City of Tigard Woos Portland Contractor Who Told WW About Difficulties With Portland Permitting

Fed up with building in Portland? Consider Tigard.

Earlier this month, Portland contractor Michael Gregory told WW about the thicket of regulations he had to hack through to build his 12-unit affordable housing complex in Southeast Portland. The same day, a planner from the city of Tigard wrote Gregory a letter suggesting he do his next project in Tigard.

“I read the article in Willamette Week about your experience developing housing in Portland and wanted to reach out to you to invite you to consider the city of Tigard for your next development,” senior planner Schuyler Warren wrote. Tigard is “a pro-housing community dedicated to deploying units in an efficient manner, to everyone’s mutual benefit.”

In his pitch to Gregory, Warren said that Tigard was the first city in Oregon to legalize middle housing—duplexes, triplexes, cottage clusters—in all residential zones in 2018, before statewide legislation passed a year later.

Warren also mentioned Tigard’s Middle Housing Revolving Loan Fund, which will start providing development loans this summer of up to $4.5 million on the condition that at least 30% of the units built are sold to people with low or moderate incomes.

“If you’re ever interested in chatting about opportunities here in Tigard, please feel free to reach out to me,” Warren wrote.

Gregory specialized in fixing up and selling single-family homes until he took on a three-story apartment project in the Foster-Powell neighborhood in 2021.

After wrangling permits throughout the construction, Gregory said he will never build another apartment building in Portland. He says he plans to sell another apartment project in Northeast Portland rather than develop it.

“I would rather kick myself in the balls 100 times than do this again,” Gregory told WW in the May 17 story.