Marc Esrig on The VIC and the "20-Minute Neighborhood" Coming to Vancouver, Washington

New Blueprint Partners co-founder Marc Esrig sat down with Connor Webb and Sharon for the "Living in the PNW" series, filmed on site at the Vancouver Innovation Center, to walk through how a former Hewlett-Packard campus is being reimagined into one of the Pacific Northwest's most ambitious live-work-play neighborhoods.

An outsider's eye on a 179-acre campus

Marc has spent his career in industrial real estate, starting right out of college as a broker in New Jersey, moving through bank workouts during the savings-and-loan crisis, and later founding and running his own development companies before partnering with his childhood friend Ron Schinik to launch New Blueprint Partners roughly seven years ago.

The VIC found them as much as they found it. Ron surfaced the listing for a campus Marc had driven past many times while working on other Pacific Northwest deals. From the air it looked like a donut hole, a large gated property that the surrounding neighborhoods had grown up around through the late 1990s. Locals knew it only as the old HP campus and rarely saw inside.

"We saw the potential that sometimes you can't see when you see something every day," Marc said. "Sometimes it takes an outsider." He compares it to the Chelsea neighborhood in New York where he grew up, a place he watched transform after he had already moved on.

Going under contract weeks before COVID

New Blueprint went under contract at the end of December 2019, with a limited due diligence window and a tight timeline to close. As February gave way to news of a spreading virus, Marc, who lives in New Rochelle, New York, one of the country's earliest COVID hotspots, asked the seller for more time and was told no. Days after he flew home, the seller called back asking how much time he needed.

"The sad fact of it is that without COVID we probably wouldn't have been able to do this deal," Marc said. The extra time gave the team room to structure the acquisition, envision the campus, and put the whole plan together.

Repositioning the buildings first, the land second

The campus carries about 700,000 square feet under roof. With single-family neighborhoods immediately to the north and west, the original industrial zoning did not fit the context, so the team knew residential would eventually play a role. After running the numbers across single-family, multifamily, office, and industrial uses, they chose to focus first on the existing buildings and let the land come along as a future source of value.

The prior owner, a large local manufacturer, had acquired the campus from HP around 2006 to 2007 with plans to build solar panels, a market that collapsed under a wave of lower-cost imports. New Blueprint inherited some legacy tenants and a campus that was under 40 percent leased. It is now roughly 85 percent leased, with the team spending real money to chase the final, hardest 15 percent.

They also rebranded the property from the Vancouver Tech Center to the Vancouver Innovation Center, both to avoid confusion with the nearby Columbia Tech Center and to signal a home for newer, growing companies taking second-generation space.

Building a 20-minute neighborhood

The bigger vision is a "20-minute neighborhood," where living, working, shopping, and recreation all sit within a 20-minute walk. To get the planning right, the team studied the concept closely and hired Sidewalk Labs, a Google subsidiary focused on how communities get built.

The math pushed them toward density over single-family homes, which consume too much of an increasingly scarce land resource. New Blueprint has approval for up to 1,800 apartments, plus roughly 800,000 additional square feet of potential commercial space, and just started vertical construction on the first 261 apartments after closing its construction loan. Because the campus fronts a major shopping corridor with grocery already within walking distance, the plan skips big-box retail in favor of more efficient use of the land.

Parking is the quiet driver of the whole equation. Surface spaces cost a fraction of structured parking, so the strategy is to build the first phase, let it create energy and value, and use the returns to support denser, structured-parking phases over time.

Sustainability as strategy

New Blueprint has invested well over $12 million in property improvements, much of it behind the scenes: new chillers, a modern building management system, LED lighting throughout, upgraded cooling-tower motors, and new skylights that flood tenant spaces with natural light. Local partners including Clark Public Utilities and the Energy Trust of Oregon provided incentives.

The logic is practical as much as environmental. Tenants ultimately pay operating expenses, so lower energy costs make the buildings more attractive and easier to lease, while the upgrades double as good marketing and good community PR in an energy-conscious region.

Why New Blueprint buys the upper tier of the U.S.

Beyond the VIC, New Blueprint Partners specializes in buying older industrial and manufacturing buildings, single- and multi-tenant, with holdings across Wisconsin, Missouri, Indiana, and Illinois, and deals in progress in Ohio. The firm favors the upper tier of the country in part because of climate: abundant power and water, and less exposure to the extreme heat that can strain manufacturing elsewhere. These are buildings with cranes, high ceilings, and heavy electrical infrastructure that would cost far more to replicate today, bought below replacement cost.

Advice for entrepreneurs

Asked what he would tell someone trying to build something of their own, Marc pointed to perseverance, the willingness to keep moving forward and to pivot to a plan B when obstacles hit, and to transparency, being open and honest with partners, investors, and neighbors alike.

For leasing or more information on the campus, the team points to thevicwa.com.

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