Downtown Vancouver to gain new apartments

Apr. 9—Hurley Development and LSW Architects plan on building a six-story mixed-use apartment building on the block of downtown Vancouver that Hurley planned to build into a Hyatt Hotel before the pandemic.

The apartment complex, called Washington Street Apartments, is planned to rise on a lot between Columbia, Washington, West Fifth and West Fourth streets. The lot is south of the Smokin' Oak restaurant.

The plans describe a 151,600-square-foot building that would cover the entire block, with 9,080 square feet of restaurant or retail space on the ground floor facing Columbia and West Fifth Streets, and one level of underground parking.

The ground floor will feature a row of walk-up style apartment units along West Fourth Street, and the floors above are all apartments, arranged around a central second-floor courtyard. The project includes 170 units and 124 internal parking spaces, along with 18 street parking stalls. Garage access is from Washington Street.

The application also details some planned landscape improvements on the far side of Washington Street to the south of the project site.

Three-quarters of the project block is currently undeveloped, with a single-story building in the southwest quadrant and a second small single-story structure near the center. Illustrations of the proposed apartment building suggest that both current structures would be removed.

The property sits at the northern end of a row of freeway-adjacent blocks that Hurley Development has spent several years targeting for redevelopment, with the goal of turning them into a modern gateway to downtown Vancouver.

"It was an extreme sore spot for the city that needed a development plan," Hurley Development President Ryan Hurley said in an interview last year.

The block immediately south of the proposed apartments is owned by Pacific Energy Concepts. The company moved into the old Eagle Street Automotive building on the site after Hurley Development remodeled it several years ago.

The next block south houses the six-story Hurley Tower, a $12 million office condo building that finished construction about a year ago.

Hurley announced plans last year for a second office tower on the south side of the BNSF Railway berm, but the project was called off after the Washington State Department of Transportation offered to buy the land for potential use as part of a future Interstate 5 Bridge replacement.

Hurley Development had long eyed the northern block as the site for a planned Hyatt Hotel project, but Ryan Hurley confirmed last summer that the plan had been reworked to focus on apartments instead of a hotel.

Hurley could not be immediately reached for comment.

Vancouver-based LSW Architects submitted the application on behalf of Ten Talents Investments 9 LLC, the Hurley-affiliated company that owns the project site. A pre-application conference has been scheduled for 9 a.m. April 29.