Drive through Town Center Loop this week and you will notice two things. The first is a fenced, flattened lot at the corner of Town Center Loop and Park Place, where Shari's Cafe and Pies served pie and coffee for decades before the building came down this year. The second is orange cones and a flagger crew working Boones Ferry Road after dark, resurfacing pavement that has needed it for a while. Neither looks like news. Both are the visible edge of a decision the city spent months arguing about, and that decision is not finished yet. Voters get the last word on November 3.
Most people driving past the Shari's site assume it is just another teardown waiting for a builder. It is actually the test case for a fight the City Council only resolved eleven days ago, and the fight was never really about one restaurant. It was about how tall Wilsonville's downtown is allowed to get, who gets to decide that, and whether the city can spend public money to make redevelopment happen faster. The lot sits there right now as the physical proof of what the city just agreed to, and as a preview of what a November ballot measure will decide about paying for more of it.
The lot itself is smaller than the story around it
The former Shari's property at 29690 SW Town Center Loop W is being redeveloped into a mixed-use building with apartments over ground-floor retail, replacing the standalone restaurant that anchored that corner. Demolition of the old building is the first phase of the project. According to the city's own Town Center project page, the developer is expected to begin construction in late 2026 or early 2027, which means the fenced lot residents are driving past now will likely stay fenced through the winter before anything visibly rises from it.
That timeline matters less than what almost derailed it. For most of the past year, Wilsonville has been fighting over exactly how tall a building like this one is allowed to be, and the fight was loud enough to reshape city policy before a single new wall went up.
The height fight residents just won, sort of
Wilsonville's 2019 Town Center Plan already divided downtown into four sub-districts, each with its own height ceiling. The mixed-use and main street sub-districts top out between two and four stories. Commercial mixed-use tops out at five. But the code also let developers apply for waivers to exceed those numbers, and by early 2026 that waiver process had become the thing residents kept bringing up.
The city's own community survey results, presented to the council that same month, found that people were genuinely excited about the idea of a busier downtown with more local businesses and gathering space. They were just as clear that they didn't want to trade the small-town feel of Wilsonville to get it. City Attorney Amanda Guile-Hinman put it plainly to the council in February:
"Community members expressed concern about losing the small-town feel of Wilsonville and building height."
That concern turned into action fast. On March 2, the council approved a limited-duration task force to review the waiver rules, set to commence the week of March 30 and wrap by mid-April before handing recommendations to the Planning Commission. The task force's conclusion, and the council's, was to remove the waiver option rather than adjust it. On September 10, the council adopted Ordinance No. 906, which strips out the language allowing developers to apply for height increases above the Town Center Plan's existing maximums. Every new building in Town Center, including whatever eventually replaces the old Shari's, is now locked to that three-to-five-story ceiling with no waiver path around it.
For a resident watching the fenced lot, this is the part that actually affects the skyline. The building that goes up there will look like what the 2019 plan always intended, not something taller negotiated after the fact.
November 3 is where the money question gets decided
Height was never the only open question. The second one is whether the city can use urban renewal to help pay for the kind of redevelopment residents said they wanted in that same survey, more local business space and public gathering areas, without waiting for private developers to fund it all themselves.
Here the timeline runs back further than most people realize. In May 2026, Wilsonville voters approved Measure 3-632, a charter amendment requiring a binding public vote before the city can establish any urban renewal district, or make certain changes to an existing one. That measure was a direct response to how urban renewal districts have typically been created in Oregon, usually by council action alone. Wilsonville residents decided they wanted the final call themselves.
That vote is now scheduled. On August 6, a ballot title was filed for Ordinance No. 905, which would establish the Town Center Development District, an urban renewal district built specifically to fund new public infrastructure and address blight within Town Center's boundaries. If Wilsonville voters approve it on November 3, and the council formally adopts it afterward, the district would give the city a funding mechanism to accelerate the kind of streets, plazas, and public space work that private redevelopment alone typically leaves out.
So the sequence, in order, looks like this. Residents worried the code let buildings get too tall. The council capped heights for good in September. Residents also wanted a direct vote on urban renewal, got that written into the charter in May, and now get to decide in November whether Town Center gets that funding tool at all. The empty lot at Town Center Loop and Park Place is sitting in the middle of that sequence right now, already locked into the new height rule, waiting to see if the district that might help fund its neighbors gets approved.
The cones are a separate, more mundane story, but they explain this week
Not everything happening on Boones Ferry Road this month is about zoning. The city is also mid-project on a straightforward pavement rehab that has nothing to do with the height ordinance or the ballot measure, and it is worth separating the two so residents aren't left guessing why every drive through Old Town suddenly involves a detour.
Here's the current schedule, according to the city's own construction update:
- Boones Ferry Road from Wilsonville Road to Barber Street began night paving on September 18, expected to take two to three nights, with Kinsman Road recommended as the detour route.
- Pavement repair in the Kinsman-to-Brown segment ran September 19, with the signal at Montebello and Wilsonville Road temporarily shut off for flagger-directed traffic.
- The Willamette Way segment was next in line.
- Lane striping across the corridor is scheduled for September 23 through 27, weather permitting.
- Final roadway paving begins October 1, broken into roughly six sections at about one section per day, with work sometimes extending into the evening commute and school pickup hours.
None of this is connected to the Shari's redevelopment or the November vote. It is ordinary infrastructure maintenance on a schedule that happens to overlap with the bigger civic story this fall, which is exactly why it is easy to lump together in your head as one general sense that Old Town feels torn up right now. It does. Two different projects are just doing it at the same time.
What the next year actually depends on
The September Boones Ferry Messenger, the city's monthly newsletter to residents, packed in a few other items worth knowing even if they're smaller: a new Frog Pond School opening for its first class, and a reminder that Wilsonville voters this fall are also electing two city councilors alongside the development district measure. Both are minor compared to the height and funding decisions, but they're part of the same fall rhythm of a city working through its own growth in public, on the record, one meeting at a time.
The thing worth holding onto through all of this is that Wilsonville didn't quietly let its downtown get taller or get funded differently. Residents raised the concern, the council built a process around it, and the next major piece goes to a public vote instead of a closed-door decision. Whatever ends up built on the old Shari's lot, and whatever gets built near it if the November measure passes, will be shaped by rules the community argued into place this year, not rules that happened to it.
If you're watching this play out because you're thinking about what your home in Wilsonville is worth as Town Center changes, or you're weighing a move here and want to understand how a place like this actually makes decisions about its own growth, that's a conversation worth having directly. Tracy Brophy has spent two decades working the Portland metro's western suburbs, including Wilsonville, and can walk you through what a market consultation or home valuation looks like once you're ready.
