Eight months after buying the former grounds of the Regal Tigard 11 cinema complex for $12 million, the city of Tigard’s development arm has settled on a course for redeveloping the 11-acre site.
The Town Center Development Agency (TCDA), which the Tigard City Council governs, will seek and narrow a field of developers interested in developing a mix of housing and retail. In parallel, city staff will plan a park to be built on a portion of the site after the new development is built. Presented with several sequence options for how the city might proceed, the agency board on March 10 unanimously backed the simultaneous but sequential approach recommended by city staff.
The site’s planning is considered a key to development of the Tigard Triangle district, a 550-acre area bounded by Highway 99W, Highway 217 and Interstate 5. The former cinema property at 11626 S.W. Pacific Highway sits near the district’s Costco Wholesale. The TCDA bought the property, the cinemas demolished, in August. The Tigard Triangle has long hosted significant retail offerings, but residential development has come on strong in recent years.
On the former theater land, according to a city staff memo [tigardlife.com/go/cinema] written by city redevelopment manager Sean Farrelly, the city’s chief aims for the land are to:
- Establish the Tigard Triangle’s first neighborhood park.
- Build out street and trail facilities to increase “connectivity” and pedestrian safety.
- Restore Red Rock Creek, which flows through the property.
For the portion of the land beyond the park, the city will solicit developers to suggest how to commercially reuse the land in keeping with the city’s vision of a mixed-use, mixed-income, walkable community landscape that would further spur development, Farrelly’s memo says.
The memo projects that the development would also require many street improvements, including new and rebuilt roads and sidewalks, as well as improvements to the Red Rock Creek Trail.
To collect community feedback about how to use the site, the city convened a Community Get Together in late October on the site, where ideas and concerns were collected from about 90 attendees. Presentations about the site were also bounced off four citizen advisory panels.
More than 320 people participated in an online survey, according to the memo. The top four wishes for the park were walking and biking trails, a playground, picnic areas with tables and shelters, and a natural green space of native plants.
Asked what else the Tigard Triangle needs now, respondents suggested, in order of frequency, more entertainment, food, community spaces and housing.
City staff also interviewed 16 “regional development industry professionals,” who voiced “key takeaways” that the real estate market is “lackluster” right now, but developers might be interested in lining up “promising sites for when conditions improve.”
“The Triangle is seen as very attractive for apartment development due to its location and the presence of incentives,” including state and federal tax advantages for housing and development, the memo says.
“There was broad agreement that the cinema site is a promising development site, although infrastructure costs, particularly street improvements, could pose a hurdle to project feasibility,” the memo says. “The proximity to a future park was seen as adding value to the development. Having the developer at the table when the park is being designed would result in a better project all around.”
Staff projected that a request for qualifications (RFQ) would yield more concrete feedback on the site’s potential.
“Releasing the RFQ in the short term would ground-truth our assumptions about the site redevelopment. If there’s low developer interest or concerns about infrastructure costs, the (TCDA) could reassess the redevelopment assumptions,” the memo reads.
The memo says the scenario calls for a request for qualifications to go out later this spring, a short list of developers to be chosen this summer, and a development agreement with one of them to come late in the year. Meanwhile, community development and park staff will begin planning the park with help from design consultants and a new advisory committee.
At the March 10 meeting, several TCDA board directors, who are also city council members, emphasized the importance of building a park, even though on-the-ground work might come after commercial development. Individual councilors made suggestions on other fronts as well.
Farrelly responded that the multiple-priority reuse of the plan would be a balancing act.
“There’s a lot of desires that the city wants to have,” he said. “Some of them might be in competition with each other. It’s important to remember that it’s a big site, but once it’s been cut through with streets, it kind of gets a little bit smaller. We’ll do our best to balance all the desires and needs with a project that’s financially feasible.”
