After a recent sold-out showing of “The Odyssey” at OMSI’s Empirical Theater, viewers scattered to their cars in surrounding parking lots, most of them making a beeline out of the gritty industrial district on the east side of the Willamette River.
Some day in the not-too-distant future, however, city planners hope many of them will exit Portland’s brick-and-glass dome of science and walk home, perhaps just across the street to one of several new apartment towers. Or they’ll linger to shop and eat at businesses surrounding a vibrant new public plaza and visit the riverfront educational park celebrating Indigenous cultures.
It’s an audacious vision for a moribund corner of inner eastside Portland, a plan in the making since 2008 — nearly two decades ago. And it’s an ambition that’s replicated in proposals for the Lloyd Center, the lower Albina neighborhood and downtown’s Broadway Corridor, each an entire city neighborhood slated for a complete makeover.
Together, they’ll comprise thousands of new housing units across nearly 175 acres. New parks, retail and office space. They represent the biggest collection of development opportunities in decades in a city where land is scarce and has historically come at a premium.
So, one would think, given the city’s ongoing need for more housing and its dreams of making the Willamette River a “front porch,” developers would be sprinting to their shovels.
Instead, they’re tiptoeing or walking right on by. For now.
In theory, Portland needs another 89,000 housing units by 2045 to keep up with population trends. After a construction boom that saw Portland add an average of 4,353 new apartments between 2016 and 2020, that pace declined by 22% during the last five years. In 2025, the number of new apartments completed was 2,458, and Portland hit a 15-year low in new permits filed, signaling ongoing weakness.
It’s little wonder why. Oregon’s labor market stalled in 2023 and has yet to regain momentum after a historic wave of layoffs, most of them concentrated in the Portland area. Multnomah County’s population didn’t grow last year and remains below where it was in 2020. Incomes and rents have stagnated. Interest rates have spiked. And construction costs are high.
If out-of-town money talks, it has nothing good to say about Portland at the moment.
One survey last year found Portland was the second-least attractive metropolis in the country for real estate investors, a hard list to climb back up. (Hartford, Connecticut, was viewed as the worst bet.) That means these yearslong redevelopments could now take years longer, in part because of insurance companies and pension funds’ ambivalence.
Then there’s the city’s reputation for social unrest, fair or not, and what developers frequently criticize as byzantine regulations. Even as downtown comes back to life and policymakers cut red tape, word is slow to get out.
Even with the biggest collection of construction opportunities in decades coming available, developers are having a hard time finding the will, or willing investors, to take on new projects here. When the big dogs do fund work here, they’re taking smaller stakes in projects to minimize risk, said Sarah Harpole with economic development agency Prosper Portland.
Jumpstarting these projects will require public subsidies, “no question,” according to Portland City Councilor Mitch Green. Otherwise, he said, “you have a dead city.”
Many of those dollars will go into infrastructure, the dirt-churning work of laying sidewalks and sewers, rerouting roads and preparing the areas to support high density residential development. That work, in some cases, is taking longer than expected, and in others, hasn’t even started.
If current economics hold, there’s little indication that developers and the investors who fund their projects will take immediate interest in the sites once they’re ready for new construction.
Those factors deter development for now, said Harpole. But she is optimistic they’ll improve over time. Harpole keeps small turtle and tortoise figures she’s collected since early in her career on her monitor stand at her agency office to remind her to be patient.
“Any success in any one of those locations helps the next, and they build upon each other,” she said. “As we start to demonstrate investor interest in any one district, that furthers the success and the feasibility of the next.”
Even if rent increases have slowed due to weak population growth, the city still needs to continue to build, analysts say, because people could come roaring back. Without enough housing for them, Portland could see a rerun of the 2010s, when rapidly escalating rents priced out many working-class tenants, said Sightline Institute researcher Michael Andersen.
How far along are the individual projects?
The 32-acre Broadway Corridor site, centered around the old U.S. Postal Service office and Union Station downtown, is on its way to delivering shovel-ready lots to developers.
It also epitomizes both the lengthy wait for infrastructure and developer reticence.
Colorado-based Continuum Partners was brought on board as Broadway Corridor’s master developer in 2018, but dropped out in 2021 after coming to loggerheads with Prosper Portland over how much control they each would have over the site.
Now, two developers — Related NW and Home Forward — plan to build two new buildings totaling 460 low- and middle-income apartments, with the former breaking ground next year and the latter in 2028.
Crews still need to wrap up infrastructure work, likely by this winter. On a recent afternoon, ornate new street lamps rose from a freshly paved concrete sidewalk. A Hitachi excavator dumped a load of loose material into the bed of a blue Kenworth truck. And as crew members jawed and exited the fenced perimeter, signage warned against trespassing and camping.
All signs portend active construction. But it’s still far from the new district planners envision, and there are no concrete plans for any other buildings thus far. A northern strip of land that would best befit a corporate campus will likely lie fallow for years to come because demand for office space remains anemic.
A 10-minute drive southeast on the other side of the river lies the “OMSI District.” It’s not much to look at today. But casting their eyes across the surrounding 24 acres, OMSI leaders want to see apartment buildings soar over the museum, new businesses and busy public plazas, all complementing a long-awaited Center for Tribal Nations to reconnect Native people to the river.
OMSI has received tens of millions in public subsidies for infrastructure work since the Portland City Council approved its master plan in 2023. OMSI officials previously said they planned to break ground in 2025, but they missed that timeline and now expect to start construction in 2027.
Erin Graham, chief executive of OMSI, said high construction costs remain the project’s biggest hurdle.
“That’s been what has maybe not gone as well as we had hoped,” Graham said.
She said district infrastructure will be ready by the time developers return to Portland in force. And nonprofit developer Hacienda CDC is already planning to build affordable housing on one of the tracts, she said.
‘Void’ from mall demolition could be hard to fill
Lloyd Center, in its own namesake northeast district, is owned by Seattle real estate firm Urban Renaissance Group and the New York private equity investor KKR.
The mall represents 29 acres of nostalgia slated for demolition sometime after it closes Aug. 8. A master plan, originally approved by the Portland Design Commission in March, calls for new walkways and streets — as in, more infrastructure — transecting as many as 5,100 new homes, plus businesses and office space. The plan survived appeals to the City Council by groups who spoke wearing “Save Lloyd” T-shirts and hoped to forestall the old mall’s closure in order to keep its ice rink and few remaining shops open.
When the Design Commission approved the plan, Vice Chair Joe Swank said he worried a flattened shopping center could remain a “void” because so few developers are building in Portland.
The market, for now, seems to agree.
Developer Paul Del Vecchio said he wouldn’t build at Lloyd based on the current outlook.
“You’d have to pay me to do it,” said Del Vecchio, president of Portland-based Ethos Development.
Put another way: “There has to be a compelling reason to put money here, and there really isn’t one,” he said, adding that he foresees a slow two or three years. “I don’t think it’s a great picture for close-in urban Portland.”
Tom Kilbane, a Portland-based managing director with Urban Renaissance Group, said mall owners remain bullish that Portland will bounce back, a revitalization they’re actively betting on. Still, Kilbane acknowledged, capital flows along the path of least resistance, wherever that may be in the U.S.
“If investors see how difficult it is to get anything done here, they’re going to go elsewhere,” he said. “It’s as simple as that.”
A different investment model
Well, maybe not quite that simple.
The 1803 Fund was formed in 2023 to advance Portland’s Black community after receiving a $400 million pledge from Phil and Penny Knight. That backing gives its leaders flexibility to invest at a time when other private investors are shying away.
The fund’s CEO, Rukaiyah Adams, says years of experience have taught her “there’s no bad market. There are markets where you make money on one thing and markets where you make money on another thing.”
Adams says she could certainly place investments outside the city. But part of the fund’s mission is to redevelop the historical heart of the Black community in lower Albina, where it has spent $70 million on real estate so far. The area includes the Rose Quarter and much of the surrounding neighborhood, linking its future to that of the Moda Center, where renovations remain an open question amid hardball negotiations between Portland city leaders and new Trail Blazers owner Tom Dundon.
Spending money, even during a down market, means 1803 Fund gets to set the tone for its developments, instead of importing out-of-town investor values like double-digit returns at all costs, Adams said.
“We want to benefit from our investments,” Adams said. “But we don’t want to benefit so much that we destabilize the community.”
In some cases, the 1803 Fund partnered with Albina Vision Trust. That’s the group laying plans to gradually redevelop or reuse buildings across 94 acres in the heart of lower Albina.
They’ve delivered some apartments already, constructing the 94-unit Albina One, which opened in July 2025. That’s next to the 66-unit Paramount Apartments they acquired in August 2025 for $11 million, converting the property at 253 N. Broadway into income-restricted units.
When fully built out, lower Albina, OMSI District, Broadway Corridor and a dark horse project – the former Zidell shipyard on the South Waterfront – will, according to Adams, “form a box” on the banks of the Willamette to supercharge the downtown economy.
Oregon lawmakers last year authorized up to $800 million to help fund a Major League Baseball stadium at the 33-acre Zidell Yards, but the chances of a team in Portland are still up in the air. The land remains fallow, another big plot with development potential but few near-term prospects beyond the community events and concerts it hosts today.
Either way, “we’re centering the river as our front porch,” Adams said.
One of lower Albina’s most significant efforts — putting caps over the sunken Interstate 5 in the Rose Quarter to build on top of — is stuck in a waiting game. The federal government last year pulled a $450 million grant initially promised during the Biden administration to fund the ambitious project.
Part of the reason to get sites in lower Albina ready now is to prepare them for a potential change in presidential administration that would once again favor funding such grants, Adams said.
Arduous times teach us to learn and to transform, she said, not to mope:
“If we sit around crying into our beer about things being hard, we’re going to miss the moment.”
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