The Northeast Public Development Authority has high hopes for the future of Hillyard, with three developments in the works valued at well over $10 million, says Jesse Bank, executive director of the PDA.

Ongoing and future investment is designed to help attract new businesses to the community and boost economic development, job recruitment, and small business growth, he says.

"Investment begets investment," Bank says.

The activity comes after years of setbacks that have stymied the authority's development progress in the community, including financing shortfalls for infrastructure improvements at Beacon Hill and Esmeralda Commerce Park, a gap in leadership at the PDA, and the pandemic.

This year, the PDA acquired a half-acre, city-owned parcel at 3011 E. Wellesley in April, where the organization plans to build a mixed-use building that would be home to 40 units of workforce housing, a day care facility, and  an office for the PDA.

The PDA doesn't have an estimated cost to develop the property yet, he says.

"This facility is going to be geared toward service-sector workers and shift workers. (Child care) will be open late and on weekends to help those people who need that," says Bank.

Funding has also been secured for a $4.5 million rebuild project on a half-mile stretch of East Wellesley Avenue, between Freya and Havana streets. Design work is underway for the road project, and construction is expected to begin next year, says Bank.

The rebuild includes lane expansion and reconfiguration, water infrastructure improvements, pedestrian improvements, and green infrastructure, according to the city of Spokane's project website.

A second street rebuild project is being planned to update a half-mile section of Freya Street between Wellesley and Garland avenues.

"Between those two, we're approaching $11 million in infrastructure investment in the next couple years," says Bank.

Outside of the infrastructure improvements, the PDA also is working on a 20-year plan for the community to be presented to City Council by the end of the year. 

The plan will outline community needs and provide a formal path forward to achieve the neighborhood's goals. 

Additionally, the 20-year plan will hold city leaders accountable to residents in the community, Bank says.

"All of those plans and the vision that the neighborhood did with previous iterations of the PDA was great, but it wasn't official," he says. "One of the biggest challenges up here throughout all of the previous planning efforts was that people in the area asked for things and ... then it never happened."

Bank joined as executive director of the Northeast PDA in August 2022 and has spent the last two years reengaging community members to contribute to the updated vision for Hillyard.

The PDA is working with Stantec Consulting Services Inc., a Bellevue-based consulting group with a Spokane office, that focuses on large-scale redevelopment projects and public financing. 

Stantec is helping review the 20-year plan and will provide funding options and financing tools, he says.

"We did that because of those empty promises. We have to deliver at least some elements of this plan and have it be obvious that they've been delivered for the people to continue to buy in," Bank says. "That's critical." 

Investments in the neighborhood are part of the PDA's strategy for business recruitment.

Many of the properties are smaller parcels of land with few paved roads and no municipal stormwater infrastructure, Bank explains. Constructing the needed infrastructure will remove some major costs for companies interested in the neighborhood.

"By having a regional stormwater system ... you're functionally making every site 30% bigger," Bank says. "The thinking is that the PDA is setting the stage for those businesses to come."

Some residents and small business owners are ready to see the planned neighborhood changes. 

Bobby Whittaker and partner Sandra Bilbrey are banking on a revitalized Hillyard community with the completion of the North Spokane Corridor, says Whittaker.

As previously reported in the Journal, construction of the $1.67 billion North Spokane Corridor continues its path south towards Interstate 90 and is expected to be completed by 2030.

Once open to traffic, the North Spokane Corridor is expected to absorb the majority of truck traffic traveling through Hillyard, creating more opportunities for the neighborhood to grow as a walkable, pedestrian-friendly community, says Bank.

Whittaker and Bilbrey are redeveloping the 117-year-old, 12,400-square-foot Kehoe Building, located at 5002 N. Market.

"We bought this building because it's on the Children of the Sun Trail," says Whittaker. "This project is hitting all the marks that Sandra and I are excited about for a bicycle, pedestrian-friendly neighborhood."

Affordability was another draw for the couple to invest in a Hillyard development, Whittaker says.

"(Hillyard) is still a mom-and-pop, brick-and-mortar community," says Whittaker. "It feels pretty progressive, but in a good way, and I like that Hillyard is growing into its own without a bunch of outside force."

PDAs were created in Washington state and act as government-owned corporations. The Northeast PDA is a partnership between the city of Spokane and Spokane County that was formed to focus on specific goals, such as the increased economic activity and job growth within its boundaries.

PDAs facilitate the redevelopment, development, and construction of public benefit projects to achieve its mission, according to the city of Spokane's website.

"Municipalities have to focus very broadly and make equally beneficial decisions, which is hard to focus on a specific project or task," says Bank. "PDAs were created as a public organization that has a lot of the rights and powers that a jurisdiction has, but they don't have the responsibility to distribute what they're doing."

PDAs also are intended to be more entrepreneurial than a jurisdiction can be, Bank explains, adding that Seattle's Pike Place Market is a notable example of an operation managed by a PDA.

In Spokane, there are two PDAs in addition to the Northeast organization: the West Plains PDA, dubbed S3R3 Solutions, and the University District Development Association.

The Northeast PDA includes about 3,500 acres, the majority of which is zoned for industrial use, says Bank.

Properties within the PDA's boundaries include undeveloped, industrial, brownfield, urban residential, and urban commercial sites, but not much suburban properties, he says.

The PDA's boundary reaches from East Hawthorne Road in the north to East Illinois Avenue to the south. The western boundary is Nevada Street and the eastern edge is about a block east of North Carnahan Road.

The town of Hillyard which was annexed by Spokane in 1924, has served as a terminal for the Great Northern Railroad, where the construction and repair of locomotives happened onsite from 1892 to 1982.

Later in the 1980s and into the 1990s, as rail activity declined and major employers in the community closed, such as Kaiser Aluminum Mead Works, Hillyard became, "one of the poorest census tracts in the state of Washington with astonishingly poor health outcomes," Bank says.

Life expectancy dropped five years for residents in Hillyard, he contends.

"Market Street didn't have all of this vitality that it's beginning to get now," Bank says. "There's lots of empty storefronts and boarded up windows, It was primarily a place to drive through, not a place to stop."

In 2011, a group of Hillyard residents and community advocates helped form the Northeast PDA, but Bank explains that it was operating without a dedicated funding stream and struggled to make progress for many years.

"They did what they could, but they weren't able to do a lot because they didn't have a lot of resources," he says.

In 2020, Northeast PDA was reformed and expanded.

"We expanded our boundaries to include a piece of the Market Street corridor, as well as some county land up north around the Kaiser plant," Bank says. "Critically, they established what's known as the Special Revenue District."

The revenue district now provides 75% of proceeds from property, retail sales, and new construction taxes to help the the organization invest in the neighborhood, Bank explains.

"The better the PDA does what it's designed to do, the better the district does, and the more money that we have to continue to reinvest," says Bank. 

The Special Revenue District will expire in 2040, which is prompting the PDA to determine the best way to invest in community development.

Last summer, Northeast PDA expanded its boundaries for the second time in a decision that added Jubilant HollisterStier and the remaining portion of the Market Street corridor to the authority's jurisdiction.

The expansion has helped increase tax revenue for the authority in 2024. Bank estimates about $1.2 million in revenue will be generated for the organization by the end of the year.

"It's substantial. That's a good amount of money that we can actually do things at scale," he contends.

Going forward, the PDA is eyeing additional properties to develop that will give residents some of the services they've been requesting for years.

"We're not ready to talk about any of those just yet, but there are more in the pipeline," he says.

He adds, "I want to get things done and solve problems and I want to help other people solve their problems. The hope is that we're building credibility for the PDA, which had been pretty invisible prior to the last couple of years. We're trying to become a trusted partner ... and resource."