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Portland is taking a small step toward reducing the amount of central city office space and increasing housing supply.
That step came this week, when the board of Prosper Portland, the city’s economic development agency, approved a $4.35 million loan to help convert a seven-story office building in Old Town to apartments. Details of that loan are here.
As has been widely reported, Portland currently suffers from a glut of downtown office space, as workers have returned slowly after the pandemic. There is an opportunity to convert office space to apartments, but it’s challenging for many reasons, including expensive seismic upgrade requirements and the difficulty of getting sun and fresh air to the interior spaces of large office towers with big floor plates.
But structures such as the Falcon Building at 321 NW Gilsan St. in Old Town offer a different opportunity. The seven-story, 1926-built structure is narrow from front to back and has high ceilings and big windows, which make conversion more attractive.
As WW reported in a recent cover story, the building’s top floor is currently leased to the state’s largest psilocybin service center, The Sacred Mushroom. In the most recently filed annual report for the company that owns the center, Kaya Holdings Inc., the company disclosed that it had signed a one-year lease on the space with an option for two additional years “if all conditions are met.” (Craig Frank, the CEO of Kaya Holdings, did not respond to a request for comment.)
Brian Wannamaker, a member of the limited liability company that owns the Falcon Building, declined to comment on the loan from Prosper, saying he’s still working through additional financing and other details of the potential conversion.