Portland’s Two Biggest Downtown Redevelopment Bets Are Both Finally Moving Vertical
For years, Portland’s Broadway Corridor and the James Beard Public Market were mostly conversations about what downtown Portland could someday look like. In 2026, both are visibly under construction.
Broadway Corridor. Prosper Portland’s redevelopment of the former 14-acre USPS Main Post Office site — part of a larger 32-acre district connecting Old Town/Chinatown to the Pearl District — has moved from demolition and soils remediation into active infrastructure construction. New streets, water, sewer, stormwater, and electric utility work critical to unlocking roughly 4 million square feet of future mixed-income development is underway now and slated for substantial completion by fall 2026. The first vertical project on the site will be a 14-story, 230-unit affordable housing development from Home Forward and the Urban League, serving residents at 30–60% area median income, with 35 units designated for permanent supportive housing for families. That project is expected to break ground in late 2026. An estimated $54.5 million of the publicly procured site preparation and infrastructure work is governed by contracting goals for minority-owned, women-owned, and disadvantaged business enterprise participation, alongside workforce diversity recruitment goals for the trades.
James Beard Public Market. After more than two decades of stalled proposals and abandoned sites, the market broke ground in fall 2025 in downtown Portland’s historic Selling and Ungar buildings at SW 6th and Alder. Design Review approval for the Ungar Building came in February 2026, with Landmarks Commission approval for the Selling Building’s Historic Resource Review following in April. Demolition work uncovered an original timber-framed structure in the building that has since influenced the final exterior design. The market — envisioned in the style of Seattle’s Pike Place Market — will span both buildings with a restaurant, teaching kitchen, cookbook store, food vendors, and a rooftop bar, funded in part by roughly $3 million in Prosper Portland loan and grant support plus $250,000 in earlier predevelopment funding. The project’s opening date has shifted from initial fall 2026 targets to spring 2027 as the design work around the discovered timber framing extended the timeline.
Why this matters for contractors: Both projects represent sustained, multi-year work pipelines in Portland’s core at a moment when downtown office vacancy sits at historic highs — a useful counterpoint for firms wondering whether central-city construction work has genuinely dried up or just shifted toward public-and-institutional-backed projects rather than private office towers.
Sources: Prosper Portland; Home Forward; Portland Housing Bureau; Next Portland; Portland Tribune
