 42 percent from fall 2007 to fall 2014, peaking at 674 pupils. With kindergarten moving off campus, enrollment at Chapman dropped last fall to 584 pupils, according to Portland Public Schools.

The neighborhood could be heading toward a political backlash, Cody said.

“It’s ripe for some kind of an uprising,” he said. “It’s not a neighborhood of need, but it’s being subjected to so much growth without any investments from the public sector. I think it’s kind of a time bomb in that way, and the canary in the coal mine is Chapman Elementary.”

The city needs to re-examine traffic in the north Pearl, including on 14th and 15th avenues, said Tiffany Sweitzer, president of Hoyt Street Properties. Northrup and Overton streets are becoming major thoroughfares, and some of the neighborhood’s one-way streets are not working well, she said.

“I do think we need to take another look,” she said. “This area tends to get forgotten because people think it’s built out, but we need to take another look at it after all of these years.”

Developers are approaching the neighborhood in various ways. Land prices remain high, so new projects tend to be large so they are worthwhile.

Paul Rudinsky’s Overton 15, an apartment building designed by Vallaster Corl Architects, will have small and relatively affordable units, compared to others in the Pearl.

“We are catering towards a younger demographic,” he said. “What we’re envisioning there is not your typical Pearl renters.”

The project won approval from the Design Commission last week; Vallaster recused himself from the hearing.

The 68-unit development will have a mix of studio, one-bedroom and two-bedroom units. And they’ll be small: a little more than 400 square feet for a studio, 550 to 625 square feet for a one-bedroom and less than 800 square feet for a two-bedroom apartment.

Vallaster, in designing the building, made efforts to mitigate noise from I-405. Overton 15 will use noise-resistant windows, noise-reducing packing beading within the walls and double the usual amount of insulation. The top floors of the seven-story building will be roughly even with the overpass.

The ground floor will have three commercial spaces totaling 3,000 square feet. The spaces are likely to be creative office, not retail, Rudinsky said.

That points to a potential role for the developing neighborhood as an employment center. The area is already home to a Legacy Health System office and a field office of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, among others.

“In that location and being next to (Interstate) 405, I just think creative office will be better received than retail,” Rudinsky said.

More office space is coming. Field Office, from project^, is under construction with Lease Crutcher Lewis as general contractor. The two-building development on Northwest Front Avenue will bring about 300,000 square feet to market later this year.

The development is happening not far from what’s been branded as Slabtown, the former Con-way shipping site in Northwest Portland. Developers including Cairn Pacific and Capstone Partners are building a fast-growing mixed-use district centered along Raleigh Street. A New Seasons grocery store has provided a core asset to the neighborhood.

Other developers are playing off of that success and extending its reach.

Rudinsky, a Eugene-based developer, purchased the quarter-block parcel for Overton 15 from developer Tim O’Brien in November 2016 for $3.3 million. It’s the latest project for Rudinsky, who was also involved in developing 11 Marché and Couch 9, and has ownership interests in the Lower Burnside Lofts and Hawthorne 44.

The area “just has everything we’re looking for,” Rudinsky said.

A Safeway grocery store and an L.A. Fitness are nearby, and the Portland Streetcar provides a public-transit option.

A few blocks north, at Northwest 14th Avenue and Pettygrove Street, crews are building Modera Pearl. The building will offer 290 market-rate apartments.

Broadstone Reveal is under construction at Northwest 14th Avenue and Raleigh Street. The project from Alliance Residential Co., based in Phoenix, will bring 147 luxury apartments to market in summer 2018.

Also under construction is Vista, Hoyt Street’s 21-story condominium tower on Block 20. The project designed by Bora Architects is on schedule for delivery in October 2018, Sweitzer said. Andersen Construction is the general contractor.

Presales of the condominium units begin this week.

Hoyt Street has built approximately 2,800 housing units in the Pearl District. The company originally held 34 acres in the neighborhood.

More development is in the works for Hoyt Street.

Sweitzer is partnering with local developer Joe Weston to build a five-story self-storage facility on Block 29, at Northwest Savier Street and 13th Avenue, under the Fremont Bridge. That project is scheduled to go before the Portland Design Commission for a design advice hearing on Thursday.

The self-storage units are targeted for use by condo and apartment residents nearby.

After Vista, Hoyt’s next project may be a senior-living facility on Block 24, just north of Vista.

“We’re doing our own homework on that and looking at the interest level,” Sweitzer said.

The facility could be a destination for seniors already living in the north Pearl, she said.
“T���y’re happy with the neighborhood,” she said. “T���y’re here to stay.”

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