Oregon Tradeswomen Inc., founded 30 years ago, is finally getting its own training facility.

The nonprofit group, known primarily for training and advocating for women in the building industry, in mid-January will move into a remodeled building in Gresham’s Rockwood neighborhood.

Central Bethany Construction, a division of project developer Central Bethany Development, is carrying out tenant improvement work at an 8,000-square-foot space on Southeast 187th Avenue, near the intersection with Stark Street. YBA Architects carried out design work for the project.

“It’s been a personal goal of mine, and an agency goal, to do this and we’re really excited,” OTI Executive Director Kelly Kupcak said. “We serve more and more women who are living in poverty and are coming to our program for answers. So it’s a critical opportunity for us to shift the way we do business and the way we reinvest back into our community and region.”

Crews broke ground on the OTI project in June, around the same time workers began tackling Rockwood Rising nearby; that mixed-use project also is being developed by Central Bethany Development.

OTI has inked a five-year lease for the new space, which will have a large shop, meeting rooms, staff space, and locker rooms for students. The group will not only have a better place to train women in pre-apprenticeships, but also space to host public workshops and other events while partnering with the cities of Gresham and Portland and other entities.

“We’re really looking forward to those things,” Kupcak said. “But the other piece that is really important to us is that we will be able to train our women at night and on weekends, which is huge for the women who are working toward new careers.”

OTI has encountered serious challenges in bringing women with day jobs into pre-apprenticeship training, Kupcak said. The new facility will help immensely, she added.

The group also will focus more on working with people simply looking for work or an opportunity.

“We are serving folks who are houseless, and we didn’t used to do this before,” Kupcak said. “Over the last two years we’ve made a lot of change about intentionality and about removing barriers for our clients; we wanted a welcoming physical space for the public and for tradeswomen.”

Kupcak praised the efforts of Central Bethany Development General Managing Partner Roy Kim and his firm.

“They really wanted a workforce development partner in there, and they’ve been incredible to work with,” she said. “Everyone’s talking about Rockwood being poor; we all know that. But it’s also the most diverse neighborhood in the region, and there is a young population, so there are huge opportunities there.”

Demolition was carried out at the site some time ago, Central Bethany Construction Superintendent Steve Wahle said, but real tenant improvement work began last month. The building was once part of a former Fred Meyer store that closed over 15 years ago, he said.

“We took it down to the studs, took out all the ceiling – and we had a lot of rot, so we did repairs there,” Wahle said. “Then we had a floor plan from our architect, and that’s what we have going here now.”

A large roll-up door separates the entrance from a large classroom on one side and staff space on the other. The building’s north end holds the shop and training area. Currently, drywall is being installed in preparation for painting and finishes.

“This warehouse side is a big space,” Wahle said. “We’re just waiting for the Sheetrock to get done and the finishes to start. It’s a little rough still, but it’s a big thing for them and for the city, the area of Rockwood; it’s all transforming right now.”

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Rockwood Rising may not be an architectural or engineering wonder. But the $70 million project in Gresham can serve as a prime example of the public-private partnership development model that some companies choose to follow.

For Matt Brown, principal and co-founder of YBA Architects of Portland, this is definitely the case. Brown’s firm has existed just five years, but from his experience with Rockwood Rising it’s safe to say that YBA is more or less sold on the concept.

“I would say people at the firm, myself included, have worked on a number of public-private partnerships, but as a firm this is our first significant one,” Brown said. “We’re really thrilled to get engaged in something like this.”

The multiuse development at the crossroads of Stark and Burnside streets in east Multnomah County has been a long time coming. The 5.5-acre property was vacated in 2005 following the closure of a Fred Meyer store. The city of Gresham purchased the property a year later for $8.1 million. A number of redevelopment ideas have since been bandied about, but nothing has stuck.

Now, Portland’s RKM Development is preparing to break ground later this year on a three-building project that will provide 108 new housing units along with new health care facilities, job training opportunities and small business space. Without the ability to bring both public and private needs together, however, the project would never have gotten off the ground.

“I guess, just from a purely architectural and design standpoint, I don’t think that there are particular features that are pioneering in terms of construction of the building,” Brown said. “However, the whole proposition of putting a town center in that location and the amount of community engagement and outreach that was done is pretty pioneering and obviously has been done with what are very good intentions and I think by and large yielded very good outcomes.”

RKM Development and owner Roy Kim already have a strong track record in this arena, having put together the celebrated Bethany Village community just west of Portland back in the 1990s.

“The owner of our development company has acquired an interest in doing projects in depressed areas, so that’s kind of what interested him,” said construction manager Jeff Oberst of Central Bethany Construction, a subsidiary of RKM Development. “This will be our second go-round with the partnership with the public sector.”

This was exactly what the city of Gresham was looking for in a developer when it began the latest round of planning in 2014. This came five years after previous planning efforts were abandoned in the Great Recession.

“I want to say we had over 150 community engagement events of all different sizes,” said Josh Fuhrer, executive director of the Gresham Redevelopment Commission – the city’s urban renewal agency.

Part of the process even involved bringing in residents to serve as paid consultants during planning. These individuals represented different community groups and ensured the widest range of voices possible would be heard during this process.

“We paid them as consultants to give us feedback about the types of things they’d like to see in the project,” Fuhrer said. “And then we brought those constituencies into larger roundtable meetings for a kind of give-and-take conversation about what this project should be about and whether it’s going to serve the people of Rockwood to the maximum extent possible. So, really, the community engagement was not an afterthought; the idea of community benefiting from the project wasn’t some piece of lipstick we put on after the fact. It’s really baked into the DNA of the project.”

The project consists of three planned mixed-use buildings on a parcel of property squeezed between East Burnside and Southeast Stark streets on the north and south and running from Southeast 187th to 185th streets east to west. Each building will be unique in size and composition, but the overall thrust of the project will be food-themed in recognition of Rockwood’s designation as a food desert, a U.S. Department of Agriculture term indicating at least 33 percent of the area’s residents live one mile or farther from a supermarket.

Then there is the financing for the project, which has a current budget of some $70 million.

“We haven’t done a lot of public-private projects this way, where you bring on a development partner and you partner to sort of co-develop the project together,” said Fuhrer, who went on to praise the city’s experience in working with RKM Development.

Roughly $9.5 million in city urban renewal money is going into the project, along with $2 million from a state grant. Another $8 million in net tax credit equity completes the public piece, with the remainder, around $50 million, being fronted by the developer in the form of both debt and tax equity. It’s a big risk, but one that could pay off handsomely down the road.

Still, because public financing is involved, some of the potential risk is mitigated for the private side, Brown said.

“The reality of the finances is, because the city is engaged and is putting up funding for it, it’s helpful,” he said. “The market is an interesting place. Construction costs are high and seem to continue to rise with all the commercial work that’s going on.”

Brown added that he feels Portland’s inclusionary zoning policy may have helped slow development of mixed-use projects in that jurisdiction. The result, he said, is that suburbs can benefit.

“Cities like Gresham, the satellite cities,” Brown said, “are benefiting from the hesitation that developers in Portland seem to be exercising as they wait for the inclusionary housing policy to become clarified, especially in recent months where we’ve seen volatility in what the policy will be and what benefits will be offered.”

Fuhrer noted, however, that while Gresham does not have an affordable housing policy similar to Portland’s inclusionary zoning regulations, Rockwood Rising nonetheless is using the latter as a blueprint to bring affordable housing units to the county’s least affluent sector.

Of the 108 planned studio, one- and two-bedroom apartments planned for Rockwood Rising, 20 percent will be allotted to families making less than 80 percent of the state’s median family income.

“That’s consistent with Portland’s inclusionary zoning,” Fuhrer said. “It’s actually out of their playbook, so we’re trying to be consistent with that even though this is the city of Gresham.”

Fuhrer said Rockwood has seen virtually no market-rate housing built over the past 20 years, despite a burgeoning population. At the same time, that population has not generally been able to keep up with metro-area rents in recent years.

“We know the importance of having more market-rate housing,” Fuhrer said. “But we also know there are a lot of families that need affordable products, so we’re trying to meet both of those needs through a strategy that has a mix of housing types and a mix of price points, and some that are actually capped at 80 percent. That’s part of our anti-displacement strategy.”

The city has tried to be mindful of that last aim, he said, despite accusations from some quarters that Rockwood Rising is little more than a gift to developers.

“It’s a big, big problem in a lot of places,” he said, “and we wanted to be very mindful of not creating a development that was going to push people in Rockwood out somewhere else, but really give them an opportunity to really put roots down and not treat Rockwood as a transitional place.”

The rising rents elsewhere make avoiding the same trend in Rockwood a challenge, Brown said.

“The rents generally have a ripple effect,” he said. “They’ve been highest in the center of the city and have been rippling out from there.

If new development adds both housing and jobs, Fuhrer said, than perhaps some of the problems of displacement seen in other parts of the metro area can be avoided.

“What we need to see is more development, more production of housing across the entire income spectrum,” he said.

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