Skip to main content
ADDRESS: Northwest 6th Avenue and Glisan Street
YEAR BUILT: It’s an empty lot.
SQUARE FOOTAGE: 38,000
MARKET VALUE: $7.5 million
OWNER: Prosper Portland
HOW LONG IT’S BEEN EMPTY: 35 years
WHY IT’S EMPTY: Sluggish city planners
The Fine Arts and Crafts Festival took over the North Park Blocks on Labor Day weekend, bringing a touch of glitz to an area that’s seen better days. But as the crowds perused $400 prints amid the bigleaf maples, a different sort of market was operating two blocks east.
“You lookin’ for some fetty?” a man asked a passerby outside the empty lot at Northwest 6th Avenue and Glisan Street. He hurried away upon learning the passerby was a reporter.
Garlynn Woodsong, an urban planner who’s wondered about the empty lot since riding the bus by it as a child, pointed out the property to WW. “We have a homeless crisis,” he says. “There’s an obvious piece of real estate, but the government’s too dysfunctional to figure out how to operate it.”
The land is owned by the city’s economic development agency, Prosper Portland, which says ideas over the years to redevelop the property didn’t “prove feasible.” A review of the city’s plans for the site over the past decade offers some clues to its underuse.
Over the past century, the site has housed a blacksmith, a service station, a series of hotels, and finally a bus depot before being sold to the city in 1985, according to records at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. The depot was soon razed, and it’s been vacant since.
Related: The late Walter Cole describes the men’s room in the Hoyt Hotel, which once stood on this site.
The city removed 220 tons of soil contaminated by leaking underground storage tanks in the early 2000s, in an apparent effort to prepare it for development.
But, a few years later, in 2006, Peter Englander, a director of what was then called the Portland Development Commission, told The Oregonian his agency had no “firm plans” for the lot and was investing its money elsewhere.
In 2016, the city purchased the old U.S. Postal Service building nearby for $88 million with plans to redevelop it. But “Block R,” as the Glisan lot is known in planning documents, appears once again to have been left by the wayside. Situated across Broadway from the former USPS site, it isn’t used in architects’ preliminary renderings. A Prosper Portland spokesman assures WW it still plans to put the block to use as “part of that phased development.”
It was used briefly as an emergency shelter during the early days of the pandemic, later morphing into a sleeping pod village. But those homes disappeared after the contractor running the site backed out, citing the “daily and nightly gunfire and gun activity,” WW reported at the time.
So the lot is, once again, empty. A man named Cody was camping out on the sidewalk on a recent Monday afternoon. He agrees the area is dangerous. He just got out of the hospital after his wrist was smashed by a man wielding a baton, and says it would probably be “quite a bit safer” if he could camp inside the fence.
It’s just a “rat sanctuary” now, he says.
Every week, WW examines one mysteriously vacant property in the city of Portland, explains why it’s empty, and considers what might arrive there next. Send addresses to newstips@wweek.com.