Proposals for the St. Johns Brownfield Project have finally been submitted, but they exclude the indoor tennis court owned by Portland Parks & Recreation. 

The St. Johns Racquet Center, adjacent to the former site of a gas station, has posted continued financial losses, and caused a stir last year when it was blamed for scaring away bids from potential brownfield developers. Portland’s Bureau of Environmental Services had to adjust the requirements for the brownfield at North Lombard Street and Baltimore Avenue.

When the center became an optional portion of this year’s second round of bidding due Dec. 4, the three development teams that submitted proposals opted out of confronting the hot-button racquet center issue. All proposals involving the building would have necessitated a public-private partnership, maintaining recreation there while also facilitating green building improvements and mixed-use development requiring both market-rate and affordable housing units.

Purchased by the Portland Development Commission in 1976, the brownfield site transferred ownership to BES for cleanup and redevelopment in 2004. Throughout the intermittent period, federal block grants and tax-cut measures hindered BES’s redevelopment funding.

The number of requirements doesn’t worry BES, even when they turn out to be too many for developers. When it comes to renovating the center and turning around its financial woes, the bureau is willing to work on that portion’s “optimal” plan for a few more years.

“The racquet center not being included is not a surprise because we made it very difficult,” says Clark Henry, manager of the BES brownfield program. “It was not intended to make it impossible, but we wanted to shoot for the stars in terms of getting everything the community wanted.”

All three proposals come from real estate developers, who lay out in broad terms how the building will be financed, although no specific strategy was required in the proposals. The three groups include developer Jeana Woolley in partnership with Bloc Design Development LLC, Cavenaugh & Cavenaugh LLC, as well as a partnership comprising Innovative Housing, Inc., LRS Architects and Walsh Construction.

Henry sees all three as qualified at this point because they all propose commercial-residential mixed-use space and incorporate a courtyard space into plans for the brownfield. 

“All are striving to build an attractive building that will set a benchmark for future development in the area while keeping an eye to the area’s historic character,” he says.

At least one of the proposals is significant for its inclusion of the building located immediately to the north of the brownfield site that was once home to Jower’s, a longtime business that provided boots and work clothes. Innovative Housing executives decided to invest in that property after attending several town hall meetings over the past few years.

“We have been involved with this process for quite a while, so we’ve gotten a pretty good sense of what the neighborhood wants,” says Sarah Stevenson, Innovative Housing’s executive director, who was born and raised in North Portland. “We wanted to provide a significant number of rental units and we were trying to maximize all the goals by purchasing the Jower’s building.”

Innovative Housing’s proposal gives a sense of the maximum scale of the project. It plans 56 one- to four-bedroom apartment units, four commercial units of 600 to 1,200 square feet, and its preferred option includes a courtyard for public gathering that would accommodate up to 75 people.

Given its unique position, Innovative Housing has pledged a commitment to a “very open” communication process. “We spent at least a year talking with neighborhood associations before construction,” Stevenson says. “The public has to help us decide how historic the buildings are going to look if we are selected.”

Confident that all three applicants would work well within the public process, BES notes all have adhered to the city’s development and land-use codes. The project’s advisory committee recently began scoring the applicants and will soon schedule a public meeting to introduce the selection to the neighborhood. Henry, from BES, hopes the advisory committee’s recommendation will be presented before City Council by February, but at press time the hearing date had yet to be scheduled.