Walk down Thames Street on a September evening and the contrast is hard to miss. Twelve's dining room glows behind tall windows, servers moving between tables set inside a building that was taken apart brick by brick and reassembled a few hundred feet from where it once stood. A few doors down, Bard Coffee pulls its second Portland location's espresso shots for a line that spills onto the sidewalk. Keep walking and the sidewalk gives way to construction fencing, a crane, and a lot that has been some version of "coming soon" since a city council approved the master plan for this waterfront a decade ago.
That gap between what's finished and what's fenced off is the whole story of Portland Foreside right now, and it matters more than most listing descriptions let on. If you're comparing East End and Munjoy Hill addresses against other Portland neighborhoods this fall, you've probably already seen this stretch of waterfront described as an amenity: walkable dining, a marina, a future public market, all within reach. Some of that is true today. A larger share of it is a bet the developer keeps revising, and the terms of that bet aren't printed on any listing sheet.
The number that keeps moving
Portland Foreside sits on the old Portland Company site, ten acres where trains were built for more than a century before the property sat mostly idle. The city approved a master development plan for the site in 2016. Ten years later, the project's total cost has pushed past $1 billion, and the current phase alone tells you why that figure keeps climbing. When the Portland Planning Board approved this phase in 2023, the developer put the price at $660 million. By early 2026, that number had grown to $970 million. Managing partner Casey Prentice now expects the work to wrap in 2029 or early 2030, a full fourteen years after the original approval.
None of that is scope creep in the ordinary sense. Nobody added a building. What changed is the quality of what's being built, upgraded, according to Prentice, based on research into what future tenants and residents would actually expect once they arrived.
"I think everybody expected it would move along faster than it did. I don't think anyone expected some of the challenges they have faced."
That's David Marshall, a Portland real estate broker who sat on the city council from 2006 to 2015 and watched the project move through its earliest approvals. He's not describing a stalled project. He's describing one that's still building, just on a longer and more expensive runway than anyone initially priced in, including, it seems, the developer.
What's open right now, and what's still a rendering
If you're weighing how much of the Foreside promise to factor into a purchase decision this year, the honest answer is that the site is roughly half a neighborhood.
| Component | Status | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Fore Points Marina | Open | Completed at a cost of $27 million |
| Sun Life office building | Open | Four stories, roughly $100 million to build |
| Twelve restaurant | Open | Housed in the relocated, reconstructed historic Building 12 |
| Bard Coffee, second location | Open | On-site coffee shop |
| Douro restaurant | Open | Part of the Prentice Hospitality portfolio |
| 130-room hotel plus 38 residences | Under construction | Part of the $970 million current phase |
| 132-unit condominium building | Under construction | Includes the Channel Mark waterfront offering |
| 200-unit apartment building | Under construction | 20 units will be income-restricted under city inclusionary zoning |
| Public market in historic brick warehouse | Delayed, restarted earlier in 2026 | Conversion began in 2019, stalled during the pandemic |
| Natural gas cogeneration plant | Permitted, not yet built | $20 million plant to serve the entire property, permitted by Maine DEP in 2025 |
The marina, the office building, and three restaurants are real, and they're genuinely good reasons someone might want to live nearby. The hotel, the second condo tower, the bulk of the new apartments, the public market, and the plant that will actually heat and power the finished property are not open, and on the developer's own timeline, several won't be for another three to four years.
Why the price kept climbing
The instinct might be to read a cost jump from $660 million to $970 million as a warning sign that the project is in trouble. Prentice frames it differently, and there's a case for taking him at his word: the developers chose to build to a higher standard once they understood who they were building for.
That's a meaningful signal for anyone pricing a home nearby, because it means the project's economics already assume a buyer who expects a finished luxury product, resort-style finishes, a branded residence, a hotel-adjacent lifestyle, before any of it exists on the ground. The upgrade in construction quality is the developer betting on future demand. A buyer purchasing a home near the site today is making a similar bet, just without the ability to revise the terms if the timeline slips again the way it already has once.
The affordability math underneath the marketing
The apartment building in the current phase will add 200 units to the East End. Twenty of them will be affordable under the city's inclusionary zoning rules, the standard mechanism Portland uses to require a share of income-restricted housing in larger residential developments. Marshall, the broker and former councilor, has called it unfortunate that most of the new housing won't be affordable to lower- and middle-income residents, a fair characterization of the ratio.
For a buyer, the relevant point isn't a judgment about the project's housing mix. It's what that ratio tells you about the rental and ownership stock that will actually surround a Foreside-adjacent purchase once the phase is complete: overwhelmingly market-rate, priced to the same buyer the quality upgrades were built for.
What to actually ask before you write an offer near Foreside
A listing that leans on proximity to Portland Foreside is leaning on a neighborhood that is roughly half-built and has already missed its own deadlines once. Before that proximity becomes part of your offer price, it's worth pinning down a few things directly with your agent:
- Which specific amenities are open today, not projected for a future phase
- What Portland Foreside's own construction timeline currently states for the phase nearest the home you're considering
- Whether the years of remaining construction, cranes, trucks, noise, altered street access, are something you're prepared to live alongside
- Whether the seller's asking price already assumes a finished amenity package that won't exist for several more years
None of this means the East End is a bad bet. The marina, the restaurants, and the Eastern Promenade trail that runs along the water are real amenities available right now, independent of anything still under construction. It means the difference between what's finished and what's promised is large enough, and has been unreliable enough on timeline, that it deserves its own line of questioning before you commit.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Portland Foreside actually going to be finished soon? Not by most reasonable definitions of soon. The developer's current estimate has the phase now under construction wrapping in 2029 or early 2030, and the project has already missed its original completion targets once.
Does buying near Foreside guarantee the neighborhood will look like the renderings? The site plan has been approved and construction is underway, so the broad shape of the project is likely to materialize. The open question isn't whether it gets built, but when, and the project's own history suggests timelines here should be treated as estimates rather than commitments.
What can I actually use if I move to the East End today? Fore Points Marina, the Sun Life building, Twelve, Bard Coffee's second location, Douro, and the Eastern Promenade trail are open and operating now. Everything else in the table above is still under construction or awaiting a restart.
A neighborhood mid-transformation can still be the right move, but only if the price you pay reflects what's actually there today rather than what a rendering promises for 2030. If you're weighing a purchase near Portland's East End waterfront, Elise Kiely can walk through exactly which phases of the Foreside project affect a specific address, and what that means for both your daily life and your long-term value. Request a private consultation to talk through the timeline before you make an offer.
