The Design Commission has approved the Hyatt Place & Allison Residences, a 23 story tower in the Pearl District. That decision has now been appealed to the City Council by the Pearl Neighbors for Integrity in Design (PNID), a group of nearby residents that is separate from the neighborhood association.
The project is being developed by Vibrant Cities in partnership with the Sunray Group, with design by Otak. The lower 11 floors of the 249′ tall building would be occupied by a 160-room Hyatt Place branded hotel. The upper 12 floors would be residential, with 113 apartment units. No vehicular parking is proposed. Bicycle parking spaces are proposed in a basement bike room.
The building will be subject to the city’s inclusionary housing rules, which require the provision of affordable housing or the payment of a fee-in-lieu.
The project site is a quarter block at NW 12th & Flanders, currently used as surface parking. A large silver maple tree is currently growing at the corner of the site. The site is on the same block as the Oakwood Pearl (originally known as the Janey).
Exterior materials include ribbed and flat metal paneling, aluminum windows, glass guardrails, steel canopies, formed concrete piers and aluminum storefronts.
The hotel lobby and and lounge will be accessed from the corner of NW 12th and Flanders. The hotel will also have a bar/cafe area at the ground floor. Conference rooms and a fitness center will be provided in the ground floor mezzanine level. A separate lobby for the residential units will be accessed from NW 12th Ave.
On NW 12th Ave a water feature is proposed, in response to the city’s River District Design Guidelines.
The Hyatt Place & Allison Residences was approved by a unanimous vote of the Design Commission at their January 16th, 2020 hearing. The project had previously been in front of the Design Commission for Design Advice Request meetings in October 2018 and January 2019 and for Design Review hearings in July 2019, November 2019 and January 2020.
In the Final Findings and Decision by the Design Commission city planning staff described how the building meets guidelines related to the public realm:
The proposal features a significant amount of glazing on all façades, particularly along the ground floor of the north façade on NW Flanders Street. The glazing provides views into the ground floor hotel lobby, lounge and café, where the interior space extends an additional floor to highlight the main hotel entrance. Glazing on the west elevation along NW 12th Ave also provides views into the hotel lobby as well as the main residential lobby.
Concrete columns at the property lines on the north and west elevations provide a bay structure and rhythm for the ground floor, while also providing recesses (the ground floor is setback 3-feet from the property line) for planters, furniture, and the proposed café areas to spill onto the sidewalk. The proposed folding glass wall systems on the north elevation provide additional transparency and transition between the building and sidewalk.
Collectively, the large, glazed storefront systems, recessed building walls within the concrete column bays, folding glass wall systems, pedestrian level canopies and pedestrian scaled water features at the corner entrance, are all successful features at the ground level that enhance and contribute to the pedestrian scale of the building. In addition to providing texture to the pedestrian environment, these features also help to accommodate pedestrian connections, viewing, and activation into the building and the pedestrian realm. Lastly, these features provide generous, comfortable, and safe areas that transition from the private development and the adjacent public spaces.
The Design Commission’s approval was subsequently appealed by PNID. Reasons cited for their appeal: the vehicle demand created by the building and the lack of the parking; Restore Oregon’s ongoing appeal of the Central City 2035 code; the intensity of the development, including the building’s height; the loss of the tree at the corner of the site; and the value of preserving the cultural and ethnic diversity of the South Pearl.
A foundation permit for the project is currently under review. City Council is currently scheduled to hear the appeal on June 4, 2020 at 2:00 pm.
Drawings
Plan | Site 
Plan | Basement 
Plan | Levels 01 and 01.5 
Plan | Levels 02-03 and 04-11 
Plan | Levels 12-19 and 20-21 
Plan | Levels 22 and 23 
Plan | Roof 
Elevation | North (NW Flanders St) 
Elevation | West (NW 12th Ave) 
Elevation | South 
Elevation | East 
Sections
Um….Parking? This just kills me. Do the developers that build these properties downtown really believe that all of the people that they expect to live in their buildings won’t own cars? Where the hell are they supposed to park? Have they ever tried finding a parking place downtown? They are adding to a huge problem downtown instead of helping solve it by including parking for their residents in their designs. One designated parking space per residential unit should be mandatory.
Curious, Mike. Do you travel in Portland? What do you think of the traffic congestion? What do you think will happen if we allow more cars downtown?
Benson, Lucia, Vintage, Marriott, The Nines, and Heathman Hotels all seem to be doing fine with Valet.
“City Council is currently scheduled to hear the appeal on June 4, 2020 at 2:00 pm.“
June?! So nothing can even start till we hear the appeal? My goodness that’s ridiculously long just to eventually deny appeal like we all know it will be
OK. I’m sympathetic to the parking argument. Although I see this as part of an ongoing effort to densify Portland and eliminate auto dependency. (I only use my car on weekends and manage my weekday activities by walking/public transit just fine.) I presume folks moving into these units, understanding the parking limitations, will adapt just fine. Not EVERYONE has a car. And eliminating parking for downtown units certainly makes more sense to me than the woeful parking provided in further-flung reaches of Portland.
As for some of PNID’s other arguments “…and the value of preserving the cultural and ethnic diversity of the South Pearl.” I looked on the PNID website. Their board of NIMBY grotesques is, big surprise, a bunch of old white folks with too much free time on their hands. How exactly is building over a surface parking lot eliminating cultural and ethnic diversity? There are better causes out there to dedicate one’s time to–like ensuring the hundreds of millions of public dollars going to low income/homelessness projects is responsibly managed and effective.
As a minority, I cannot emphasize how often Portlanders use minorities as human shields to advance personal agendas in every facet of society. I think it’s a huge reason why people of color can be so uncomfortable here…it’s about supposedly caring about diversity when it’s convenient, but having no respect for the wants/needs of communities of colors.
As far as the parking argument, I think the goal is as you described, to limit car use to when needed and allow people to walk/bike/transit to do day-to-day activities (which is one of the benefits of a being in a dense, pedestrian-oriented city).
As far as the height goes, isn’t this an issue with the city zoning, rather than an individual building? If you don’t like the height, you need to be against the policy that enables such heights, rather than cherry-picking individual buildings without an extraordinary context, which I’m not seeing in this case.
No one should worry. This project will be DOA for years. The hotel business is tanking. Marriott to layoff thousands with Hyatt hot on its heals.
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