South Waterfront in Portland gets first apartments

Daily Journal of Commerce (Portland, OR), Apr 1, 2008 by Libby Tucker

The South Waterfront's high-flying skyline is about to come closer to earth with the start of construction on the neighborhood's first apartment buildings.

R&H Construction in June will begin work on the Matisse. The project consists of two five-story apartment buildings at Southwest Lowell Street and Moody Avenue being developed by Denver-based Simpson Housing, which declined to release the estimated cost of The Matisse.

Set inside the loop of the Portland Streetcar's turnabout, The Matisse's 272 rental units will be the first of 700 market-reate apartments called for in the Portland Development Commission's South Waterfront urban Central District Development agreement. And the mid-rise, stucco and wood-paneled buildings promise to help ground the austere glass-and-steel condo towers that currently dominate the district.

"It will change the look of the waterfront," Alexis Wheeler, a project architect with Ankrom Moisan Architects' Seattle office, said.

To balance the district's tall buildings, the Ankrom Moisan design team approached the Matisse like it was "a meadow in the forest," Wheeler said. "All of a sudden there's something a little lower and (of) a slightly more comfortable scale you can walk around and through."

Instead of one large building at the site, the design team decided to split the project in two to provide a walkway on Thomas Street, which cuts through the center of the site. The common area and ground-level retail and live/work spaces will open the site to pedestrians and lend a sense of connection to the rest of the neighborhood and the nearby Willamette River.

The apartments also will open the district up to residents that can't afford the down payment for a high-end condo. At market rate, The Matisse won't quite reach the ground for the city's low-to- moderate-income residents, however.

"They'll be high-end, condo-quality apartments, to appeal to the same people that are buying down there," Mike Kremers, senior project manager for R&H Construction, said.

To further diversify the South Waterfront and provide a "continuum" of housing prices in the district for all income levels, the PDC so far has plans to provide public funding to two more apartment buildings in the district within the next two years, said Komi Kalevor, a housing development finance manager with the Portland Development Commission.

The agency is in pre-development discussions with Williams & Dame Development on a project expected to contain 210 low-to-moderate income units at Block 49, a 40,000 square-foot lot across the street from The Matisse, according to the PDC.

No concrete plans have yet been laid for the other PDC project, which will be dictated by future vacancy rates and housing market conditions over the next few years, Kalevor said.