Flooring underpins all of the other elements in a room. Whether it’s hardwood, laminate or carpeting, it’ll help set the space’s tone.

Dennis Stone, the owner of Wilsonville-based Techsource Enterprises Inc., recognizes the importance flooring can have on a first impression. Whenever people walk into a space, he said, it’s the first thing they notice.

Flooring “brings the room to life,” he said.

Before construction, Stone spent 16 years as a computer engineer. He traveled the U.S. and overseas troubleshooting computer systems. Stone said he longed for the day he could work for himself. Then a client offered Stone a contracting opportunity – which he accepted.

Later, in 1996, he started Techsource Enterprises as a contractor. Early on, he rehabbed foreclosed properties. Eventually, Stone transitioned his business to focus solely on flooring, which was his favorite part of the rehab process.

“It’s almost like you’re the closer,” he said.

Flooring is one of the last components of a project. By then, infrastructure has been set, plumbing and electrical portions have been fitted, and the paint has been applied.

“It’s the final piece,” Stone said. “It’s your touch to that space.”

Techsource Enterprises started out installing residential flooring and then 11 years ago shifted to commercial projects. The feeling of transforming an office space and bringing it to life has never faded, Stone said. It was what first attracted him to flooring, he added.

As with any endeavor, Stone said, money has been a challenge. At one point, he said, he sold his vehicle in order to make payroll and pay his employees.

“Getting the capital and getting people to believe in you,” he said, has been the most challenging part.

But along the way, Stone has been able to build more relationships.

One day, when eating breakfast outside of a restaurant in Lake Oswego, Stone was stopped by a man.

“I don’t know (if it was because) both (of us) being Black, he asked what I did,” Stone said. “I said, ‘I do flooring.’”

The man gave Stone his business card. It turned out to be Hermann Colas Jr., founder of Colas Construction. Stone later made a phone call and was able to get back-to-back contracts with Colas Construction.

“I am very grateful to him,” Stone said.

This past year, Stone worked on his first major project – the Meyer Memorial Trust headquarters. The building has 19,800 square feet of carpet tile, hardwood and vinyl. O’Neill/Walsh Community Builders was the project’s general contractor.

Stone “just has a really solid business and accruement on the way he approaches the work,” O’Neill Construction Group owner Maurice Rahming said. “He knows the business and comes up with good recommendations. He usually has the answer for you – and different options.”

Rahming said there was a good indication that Stone was a team player, and then he proved it.

“Really solid guy and really solid company,” Rahming said.

So far, Stone said some of his most memorable projects are the Yacht Harbor Club Apartments, a job for Toyota of Corvallis, and hospital work for Kaiser Permanente and Veterans Affairs.

During this past year, even during the pandemic, the company has continued to grow, Stone said. He has six full-time employees and is bidding on projects nonstop.

Techsource Enterprises is one of the only African American-owned commercial flooring companies in Oregon. But that hasn’t widened the door of opportunity, according to Stone.

“Has it advanced me?” he said. “I don’t see that.”

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The Black Lives Matter movement has spurred corporate America into action, prompting donations, statements of solidarity and public reexaminations by some of the nation’s most recognizable companies.

The construction industry, however, has been noticeably quiet.

“It’s been shocking to me,” said Andrew Colas, president of Portland-based Colas Construction. “The CEO of Warner Bros. made statements. The CEOs of Fortune 500 companies have made statements. There’s just been complete silence on the local level, on the national level, in our industry.”

Colas Construction is the largest Black-owned construction firm in Oregon, and one of the largest on the West Coast. The company has tackled large public projects, including a sizable renovation of the Oregon Convention Center.

“Change is on all of us, and the chance to lead it comes in the choices we make every day,” Colas wrote in a statement posted to the company’s Instagram page on June 3. “Speak up, stand up and disrupt the cycle.”

Colas said he decided to say something after hearing little from others in the construction industry.

“A $650 billion industry has had nothing to say,” he added in a text message. “So we had to speak up.”

The death of George Floyd, a Black man, in Minneapolis after he was held under the knee of a police officer for 7 minutes and 46 seconds has galvanized protests and forced a fast-moving reckoning of racism in American life. So far, there have been few immediate repercussions in the construction industry.

Some organizations connected to the building industry have embraced the Black Lives Matter movement. Prosper Portland posted a Black Lives Matter webpage. Several architecture firms have posted supportive statements. Lever Architecture, for instance, issued one that read in part, “It is incumbent on us as architects to engage communities of color and to listen with humility.” Lease Crutcher Lewis also posted a supportive statement to Instagram.

Statements are good, but require follow-through, said Nate McCoy, executive director of the National Association of Minority Contractors-Oregon.

“Statements mean nothing if there are no real efforts or change behind them,” he said.

As for Associated General Contractors‘ Oregon-Columbia chapter, it has taken a low-key approach to the moment.

“During this time, we have quietly chosen to continue the work we have started and been part of for many decades,” Executive Director Mike Salsgiver stated in an email message. “The AGC Oregon-Columbia Chapter condemns the murder of George Floyd – and the behaviors that led to his death and to the deaths of many others – in the strongest possible terms. We fully understand the deplorable and unacceptable effects these crimes against our fellow citizens have had, and continue to lead and support initiatives that will eliminate racism in our society and our industry.”

The local AGC chapter has worked for many years with NAMC-Oregon, the Oregon Association of Minority Entrepreneurs, LatinoBuilt, the Professional Business Development Group and others, Salsgiver stated.

“We continue to stand with these and other organizations to ensure that this work will continue,” he added.

Locally, the construction industry remains overwhelmingly white in ownership as well as in executive and managerial roles, despite a diverse entry-level workforce. But public-sector work has helped Black-owned firms grow. Contracting preferences that favor minority-owned contractors have boosted companies including Colas Construction, Raimore Construction and O’Neill Construction Group in winning major contracts from local public agencies such as Prosper Portland, Metro and TriMet.

Colas Construction in 2017 landed the largest public contract awarded to a minority-owned firm in Oregon at that time: a $32 million deal to perform interior renovations at the Oregon Convention Center.

That was exceeded in March by with TriMet for the Division Transit Project in Southeast Portland. Raimore co-founder Jeff Moreland could not be reached for comment.

But contracting preferences haven’t done nearly enough to compensate for the advantages of white-owned firms that have decades of accumulated wealth and business relationships as well as large-scale bonding capacity, Colas said.

“It’s about economic development for Black people,” he said. “There are a lot of Black businesses out there that are fully capable, that do great work and just don’t get the opportunities others do.”

Portland should have many more successful Black-owned construction firms, according to Colas.

“Until we start seeing more Raimores, more City of Roses, more Colas’, you’re not going to see that (economic development) piece,” he said. “Can anybody tell me five Black-owned companies that have more than 50 employees? You can’t. It’s not working.”

McCoy echoed those sentiments.

“It’s shameful that it’s only Colas and Raimore that are getting contracts at the level that they’re at,” he said. “Why is that? I think there’s still a systemic problem.”

McCoy and others are pushing public agencies to move away from race-neutral policies to race-conscious policies that take into account historic discrimination.

Black-owned firms and other emerging contractors typically begin as subcontractors. More must be done to help them grow, said Daniel Drinkward, vice president of Hoffman Construction, a major general contractor.

“It’s got to go beyond hitting the contracting and workforce targets,” he said.

Hoffman mentors minority-owned contractors on business aspects such as insurance and accounting that sometimes prove challenging for new firms, Drinkward said.

“We spend a lot of time working with minority-owned firms to make sure that when they do get contracts on our projects that they are successful and that it helps build their business,” he said.

Hoffman Construction stands with its Black workers, Drinkward added.

“Hoffman is committed to providing an anti-racist and inclusive workplace,” he said. “The status quo is not acceptable and we have to do better.”

The widespread protests have generated some optimism in the fight against racism, Colas said.

“It has been heartening,” he said. “It’s nice to see all shades of people standing up and saying this isn’t working. What’s been happening the last 400 years is wrong, and we need to acknowledge it.

“You get to the point as a Black person where you just feel helpless,” he added. “Our struggles are serious and they’re real.”

McCoy said he’s had conversations in the industry where others say “all lives matter” as a counterpoint to the Black Lives Matter message. Such race-neutral language accomplishes nothing, he said.

“Absolutely all lives matter,” he said. “Black lives have to matter more, and have to be called out individually because things have to change.”

Correction: This story earlier referred to an incorrect timeline for the Minneapolis incident. Media reports have since indicated George Floyd was pinned by an officer’s knee for 7 minutes, 46 seconds, not 8 minutes, 46 seconds.

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Sarah Moreno isn’t working much these days.

The heavy equipment operator has three kids – ages 12, 13 and 16 – at home. They would normally be in school, but with schools closed, Moreno is often home with them.

Moreno still goes to work whenever she can. Last week, she worked only one day – at a demolition site with contaminated soils at Portland International Airport for McDonald Excavating.

“You don’t want to use your kids as an excuse to miss work, especially me being a mom in the trades,” she said.

Moreno, an apprentice with Operating Engineers Local 701, moved to Portland from Southern California to take Constructing Hope‘s pre-apprenticeship program. Her kids can stay home by themselves, she said.

“They’re old enough now that I don’t really have to worry about it too much,” she said. “I’m grateful for that, because to find child care, it’s kind of hard.”

Many construction workers are juggling work and children during the COVID-19 pandemic. In recent weeks, contractors and subcontractors also have come to realize that their workers’ child care issues are increasingly their problem.

“I didn’t realize how many of our workers are single parents,” Maurice Rahming, co-owner of O’Neill Construction Group, said last week during an industry conference call that was organized by the Professional Business Development Group. “So with the schools being shut down, they’re responsible for taking care of their kids at home. They have to take the time off because they don’t have anyone else to take care of their kids.”

It can be difficult in the best of times for construction workers to find available and affordable child care. Before the coronavirus began to spread, labor groups in the Portland area were working to provide child care to pre-apprentices entering the industry. The Columbia Pacific Building Trades Council and allies were pitching a program called Labor’s Littles. Willy Myers, executive secretary of the labor council, said the group had asked Metro and other local governments to support the child care effort.

“We struggled to get public funding,” he said.

The COVID-19 pandemic has sharpened those concerns. Schools and day care facilities are closed, and many families are practicing social distancing from grandparents and other family members who would otherwise help out.

Child care is especially needed for beginning workers on labor’s lowest rungs.

“It’s more expensive than people can afford until they reach a certain level,” Myers said.

Meanwhile, the shutdowns of schools and day care facilities have been particularly difficult on women workers, minorities and those with lower incomes. Constructing Hope, a Portland nonprofit that operates a pre-apprenticeship program geared to serve formerly incarcerated people, women and people of color, is speaking with funders to reallocate money for child care.

“There’s really no availability for day care right now,” said Bobby Hamilton, case manager for Constructing Hope.

The pandemic could also slow the entry of new workers into the construction industry.

Anthony Williams, a heavy-machine operator apprentice at the Northwest College of Construction and a recent graduate of Constructing Hope, said he had to take time off from his part-time job at Subway to care for two of his children who live with him, a 7-year-old son and a 5-year-old daughter.

“My child care facility closed,” he said. “I wasn’t able to work for about two weeks until I figured it out. I was forced to try to find someone who does in-home care.”

Williams began taking online classes earlier this month at the Northwest College of Construction. The move to online education has slowed what’s usually a four-year process to become a journeyman.

“Things are moving real slow as far as classes go,” he said.

Williams, 41, entered construction after attempts to have a white-collar business career ran aground because of a 15-year-old felony on his record.

“Construction is the only thing you can go through that you can make a living wage,” he said.

Construction firms in fact have seen some employees come back to work after they were unsuccessful in obtaining unemployment benefits, said Robert Camarillo, executive secretary of the Oregon State Building and Construction Trades Council.

“We saw a lot of folks ask for voluntary layoffs early on,” he said. “What I’m hearing now, the reports that I’m getting, is a lot of those people that asked for those layoffs realized the unemployment system wasn’t there yet, wasn’t ready to be the safety net they were hoping. And so a lot of them have started to return to work.”

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O’Neill/Walsh Community Builders was very busy in 2018, and that hasn’t changed in the new year.

The partnership of general contractors Walsh Construction Co. and O’Neill Construction Group specializes in building affordable housing projects in the Portland-metro area, often with public or nonprofit partners. The latest collaboration fitting that bill is under way at 8118 S.E. Division St. There, ROSE Community Development, the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon (APANO) and Metro are developing a new four-story mixed-use project dubbed Orchards of 82nd.

The 51,700-square-foot building will include 48 affordable housing units with one, two or three bedrooms. The ground floor will house APANO’s new headquarters and community amenities for residents. SERA Architects designed the building to Earth Advantage gold standards.

The project’s budget is $11.5 million. Some of that cost is being covered by grants from Oregon Housing and Community Services, the city of Portland and Metro. Metro bought the property in 2014 and leased an existing furniture store to APANO prior to the new development.

Currently, drywall, interior and exterior finishing, painting and other finishing touches are taking place. A temporary certificate of occupancy is expected to be received within the next 30-60 days, according to Walsh Construction project manager Kent Usher and superintendent Ben Bechdolt.

Cascade Management is handling leasing of the apartments, which will be rented in tiers to households of one to eight persons making no more than 30, 50, 55 or 60 percent of the median family income, respectively.

The project fits within the vision for the Jade District – an initiative spearheaded by APANO to revitalize the 10-square-block area around Southeast 82nd Avenue and Division Street. In 2011, Prosper Portland selected the Jade District as a Neighborhood Prosperity Initiative district. The district, according to its website, “focuses on community development work in the neighborhood.”

Ground was broken on Orchards of 82nd in October 2017. The project was originally known as The Jade, but the APANO board of directors voted late last year to change the name as a nod to the history of the area. It once featured a number of orchards and farms owned by Japanese-American families, but then much of that land was seized and the owners were interned during World War II.

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The idea for a park in North Portland’s Cully neighborhood goes back nearly 20 years. In early 2000, Portland Parks and Recreation acquired a 25 acre former landfill in the heart of the neighborhood.  The area has been primarily African American and ethnically mixed for decades and some questioned the idea of building a public park on a landfill.

In 2008, a master plan was created, but no funds were available to begin implementing the cleanup and construction. In 2005, Verde, a project started by Hacienda CDC to serve impoverished communities was started in Cully. Oriented to providing jobs and improving the neighborhood with an emphasis on environmental design, they launched letsbuildcullypark.org.

The organization was soon active in making the vision of a community park become a reality.

In 2012 a public/private partnership was approved by the Portland City Council and fundraising began. The park design included new access on Northeast 72^nd Avenue, parking, fitness trails, a dog park, athletic fields, stormwater management, bioswales, plantings, and the Native Gathering Garden. Among the issues they had to deal with was adherence to state and federal DEQ policies. Once that was achieved, people in the neighborhood saw the potential and were eager to participate.

Michael Martin, president of Northwest Infrastructure, served as the main lead of the group that worked to bring the $11.3 million project to fruition.

“I’ve been involved for about three years, but this is really a community project,” said Martin.

Maurice Rahming and Ali O’Neill of O’Neill Construction Group and James Faison of Faison Construction were also heavily involved. All are COBID-certified contractors.

“Instead of just one contractor, we kept the spirit of what Verde was doing and included several certified minority companies,” said Martin. “And people in the neighborhood got on board. They were a lot of the labor force that helped with the landscaping and built the community garden.”

A grand opening event was held on June 30th with Governor Kate Brown, Mayor Ted Wheeler, members of the various construction firms and landscape teams – and even the Portland Timbers – on hand to celebrate opening the park for public use.

Alan Hipolito, Verde’s outgoing executive director, said of the project, “Cully Park is a statement about the power of community, and I want to especially thank the hundreds of Cully adults, families and children who worked so hard for so long. My friends, you did it. You designed and built a park which everyone can enjoy and which will serve generations of Portlanders.”

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A strong turnout greeted three candidates seeking to serve as master developer of the Broadway Corridor, a 32-acre site in Northwest Portland with potential for more than 3.8 million square feet of development, on Wednesday.

A public forum hosted by Prosper Portland was held at the Leftbank Annex, drawing local developers, architects, planning professionals, union workers and nonprofit advocates. About 300 people showed up to hear the developers boast of their past projects and commitments to diversity.

Audience members repeatedly asked the developers questions about diversity within their own firms and projects, commitments to communities of color where they build and disability access.

The developers pointed to similar multi-block projects they’d led in the past. In describing their own values, they sometimes lapsed into business jargon.

“The number one product we have is synergy, which is energy in alignment,” said Chad McWhinney, CEO of Denver-based McWhinney.

The forum was an opportunity for the public to meet the developers vying to transform the Broadway Corridor. The area includes the 14-acre U.S. Postal Service site, Union Station and several other publicly owned properties in a broad swath bridging the Pearl District and Old Town Chinatown.

Prosper Portland in early March named three companies as finalists. Besides McWhinney, Related Cos., a New York-based developer represented by its San Francisco office, and Continuum Partners, another Denver-based developer, made the cut.

The three developers have jockeyed to line up local partners. McWhinney is working with Portland hotel group Sage Hospitality, nonprofit housing provider Hake Development and former Portland Development Commission executive Bruce Wood. Local advisers include Beam Development for project entitlements and Mortenson for construction planning. The James Beard Public Market is also on board with McWhinney.

Related California has enlisted Portland commercial real estate heavyweight Melvin Mark and nonprofit housing provider Central City Concern.

Continuum Partners has not publicly announced any local partners. The group pointed to its experience remaking Denver’s Union Station, the Belmar shopping center in suburban Lakewood, Colorado, and a 26-acre university-owned site.

Related California CEO Bill Witte garnered some of the little applause of the night when he said his firm “beat out Donald Trump for the Time Warner Center project in New York.”

Frank Cannon, Continuum Partners’ development director, said Prosper Portland’s “tremendously aspirational” goals may come into conflict with each other and will require careful balancing by the master developer.

“It starts with an open and honest dialogue with the community about your goals and objectives,” he said.

Maurice Rahming, co-owner of O’Neill Construction Group, praised Prosper Portland for bringing the developers in front of the public. He wrote a letter in support of McWhinney’s bid.

“This is refreshing,” he said. “In the past, a lot of this happened in a vacuum and there wasn’t a lot of public vetting.”

Prosper Portland has also done a good job clearly laying out the expectations for diversity, Rahming said.

“As far as the teams, some of them were stronger than others, but they have a good idea of the expectations,” he said.

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Architecture Building Culture, which has an office in Portland, recently received from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) one of its 11 Small Project Awards for 2017.

Awards were given out in three categories: projects with construction costs under $150,000, projects with construction costs under $1.5 million and projects under 5,000 square feet. The theme for this year’s competition was reflection.

Architecture Building Culture’s Laura’s Place expansion project had construction costs under $1.5 million. Laura’s Place provides transitional housing for pregnant women or mothers who have graduated from Central City Concern‘s Letty Owings Center, an in-patient treatment facility for drug and alcohol addiction. The facility on average serves 16 women and 16 children each year.

Laura’s Place was expanded from four units to six via strategic placement of the new building as well as amenity bonuses, including expanded outdoor space, solar hot water for all units, and safety and security improvements. Locating the addition on the north side of the building improved accessibility and allowed creation of a courtyard directly adjacent to a new common room.

Each new unit is 330 square feet, and has a kitchen, a living and sleeping area and a bathroom.

Nickerson Engineering was the structural engineer for the project and O’Neill Construction Group provided general contracting services.

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