Ben Kaiser paused for a moment outside an October meeting of the Portland design review commission, close enough to see and hear the neighbors gathered to argue against an eight-story building he plans for North Portland.

The developer knows what neighbors think of him. They’ve called him a monster. They look at him, he says, like he builds for sport, like he’s wealthier than God. Still, he smiled at them.

“Long time no see,” he said.

“Is that him?” one person asked. “He looks like a horse jockey.”

The dig about Kaiser’s stature -- he’s a wiry 5-foot-2 -- underscored just how bad relations have become between the 47-year-old builder and neighbors, and how traumatic rapid redevelopment can be for a community.

Not long ago, neighbors saw

as the answer to their prayers for revitalization in this run-down, long-ignored inner-city neighborhood close to Legacy Emanuel Medical Center and the Fremont Bridge.

A decade after arriving, Kaiser hasn’t built anything on North Williams Avenue. But neighbors have made him the personification of their anger. Like activists in Southwest Portland’s Lair Hill, in Southeast Portland’s Richmond and

, they’re arguing against taller buildings and greater density -- traits city planners and builders say are necessary to keep the region vibrant and growing.

What makes Kaiser’s story unusual is how hard he worked to win neighbors over. He wanted to remake a community hand-in-hand with its residents. Instead, he’s pushing ahead over their objections and learning that when a neighborhood changes, the developer almost always ends up as the bad guy.

Inspired by a children's book

Kaiser wanted to be on North Williams because no one else did.

He grew up in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and had dreamed of becoming an architect since reading Richard Scarry’s “

” – in which anthropomorphized animals build a house and a community -- as a little boy.

He graduated from the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design and came to the Pacific Northwest in 1993 to rock climb as much as make a living. He started his career renovating then selling rundown houses in Southwest Portland.

That work was profitable but unfulfilling; any developer, Kaiser figured, could flip a house in an established neighborhood. He’s a risk taker – a guy who runs ultra marathons and once sold all his belongings to study jewelry making in Italy. He wanted to do something more meaningful.

The area around Williams had been a thriving neighborhood of German and Eastern European immigrants in the late 1800s, and the heart of African-American Portland before much of it

.

In the 1980s, urban renewal remade Northeast Portland. The worst neighborhoods became the coolest. But Williams remained a collection of empty storefronts and vacant lots, a place people from Irvington and Alameda drove through -- as fast as possible -- on their way downtown.

Portland’s star developers turned industrial warehouse space into the Pearl and worn-down Alberta into an arts district. Kaiser believed he could achieve similar success on Williams.

He started buying land in North Portland in 2004, at a time when lots went for as little as $16 a foot. As he toured the neighborhood association circuit, talking up a planned four-story condo project with ground-floor retail, Kaiser introduced himself as a neighborhood guy. He lived just east of Williams on Northeast 7th Avenue and kept an office on nearby Mississippi Avenue. In meetings, he cracked jokes and described a vibrant community few others could imagine. He wooed

to the neighborhood. He wrote letters to the power company, urging them to start planning for a spate of construction.

Half Kaiser’s condos sold before he ever put a shovel in the dirt.

North Williams Avenue

North Williams and North Vancouver avenues are in the middle of a construction boom. As half a dozen new projects go up along the corridor, the neighborhood surrounding them still holds many century-old houses. This map, color-coded by age, illustrates the juxtaposition.

The economy turns

Only a few months later, Kaiser asked friends to meet him before rush hour on North Williams on the site of his condo project. In pre-dawn darkness, they took down the signs announcing units for sale and shuttered the old gas station he used as a leasing office.

As the country slipped into recession, Kaiser refunded all the deposits. He and a partner held millions of dollars in debt, but nothing was getting built. Kaiser’s wife, real-estate agent

, supported the family financially for five years. He supplemented that with smaller projects, like a backyard studio and a renovation of the Cedarwood Waldorf School.

“If you had called me, I would have personally built a doghouse for you,” Kaiser said.

When a neighbor did call in 2011, asking to open a community market on one of Kaiser’s lots, he said yes. The neighbor couldn’t afford rent, but Kaiser thought a daily market, with concerts, locally grown produce and handmade crafts, would bring a healthy buzz to the neighborhood. Better something than nothing, he figured.

He was wrong. The property wasn’t zoned for all the ways market organizers used it. Some neighbors preferred vacant land and reported Kaiser to city regulators, who fined him close to $1,500.

“Suddenly,” Kaiser said, “I’m making more enemies over something intended to help the neighborhood.”

Relationships gone wrong

After the recession, Kaiser returned to work on a street that had become hip in his absence, and to neighbors who’d learned how to fight.

Kaiser thought all his hard work on building relationships along Williams would allow him to avoid the kind of complaints that bubbled up when a developer built 72 apartments on land once home to the iconic African-American owned business House of Sound. He met with neighbors to brainstorm ideas for his properties, and listened to their requests for a hotel or a movie theater at the corner of Williams and Fremont.

Kaiser went to the Eliot neighborhood association’s land use committee and asked them to support a zoning change that would allow a mix of residential and retail, but not require a housing component, on the property where he’d originally hoped to build four stories of condos.

Over ribs at a local barbecue joint, the land use committee’s chairman told Kaiser the association opposed that change because it could allow a standalone chain-store such as Walgreens. Instead, Mike Warwick suggested that Kaiser pursue a different zoning that would require both housing and commercial uses.

They didn’t discuss height during that meal, but the zoning class Warwick suggested allows buildings as tall as 100 feet -- potentially nine or ten stories.

Kaiser said he hadn’t thought about how tall he wanted his new project to be at that point, though in an email he told Warwick he wasn’t interested in a “65-foot behemoth.” He began to reconsider as momentum for the zoning change grew among neighborhood leaders and he came closer to actually building something.

Portland planners routinely nudge developers to use all the space available to them, to fill every square foot a particular zoning category allows. Kaiser, thinking about the larger picture, proposed an 85-foot-tall complex. That’s two stories higher than anything in the surrounding neighborhood. But Kaiser, who now lives in nearby Sabin, said he isn’t thinking about today’s Williams, a place with plenty of vacant land. He’s anticipating Williams in a decade, the hip hotspot where his now 7-year-old daughter will hang out when she’s in high school.

He expected neighbors would greet this plan with the same approval he enjoyed before the recession.

. They were fine with a six-story tall building, but eight stories seemed unreasonable. Paul Van Orden, who lives two houses away, said Kaiser’s project would prohibit his family from using solar panels they’ve spent a decade saving up to buy.

Kaiser’s joking, talkative manner once seemed charming. Now, neighbors said, he came off as manipulative and insincere. They put up yard signs calling his project a monster. They accused him of lying to them, of taking advantage of them.

The Portland City Council

anyway. Only Commissioner Amanda Fritz voted no, questioning why Kaiser wanted to build so tall.

In response, he cited the city’s own plans for more density.

“We cannot go backwards,” Kaiser wrote Fritz. “We cannot let these entitled neighborhoods dismantle decades of previous work.”

This kind of fight has become common in the Portland area, with similar recent skirmishes in every quadrant of the city. Even suburban Hillsboro, which has tried to replicate the Pearl District’s success in its own Orenco neighborhood, has seen longtime neighbors fighting with developers about density and building height. The two sides aren’t just fighting about specific buildings. They’re arguing, block by block and neighborhood by neighborhood, over the future shape of the region.

The Final Showdown

Kaiser and North Williams neighbors met for their final showdown in late October.

Neighbors who took off work to attend the afternoon meeting of the city’s

complained that the process favors developers: Kaiser, they noted, had hours to present his plans; they each had only three minutes to point out the flaws. Worse yet, they said, Kaiser has served on the design commission for seven years. Even though he recused himself from this case, he’s worked with the commission’s other members to make hundreds of small decisions about Portland’s future.

“This doesn’t pass my gut check,” said

, a neighboring business owner.

Kaiser caught some of their complaints, though not the crack about his height, as he passed neighbors in the hallway. But he pressed on, smiling in a friendly way at them as he walked by.

His wife gets riled up about the protestors. His father-in-law even crashed one anti-Kaiser rally to defend him. Kaiser brushes criticism as part of the job: The first skill any developer needs, he said, is the ability to compartmentalize.

Kaiser said he has learned this year that he will never make everyone happy. At some point, he said, he has to move forward with the kinds of projects that fit the city’s long-term planning goals, regardless of neighborhood opposition.

His two-building project would top out at 85 feet on Northeast Fremont Street, he told design commissioners, but step down to 40 near adjacent houses. He planned a

for retirees in one building, and small, furnished apartments and retail space in the other with a large courtyard in between and parking underground.

When their turn came to speak to design commissioners, residents said the project was too tall, too fancy and too far removed from what Kaiser originally told them he wanted to build. One neighbor said the project would work perfectly – in the Pearl.

“Perhaps we were naïve,” Warwick said.

“It belongs in the Pearl,” neighbor Kelly Gillard said.

Commissioners expressed reservations about the height, but said they prefer tall to wide and supported Kaiser’s plan.

“You should be commended,” one commissioner told him. “It’s evident you care about the neighborhood a lot.”

At the end of the six-hour meeting, Kaiser had to walk the gauntlet of neighbors again to leave. He smiled at them and tried to sound friendly.

“See you guys,” he said.

One neighbor laughed. Just before the door shut behind Kaiser, she called out after him:

“I hope not, Ben.”

-- Casey Parks