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Many young people these days are moving to Portland and choosing to patronize businesses near their residences. Developers and owners of small businesses are responding to this trend by neighborhoods’ available commercial buildings for tenant improvement projects.

The construction industry, meanwhile, has suffered from a lack of big, private projects. And although renovations of existing commercial spaces may not be much work, many contractors say small jobs are better than the alternative – none.

Randy Rogers of Randy Rogers Plumbing LLC is performing plumbing work on a former church at Northeast 17th Avenue and Killingsworth Street. The space is being renovated to suit Podnah’s, a new barbecue restaurant.

“We’ve had to lay off a lot of people. We had the potential to be as big as any job needed us to be, but there isn’t any work.” Rogers said. “This job is about a week’s worth of work for a three-man crew. It’s not a big job, but if it wasn’t for this we’d be sitting at home right now.”

Few large projects may be taking place in the Portland-metro area nowadays, but smaller projects seem to be popping up all around town.

“We’re doing quite a few tenant improvement projects. It’s making up quite a bit of our business right now,” said Cory Riedel, senior project manager for Bremik Construction. “We’re definitely doing more small jobs than we were doing a few years ago, but that’s the nature of the beast with the economy.”

Bremik recently completed a project to transform and add to the former Arthur Cole Candy Co. building on Northeast Alberta Street and 14th Avenue. Five retail spaces and six live-work spaces were created.

Brad Fowler of Fowler and Andrews LLC said the project drew so much interest from businesses wanting to lease space that his company is planning to break ground on a similar project on the corner of Alberta Street and 19th Avenue in spring 2011.

Thad Fisco, owner of Adaptive Construction, said 30 to 50 percent of his company’s work over the past five years has taken place on North Williams Avenue, where they improved and added to three separate buildings they converted to feature small retail spaces.

Adaptive Construction’s most recent project on North Williams Avenue was to build the shell for the Hub Building, which features 20 commercial spaces. Adaptive Construction did the majority of the work on the building, but some tenants hired contractors and subcontractors to finish the spaces they rented. Fisco estimated that the Hub Building project created approximately 100 jobs.

“Right now it’s pretty slow, but there are still some tenant improvement jobs over at the Hub Building,” Fisco said.