New Freight Warehouse to be Built in SE Portland

Sears, which owns Kmart Corporation, announced it would be closing 15 Kmart stores in the Portland metro area on May 31, 2018, as part of a nationwide bankruptcy filing. Included in the shutdowns was a Kmart store located on 122nd and Sandy in the Southeast Portland neighborhood of Argay Terrace. This Kmart was located directly across the street from Parkrose High School and was one-and-one-half blocks away from Parkrose Middle School. It was one of only two grocery stores in the surrounding neighborhood, in addition to a Costco a few blocks away, which requires a paid yearly membership to access. Since the store’s closing, the building has remained. However, Prologis, a San-Francisco based company, now plans to build a new 260,000-square-foot freight warehouse in the abandoned lot.

Prologis currently leases out 65 warehouses to various companies in the Portland area, and it has thousands more warehouses across the country. In its mission statement, Prologis claims that its “environmental stewardship, social responsibility and governance (ESG) practices support [its] customers and stakeholders while addressing many of the world’s most pressing challenges,” meaning that it claims to be committed to sustainability. The proposed new warehouse in Argay Terrace would follow this sustainability mission with plans to add beehives on the roof of the building, plant native plants around the site, make the building LEED silver certified, and allow space for food trucks on site. Prologis Spokeswoman Maddie Sorrentino said to Oregon Live that “[t]his project will create new local jobs and support the community by helping people receive the goods they want and need.”

The proposed building has been met with extensive outcry from the Argay Terrace and Parkrose communities, mainly due to environmental and safety concerns. At the moment, however, it does not appear that there is much the community can do about its construction since the city approved new zoning immediately after the Kmart shut down. This allows the warehouse to be built at its current size. The previous zoning would have allowed the warehouse to be constructed but at a size of a maximum of 10,000 square feet.

One major complaint community members have voiced is that the proposed warehouse will be built on the residential side of Sandy Boulevard, encroaching into the low-income, high-minority neighborhood. According to the Portland Bureau of Transportation, 41.5% of Argay Terrace residents are people of color, and the average income of the neighborhood is among the lowest in Portland. According to Oregon Live, in the Parkrose school district, which includes Argay Terrace, 70 percent of the students are not white and all students receive free lunches due to high poverty rates in the area.

In March 2020, the City of Portland released a comprehensive 2035 plan aimed at “specifically [recognizing, addressing and preventing] repetition of the injustices suffered by communities of color throughout Portland’s history.” Argay Terrace residents argue that building this warehouse goes directly against that plan because it brings a warehouse to a low-income neighborhood, rather than providing it with needed services, such as a grocery store.

According to a Willamette Week article by Anthony Effinger, the Argay Terrace Neighborhood Association stated that “the industrial development is not fair to the residents who have lived here for years.” The association predicted that “it is going to devalue properties and do irreparable damage to the community values, livability, and walkability to [sic] our neighborhood.” In an interview for that article, Megan Petrulli, a therapist who lives in Argay Terrace is also against building the warehouse, highlighting how “[i]t’s dooming the neighborhood to be an industrial wasteland. It’s not strategic and it’s counter to all the goals the city says it wants to meet.”

Furthermore, the siting of the warehouse directly across the street from Parkrose High School raises more concerns. Recently, the city built an extra wide driveway leading into the properties of Parkrose High School and Middle School that is designed to be a safe route to school. However, Portland Bureau of Transportation traffic maps show that already between 100 and 500 trucks go down the driveway every day, to avoid traffic on Sandy, despite the driveway being marked “no trucks.” The new warehouse would simply increase the amount of trucks in the area, likely leading to an increase of trucks using the driveway to get to the Prologis warehouse, therefore making it unsafe for the children who rely on it to walk to school.

The warehouse could also bring increased diesel pollution to the area, due to the heavy amount of truck traffic going in and out of the warehouse. Diesel pollution can cause asthma and other respiratory problems, especially in children. “It’s scary—I don’t want that kind of industry here. It’s really close to the schools, to the kids crossing the street, to all the apartments,” said Jacob Klesalek, a father of three children who lives directly adjacent to the empty Kmart lot, in an interview with Oregon Live. Echoing these concerns Elizabeth Durant, the Parkrose school board chair, opined that the children “deserve to be able to play outside and not be breathing bad air.”

A final concern about the proposed warehouse is the adverse health effects it will cause. According to a heat map of the city created by Portland State University professor Vivek Shandas, Argay Terrace lies in the middle of a heat arc caused by the high levels of cement in the neighborhood, which amplifies the local heat, causing it to be among the hottest neighborhoods in Portland. Temperatures in Argay Terrace can be as much as 20 degrees higher than in inner Portland neighborhoods where there is more tree coverage and less open, exposed cement. Prologis claimed that the new warehouse would shrink the pavement in the area by 195,000 square feet, which could help to make the heat arc less prominent in the neighborhood. 

Not all residents oppose the building of the new warehouse. In response to a Willamette Week article about the proposed warehouse, one Twitter user observed that “I’d rather be across the street from a freight terminal that is busy during the work day and has predictable hours than a strip club or weed shop, personally. […] That’s me.” 

Unfortunately, since the city approved new zoning allowing the warehouse to be built, there is not much the residents of Parkrose and Argay Terrace can do to stop it. At the moment, the best case scenario is a good-neighbor agreement in which a compromise is reached between the community and the business to prevent environmental and other concerns. The agreement would likely not prevent the warehouse from being built, but it could address some of their concerns by making the building more eco friendly or limiting how long trucks can idle for.