Portland, OR | 2021

Cascadia Partners was hired by a local advocacy organization to create a real-estate-focused strategy to strengthen Asian and Pacific Islander (API) identity and safeguard the permanence of API business and resident communities.

Cascadia Partners focused on how to provide long-term and affordable living-and business-space opportunities while reflecting APANO's existing resources and constraints. Cascadia conducted qualitative and quantitative research to ground the strategy in community needs and development and property ownership realities. CP conducted interviews with affordable housing and commercial developers, hailing from small culturally specific community-development-corporations to larger regional mission-driven real estate organizations. Cascadia then synthesized and presented interview findings to an APANO Steering Committee and facilitated a discussion triangulating community needs, interviewees’ recommendations regarding a community development strategy, and APANO’s pre-existing resources, constraints, and desires for how to move forward. This high-level strategizing exercise laid the groundwork for placemaking and real-estate acquisition, ultimately resulting in the purchase of an identified opportunity site.