Build Out

There are big plans for the big empty lot next to the vacant Washington High School on SE 12th and Stark. Behold: A vision of the future! Whether that building—a long-sought-after community center—is vision of the near future or distant future is still unclear. While the Portland Parks Bureau submitted a plan to build a […]

Just when you thought your life couldn’t get any more exciting… Meet the Portland-Milwaukie Light Rail BridgeCam! Okay, so it’s been around for a while (as has the construction of the bridge), but today you can actually see a bit of the bridge peeking out of the Willamette. It’s that little green pylon on the […]

Making way for a four-story building? Richmond neighborhood residents are peeved. Not only is a four-story, 82-unit apartment/retail building slated to pop up in the heart of their mostly two-story ‘hood, they complain, but the developers have no plan to create a neighboring parking lot. And that means nearby streets will be responsible for an […]

Yesterday I posted about the rapid change on North Williams and the decades-long process that has replaced black-owned businesses with fancy new stores, restaurants, and apartments. One current example is the major new building planned for Williams and Skidmore. The lot on that corner has been vacant for at least 10 years, but community elder/hilarious […]

Been by the corner of SE 20th and Morrison recently? What was once the Cemetery Gates cafe is now an empty lot covered in construction equipment. The new development across the street from Lone Fir Cemetery leveled two buildings constructed in 1907 and 1891 to build a two high-density residential buildings home to 71 apartments […]

This isn’t happening: Instead, we’re stuck with this: The DJC reports that the deal for a downtown Uwajimaya has fallen through, after years of work between the Portland Development Commission and developer (and years of getting our hopes up). The PDC had been trying to swing the $80 million mixed-use project since 2003, working with […]

I’m surprised by how many vacant lots there are on NE Alberta. For a street that’s at the center of demographic change in Portland, that’s gone in just over a decade from being a drug hotspot to written up in the New York Times as a “hub of the creative class” that’s a great place […]

The Pacific Northwest College of Art has big plans for an old building downtown. The 511 Building on NW Broadway was a federal building (everything from a post office to the home for the Department of Homeland Security) since 1916. But in 2008, the feds transferred the property worth over $27 million to the art […]

CamKnows The state is considering nominating Portland’s arguably most controversial building for the National Register of Historic Places, according to an article in the Portland Tribune. It looks like a group of architects are pushing for the state to nominate the 29-year-old building to be placed on the official list of historic buildings. Michael Graves’ […]