Building permits issued for Oct. 19-Oct. 25, 2020

• A $1 million new construction permit was issued for a three-story, six-unit apartment building at 2416 N.E. Flanders St. The applicant is Steven Fosler of Fosler Portland Architecture, the owner is Yoni Schwartz of Los Angeles and the contractor is GSI Builders Inc.
• A $2 million new construction permit was issued for curtain wall at Lincoln High School, 1750 S.W. Salmon St. Mark Sawallich of Hoffman Construction is the applicant, and Hoffman is the contractor. Portland Public Schools is the owner.

Building permit intakes for Oct. 19-Oct. 25, 2020

• A $10,937,143 permit is under review for a four-story, 50-unit Portland Housing Bureau project at 5825 N.E. Prescott St. The applicant is Craig Riegelnegg of Carleton Hart Architecture. The city of Portland is the owner.
• A $3 million new construction permit is under review for a three-story, 25-unit apartment building at 6865 SE 52ND Ave. The applicant Meghan Eubank of YBA Architects, the owner is HMS SE 52ND ST LLC of Portland and the contractor is Michael Carrigg of Andersen Construction Co.

Facility permits issued for Oct. 19-Oct. 25, 2020

• No permits issued were valued at $500,000 or more.

Facility permit intakes for Oct. 19-Oct. 25, 2020

• A $1.25 million alteration permit is under review at Portland International Airport, 7200 N.E. Airport Way, for tenant improvements for Port of Portland police training. Mike Coyle of Faster Permits is the applicant, the Port of Portland is the owner and the primary contractor is out to bid.
• A $2.25 million alteration permit is under review at Portland International Airport, 7000 N.E. Airport Way, for tenant improvements for retailers including Nike, Peet’s Coffee, Soundbalance and Timberline. The project involves demolition and rebuilding. Mike Coyle of Faster Permits is the applicant, the Port of Portland is the owner and the primary contractor is out to bid.
• A $2 million permit is under review for tenant improvements at 1125 N.W. Couch St. on floors eight through 10. Work includes conference rooms and a video production room. The applicant is Chelsey Boreas of GBD Architects, the owner is SPF Brewery Blocks LLC of Portland and Swinerton Builders Inc. is the contractor.

Source: Portland Bureau of Development Services

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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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Oregon Tradeswomen Inc., founded 30 years ago, is finally getting its own training facility.

The nonprofit group, known primarily for training and advocating for women in the building industry, in mid-January will move into a remodeled building in Gresham’s Rockwood neighborhood.

Central Bethany Construction, a division of project developer Central Bethany Development, is carrying out tenant improvement work at an 8,000-square-foot space on Southeast 187th Avenue, near the intersection with Stark Street. YBA Architects carried out design work for the project.

“It’s been a personal goal of mine, and an agency goal, to do this and we’re really excited,” OTI Executive Director Kelly Kupcak said. “We serve more and more women who are living in poverty and are coming to our program for answers. So it’s a critical opportunity for us to shift the way we do business and the way we reinvest back into our community and region.”

Crews broke ground on the OTI project in June, around the same time workers began tackling Rockwood Rising nearby; that mixed-use project also is being developed by Central Bethany Development.

OTI has inked a five-year lease for the new space, which will have a large shop, meeting rooms, staff space, and locker rooms for students. The group will not only have a better place to train women in pre-apprenticeships, but also space to host public workshops and other events while partnering with the cities of Gresham and Portland and other entities.

“We’re really looking forward to those things,” Kupcak said. “But the other piece that is really important to us is that we will be able to train our women at night and on weekends, which is huge for the women who are working toward new careers.”

OTI has encountered serious challenges in bringing women with day jobs into pre-apprenticeship training, Kupcak said. The new facility will help immensely, she added.

The group also will focus more on working with people simply looking for work or an opportunity.

“We are serving folks who are houseless, and we didn’t used to do this before,” Kupcak said. “Over the last two years we’ve made a lot of change about intentionality and about removing barriers for our clients; we wanted a welcoming physical space for the public and for tradeswomen.”

Kupcak praised the efforts of Central Bethany Development General Managing Partner Roy Kim and his firm.

“They really wanted a workforce development partner in there, and they’ve been incredible to work with,” she said. “Everyone’s talking about Rockwood being poor; we all know that. But it’s also the most diverse neighborhood in the region, and there is a young population, so there are huge opportunities there.”

Demolition was carried out at the site some time ago, Central Bethany Construction Superintendent Steve Wahle said, but real tenant improvement work began last month. The building was once part of a former Fred Meyer store that closed over 15 years ago, he said.

“We took it down to the studs, took out all the ceiling – and we had a lot of rot, so we did repairs there,” Wahle said. “Then we had a floor plan from our architect, and that’s what we have going here now.”

A large roll-up door separates the entrance from a large classroom on one side and staff space on the other. The building’s north end holds the shop and training area. Currently, drywall is being installed in preparation for painting and finishes.

“This warehouse side is a big space,” Wahle said. “We’re just waiting for the Sheetrock to get done and the finishes to start. It’s a little rough still, but it’s a big thing for them and for the city, the area of Rockwood; it’s all transforming right now.”

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It was the project of a lifetime. A team of volunteers – mostly Andersen Construction and YBA Architects employees – traveled from the Pacific Northwest to South Africa to construct a new school building for a community in need.

“It was really exciting to have people come together from all our offices and work on something that’s so different from what our day-to-day looks like,” said Maddy Stolowitz, director of philanthropy for Portland-based general contractor Andersen Construction. “It was being in a community every day with people I care about and it was about doing something important in service (for) other people. We got to be outside every day and work until we were so tired we could barely stay awake through dinner. And then you got to get up in the morning and do it again. It doesn’t get much better than that.”

The group – 38 people in all – traveled in July to the tiny village of Dixie, South Africa, to build a new classroom structure for the Hananani Primary School. In barely two weeks the team completed the project with the help of workers from South African contractor EcoSteps, local residents and employees of the Thornybush Collection. The latter is the company that runs the nearby Thornybush Game Reserve and also supports Hananani Primary School operations.

Work on site kicked off in July when volunteers and family members reached a pair of Conex boxes shipped several months earlier from Portland. The containers not only held tools, materials and other supplies, but also became an integral part of the construction.

But that point was really just the end of the beginning.

“A lot of this was (Andersen Construction CEO) Joel Andersen’s brainchild,” said Alex Yale, a YBA Architects principal and a member of the traveling party. “Originally he was there on a separate trip and visited the school and was really taken aback by the people there and the kids, and met the principal and saw a great need to add classroom space.”

That was summer 2017, Stolowitz said, and the goal of that trip was to seek out exactly such an opportunity.

“While we were there we stopped at Hananani School and spoke with Concelia, the principal,” she said. “And Joel was just so impressed by her. He promised Concelia he would be back, but I just didn’t believe it was going to happen. It seemed crazy to me in the best way, but that’s how things go with Joel. He has an incredible heart and vision, and he inspires people.”

Upon returning to the U.S., Andersen approached Yale about the idea.

“He came back from that trip and sat down with me and said, ‘Alex, how do we do this?’” Yale said. “The concept was to ship over a lot of the building materials and get as much donated from here as possible. But the challenge was: ‘Hey, Alex, we only have a week or two; how do we build this in a week or two?’”

That’s when Yale came up with an efficient solution.

“We used the two 40-foot-long shipping containers as the principal structures and used them as two sides,” he said. “And we opened the two sides to the middle and put trusses across and we found we can build this building really fast – almost like an IKEA kit.”

Over the course of 2018 and into 2019, Yale and fellow YBA co-founder Matt Brown worked with their Andersen counterparts on the project’s design and logistics. They drew up a construction schedule.

“The challenge was we worked almost two years in research and development over here with the superintendents from Andersen to design the school – the classroom building – as a kit of parts that could be shipped over there and could be built rapidly,” Yale said. “The big vision was: Let’s do all the design; let’s try it out and figure out the stakes ourselves and then we’ll post everything to the Internet and open-source the design.”

They quickly figured out that additional labor would be required. Fortunately, Thornybush and its outreach coordinator, Candace Grover, put out a call for help.

“We worked together for over a year organizing the logistics,” Stolowitz said.

They established an application process for laborers.

“We hired 40 locals that we brought on, and they showed up every day to work,” Andersen Construction superintendent Paul Rovianek said. “One of Joel’s goals was to infuse capital back into the local community, so each person went through an interview. We brought in old, young, male and female to help, and paid them a very good wage.”

Priority was given to people with children attending the school, as well as specific families in need.

“It was a very careful project in that they also engaged with the local tribe leader and really got the buy-in from the local communities,” Stolowitz said. “That was a really big piece; we really did engage with the local community.”

Andersen Construction senior project manager Brad Nile was one of the volunteer participants. He even brought his two children along. Grover and the Thornybush staff provided a “lifeline” for the project, Nile said.

“Because they’re on the ground, they know the chief in the village and made arrangements for local help and local materials,” he said. “They got permission at a local level to do what we wanted to do. This had to be a community effort, not a short-term dive bomb and leave. It had to be something the community was behind 100 percent, and that’s what our friends at Thornybush helped with.”

Aside from construction of the new school building, other work was carried out. This included painting the interior and exterior, making five existing school buildings level, improving those buildings’ heating and cooling systems, building outdoor seating pods, erecting a covered parking structure and community sunshade, and making a soccer field level.

The hands-on construction process was nothing like the Andersen contingent had ever experienced. For instance, brick is by far the predominant building material used in South Africa.

“You can’t get a mortgage in Dixie,” Rovianek said. “You buy materials, lime, sand, a brick mold, and when water’s abundant you build with bricks. People are constantly in one way or another making or using or building with bricks.”

For this job the team used concrete for the foundation slab and other features. But without a ready supply available, all of it had to be mixed by hand on-site.

“We poured so much concrete,” Nile said with a laugh. “And it was ugly, and by city of Portland standards I’d have been fired like five times. But we had architects helping us with the design, and it worked.”

Old desks and furniture donated by Portland Public Schools were shipped to outfit the new building.

Steel roof trusses were shipped inside the containers and welded into place within a few days. Then the exterior walls were roughed in with plaster and the roof was completed.

Finally, the new building was adorned with a tiled mural displaying a light bulb and the school logo, and the existing buildings were repainted. The two sides of the shipping containers cut out were even repurposed and used to construct a covered parking structure.

“EcoSteps went out and bought light gauge tube steel and our welders constructed a nifty little canopy structure carport,” Rovianek said. “The panels that were cut out of the containers became the roof, and that was the slickest little three-day carport you’ll likely see.”

When work wrapped up, the entire village threw a celebration and feast to commemorate the new building.

The project had a profound impact on participants, Nile said.

“I don’t think any of us were prepared for how emotionally connected we would become,” he said. “We didn’t realize it would change our outlook on life, and it made us realize we’re fortunate to live the way we do.”

Plus, the Dixie community is expected to continue to benefit from the visit.

“One of the biggest skills we taught was concrete,” Yale said. “We taught them finishing concrete – pouring it, mixing it – as well as painting. The women were learning different skills they generally don’t use and don’t have, so that was really cool.

“We were sprinting on this stuff and teaching life skills to these 40-plus locals that they can now take to other jobs in the village,” he continued. “Or if they want to venture out and look for more work, they have skills. In the bush, really, you’re stuck and the only way out is through education.”

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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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The proposal for Civic Northwest – a massive transit-oriented development in Gresham – has received design approval.

Gresham’s Design Commission last week voted 4-1 to approve YBA Architects‘ design for the Wood Partners project, which calls for construction of eight buildings on a 7.4-acre parcel at the southwest corner of Northwest Civic Drive and Council Drive. The property is not far from TriMet‘s Civic Drive MAX station.

“Conceived as a ‘village on a hill,’ the development is a keystone within the larger Civic Neighborhood District and is devised to establish an urban, pedestrian-oriented center for neighborhood residents,” YBA Architects owner and principal Matt Brown stated in an email.

The total new floor area planned in the eight buildings, Brown stated, will be roughly 290,000 square feet. Two five-story mixed-use buildings, a four-story mixed-use building, four three-story apartment buildings and a retail pavilion will make up the development. Collectively, the structures are expected to hold at least 318 residential units and more than 12,000 square feet of retail space.

The half-acre plaza will be activated by multiuse play spaces and flexible commercial spaces on the ground floors of the five-story mixed-use buildings. The single-story, 1,200-square-foot micro-restaurant pavilion, meanwhile, will be the focal point of the entire development. The project team hopes it will become an 18-hour center of activity.

One site challenge for designers is that it features a nearly 25-degree grade change from the highest point to the lowest. To take advantage of this, Brown stated, a pair of woonerfs – spaces shared by vehicle drivers and pedestrians – will extend into the middle of the site to connect the upper and lower terraces. In addition, several open areas will be integrated.

In wider terms, the development fits within the Civic Neighborhood Vision and Design District Update approved by the city in 2017. That plan updated rules to remove obstacles for large developments of this type and also established design standards for new construction.

Civic Northwest project team members will next enter the permitting process, Brown stated. The goal at this point is to break ground this summer.

In addition to Wood Partners and YBA Architects, the team includes landscape architect Shapiro Didway Landscape Architecture and civil engineer Harper Houf Peterson Righellis Inc. The general contractor will be a firm affiliated with Wood Partners.

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A proposed mixed-use development with 310 residential units could help transform Gresham‘s Civic neighborhood into a much busier place.

At the heart of the proposal is a five-acre parcel located near the intersection of Northwest Civic Drive and MAX blue light-rail tracks in downtown Gresham. It is one of four Metro-owned properties in the area and the first of those being targeted for development.

The plan for “Civic Northwest” envisions as many as seven mixed-use or residential buildings being constructed on the site bordered by Northwest Fanning Way, Council Drive, Civic Drive and MAX tracks. Those buildings would surround a central parking lot and a public plaza with a playground and other amenities.

Metro and the city of Gresham nearly a year ago jointly released a for the project. They subsequently chose a development and design team of Atlanta-based Wood Partners and YBA Architects.

Design advice from the city planning department was requested in May, and site concepts were presented to the Gresham Design Commission shortly thereafter. The project is still in the design stage.

Early site concepts show four three-story residential buildings on the northwest portion of the trapezoidal property. Each of these buildings would have slightly more than 22,000 square feet and 24 residential units.

Then, on the southeast side, three other mixed-use buildings – two five stories and another four stories, would front Northwest Civic Drive. One five-story building would be 73,225 square feet and hold 87 residential units, and the other would be 71,190 square feet and hold 72 residential units. Each would offer ground-floor commercial space. The four-story mixed-use building would be 50,900 square feet and hold 55 residential units. It also would have ground-floor commercial space.

The plaza would feature prominently on the property’s southeast edge, near the MAX tracks.

Master planning efforts envision this part of the city featuring an array of housing, businesses and entertainment along with public gathering areas and green spaces. The Civic neighborhood is singled out as one of the city’s three core commercial areas for high-density, mixed-use, pedestrian-oriented development.

Both Metro and the city of Gresham are offering financial incentives to develop this parcel and the three others in the neighborhood owned by Metro.

For instance, the city has up to $634,000 in system development charges and local improvement district funds available for construction of the plaza and open space, with the requirement that those amenities be dedicated to the city. In addition, the city offers vertical housing tax credits for projects on these four sites.

Meanwhile, Metro’s Transit Oriented Development program was created with projects like this in mind. TOD supports high-density development near high-capacity transit lines. It has two mechanisms to accomplish this: the land value write-down, and the purchase of a TOD easement.

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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:

The post VIDEO: Rockwood Rising aims at lifting east Multnomah County appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

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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