After several years of permitting and design revisions, bulldozers are finally rolling at the former Hewlett-Packard campus east of Portland. New Blueprint Partners and Rabina Properties have broken ground on the first phase of a long-planned redevelopment now branded as the Vancouver Innovation Center (The VIC). The sprawling site is slated to become a mix of apartments, offices and light-industrial space, with an apartment building leading the initial work. Crews began clearing the site this week, kicking off the residential side of the project.
As reported by CoStar, the first building will deliver roughly 250 apartments as the campus’s initial residential offering. The outlet notes that JLL arranged financing for this phase and identifies Casey Davidson and Charles Watson as the JLL contacts on the deal. CoStar did not disclose a public completion date for the building.
What’s being built
The VIC covers roughly 179 to 180 acres and already includes about 700,000 square feet of office and flex space that the developers are repositioning for new tenants. According to New Blueprint Partners, the full buildout could include more than 1,200 housing units and support between 5,000 and 6,000 jobs.
Local reporting notes that the development team reworked earlier concepts to add more density and sold about 20 acres to the Evergreen School District for a future middle school. Those moves are part of a broader push to create a walkable “20-minute” neighborhood, per the Vancouver Business Journal.
Financing and timeline
CoStar reports that JLL arranged the construction financing for the first residential phase and names Casey Davidson and Charles Watson as the JLL team on the transaction. The outlet does not identify the lender or spell out specific loan terms, and the developers have not announced a firm delivery schedule for the apartment building.
Beyond this initial phase, the timing of future residential and commercial construction will be shaped by permitting, market conditions and phased entitlements, so the broader project is expected to roll out over time rather than all at once.
Why it matters for Vancouver
Redeveloping the former HP campus into denser housing is aimed at easing a tight rental market in the Portland-Vancouver region while opening up a site that had been closed to the surrounding community for decades. “We’re creating a 20-minute mixed-use neighborhood,” Rabina told the Vancouver Business Journal, describing a plan that mixes housing, jobs and public open space.
Developer materials frame the new apartment project as the opening move in a much larger transformation that, according to New Blueprint Partners, is expected to provide workforce housing and thousands of jobs for the metro area once the Vancouver Innovation Center is fully built out.
