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.”

The post Building trades organization’s new headquarters nearly ready appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

The ongoing redevelopment of Gresham’s Rockwood neighborhood is continuing apace, including the recent completion of a new LifeWorks NW clinic.

This three-story clinic, at 18417 S.E. Oak St., near the Rockwood Rising mixed-use development, is replacing former facilities in Rockwood and Gresham. Central Bethany Development, the project’s developer, served as its own general contractor. Carleton Hart Architecture designed the project.

Staff in the new building will provide mental health and addiction treatment. LifeWorks NW, which has operated for nearly 60 years, needed something quite a bit different than a typical commercial structure.

“With this program it’s really important to have that point of control – that single main entry with really strong controls,” Carleton Hart Architecture principal Brian Carleton said. “So, the entry could only really be at one end or the other, and the rest of the building becomes this rabbit warren of offices and meeting spaces and therapy spaces.”

One of the building’s biggest challenges is the southern location of the entrance. This faces away from a nearby MAX light-rail station to the north, from which many clinic patients and staffers will likely approach.

“How do you design the building where you’ve got the open and inviting end, but you can’t turn your back on the other street?” Carleton said. “We don’t want people to enter that end of the building, but we want to guide them and make them feel welcome as they’re coming off the MAX.”

This was accomplished by adding concrete benches and other furniture items on a back patio. In addition, a landscaped and lit path running the length of the building provides an easy route to the entrance.

Inside, the three floors serve distinctly separate purposes. The ground floor features the main lobby and a pharmacy, as well as a host of exam rooms and group meeting rooms. The second floor is dedicated to clinical services, and the third story is home to LifeWorks NW staff and information technology systems.

On the top floor, the layout was made as open as possible, Carleton Hart project architect Devin Follingstad said. Because structural steel columns bear loads, this also allows for relatively simple tenant improvements or partitions.

Also on the third floor, an employee break room is equipped with a small kitchen. Even here, the space is set up for flexibility.

“The break room is wired for future cubes if they need it,” Follingstad said. “The break room may even go away and become offices.”

Designers also convinced LifeWorks NW to include an outdoor patio on the third floor, Follingstad added.

The building – three stories of wood framing atop a slab-on-grade foundation – was relatively simple to construct, Central Bethany Development superintendent Jeff Oberst said. The difficulties, he added, were tied to materials and labor.

“We have the same woes everyone else right now has in this market,” he said. “The labor woes are terrible, so it definitely had an impact.”

Ongoing major school construction has contributed to the problem, Oberst added.

“The trades were impacted by that, and the rest of us have to compensate based on the schedules of the schools,” he said.

The new clinic’s exterior cladding includes masonry, fiber cement panels and metal panels. The project team experienced difficulties with its original supplier of bricks, Oberst said.

“After it was two and a half months late, we had to go find new brick in California,” he said.

Ground was broken a year ago, and a temporary certificate of occupancy was expected to be issued last week. A punch list of items should be addressed this month, before the arrival of staff.

LifeWorks NW contracts out some of its services, so in the new building, Wallace Medical Concern will offer primary care services and Genoa Healthcare will provide pharmacy service.

The post Crews wrapping up work on Gresham clinic appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

In Gresham’s Rockwood neighborhood, on the east side of Southeast 187th Avenue near its intersection with Stark Street, an existing single-story commercial building is being refurbished to accommodate a host of new tenants. One will be Oregon Tradeswomen Inc.

The Portland Opportunities Industrialization Center, Mt. Hood Community College Small Business Development Center and Micro Enterprise Services of Oregon will occupy space in the building. OTI plans to move its operations there from Northeast Portland sometime between December 2019 and January 2020, according to OTI communications director Mary Ann Naylor.

“This new location will allow us to have our offices, our classroom, as well as our workshop (together),” she said Wednesday. “Right now, the way we handle the hands-on training portion of our pre-apprenticeship classes, we partner with other nonprofits that need help with their projects because we want to give our students an authentic building experience to really prepare them for the jobsite.”

But that also means students currently have to travel to various jobsites and training facilities around the metro area. However, in Rockwood, with space of their own to work in, students generally won’t have to travel as much.

“Having a workshop will allow us to standardize that training and bring our partners in to conduct specific trainings,” Naylor said. “We will actually have a place to train our students. It’s just going to give us all the flexibility we’ve been wanting for the last few years to really better serve our students and industry.”

Naylor also noted that OTI originally established its headquarters in Northeast Portland because that area of the city was considered blighted and socioeconomically disadvantaged. As the area gentrified and property values shot up, however, the same women OTI sought to serve were priced out.

“In the 20 years that Oregon Tradeswomen has had offices in Northeast (Portland), it was perfect because that’s where our people used to be,” she said. “But as we’ve developed in the Northeast, a lot of those people have moved out (to east Multnomah County).”

The post Oregon Tradeswomen Inc. preparing to move to Gresham appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

The Eastside Timbers youth soccer club is seeking to build a new 43,500-square-foot futsal center in Gresham’s Rockwood neighborhood.

As described in a project information form filed Wednesday with the Gresham Urban Design and Planning Department, the new facility would be constructed on a 10.35-acre site on Southeast 174th Avenue, slightly south of Powell Boulevard. This is the same property upon which general contractor P&C Construction completed the Eastside Timbers & Thorns Sports Complex under a design-build contract in April 2018.

According to public documents, the new building would be the second phase of development of that complex and have 43,500 square feet of space dominated by three new futsal courts. The building would also have office and tenant space, a retail shop, a concession area, team meeting space and a gymnasium. A mezzanine level would overlook the futsal courts.

Soderstrom Architects is the applicant and designer for the new facility, while P&C Construction is set to serve as the general contractor.

“It’s going to have three futsal courts, and then it will have TI space for a restaurant and physical therapy,” said Dan Van Calcar, a Soderstrom Architects principal. “It will also have a clinic and concessions; it’s going to have a strong connection with the (three existing) soccer fields outside.”

Ryan Kelley, project manager for P&C Construction, said many changes have already been made to the phase two project – and more are likely.

“This started off as an athletic field, and that was completed,” he said. “And we’ve been back and forth on multiple revisions on the phase 2 futsal courts. We wanted to utilize (cross-laminated timber), but costs of the structure were not where the client needed it to be, so we’re exploring a metal structure right now.”

Project valuation is estimated at $5 million to $6 million, Kelley said. Ground is expected to be broken in March 2020.

“We actually put this project on hold for about a year,” he said. “Not only have things developed slowly behind the scenes, we’re picking this up and figuring out where we’re at now.”

A number of procedural hurdles must be cleared before development may take place. These include design review, a modification of a future street plan and a conditional plan map amendment to allow a commercial building to be built on property zoned for industrial use. The street plan modification will require a comprehensive traffic study of both 174th Avenue and its intersection with Southeast Powell Boulevard.

The post New sports facility in the works in Gresham appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Preliminary plans have been submitted to build a 224-unit affordable housing complex on approximately 8 acres in Gresham‘s Rockwood neighborhood.

According to city records, applicant Waechter Architecture has requested design review for a complex featuring multiple apartment buildings (all four stories) wrapping around a central community building.

The project site is comprised of two tax lots near the northeast intersection of Southeast Yamhill Street and 182nd Avenue. The property lies within an Open Space Overlay District in the Rockwood Town Center zone and would be subject to certain design regulations that don’t pertain to the rest of the city.

The Gresham Design Commission last month discussed the proposal with representatives of Waechter Architecture and Community Development Partners. At that meeting, according to a city staff summary, design commissioners asked about walking access for the site outside the complex and requested that the design be “permeable” for pedestrians.

Design commissioners want corner lot entries to face Southeast Yamhill Street and one of the future streets planned to bisect the property, the summary states. Southeast Yamhill Street is thus likely to be the public entryway into the central common space, with commissioners asking for an “active, engaging” facade.

According to public records, one of the two future streets would run north-south between Southeast 182nd Avenue and 187th Avenue. The other would run east-west along the property’s northern boundary.

The property owners are listed as Aspen Ho LLC, a corporation connected with Portland private equity firm Aspen Capital, and the Portland Lutheran Association.

The post Design review requested for Rockwood project appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

In this short video Gresham Redevelopment Commission Executive Director Josh Fuhrer gives a brief overview of Rockwood Rising, a long-awaited plan to redevelop a key property in the impoverished Gresham neighborhood of Rockwood. Once an unincorporated area of the county between Portland and Gresham, Rockwood has remained behind the development curve in spite of the region’s red-hot housing market. This has left plenty of room for enterprising developers to seek out public-private partnerships like Rockwood Rising, which has seen RKM Development team with the city of Gresham to make the project work. Check it out here:

The post VIDEO: Rockwood Rising aims at lifting east Multnomah County appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Kids throughout the Portland area who are at high risk of dropping out of school will get some strategic help when Open School East arrives in the fall of 2016. And those kids will have even more resources when Boys & Girls Clubs of Portland Metropolitan Area redevelops an adjoining facility.

Gov. Kate Brown and Gresham Mayor Shane Bemis were among the dignitaries on hand last week at a ground-breaking event for the school facility. Operations started last year with about 60 students attending classes at Oliver Elementary on Southeast Taylor Street. Open School East is projected to serve 270 students from six school districts throughout the Portland-metro area by 2019. All of the students are in danger of becoming dropouts.

The school’s philosophy is rooted in the belief that every child can graduate if given the means, so wrap-around programs are provided to give high-risk students support in intensive remedial education and social services.

The new Open School East will get a neighbor when Boys and Girls Clubs of Portland Metropolitan Area starts work on its facility next spring. Holst Architecture is designing both projects, and P&C Construction will serve as the project manager for both. They’re being built on four acres at the corner of Southeast 165th Avenue and Stark Street.

Andrew Mason, executive director of Open School East, said joining forces with Boys & Girls Clubs by sharing a gym and kitchen saved a substantial amount of money.

“In terms of capital, not only will we build a single gym and a single kitchen and share some classrooms, but it also makes us eligible for New Market Tax Credits,” he said.

The partnership also benefits from Boys & Girls Clubs operating its programs after school is out for the day, he said.

“It’s really smart in terms of capital and operating,” he said. “We’re getting together in an intelligent way and using taxpayer money in a smart manner.”

Mason said the school didn’t have all the dollars it needed to build what it wanted, but when he discovered that Boys and Girls Clubs had the same architect, combining forces made even more sense.

Josh Fuhrer, who left Gresham City Council two years ago to head the city’s redevelopment commission focusing on Rockwood, said seeing the development move forward is a dream come true.

“Those two organizations have such an impact on the community they serve, and all of our East (Multnomah) County youth will benefit from having them here,” he said. “These are organizations that have been serving our community for a long time, but from afar. Having them here is a huge positive for Gresham.”

Traci Rose, vice president of communications for Boys and Girls Clubs, said Holst has been an “amazing partner” in planning the new facility.

“They sat down with staff and had the staff lead them through what we needed and were really thoughtful in what the club would look like,” she said.

Nonprofits often collaborate and share resources, Rose said, and Boys & Girls Clubs had previously tried to share a facility with Friends of the Children, which two weeks ago opened its new facility at Northeast 172nd Avenue and Glisan Street.

Those plans fell through, but when the city of Gresham bought the land on 165th Avenue (the former site of Drake’s 7 Dees Landscaping), an opportunity was born.

“We had no idea what to do with it, but we knew it was a big enough site and we wanted to make sure something positive happened here,” Fuhrer said. “So Boys and Girls Clubs decided to move to the site on Stark and they actually brought us to the Open School.”

The city sold two parcels of the land to Boys and Girls Clubs and Open School East, and it’s a good bargain for the city, Fuhrer said.

“The city basically sold them the land for what we paid for it, and the city was able to get two fantastic organizations and (approximately) 60,000 square feet of new development,” he said.

The site contains two existing buildings on the southwest corner, one of which is 30,000 square feet and will be redeveloped for Boys and Girls Clubs. The other is being leased by Drake’s, at least for now, Fuhrer said.

A portion of the northeast corner will be used for outdoor recreation. Both groups and the public will use space there.

The new Open School building, on the lot’s southeast corner and abutting the Boys & Girls Club building, will be 21,000 square feet and serve students ages 11 to 18. Plans call for 11 classrooms, two science labs, an art studio and administrative office on two floors around a double-height central space. A cascading bleacher stair in the central space will connect both floors and accommodate 200 people.

Rose said a lot of credit for the developments should go to the city of Gresham for its support, especially since they are located in the Rockwood neighborhood, which has rising poverty and high dropout rates.

“Rockwood has one of the highest percentages of child welfare cases in the state,” Rose said. “There are academic challenges and a myriad of issues that caused a lot of stress to children and families.”

The post New facility coming to help at-risk kids succeed appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

A new Rockwood MAX station in Gresham will open at the beginning of service Friday, replacing a 25-year old station that was perceived as unsafe.

The new station, built by Skanska USA, was funded by a $3 million grant from the Oregon Department of Transportation’s Connect Oregon II program, $2.15 million from the Gresham Redevelopment Commission and $160,000 from TriMet. The project is part of a Rockwood in Motion revitalization effort underway in Gresham.

“The city, as part of its overall vision for the area’s redevelopment, felt that having the stations adjacent to each other rather than split, and having the area more pedestrian-friendly, would help prompt redevelopment in the area,” said TriMet spokeswoman Mary Fetsch. “It’s a more open station with open sightlines. It’s really very attractive and it serves as the anchor for that area.”

The new station, located at East 188^th Avenue, has closed-circuit security cameras, additional lighting and updated signal improvements. A large, colorful art piece called “Rockwood Sunrise” by Seattle artist Dan Corson frames the station.

Demolition of the old eastbound platform and interim westbound platform will begin May 31.

The post Rockwood MAX station complete, to open Friday appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

More than 30 years after discussions about a new East County Courthouse started, the idea is finally coming to fruition.

The Multnomah County Board of Commissioners approved the project and its funding during a meeting on Thursday. Construction of the $19.6 million, three-story courthouse will begin in the first week of 2011. The move-in date is slated for late January 2012.

“For a project almost 40 years in the making, today marks a Herculean accomplishment and that cannot be overstated,” said state Rep. Nick Kahl, D-Portland, who represents the district where the courthouse will be built.

The new courthouse will be in Gresham’s Rockwood neighborhood, on the corner of Southeast 185th Avenue and Stark Street. The courthouse will replace the present East County Courthouse in Gresham; the county leases that building, which has been described as leaky, cramped and inadequate.

Funding is a big reason the project is moving forward now, said Commissioner Diane McKeel, who’s leading the effort. Over the last year, the projected cost has dropped from $20.7 million to $19.6 million because of declining construction costs. The cost has stabilized despite a recent addition of nearly 4,000 square feet to the project.

Also, the county will be allowed to use $15.1 million in interest subsidized federal bonds – known as recovery zone bonds – for the project, which will save the county $1.5 million over the life of project payment.

Multnomah County initially was allotted only $3.6 million in recovery zone bonds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. But the county worked with the state’s business development department to use money allotted to the state that wouldn’t be used before the Jan. 1, 2011 deadline.

The post East County Courthouse plans approved appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

The Rockwood Building

Architect: Myhre Group Architects

General contractor: Howard S. Wright Constructors

Size: Three stories totaling 75,000 square feet

Cost: $16.9 million

Tenants: Human Solutions, Loaves and Fishes, Mount Hood Community College Head Start, El Programa Hispano, Metropolitan Family Services, Lifeworks NW, Outside In and medical services

Funding sources: City of Gresham, city of Portland, Multnomah County, state of Oregon, Meyer Memorial Trust, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Collins Foundation, Portland General Electric fund of the Oregon Community Foundation, Providence Health, State Farm Insurance, Pacific Source Foundation, Swindells, Hedco and others.

Despite having the highest poverty levels in east Multnomah County, the Rockwood neighborhood has few social services available.

That will soon change, however. Eight social-service organizations, which serve a total of 80,000 clients annually, are scheduled to move into the Rockwood Building next year. The three-story building, presently under construction at Southeast 181st Avenue between Couch and Davis streets, also will include two floors of affordable housing.

But space requirements created a design challenge for Myhre Group Architects. The project team found the building would need a structural system more commonly used in bridges.

Generally, for such a facility, architects would choose a typical wood-frame structure because it is the most cost effective, according to Devin Follingstad, project manager with Myhre Group Architects. Social-service groups’ specific square footage requirements, however, meant a typical structural system would be out of the question, Follingstad said.

With 23,000 square feet for ground-floor services and 52,000 square feet of housing spread across two floors, a stick-frame structural system simply would not be able to support the weight.

“Some (tenants) couldn’t use more than a certain amount, which meant adding square footage to the ground floor wasn’t possible,” Follingstad said. “With two floors of apartments on top, we needed a system that could support that over a smaller ground-floor footprint.”

The design team used cantilever trusses to allow the upper floors to extend over the building’s sidewalks so that all 47 housing units would fit, Follingstad said. A cantilever is a beam fixed at one end that can extend beyond its support to form an anchorage point and increase stability. This structural system is often used in construction of bridges to allow them to extend far over waterways without constructing additional supports.

Despite increasing the project’s cost to $16.9 million, the protruding upper stories of the Rockwood Building create an attractive and welcoming presence, said Jean Demaster, director of Human Solutions. The building is adjacent to a former Fred Meyer site at 18535 S.E. Stark St. The city hopes a major developer will revitalize the 6.5-acre property.

“The area where the building is located has been a vacant lot for 30 years,” Demaster said. “Now there will be an attractive building there when the Fred Meyer site starts to be redeveloped.”

“This area has been depressed for many decades,” Follingstad said. “We wanted to design something that stands out and welcomes people. We could have done something that blended in, but the tenants really wanted this building to show the neighborhood is open for business.”

Loaves & Fishes, one of the eight service groups set to move into the new building, has had a small satellite location in a Rockwood apartment building for some time. But its director of communications, Julie Piper Finley, says the apartments have no street frontage, and many residents don’t know that the meal provider is there. Finley hopes the Rockwood Building’s central location and striking design will increase Loaves & Fishes’ visibility in the community.

“Now we’re going to be collocated with other services so seniors can come for medical care or other services and stay for lunch,” Finley said. “It makes a lot of sense (for) a community with such a large elderly population.”

Howard S. Wright Constructors is scheduled to finish the project by July 2011, Demaster said.

The post Help planned for aching Rockwood neighborhood appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.