Brownfields Update for the Pacific Northwest

An affordable housing development in southwest Portland is this year’s Region 10 Phoenix Award winner. The Phoenix Awards were established in 1997 to recognize notable achievement in Brownfields redevelopment and in 2000 became part of the EPA National Brownfields Conference. The award was presented to the owners of the property, Community Partners for Affordable Housing, at the national conference held in New Orleans November 16-18.

The Watershed at Hillsdale project illustrates the effective reuse of a relatively small Brownfields site and showcases the collaborative efforts and patience often required to bring Brownfields projects to fruition.

The Watershed at Hillsdale is a mixed-use commercial/residential development with underground parking in Southwest Portland. The 3 and 4-story building contains 51 units of senior (over 55) housing, a 2,700 square foot commercial condo, and a community/meeting room in the building for residents and neighborhood use. The project received LEED silver certification due to the incorporation of sustainable elements in the design and construction of the building.

The site where the Watershed is situated had been a station on an interurban trolley system in the 1920s and was used as an auto wrecking and fueling facility in the 1930s and 40s. In 1957 the site was purchased by the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) who used it in the 1990s for paper recycling storage and as an overnight vehicle parking area. In 1998, Multnomah County expressed interest in the property to locate a branch library but decided not to pursue the idea due to concern about unknown contamination.

That contamination’s effect on the development potential of the site actually made it more attractive to the site’s present owner, the Community Partners for Affordable  Housing (CPAH). CPAH had been looking for a site in Southwest Portland to build affordable senior housing and the site’s location in the Hillsdale neighborhood seemed ideal with nearby  access to services and transit opportunities. As CPAH Executive Director Sheila Greenlaw-Fink explains, the property’s impaired condition and the challenges presented by Brownfields gave the non-profit an edge over other developers in purchasing and redeveloping the property. Non-profits are willing to manage the risks and seek the grant funding that often makes Brownfields projects economically viable. Affordable housing non-profits are also used to navigating and managing complex, overlapping guidelines and regulations similar to those governing Brownfields redevelopment.

Another factor in CPAH’s favor was the anticipated duration for redevelopment of the site due to the probability of dealing with environmental contamination issues. Affordable housing projects commonly have much longer timelines than traditional developments due to financing and regulatory hurdles and the developers of affordable housing developers are used to managing these expectations. As illustration of this, CPAH first made an offer to purchase the property from ODOT in 1999 and the building did not receive its first tenants until December of 2007.

CPAH retained the services of the Housing Development Center (HDC) to provide financial and construction management services for the project. HDC provides project support to non-profit housing developers in Northwest Oregon and Southwest Washington and has completed work on over 2,300 units of affordable and special needs housing since incorporating in 1993.

Craig Kelley of HDC, Project Manager for the Watershed project, found the experience of dealing with the EPA and the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality to be a positive one. This was his first encounter with a Brownfields site and he was struck by the responsiveness of the agencies and their enthusiasm for seeing the site redeveloped. He came away from the experience with the observation that the agencies place a priority on Brownfields reuse that is well-balanced with their mission of environmental protection and regulatory compliance.

Kelley related other lessons learned from the Watershed project. He found the City of Portland Brownfield Program staff to be a valuable resource, helping him to navigate the Brownfields redevelopment process and acting as liaison. With assistance from the city, HDC and CPAH applied for an EPA Brownfields Cleanup grant and in 2005 CPAH was awarded $180,000 to clean up petroleum-contaminated soils at the site.

Also, with so much focus on EPA and state involvement in a Brownfields project, Kelley advises others not to overlook getting local government involved early in the process so that local permitting issues do not delay a project.

One of the more interesting aspects of the project was a flow chart developed by HDC and CPAH used when communicating with other project stakeholders such as the many funding sources for the project. The chart presents the regulatory hurdles that the project faced in a linear, timeline fashion that demystified and simplified the complexity of the redevelopment process.

A time lapse video of the project can be viewed here.

For more information about the Watershed at Hillsdale, contact:

Craig C Kelley, Project Manager
Housing Development Center
847 NE 19th Avenue, Suite 150
Portland, OR 97232
503-335-3668
craig@hdc1.org