It doesn’t matter whether it’s pouring rain, as the sun rises at 7am, the construction crew is already hard at work on the new building rising in the middle of Portland, Oregon’s Hollywood neighborhood. The crew working on what will soon be 222 units of affordable housing pours concrete into the form of pillars, building the solid bones of a new floor every 10 days.

“I really enjoy work that kind of sucks. And concrete's that,” says Jason Reynholds, who at some point over his 12 years working in structural concrete got the nickname “Sassy”—short for Sasquatch. “Because I’m 6’7 and fuzzy in pictures, apparently.”

The job of pouring, lifting, and placing concrete is tough. “It's always hot or cold, it’s dangerous. You put a lot of blood, sweat, and time into it.”

The building is growing to 12-stories tall in-between the Hollywood light rail stop and Trader Joes is titled the HollywoodHUB, a much-needed affordable housing development that’s slated to open in 2027. According to the most recent numbers, there are 8,800 people living unsheltered in Multnomah County. The project is possible because Portlanders wanted that to change and voted to support affordable housing: $37 million of the building construction budget comes from an affordable housing bond local voters passed in 2018 and another $45 million comes from the Portland Housing Bureau. The building’s 222 affordable housing units will be permanently reserved for people who make between 30-60 percent (or less) of Portland’s median income.

While a lot of affordable housing units are studios, at the HollywoodHUB, a majority of the units will be two and three-bedrooms, so they can welcome entire families. The building will also have a two-story indoor playground for kids. That’s all an exciting future for the location which previously was just a stretch of asphalt that TriMet used as a bus stop, plus a building left vacant for several years.

“It’s the kind of project that brings a lot of purpose to what we do and makes a real impact and a stronger, more connected community for Portland,” says Maren Sinclair, the marketing manager for O’Nell/Walsh Construction, which is the general contractor on the project. The designs by Holst Architecture show a building shaped like a U around a courtyard full of benches and trees that face the steps leading up to the Hollywood MAX stop. The idea is to create housing that has easy access to transportation and grocery stores. “It is a transit-oriented development, so it’s really important to provide affordable housing that has access to services and amenities, for people that don’t have cars,” says Sinclair.

The owner and developer of the building is BRIDGE Housing, but such a huge project requires several partners, including Hacienda CDC and the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization, both of which will provide social services on site. “It does take a village to do these projects,” says Sinclair. 

For now, creating the future of affordable housing requires doing the “work that kind of sucks.” Construction started in 2024 and will continue until 2027, with dozens of people like Reynholds working every day to do everything from pouring concrete to install the finishing touches on the apartments that will hopefully be a safe place to land for the next generation. The job is worth it despite the effort, says Reynholds. “At the end of the day, you can turn around and be like, ‘Dang, look at that. We're another floor higher.’”