Apartments on the rise in Northeast Portland’s Beaumont-Wilshire neighborhood
By Jon Bell | Portland Business Journal on 07/28/16
There’s a relatively new four-story apartment building on Northeast Fremont Street in the Beaumont-Wilshire neighborhood that riled up neighbors a few years ago to the point that they filed an appeal with the state’s Land Use Board ofAppeals.
At issue: the building’s size and lack of parking.
The building came to be anyway, and today it stands as an example of what many neighbors don’t want in the area.
Paul Del Vecchio, head of Ethos Development, is aiming to ensure that The Bridgetown apartments he’s developing just a block away at Northeast 46th Avenue and Fremont don’t leave that kind of mark.
Instead, Del Vecchio, who moved to Portland about two years ago and whose had a range of real estate development experience, said he’s tried to work with neighbors on as many different components of the four-story, 50-unit building as possible. That’s resulted in a multifaceted building, designed by Siteworks Design-Build, that has varying facades, 6,000 square feet of retail space to accommodate a restaurant and a few small shops and an outdoor entry courtyard that’s designed to encourage people to congregate.
“It’s really a way to create a dialogue between the building and the community,” Del Vecchio said, adding that he’s looking for local retailers, including possibly a fitness business and one aimed at children, to populate the retail space.
There will be 11 parking spaces, including one for Zipcar, and a prominent yoga and community room decked in yellow and bridging two sections of the building.
Though the building is going up right next to longtime neighborhood pub McPeet’s, it won’t entirely block out the vintage Coca-Cola mural that’s adorned the outside wall of the pub for decades. Instead, the buildings will be separated by a slim corridor that will preserve visual access to the mural.
Initial construction work has begun, and Del Vecchio said completion is just about a year away.
He also said neighbors have, on the whole, been supportive of the project. That said, John Sandie, president of the Beaumont-Wilshire Neighborhood did tell the Hollywood Star in May that there were still some concerns over “scale and parking issues,” but that overall, Del Vecchio has “done a lot of good things for the neighborhood.”
