Westin Glass of Guerrilla Development

A Designing for Trees Feature By Kyna Rubin

Trees For Life Oregon showcases the creativity and thought processes of developers and architects who are taking the time to design buildings with trees in mind. Their work, which preserves or creates space for trees, illustrates that new development and trees need not be mutually exclusive.

December 19, 2019

True to its name, Guerrilla Development doesn’t follow the mainstream. Company project manager Westin Glass talks about the value of giving up rentable square footage for green space, including trees.

Trees are rarely preserved when Guerrilla Development repurposes industrial buildings for office or residential use. That’s because usually there aren’t any there to begin with. Instead, as code requires, the development team adds trees, though not always in an obvious way. On some of its properties Guerrilla carves out space in the middle of a site for an inner courtyard holding new trees and plants. Reducing the original structure’s footprint in this way erodes the site’s leasable square footage, says the company’s project manager, Westin Glass, but he’s fine with that.

People are often shocked at Guerrilla’s willingness to cut back on rentable space, he says, “because to most developers that’s the worst thing you can do.” To him, however, it makes perfect sense, because that green space increases the value of the remaining leasable square footage. “It’s just a matter of how you see it.”

Inspired by founder Kevin Cavenaugh, Guerrilla takes pride in doing things differently, reflected in its tagline—“risk takers, model breakers, culture makers”—and in splashy projects like the Fair-Haired Dumbbell at the east end of the Burnside Bridge, and The Tree Farm, which Trees For Life has previously profiled.

The completed New New Crusher Court at 2500 NE Sandy Boulevard is a case in point. (Other examples of the less-rentable-space-is-more-approach such as Puzzle Box and Dr. Jim’s are currently under construction.) The original building, an auto shop, occupied the entire 21,000 square foot site. The transformed structure takes up only about 15,000 square feet. Guerrilla left a hole in the center for a courtyard that is accessible from the street and contains glassed entrances to resident businesses. The people who work for the dozen or so creative-oriented entities that rent the space—for instance, Brett Schulz Architect, an oft-collaborator with Guerrilla Development including on this very building, and Guerrilla Development itself—enjoy the benefits of floor-to-ceiling glass doors and garage-door-size windows that open onto the inner landscape, which holds picnic tables and other seating.

Since deciding to sacrifice greater rentable square footage for trees and plants, how does Guerrilla pencil out its investment? The development company may charge a dollar more per square foot than neighboring offices do, says Glass, but that hasn’t deterred takers. “There are other values that don’t show up on spreadsheets.” The green courtyard brings cachet. A nearby traditional office building with no green space might offer slightly lower rents, he says, but the Guerrilla design has attracted a steady stream of interested leasers. Guerrilla has a waiting list of tenants for its buildings, according to Glass.

As many of us observe around town, trees that are not properly maintained after planting often die. Guerrilla Development takes steps to prevent that. The company places watering bags around the new trees it plants for the first three years. If a street tree does succumb at one of its buildings, which happened to a street tree at the New New Crusher Court property, “we’re not going to check the tree code to see if we have to do something about it,” they just take care of it, says Glass. In that case they replaced the dead tree. Guerrilla’s obligation toward tree care is “forever,” or as long as they own the building, he says, which meshes with tree code requirements. The developer planted seven street trees: four at front on Sandy Boulevard and three in back on Hoyt.

Not all of Guerrilla’s properties were once industrial or commercial sites. Right now the firm is constructing the C-Channel Lofts, a three-story building with 14 apartments and retail space next to Arbor Lodge Coffee on the northwest corner of N. Interstate and N. Rosa Parks Way. Scheduled for completion in 2020, the project will contain four units at below-market rate (see Kevin Cavenaugh’s TEDx Portland talk about interesting ways he makes his affordable housing projects work). The company demolished a single-family home on the site but preserved the large maple tree in the former backyard. A few of the apartments will have access to the space around the tree, and four more will have window views of it. “We’ll always save a tree when we can,” Glass says. His team designed the building in a C-shape around a courtyard (below, right) that will hold a newly planted large-form tree. The species is yet to be determined but could be a broadleaf evergreen along the lines of what horticulturalist Sean Hogan might suggest.

Glass says he’s happy the city has a tree code (there wasn’t one before the 2015 implementation of Title 11), but that it doesn’t allow room for developers like Guerrilla “who are trying to do the right thing [in terms of saving or planting trees] but also trying to do something creative and different.” He says there’s nothing more frustrating than sitting across a city desk explaining that although what he’s trying to do “doesn’t meet the letter of the code, it clearly meets the spirit of the code, and in fact goes over and above. But because of the code language, the city employee says, ‘I completely understand. I wish I could approve this but my hands are tied.’”

Though this developer prefers to save trees, it’s not always possible. In one case, Glass recalls, Guerrilla took down two trees 12 inches diameter and less. They had been in the front and backyard of a single-family home razed to construct two mixed-use buildings that include a homeless housing component. “It’s too bad you can’t just copy and paste a tree,” says Glass, because he would have preferred to have been able to preserve those trees. But the site design couldn’t accommodate them. The structures were built where the two trees had stood, and then Guerrilla, per code, added several street trees and new trees in a courtyard between the two buildings.

Like his boss Kevin Cavenaugh, Westin Glass is an architect-turned-developer. Both of them, he says, became developers because they wanted to be able “to do these fun, crazy designs” that an architect likely couldn’t get a developer to pay for. He understands why most developers may find it easier to clear-cut a property and pay the mitigation fees for larger trees. They’ll plant whatever works with their design, he says, because in the long run they’ll save money by not having to pay someone to do the calculations around saving this tree or that, and by not redesigning around existing trees. If given the hypothetical opportunity to build on an East Portland tract full of Douglas-firs—a situation where developers have been known to do away with all the trees—Glass says he’d approach it differently. As a practical matter, you can’t build on a Douglas-fir grove without harming tree roots, he says. But he would minimize the number of trees he’d take down, and build around the others. With his architect’s hat on, he says, he’d love the idea of meeting that challenge.

Designing for Trees: Ben Carr of Brent Schulz Architect