The Port of Portland and Hacienda Community Development Corporation are teaming up on a project using mass timber to create prototypes for modular housing. Mass timber is a high-strength engineered wood. The state Legislature awarded the organizations a $5 million appropriation to work on the project. Curtis Robinhold is the executive director of the Port of Portland. Ernesto Fonseca is the CEO of Hacienda Community Development Corporation. They join us with details.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB, I’m Dave Miller. Monday was a good day for the Port of Portland and Hacienda Community Development Corporation. The two organizations have teamed up to work on a project using a product known as mass timber to create prototypes for modular housing. On Monday the legislature allocated $5 million for the project. Separately, the federal government announced that the coalition the group started had made it to the final round of a $1 billion dollar grant-making process. So what exactly are these groups doing and why have they teamed up? Curtis Robinhold is the Executive Director of the Port of Portland; Ernesto Fonseca is the CEO of Hacienda. They join us with the details. It’s good to have both of you on the show.
Curtis Robinhold / Ernesto Fonseca: Great to be here, Dave, thanks.
Dave Miller: So, Curtis first. As I noted, these two big things happen on Monday. The legislature’s allocation of $5 million for this coalition and the federal government gave you $500,000 because you’re named as a finalist for some portion of a $1 billion COVID Relief Grant Program. Is there a connection between these two pots of money?
Curtis Robinhold: Yeah, there are. Thanks for having us on today, David. Really what we’re talking about, Hacienda Community Development and the Port together with the Oregon Mass Timber Coalition, is an effort, really a vision, to create mass timber, modular manufacturing down at our Terminal Two on the Willamette River, and the two pots of money are for different things in that vision. One, focused really on the short term – can you show how this work can begin and produce housing units out of mass timber, and the other is around this larger grant process with the Economic Development Administration, to really show a longer term vision for how you do mass manufacturing at that site and in this partnership with a number of other partners here in the community.
Miller: Ernesto Fonseca, why did Hacienda get involved in this?
Ernesto Fonseca: Hi Dave, thank you for having us here today. It’s pretty simple, you know, Curtis and I’ve been working on initiatives for about three years… [Audio cuts out]
Miller: And Mr. Fonseca, can you hear me? Because you seem to have dropped. Curtis Robinhold, are you still there?
Robinhold: I am.
Miller: Okay, We’ll stick with you for a second as we work on Ernesto’s line, the continuing adventures in pandemic radio. Oh, Ernesto, are you back?
Fonseca: Yes, I’m here, thank you. Can you hear me?
Miller: I can hear you once again. So go ahead. You were saying you’ve been working with Curtis and the Port for a couple years now and it’s pretty simple, and then we didn’t hear what you said.
Fonseca: I am sorry about that. It’s pretty simple for us to make this decision, this is just another continuum for the housing that we are currently doing. We’re doing about $300 million dollars in assets across the state. And doing this project will enable us to expand this vision of providing affordable homes for all Oregonians. In addition and along the way, we are going to be creating jobs as well as creating more opportunity in rural communities and obviously in the urban area.
Miller: This is one of those cases where it seems like the two of you, and then the coalition you’re part of, you’re trying to address a whole bunch of different issues all together with a kind of silver bullet. I don’t know if you would describe it that way, but we can talk about these as we go, but it’s one of those things that often seems too good to be true. We’ll solve homelessness or affordable housing and provide people with jobs and boost Oregon’s manufacturing sector and help with the timber industry. Curtis Robinhold, am I wrong that you’re saying you can do all of this at the same time?
Robinhold: [Laughing] It’s certainly ambitious. I guess what I’d say is when you take a step back, that what we’re talking about is the material, the use of wood products in a new and different way, essentially pivoting a little bit from existing production techniques and moving it into housing. Now, that has a number of those other, I don’t want to call them knock on effects, because for us, the idea of doing this at Terminal Two is not just about housing affordability, it’s about who’s doing the work and what do you do about training up the workforce, so you get that benefit. And then I think you mentioned part of the rationale of this wood is connection to rural communities and to climate change and reducing wildfire risk. So, you know, it is a pretty unique Oregon story, it’s part of why I think you hear from both Ernesto and I, we’re very excited about it, and the reason we have good partners in it as well, like the Department of Forestry or the U of O or OSU is that a lot of people are seeing this opportunity that really does get at a number of challenges at the same time. Not a silver bullet, and it is going to be challenging, but it really does feel like a unique opportunity, a unique time right now for us.
Miller: So let’s dig into some of the details here, first of all, because it’s been a little while since we’ve talked about this. What is mass timber?
Robinhold: Why don’t I take that? And then maybe, Ernesto, you can talk about it relative to housing. Mass timber products are essentially thick, compressed layers of wood that, when they’re laminated or glued together, create this strong, structural load-bearing element that can be essentially constructed into panelized components. That lets you build the whole side of a house with one piece of mass timber, as an example, and it creates new opportunities in a space that I think people will recognize. Manufactured housing is not new, but using mass timber in that space is a new thing. So Ernesto, maybe if I could pivot to you on housing?
Miller: We’ll get to the housing in just a second. But just to be clear, as a manufacturing product or a product used in manufacturing, this could replace various things, it could replace steel beams or cement or plywood?
Fonseca: I can respond to that David, you know that’s my background. Yes, it can replace all of the above. The beauty of mass timber is that when you cross-laminate it, like cut it, that sounds like an expert now describes it, you definitely develop panels that are really strong to load on a span as well as loads and walls. So you will be solving that issue off of that. But more than that you’re going to be using a small dimension of timber which enables us to use a lot of scraps, a lot of small dimensional timber logs in our forest systems. And this will create an ability for us to reuse a lot of wood that traditionally will be used for other things including mulch. So it is a fantastic product I think.
Miller: I have seen, and maybe folks have seen this as well, a couple years ago there were some relatively high profile problems with cross-laminated timber buildings including one at OSU where some panels fell down. Ernesto Fonseca, have those issues been taken care of? That was two or three years ago now, and I imagine some things have changed, but it’s not that long ago.
Fonseca: That is true. A lot of things have changed, actually. Right after that event, many of the grooves as well as the dimensions of those small timbers were taken into consideration for us not to make the same mistakes. I was not part of that project, but I’m very well informed as to why some of those things happened- gluing, compression as well as the length of those small timbers. Those small dimensional woods that we’re talking about were not necessarily crossed proficiently. Now all of those things and all of those issues have been solved all together. So we believe that while we do the trial project, the better test in the pilot project that we’re discussing, we will be discovering some other issues. More than that, we’re going to be building several units across the state that we will be stressing precisely to find some of those issues that are not yet discovered.
Miller: The kinds of buildings in the past, certainly the ones that have gotten press, that have been written about in newspapers using this manufacturing technology, have been pretty big buildings or pretty high profile ones, at colleges or community colleges or headquarters for building companies, the kinds of buildings that builders want to show off to say this is what we can do with this technology. Ernesto, it seems like building a manufactured home or, or modular home, it seems like a very different use for this technology. Has it been used before for smaller cases like this?
Fonseca: No, not for any real solution. They are starting to make smaller structures. And you touched a really important point, some of the issues that you described earlier where identifying larger stands and larger buildings for as you know, having that problem by itself will be extremely difficult.
Miller: I want to remind folks that Ernesto Fonseca is the CEO of Hacienda Community Development Corporation, Curtis Robinhold is the Executive Director of the Port of Portland. Curtis Robinhold, back to you. I think of the Port of Portland as doing two big things: Running the Portland Airport and managing shipping terminals where consumer goods, broadly, are imported, especially from Asia and agricultural products are exported to Asia and to other markets. What’s the connection between the ports and timber construction?
Robinhold: It’s a great question, Dave. The Port has been around for 125 years and we do run PDX and two general aviation airports in Hillsboro and Troutdale. We have the marine terminals on the Willamette and Columbia, we’re also the largest developer and owner of industrial property in the state of Oregon. So it’s a pretty diverse portfolio. One of the things really the pandemic, and the increased awareness of racial discrimination in our community, and economic disruption, sort of these three trends that we’ve become increasingly aware of. At the port we started to think about what is our role in the community and what is our mission. Our mission is really about economic development and lifting up the community. In particular, I think now, it’s about lifting up the community for people who have been missing out on the prosperity that the port has created in the past. So we’ve really been leaning in on this in the last couple years, Ernesto mentioned that we’ve been looking for opportunities. This is one where Terminal Two, downtown Portland, for about 100 years, we exported raw logs from Oregon to other markets from that facility. Now that it’s sitting idle, it’s an opportunity for us to think about, ‘What are you doing with your assets? How are you applying them to the community benefit?’ This is one we talked about earlier, not only addressing affordable housing, but also workforce issues. How do you get people in those jobs who maybe didn’t have opportunities in manufacturing in the past and really how can you use manufacturing to help on an issue like climate change. So it felt like a really unique opportunity, you’ll hear as I defer to Ernesto on the mass timber issues? We aren’t pros on housing, we’re really pros on industrial development and on running large projects successfully.
Miller: And what about workforce development? Are you an expert on that? Because that’s a part of what you’re talking about. I would imagine a place like PCC would be more in their wheelhouse. What experience do you have at the ports in training future workers?
Robinhold: You bet. Our assumption is not that we would train the workers ourselves, but that we’ve identified as a place where we can partner and be the place where that happens. So really training a workforce in high tech manufacturing is going to take people who are not from the port, it’s leveraging existing programs in the state to really grow the trades relationships with labor unions and training organizations. And that’s really this piece that the federal grant you mentioned at the outset of the show is going to help us to explore: How do you do that? Who do you bring in? How do you create a place where people can enter a workforce that pays above median wages from the get go. And it’s a pretty exciting opportunity. That is not our area of expertise, but really where we can create a platform for that to take place.
Miller: Ernesto, I want to go back to the affordable piece of affordable housing because that is one of many parts of this that the two of you were talking about. It is mass timber or cross-laminated timber, is it right now, as inexpensive as the kinds of materials that are currently going into modular homes?
Fonseca: Yes and no, depends on how you analyze this product. The regular traditional housing that is being built with sticks and bricks, of course a lot of labor on site. So if you take into account only the materials, it will be more expensive. But if you look at this product, you know that introducing the manufacturing facility, it will be a lot cheaper, about a third of the cost of what we currently are experiencing. Those are projections. They will be much cheaper to build in our facility and then deliver these units to different locations in the smaller parts than what you can see in the current level of labor, specialist labor to different sites across the state. So that is one of the things that I want to discuss and we were discussing earlier. This will be also alleviating some of that labor capacity shortages that we see in Oregon when you don’t have a dry-waller or roofer or something like that. In this vision you can control it. So quality control as well as mass producing this will lower the cost significantly from what we currently see here in Oregon, all of these other construction types. Obviously not the solution for everything, but it’s a solution that we believe is going to change and disrupt the industry, at least in housing.
Miller: Ernesto Fonseca and Curtis Robinhold, thanks very much.
Robinhold: Thank you, Dave.
Fonseca: Thank you.
Miller: Ernesto Fonseca is the CEO of Hacienda Community Development Corporation, Curtis Robinhold is the Executive Director of the Port of Portland. There are two of the groups behind this consortium to practice to do prototypes of mass timber modular homes at the Ports of Portland.
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