McDonald's Gives in to Mixed Use on Hawthorne

PORTLAND-It appears Portland’s popular Hawthorne Boulevard will see a new and improved use at the corner of Southeast 34th Avenue, a 23,000-sf parcel currently home to a large parking lot and a boarded up fast food restaurant. McDonald’s recently assigned a purchase option for the property to a local architect and developer in exchange for the right to lease a 2,500-sf corner space in the 80,000-sf mixed-use building now being planned for the site.

The news follows a city report that finds that an illegal alternation of the drive-thru in the mid-1990s means it is no longer a grandfathered use, which is what attracted McDonald’s to the property in the first place. The would-be buyer is Alan Kravitz, part owner in and former project manager of Paul Brenneke’s Avalon Hotel project on Southwest Macadam.

Kravitz, who also owns an interest in several area senior housing projects with another partner, recently formed his own company, Aiyana Group, the tagline for which is “progressive real estate solutions.” Kravitz tells GlobeSt.com he also is buying up the 40,000-sf block bounded by Broadway and Weidler and 17th and 18th in the Lloyd District en route to another mixed-use project.