Owners of Lloyd Center Unveil Master Plan for Mall That Restores Street Grid and Adds Housing –
The ice rink stays in the picture, and the mall stays open during construction.

By Anthony EffingerSeptember 21, 2023 at 1:15 pm PDT

Almost two years after the property fell into foreclosure, the owners of Lloyd Center Mall made public their plan to revitalize the 29-acre site with as many as 5,000 units of housing, restaurants, greenspaces and—if the market for office space revives—a corporate office campus.

The plan doesn’t include a Major League Baseball stadium, but it could accommodate one “should a concrete proposal emerge to bring an MLB team to Portland,” mall co-owner Urban Renaissance said in a press release.

The mall, open since the foreclosure, will remain open during the planning process, which is expected to take up to a year, and during construction, which will be done in pieces over the next decade.

The most popular feature of the mall, the ice rink, will stay in the new development, though it may move to accommodate other features, according to Urban Renaissance, the Seattle-based company that owns the mall alongside KKR Real Estate Finance Trust. KKR took possession of the property in 2021 after foreclosing on the former owner, Texas-based real estate firm EB Arrow.

“We’re going to knock stuff down,” said Tom Kilbane, managing director at Urban Renaissance. “Eventually, everything there is going to become something else. There will be an ice rink.”

Urban Renaissance applied for a “design advice request” meeting with the Portland Bureau of Development Services’ Design Commission today. A formal application for the master plan will follow.

The big idea behind the master plan is to open the mall up to the neighborhood around it, Kilbane said in an interview. In its present incarnation, the mall presents solid blank walls to many neighboring buildings and blocks north-south traffic from Northeast 9th to 15th avenues.

“Our goal is to reverse the inward focus,” Kilbane said.

The new design will restore much of the street grid that was obliterated by the mall. One street, 12th Avenue, will run from the north side of the mall all the way through to Holladay Park.

Urban Renaissance and KKR hired Portland architecture firm ZGF to lead the master plan. ZGF is also doing the main terminal expansion at Portland International Airport. Field Operations, the firm that designed the High Line, the wildly popular park built on an old elevated train line in Manhattan, will design the open spaces at the new Lloyd Center. About 20% of the site is designated as greenspace.

Urban Renaissance didn’t give a cost estimate for the project. The owners plan to borrow as they go to pay for construction. KKR has vowed to keep its ownership through the planning process, Kilbane said. The owners may pursue new tax increment financing, he added. TIF is used by municipalities to stimulate redevelopment by diverting future property tax revenue increases to specific projects.

City leaders are on board with the plan, Kilbane said.

“I am encouraged that the current owners envision creating an authentically Portland neighborhood that will reflect our city’s core values of inclusivity and sustainability,” City Commissioner Carmen Rubio said in a statement. “I am particularly excited about the prospect for a significant number of new housing units designed to serve a range of income levels. We sorely need this investment in housing.”

Any housing built on the property will conform to the city’s inclusionary zoning, Kilbane said.

The master plan doesn’t include a baseball stadium. Nor does it preclude one.

“We would be thrilled to see a major league team come to Portland,” Kilbane said. “We have certainly heard the rumors, including around Lloyd Center as one of the potential sites for a stadium, and our ownership group is open to dialogue with team owners, the MLB or anyone else who presents an actionable proposal.”

In June, The Oregonian reported that Mayor Ted Wheeler supported the Portland Diamond Project’s proposal to turn Lloyd Center into a stadium. The group’s founder, former Nike executive Craig Cheek, has been trying for years to bring baseball to Portland, eyeing various sites.

One attraction that’s definitely coming is “Painted Pines Park” a 45,098-square-foot educational art installation by local artist Mike Bennett, the creator of “Dinolandia,” a temporary exhibit of painted plywood dinosaurs in downtown Portland that ran until September 2022.

Bennett will stage “Painted Pines,” an exhibit inspired by U.S. national parks, in the old movie theaters on the top floor of Lloyd Mall starting early next year. It will have four areas to explore: Tall Tall Timbers, Geyser Gulch, Critter Canyon and Acrylic Alps, populated by 1,000 cartoon animals and plants made by Bennett.

Article courtesy of Willamette Week – Sept. 21st, 2023

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The following article courtest of:
By Lillian Karabaic (OPB)
June 11, 2023 6 a.m.

Indie businesses thrive as Lloyd Center mall reinvents itself — again…
Lloyd Center isn’t just a mall. It’s a community

When Lloyd Center opened in Northeast Portland in August 1960, 700 homing pigeons were released to share news of the mall all over the Pacific Northwest. Nestled right in the heart of this new open-air shopping center was something unusual for a mall — a bustling ice rink.

Lloyd Center has undergone so many transformations in an attempt to stay relevant over the last 63 years, it would have required a lot of homing pigeons to announce each change. But one thing that has remained constant is the ice rink — which now sits at the center of a new group of independent local businesses.

For Cheryn Grant, Lloyd Center has been part of her routine since she moved to Portland in 1979. She ice dances with a group of adults in their 60s and older called the “Hooky Club” which has met weekly at the Lloyd Center ice rink since the mall’s opening.

In 2015, Lloyd Center’s new Texas-based owners financed a $177 million remodel to revitalize the mall. In addition to architectural upgrades and a new three-story spiral staircase, they made a controversial change to the ice rink, shrinking it and making it a different shape.

“They made a smaller rink that looks like an egg, versus a real ice rink,” Grant said. “So they lost customers. Lloyd Center lost people because a lot of skaters won’t come here anymore, because the rink is too small.”

And skaters weren’t the only loss for the Lloyd Center. As retail trends changed to shopping online, Lloyd Center’s anchor stores closed down one by one. Sears shuttered, followed by Nordstrom. The mall’s extended closure during COVID-19 lockdowns accelerated the downward spiral. In January 2021, the final remaining large department store in Lloyd Center, Macy’s, closed.

The shutdown of Macy’s, combined with $100 million of unpaid debt from the 2015 remodel, pushed the mall into foreclosure. KKR Real Estate Financial Trust took ownership of the mall in late 2021 and brought on Seattle-based developer Urban Renaissance Group to help revitalize the mall and plot its next act.

Urban Renaissance Group’s Managing Director Tom Kilbane says they were still determining what would happen with Lloyd Center when they started working on the site in November 2021. But figuring out how to revitalize a space like the Lloyd Center is tough and time-consuming.

“It’s a 30-acre site. It’s very big,” Kilbane said. “There are over a hundred tenants in the mall right now. And it’s just a lot more complicated. It’s got an ice rink in the middle of it. That’s a first for our company for sure.”

Urban Renaissance Group has been intentional about bringing community into the mall, partly through hosting regular events. They invited artists to host gallery shows and paint murals in vacant storefronts. Hours-long queues formed for underground community events like Secret Roller Disco, an all-ages DJ’d skate night inside the old Marshalls department store. Events such as the Portland Film Festival brought in some of the foot traffic that was missing without big anchors.

Lloyd Center as it is today might not be what people expect from a huge shopping mall surrounded by parking garages, with its smaller, home-grown stores and lack of behemoth chains. Tom Kilbane, of Urban Renaissance Group, says that’s pretty special.

“There are a lot of malls in the country that are trying to reinvent themselves and to repurpose themselves,” he said, “but I feel like what’s happening here is pretty unique to Portland… I think it comes down to the sense of community. People like to gather. They like to mingle. And this is just a great opportunity to do that.”

Kilbane says that anchors are essential to the mall’s business model. “They’re called anchors for a reason and, and they drive traffic, but the nature of retail is changing, and a lot of the traditional anchor tenants like Sears, Macy’s, Nordstrom that we had here aren’t doing as well as, as they used to,” said Kilbane. “But, there are other large format retailers that would definitely like to be here, in this close-in neighborhood.”

This summer, a unique anchor is moving into the mall: Trackers Earth, a wilderness kids camp. They focus on survival skills — everything from blacksmithing to foraging. When Trackers was looking to expand, founder Tony Deis was surprised that Lloyd Center was suggested as a possible location for his company’s nature-focused program, “I was like, no, we are not going to the mall.”

But after some reflection, Deis, who grew up in Oak Grove, thought about the cultural significance of the Lloyd Center he remembers from his childhood and read about how the mall is reinventing itself with a community focus. The massive parking lot didn’t hurt, either.

“Of course,” he said, “our parents love good parking.” As a camp with storytelling at its heart, he saw something unique in the department store’s empty spaces to “create something entirely new and novel. And we realized it’s actually the perfect fit.”

Trackers Earth is certainly big enough to fill the old Marshalls department store, with up to 1,200 families per week coming through. They’re outfitting the space with an archery range, a wrestling ring, and blacksmithing on the loading dock.

But while the developers plot the mall’s next act and try to lure new anchor stores, these young archers and foragers will be another part of breathing new life into this iconic Portland mall.

The long-term plans are still under wraps, but rumors of everything from a Home Depot to a Major League Baseball franchise have floated about.

And the only guarantee?

“The only decision that we have made and announced publicly about the future of Lloyd Center, is that there will be an ice rink,” said Kilbane.

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This story was published on The Oracle.

Mall under new ownership with plans to preserve main attractions

Lincoln Wheeler, Copy Editor|March 30, 2022

Entrance+to+Lloyd+Center+Mall

Entrance to Lloyd Center Mall

Partial ownership of Lloyd Center was transferred to Urban Renaissance Group (URG), a west coast real estate company, according to a Dec. 20 press release.

This followed a Portland Business Journal announcement last November that KKR Real Estate Finance Trust planned to foreclose on Lloyd Center. KKR cited a debt of $110 million owed from a loan taken out by the previous owner, Cypress Equities, for renovations as their reason for foreclosing. 

Leading up to this announcement, discussions of a partnership between KKR and URG began early last year and eventually led to an agreement that, under new joint ownership, the mall’s debt would be shed.

“[KKR] approached URG about a potential partnership after it became apparent that a foreclosure was likely to occur,” Tom Kilbane, URGs Portland Managing Director, said.

Now the new owners intend to keep Lloyd Center a community gathering place, planning to maintain retail, ice skating and workspace.

“Our goal is to make sure that [the mall] continues to be welcoming to all Portlanders, although it is too early in the process to provide details,” Kilbane said.

He added that their immediate goal is to “keep the existing tenants in place and improve the shopping experience.”

While businesses have been leaving the mall, including Nordstrom in 2015 and Macy’s in 2020, there are long standing shops and attractions that remain open, including Joe Brown’s Carmel Corn and the Lloyd Center Ice Rink 

Tyler Harvey, the rink’s manager, has watched the mall change since his employment over seven years ago.

“Working at a business in Lloyd Center has been fun, exciting, eventful and educating,” Harvey said. “I have seen a complete renovation of the entire mall. I’ve seen how quickly a pandemic can change a business, let alone a mall like Lloyd Center. Most of all I have seen the Lloyd District change with businesses slowly shutting down or moving away in time due to various reasons.” 

Lloyd Center Ice Rink’s management has already begun interactions with the new owners.

“Our management company has had the most direct interaction with URG, and they have assured us and eased any concerns we originally had,” Harvey said. “But we have not had any direct contact with the new ownership just yet.”

Junior BreeAn McGlone-Shuell also works at Lloyd Center Ice Rink and learned how to ice skate there. She has seen a similar change.

“I remember at first it was, I don’t know, I guess you could say a normal mall…” McGlone-Shuell said. “For what it was, it was okay, it was pretty good, like what you would expect. And then I remember there was a lot of excitement I guess, or just curiosity when it came to the remodel. And when it came out, it was like, ‘Oh cool,’ but then it just wasn’t doing very well.”

McGlone-Shull had one idea for how the new owners could support business at the mall, but she still had some reservations about whether or not it would be effective.

“Honestly, probably get bigger brands, but then again, I don’t think that would necessarily work…I think some people are fine with going down to Clackamas just because it’s a bigger area, it can hold bigger stores.”

Sophomore Ciara Fragoso-Tovar has many memories from Lloyd Center. She learned to ice skate there and frequented it with her family.

“I really miss spending my whole afternoon just running around the place,” Fragoso-Tovar said. “[Stores] that we used to go to were Ross, Marshall’s and more.”

She said her family stopped going to Lloyd Center for several reasons.

“First off, most of our favorite stores have closed down, so there is really no need to go there. Second, we don’t have much time to go there anymore. And third, all the shootings that have happened in the parking lots have really made us a little bit worried about going there.”

Fragoso-Tovar said that if the new owners “make the place how it was before,” her family would likely return, although she is skeptical about this happening.

Kilbane said that URG is planning a visioning process for Lloyd Center’s future to be their first course of action. He said they would incorporate community input throughout the process.


THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE IS FROM WILLAMETTE WEEK

Official Plans Emerge for Lloyd Center. The Ice Rink Stays in the Picture.

URG, as it’s known, has a history of remaking Portland.

By Anthony EffingerDecember 21, 2021 at 8:36 pm PST

The new owners of the Lloyd Center Mall are real estate barons of few words.

In October, when KKR Real Estate Finance Trust announced its intention to foreclose on the crime-ridden cavern of broken retail dreams, it didn’t even dignify the place by saying its name. It called the mall the “Portland retail asset.”

This week, KKR announced it had hired Urban Renaissance Group out of Seattle to figure out what to do with Lloyd Center. URG, as it’s known, has a history of remaking Portland. It turned The Oregonian’s old printing plant near Providence Park into an eight-story office tower with an “epic” (its word) beer garden on the roof.

URG managing director Tom Kilbane didn’t say much about what Lloyd Center would become, calling it a “uniquely situated property” and saying URG “takes seriously our responsibility for making sure it continues to be a community gathering place.”

Gathering place? Has anyone from URG been to Lloyd Center lately?

Related Article:

By Anthony EffingerNovember 17, 2021 at 5:36 am PST

The biggest opportunity to reshape Portland’s landscape currently smells like a Cinnabon.

That’s right: Those 23 acres of prime real estate are Portland’s way out of civic malaise.

Ever since lenders decided to foreclose on the Lloyd Center Mall, Portlanders have flooded social media with tear-stained memories of childhood ice-skating parties and caramel corn feasts.

Most of those people probably haven’t visited for a while.

For more than a decade, Lloyd Center has degraded into a carjacker and shoplifter’s paradise. The pandemic accelerated that decline, but Lloyd Center was struggling well before then. (In 2019, this newspaper published a cover story wondering if the mall would last another Christmas.) The four anchor stores—Sears, Nordstrom, Marshalls, Macy’s—have all abandoned ship.

A Honey Baked Ham kiosk is one of few signs of holiday bustle. Only a third of the mall’s storefronts are occupied, and several of the shops lower their security gates even during posted business hours.

It is a tawdry end to one of Portland’s most beloved, yet much-maligned, institutions, where people have been eating Joe Brown’s Carmel Corn since 1960, where Tonya Harding learned how to skate, and where you could get a Jamba Juice within walking distance of the Willamette River.

KKR, the New York City lender that is foreclosing on Lloyd Center, said little about what it planned to do with the 23-acre property, beyond a bit of real estate jargon that could mean almost anything: “We intend to foreclose and to take ownership of the asset, enabling us to optimize value over the near and medium term,” KKR executive Patrick Mattson said.

Likely translation: We’re going to put some lipstick on this pig and sell it for bacon.

Lloyd Center is big. Eighteen square city blocks big. A plot of land that size is exactly the kind of blank slate an aimless city needs to excite its imagination.

It’s no secret that Portland needs a jolt. The pandemic exposed political rifts, social ills, and a lack of leadership. But it also provided an opportunity to reconsider how we should use communal spaces—the places we couldn’t gather around for two years.

The Lloyd District has long been a disappointment. Its namesake, Ralph Lloyd, was a California rancher who struck oil under his land and bought a huge swath of the city he loved: Portland. He thought it would be the new Los Angeles. He died, but his daughters pursued his vision, hired the architect who would soon after help design Seattle’s Space Needle, and, in 1960, built Lloyd Center, touted as the largest shopping mall in the world at the time.

Its windowless walls loomed over the neighborhood like the sides of an oil tanker.

“When they built the Lloyd Center, they turned their back on Broadway,” says Roslyn Hill, a landscape designer known as the “Queen of Alberta” because she grew up in the neighborhood and returned to spearhead its revival in the 1990s. “They thought Multnomah would be the key street, but there is no one on it, so the mall became an island unto itself.”

This is Portland’s chance to fix that development bungle. A property this size, this central to the city comes along every generation or so.

We asked some of the smartest people in town: What do we do with it?

Almost all of the ideas include affordable housing, which Portland needs desperately. Beyond that, the ideas range widely. New neighborhood. Skateboard park. Wooden tower. Library branch. Robot market.

It’s time to rethink Lloyd. Everything must go. Except maybe the ice rink.

One solid detail: The ice rink just might survive. “Our ambition is to embrace and preserve features of the property that make it special, including retail, creative work spaces and ice skating,” Kilbane said.

Sounds like a mall with an ice rink, which is what’s there now. So much for Portlanders’ dreams, chronicled in these pages for the past eight weeks, of restoring the street grid or building affordable housing.

A Giant Apartment Building—With an Ice Rink in the Lobby

In the late 1940s, a group of Portland women got fed up with housework, decided to play hooky, and hit the rink at the now-defunct Portland Ice Hippodrome. They called themselves the Hooky Club.

When Lloyd Center opened in 1960, they moved the party to the ice rink there, skating twice a week. They’re still at it, along with lots of other Portlanders. Coaches give lessons in multiple languages.

Lillian Karabaic, host of a Portland podcast that takes financial advice from cats (no, really), skates at Lloyd Center at least five days a week.

Keeping the rink makes good business sense, Karabaic says. Going east from the Willamette River, the next rink you hit is in Bend. There are only four in the Portland metro area—two on the tony westside and another in Vancouver. Ask around and you’re sure to find a friend who plays beer league hockey at 5:30 am because that’s the only time their team can get on the ice.

“The city of Portland is too large not to have a rink,” Karabaic says.

Her idea? Keep it—and build apartments above it.

On the upper floors, Karabaic would like to see transitional housing. The Arcade Providence, the oldest mall in America, is her model. Built in 1828, the Rhode Island building is now home to 48 micro-loft apartments on the upper two floors, with retail, restaurants, and a whiskey bar below.

Robert Liberty of Cascadia Partners, a local urban planning firm, agrees with Karabaic on both points: a rink and affordable apartments. With the Blumenauer Bridge for walking and cycling almost complete above Interstate 84, kids living in the new complex could cycle or walk to the new Benson High School, due to be renovated and reopened for the 2024 school year.

Liberty says the city should keep much of the mall’s structure because its midcentury modern aesthetic would prove popular in the long run.

“Tearing everything down is not my idea of sustainability,” he says.

For the new stuff, Liberty proposes a design competition. Portland doesn’t have a signature architectural style, and a competition for the whole Lloyd District might help remedy that. Just for fun: Judges could say that all the buildings must be timber-frame construction. Milling wood is better for the environment than forging steel, and Portland has a tall wood-frame building already: the eight-story Carbon12 on the corner of Williams and Northeast Fremont Street.

He’d like the competition to be local, too, excluding big names that build a monument to their egos. “I don’t want a starchitect building like the public library in Seattle,” Liberty says. (That was done by Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus, for those keeping score at home.)

RELATED ARTICLE:

Tom Kilbane, Portland managing director of Urban Renaissance Group, the new owner-manager of Lloyd Center, told store owners they won’t see major changes to the mall before two years.

Kilbane explained that the city of Portland’s planning process takes that long to make big changes to buildings, but soon they will see increased security and a cleaner and better-maintained building. These third-party providers have been short on staff, but he is asking them to hire more people.

A few dozen store owners met with Kilbane and the mall’s current marketing and general managers in an empty store on the morning of Wednesday, Dec. 22. He apologized to vendors who felt blindsided by the news that the previous owner, Cypress Equities of Dallas, Texas, had defaulted on their loan and that financiers, KKR Real Estate Finance Trust of New York City, were foreclosing on them and might sell the mall to a firm who would close it down. Kilbane explained that the news slipped out in October in an earnings call to Wall Street.

“Probably the thing you’re most interested in is what’s going to happen,” Kilbane said. “And the short answer is: I don’t want to say nothing’s going to change, we hope things are going to get better. But there are no plans to close the mall, no plans to knock anything down. Our goal is to improve the operation of the mall, improve the tenant experience and improve customer experience.”

He urged vendors to have faith in the Urban Renaissance Group and renew their leases. When asked what the company would do to bring back anchor tenants who have fled (Marshalls, Nordstrom, Macy’s) he said they were advertising for smaller companies to lease space at the mall. He also had heard from “big box” stores who were interested but did not disclose any names.

“We’re probably not able to sign five-year leases, just given the fact that we don’t know yet what the future plan is going to be.” he said.

He asked them to encourage fellow retailers to apply. Local pop-up shops have filled some gaps in Lloyd Center as chain stores have fled.

Keep calm and shop on

Any thoughts of radical change at the mall remain under wraps. “So will it stay the same forever?” Kilbane asked rhetorically. “Probably not. But we are going to begin a planning process. And if any of you had to go through the permitting process with the city of Portland, you know that it doesn’t go very quickly.”

He said that usually takes two years. The Urban Renaissance Group already partners with KKR on properties in Seattle; it manages eight properties in Portland, mostly offices and all of them with some retail component, and has 28 staff here.

“This has been a very big deal for us, it’s almost 10% of our total portfolio,” Kilbane said, adding that he lives two miles away and his teenage sons’ photos with Santa Claus were all taken at Lloyd Center.

Sorry we’re not closed…

One vendor complained he had been fielding calls from customers who thought Lloyd Center already had closed for good. Kilbane said they wanted to run their ad announcing their intention to revitalize the mall before Thanksgiving, but could not until they became formal partners on Dec. 17. He apologized for the uncertainty it caused just before the holiday season.

Others in the room pleaded for three monthly meetings, to keep them up to date on management decisions.

Speakers became most animated about shoplifters and skateboarders, whom they say have made their jobs difficult. A manager at fast fashion shop Forever 21 said it was hard to hire 16-year-olds because they are afraid of having to deal with shoplifters and feared violence. She complained the store loses thousands of dollars per week in theft. The previous owners cut security guard hours by half, but the Urban Renaissance Group pledged to restore it back to previous levels, with more guards walking around in pairs.

Shop owners asked if there would be a change in the hands-off policy, in which security cannot touch shoplifters and can only escort them from the mall while allowing them to keep stolen merchandise. Kilbane said the problem was with Portland Police and their response times, which are considered non-existent for petty crime.

Skateboarders also were criticized for damaging the interior floors and for being “very disrespectful,” although one woman said they were “still part of the community” and thought there should be a skate park.

The mall’s operations manager said he already had a spot in mind for that.

The marketing director for the Lloyd Center said “Having local partnership makes such a big difference. You guys (the store owners) know this market is unique, and having owner-managers that understand that uniqueness is what is going to take Lloyd Center to the next level.”

She added the mall will have a social media campaign in January and asked store owners for creative ways to partner on getting the word out. They have largely stopped doing radio and print ads to promote the mall, relying on earned media such as live spots on “Good Day Oregon.” The mall also will have more “fun eventing” in the future, since that brings in shoppers.

Kilbane said in a statement last Sunday, as news emerged of the Urban Renaissance Group’s new partnership, “Our ambition is to embrace and preserve features of the property that make it special, including retail, creative work spaces and ice skating.”

Store owners were concerned their rent might go up, but he reassured them, saying he knew they could not absorb rent increases at the moment.

What’s new?

One worried store owner said it sounded like they were being asked to wait and see.

“You’re not trying to get anchor stores back or trying to bring new restaurants in. It’s not revitalizing Lloyd Center, it feels like it’s a holding pattern while you guys decide what you’re going to do with the space,” she said.

Kilbane replied, “I wish I could be more definitive about what that transition is going to look like, but we just don’t know. We have a lot of really interesting inquiries from people who we would consider big box stores.”

They are still working on the long-term vision of the mall, which he set at 15 to 20 years.