In east Multnomah County, near the edge of the Columbia River Gorge, winds can sometimes become especially strong. The city of Gresham accounts for that in its development code.

The team building Archibald Grove Apartments, a 37-unit complex at Southeast Stark Street and 202nd Avenue, now knows that.

“There’s a 135 miles per hour wind load zone out here,” LMC Construction Superintendent Cameron Grieb said. “One block down it’s 120, so we had to completely re-engineer everything at a huge cost to the owners.”

LMC Construction is serving as general contractor for the project; it’s being led by Gibbins Kaplan Development, a relatively new firm founded by a pair of former executives from Williams/Dame & Associates. MWA Architects designed the complex.

Footings measuring 4 feet wide and 18 inches thick – far larger than the usual 18-inch-wide and 12-inch-thick footings used for three-story buildings of this type – were used for Archibald Grove.

“There’s a lot more hardware, a lot more hold-downs, a lot more straps,” Grieb added. “Even inside the floor system, I’ve never had to put hurricane clips and blocks on the floor joists before.”

Breezeways will connect the seven buildings at Archibald Grove and host apartment entrances, which will be shielded from surrounding street frontages. Wood framing is being used over slab-on-grade concrete foundations. Glass-fiber-reinforced concrete wall panels and metal panels are planned for the exterior.

On Monday, Precision Truss & Lumber began delivering roof trusses to Archibald Grove as a contingent of carpenters from Wood Mechanix continued to frame and sheath the buildings.

“Right now it’s just the framers,” Grieb said. “The plumbers want to work from the top and work down, and they should be in here soon.”

Grieb noted that Gibbins Kaplan Development did not necessarily choose the cheapest design or look to excessively value-engineer the project. He cited the roof as an example.

“It has huge gable ends,” he said. “If they went to a hipped roof type they would have saved themselves a lot of money. It’s a lot more lumber, a lot more braces, a lot more hardware. It’s going to give it a good look, but they could have saved a lot of money.”

Slightly north of the Archibald Grove project site, Gibbins Kaplan Development is working on a similar project – the 25-unit Douglas Grove Apartments. Both projects are expected to be completed by February 2020.

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Development has been ramping up in Portland’s Northwest District for the past several years. One of the latest projects to move ahead there is Raleigh Slabtown, a six-story mixed-use building designed by SERA Architects for the partnership of Cairn Pacific and California-based Prometheus Real Estate Group. R&H Construction is serving as general contractor.

The project site – formerly occupied by the George Morlan Plumbing warehouse – is slightly west of the Con-way Master Plan area, which consists of 20 acres formerly owned by Con-way Freight. Raleigh Slabtown will be across Northwest 22nd Avenue from the new Breakside Brewery and New Seasons Market. Other developments nearby include the Leland James Building and The Carson Apartments.

Raleigh Slabtown will have a total of 173 residential units – some on the ground floor.

“There’s a lot of retail space on the ground floor too, and we spent some time focusing on setting it up for successful leasing,” said Mike Kremers, a senior project manager with R&H Construction. “It’s got a rooftop amenity as well, and it’s basically full of fairly high-end finishes.”

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

The building will feature five wood-framed stories atop a concrete podium and two levels of below-grade vehicle parking. These days, crews of carpenters from Whitaker Ellis are busy building formwork, while ironworkers from Bar M Steel and MEP workers from Bear Electric and other subcontractors are installing conduit, plumbing and other utilities on the second level deck in advance of pouring the second half of the concrete floor slab.

A prefabricated wall-panel system is being used for Raleigh Slabtown. Carpenters from Wood Mechanix are preparing to arrive on site in the next few weeks to start installation of wood-framed interior and exterior wall systems. The interior walls will consist of bare timber while the exterior walls will come framed and covered with DensGlass sheathing. Exterior masonry and metal panel siding will be installed separately along with drywall and MEP fittings on both interior and exterior walls.

“It’s a huge effort to do the shop drawings, but it’s a smaller framing crew on the site,” Kremers said. “We’re in a tight labor market, and it’s really to Wood Mechanix’s and R&H’s advantage to do this. To get large framing crews – it’s tough.”

Building stick-framed walls on site would extend the schedule, R&H Construction project manager Ted Rhodes said. Because of the project’s scale, he added, purchasing prefabricated walls from Pacific Wall Systems made financial sense.

“On a project like this (on-site framing) probably adds at least four weeks to the framing schedule,” he said. “And there are less labor hours on-site (with prefabrication), so it’s safer.”

Because of an ongoing shortage of skilled labor, Kremers said, it’s likely that use of prefabrication in construction will only increase.

“I see us in the future panelizing virtually everything,” he said.

“There’s a shortage of labor, especially after the last downturn,” Rhodes added. “We lost two million workers (nationally) and those people never came back. The market is now way hotter and we just don’t have the bodies.”

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O’Neill/Walsh Community Builders, a partnership serving as the general contractor for Northwest Housing Alternatives‘ headquarters project, has its hands full.

“We’ve got three different construction types across five different buildings, which makes it a lot of fun and really easy to coordinate,” superintendent Drew Anderson said with a laugh. “They do that to make it easier on us.”

Northwest Housing Alternatives, a nonprofit, builds and manages affordable housing and homeless services throughout Oregon. Its in downtown Milwaukie, fronting Lake Road, includes one office building, three residential buildings and an emergency shelter.

Funding is coming from a variety of sources, including Clackamas County, $8.4 million worth of federal Low Income Housing Tax Credits, private contributions and a $2.78 million NOAH (Network for Oregon Affordable Housing) mortgage.

“A note on the housing buildings is that they are all (being built to) Earth Advantage” (silver standards), Anderson said. “So not only do we have a mix of funding on this project, but we have a mix of construction types.”

Northwest Housing Alternatives’ standard practice is to adhere to Earth Advantage standards for its new projects. This one was designed by . The three residential buildings will provide 28 total units – almost entirely two- and three-bedroom apartments.

The development and management office is actually being built to achieve net zero certification. To do this, a 38-kilowatt solar array will be installed on the roof of the split-level building, with insulation “like you wouldn’t believe,” Anderson said. Even the foundation will be insulated.

“All the slabs that we’ve poured here have two layers of two-inch, staggered, rigid foam insulation underneath the concrete,” he said. “The construction techniques are very similar to passive house because we’re building a highly efficient building.”

To achieve certification, the building will undergo a 12-month audit to demonstrate that it ultimately produces more energy than it consumes.

Then a two-story, eight-unit emergency family shelter will be built with more traditional techniques to provide the same services as the longstanding Annie Ross House, which was one of 11 structures on the 1.75-acre site that were demolished to make way for the new campus. The new shelter will take on the Annie Ross name and provide 60 percent more space than the old facility.

Currently, construction of each building is in a different phase.

Last week, in Building A of the residential trio, crews stocked and installed drywall. In Building C, MEP rough-in took place while roofers completed sheeting. In Building B, crews of carpenters from subcontractor Wood Mechanix busily installed roof trusses and the first pieces of sheeting.

The three residential structures were the first to have their foundations poured. The new office building was next in line and currently is gaining exterior wood-framed walls.

The emergency shelter is the final piece of the puzzle, in a center space surrounded by the other four buildings. Crews have finished pouring the concrete matte-slab foundation and installing utilities.

“It’s all old-school, with minimal production,” Anderson said. “It’s lay it out, shoot them all together, stand the walls and keep going. I’d really prefer to have a crane, but they told me it wasn’t in the budget.”

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A major expansion under way at the Mary’s Woods retirement community will add nine buildings to the Lake Oswego campus. General contractor R&H Construction is building The Village at Mary’s Woods, a $100-million-plus project that includes 198 units of independent living space, 48 assisted-living residences, three retail buildings, a community center, and significant site improvements.

Ankrom Moisan Architects is the designer of the project, which spans six acres of former open field space. Site work began in early 2017 with grading, installation of utilities and geopiers, which run eight feet on center under every structure. Construction of buildings commenced last May.

The initial scope of the project was for six new buildings consisting of a mix of independent and assisted living, a retail structure, and the community center. After construction had begun, two more retail buildings and a fourth independent living building were added to the project, extending the duration of the project by approximately six months.

The four independent living buildings are all three-story wood-framed buildings over single-level below-grade parking structures. Buyers of the one- and two-bedroom units are being given the option to pick custom finishes, which R&H is keeping track of using a software program it has used on previous projects to track building multiple units with a wide variety of finishes.

Approximately 300 trades workers are currently working on the site, and the contractor has a team of about 15. The project team also includes landscape architects PLACE Studio, civil engineers Humber Design Group, and structural engineers Froelich Engineers. The mechanical/electrical/plumbing/fire protection systems are design/build by Prairie Electric, Tapani Plumbing, Hunter-Davisson, and Patriot Fire Protection.

The first of the residential buildings is slated for turnover late this year, with two more slated to follow in the coming months. The project is slated for total completion by fall of 2019.

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A new 101-unit affordable housing development is rising on Southeast Foster Road in the Mt. Scott-Arleta neighborhood. LMC Construction is building 72Foster – a four-story mixed-use building designed by Holst Architecture for REACH Community Development. The building will feature three stories of wood-framed apartments over a concrete podium that will hold commercial and residential amenity space.

Carpenters with framing contractor Wood Mechanix are nearly finished framing the building’s fourth floor. Installation of roof trusses and the weather-resistant barrier will begin next week, and windows will follow starting next month. The building will be topped out in early June.

72Foster’s 101 apartments will range in size from studios to three-bedrooms to primarily serve seniors and families. The units will be available to people earning 60 percent of median household income; 20 units will be occupied by residents with Project Based Section 8 vouchers. REACH is partnering with Asian Health & Service Center to provide outreach and on-site programs and services to residents.

The ground floor will hold five commercial spaces totaling 8,900 square feet, as well as residential amenities including a community room and bicycle storage. A breezeway will connect the corner of Southeast 72nd Avenue and Foster Road with a public courtyard on the property.

The building will have two parking lots – one with 23 stalls and another with 12. The $24 million project also includes right-of-way work and frontage improvements, including new sidewalks, lighting and vegetation. Crews began work on the site, a former parking lot owned by Prosper Portland, in September 2017. The building is slated to open in February 2019.

The project team also includes development consultant Housing Development Center, landscape architect PLACE Studio, civil engineer Humber Design Group, and ABHT Structural Engineers.

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A six-story hotel under construction on East Burnside Street will serve as an expansion of the Jupiter Hotel, a motor inn located one block west across Southeast Ninth Avenue. Yorke & Curtis is building the 67-room hotel, which was designed by Works Progress Architecture.

The building’s ground floor will contain a restaurant, lobby and programming space, the second floor will feature a lounge, meeting room, banquet hall, and outdoor garden space, and the guest rooms will be on floors three through six. The structure has two floors of post-tensioned concrete on a slab-on-grade foundation, and floors three and above will be wood-framed.

The building will be mostly clad in asphalt shingle panels manufactured by Portland-based Malarkey Roofing Products. Construction on the project began late last year, and is slated for completion at the end of this year.

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A celebration was held last week for the topping out of The Union at St. Johns, a four-story mixed-use apartment being built in North Portland by R&H Construction for developer Farid Bolouri. The Jones Architecture-designed building features three stories of wood-framed construction over a ground-floor concrete podium and a below-grade parking garage with around 90 spaces. It will have 103 residential units including studios, one- and two-bedrooms, 20,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space.

All of the project’s wood framing was prefabricated by Pacific Wall Systems in Medford and installed by Wood Mechanix. The weather-resistive barrier application is 25 percent complete, and window installation began last week. Next month, drywall installation will begin, masons will begin installing the brick veneer finishes, and the tower crane will come down. The project is under budget, on schedule and gaining on the completion date, which is slated for this December.

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