Copeland Commons, an affordable housing project, is planned for a former hotel building on Marine Drive.

Two significant projects in Astoria and Warrenton are receiving a boost from the state historic preservation office of Oregon.

This week, the Astoria Downtown Historic District Association received a $400,000 Revitalizing Main Street grant to support Copeland Commons, a low-income housing project planned for downtown Astoria. Spruce Up Warrenton also received a $400,000 grant to support Outpost Warrenton, a third space with housing planned for downtown Warrenton.

Copeland Commons

Copeland Commons would bring more than 60 units of housing to Astoria in the historic State Hotel on Marine Drive. 

In 2019, a group of members from Astoria First Presbyterian Church purchased the property. Since then, they’ve formed a nonprofit and partnered with Innovative Housing, Inc., a Portland-based developer that has overseen other similar low-income housing projects like the Merwyn apartments next to Astoria City Hall. Quinn Haase, the Astoria Downtown Historic District Association’s executive director, said the project aligns well with the organization’s mission of preserving and advancing elements of the downtown historic area. 

It also fits with broader goals for bringing more housing to Astoria. 

“The goal that the Copeland Commons group foresaw with using this building, this property that they bought, aligns very neatly with the city’s plan for and the state’s plan for more housing being developed in the state and within the city of Astoria,” Haase said. “We have pretty limited options as far as building in Astoria since we’re kind of already at a pretty full capacity land-use wise, so it makes a lot of sense to utilize the existing structures that we have and repair and restore the ones that aren’t being used.” 

Bill Van Nostran, a retired pastor and Copeland Commons’ volunteer board secretary and registered agent, said the vision for housing remains six years later. 

To complete the project, the nonprofit plans to apply for federal tax credits and Housing and Urban Development funds through Oregon Housing and Community Services. They initially worked with developers to set a goal of raising $1.5 million on their own to complete pre-development tasks and to demonstrate they had put significant time and effort into the project. The $400,000 Main Street grant gets them almost all the way there.

But they’ve also identified an additional $700,000 need — a gap they’re in conversations with the City of Astoria to try to help fill. At a recent city council meeting, Julie Garver, the housing development director for Innovative Housing Inc., formally requested $200,000 from the city. 

The total cost of the project has also risen significantly. In 2019, Van Nostran said the price tag was between $18 million and $20 million. Now, the estimated total is more than $29 million. 

Van Nostran attributed those changes to a number of factors, including rising interest rates, supply chain and tariff concerns and impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. A recent ruling by Oregon’s Bureau of Labor & Industries that determined the project needed to pay union wages also added a cost of about $2.5 million to the project. Previous Innovative Housing developments have not been subject to that type of determination, and Copeland Commons is currently appealing the decision.

“The reason that affordable housing is so hard to build is because it’s so hard. Every step of the process is difficult, and no amount of do-gooder energy in the community or in the state or in the nation can make up for the onerous hoops and hurdles and cost barriers to develop housing,” Van Nostran said. 

Van Nostran said $400,000 is a drop in the bucket for the overall project, but it brings the nonprofit that much closer to applying for funding with Oregon Housing and Community Services — something they’re grateful for. 

“We’re closer than we’ve ever been since 2019,” he said. “We’re hoping that we might be in a position to get the approval letter from OHCS in January of 2026.” 

He also expressed gratitude to the Astoria Downtown Historic District Association, which has been an accredited participant in the Oregon Main Street Network for around a decade. Because this round of grants was only available to network participants, their shared vision played a key role in helping Copeland Commons secure funding. 

“I think a lot of Astorians would be able to be qualified to live in these units, and that’s going to do a lot for our downtown, especially as we keep seeing more of a trend towards a tourism-based economy and hospitality-based economy with lots of jobs in the retail and food industry,” Haase said. “These are homes for people who are going to work and live in Astoria. And I think that part is important.”

Outpost Warrenton

Jess Sollaccio’s vision for Outpost Warrenton is to add a vibrant new third space to downtown Warrenton. The project will bring a coffee shop, children’s play studio and other micro enterprises to the ground floor, and housing units to the second floor of the historic Fenton grocery building on South Main Avenue.

When Sollaccio first moved to Warrenton, it didn’t take long for her to notice that the building, right at the heart of downtown, was going unused.

“Since we moved into Warrenton, I’d just been looking at this vacant, mostly vacant property, wondering, you know, like, what it could possibly be for the community,” she said.

Sollaccio and her husband acquired the building in 2024 with the support of a Warrenton urban renewal grant, and the project has been in the permitting phase since November. At the time that the most recent Main Street grant application opened up, Sollaccio was serving as the economic development committee chair for Spruce Up Warrenton, a community organization dedicated to revitalizing downtown Warrenton and Hammond. The nonprofit opened up the application to other businesses in the community, but ultimately identified Outpost Warrenton as the best fit. 

In total, the project is anticipated to cost around $2.5 million. Between the $400,000 Mainstreet grant and the funding the project has received through urban renewal, Sollaccio said they’ve already passed $1 million. That type of support — especially for a matching grant — has made a world of difference. 

“My husband and I could never take on a project like this, because it’s an empty building, and no one’s gonna loan you money for an empty building if you’re not a big name developer. And if we want to keep projects local and have local people do them, really, the only mechanism is through grants like this,” Sollaccio said. “So we’re very grateful to be trusted and to be given the opportunity that would typically only be open to people that have more means.”