News / Business

Vancouver celebrates waterfront extension

Opening of Columbia Way intersection paves way for construction to start on $1.3B project

By Amy Fischer, Columbian City Government Reporter

Published: September 24, 2015, 8:12pm

4 Photos

Barry Cain of Gramor Development speaks to the crowd along Columbia Way before the ribbon cutting Thursday morning, Sept. 24, 2015. (Amanda Cowan/The Columbian) Photo Gallery

With the “awooga” of horns, a fleet of Model A Fords puttered down Grant Street on Thursday and turned left onto Columbia Way, officially opening the new intersection at the heart of Vancouver’s future $1.3 billion mixed-use development on the waterfront.

“People are going to look back at this time in 20, 30 years, and say today was the start of a whole new era for downtown,” Barry Cain, president of Gramor Development, told the crowd of more than 100 city officials, local leaders, business people and residents gathered at the 32-acre site.

Based in Tualatin, Ore., Cain’s company is developing the 21-block project called The Waterfront on a former industrial site that’s been off limits to the public for 100 years. Buildings on three blocks will begin rising in spring, and in a year, $150 million to $200 million worth of development will be under construction, Cain said.

At Thursday’s ceremony, Cain announced the retail-commercial-housing development’s first tenant for the first office and retail building on Block 6. M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, a nonprofit group that awards millions of dollars in grants annually, signed a letter of intent move its Vancouver executive headquarters from 703 Broadway to the top two floors of a seven-story building at 305 Columbia Way. The lease for the 18,000-square-foot space begins Sept. 1, 2017, according to a Gramor Development press release.

M.J. Murdock’s move is in keeping with a recent pattern of businesses moving within downtown. Although downtown Vancouver rents are at least $10 per square foot cheaper than in Portland, it has attracted few new businesses from Portland or outside the region.

The waterfront building into which M.J. Murdock is moving will have about 61,000 square feet of leasable office space and 17,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space, with underground parking. On the same block, a retail and market-rate apartment tower will be built with up to 150 living units, the press release said.

Cain also announced Thursday that two restaurant buildings with 40,000 square feet of space would be built in the spring, with “an unbelievably beautiful view.” In addition, he said he had a letter of intent signed by a new hotel with local connections. Later, he told a reporter he hoped to announce the names of the restaurants and hotel in a month, once the leases were ready.

Although relations between Gramor and the Port of Vancouver have been strained lately, Port Commissioner Nancy Baker was a speaker at Thursday’s city-hosted event. After extending her congratulations to the city for finishing the $4.7 million Columbia Way extension into the site, Baker noted that the port was involved in every part of the project from the beginning. If everyone works together, “we can do wonderful things for this community,” she said.

Then she glanced at a loud airplane overhead and said, “it’s going to be hard to sleep down here at night, I think, with trains and airplanes,” which prompted several audience members to exchange pained looks.

Earlier this month, port leaders, in discussing a draft master plan for 10 acres of the port’s Terminal 1 waterfront property that includes the Red Lion Hotel Vancouver at the Quay, suggested that work on Gramor’s adjoining 32 acres was stalled. Port officials suggested their Terminal 1 project could jump-start the larger waterfront redevelopment by including housing, an idea that ticked off Cain. He said the port shouldn’t try to duplicate the plan for his site, which has long included residential development.

On Thursday, Cain said he would have liked to have begun construction on the buildings sooner, but the infrastructure wasn’t ready, and there was nothing that he could have done differently.

He laughed off Baker’s trains-and-airplanes remark and noted that air traffic is typically busier during the day than at night. However, his residential buildings would be much more sound-resistant than the average home, he said.

“It’s not different from a lot of urban areas,” he said. “That’s just part of the fun. It’s an urban experience.”

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