When Portland developer Vanessa Sturgeon bought an old gear factory for $6.8 million, she designed it with exposed wood beams, polished concrete, expansive windows, a rooftop deck, and other facilities that were fashionable at the time. He envisioned an office building with all the amenities that attracted employees.
She spent $18 million demolishing and rebuilding the Premier Gear & Machine Works building on Northwest 17th Avenue at Thurman Street. It opened in April 2020, just as the lockdown due to the new coronavirus infection began. Tech companies that flocked to Portland from Seattle and San Francisco sent most, if not all, of their employees home, eliminating the need for office space anywhere.
Suddenly, Sturgeon had a trophy fortune that no one wanted to acquire. Now that she's been paying for the upkeep of the vacant building for three years, she's pivoted to meeting demand from an entirely different customer base: people suffering from mental health crises often caused by drugs. I am.
If Sturgeon had her way, the building where her tech buddies would be sipping matcha tea and typing marketing copy on their laptops would be a 16-bed “crisis assessment and treatment center” attached to 80 homes. (industry term). , 50 of which are permanently installed. We are staffed 24/7 by doctors, nurses, counselors, and intake specialists.
“We went to Multnomah County and asked, 'What is your biggest need?'” Sturgeon said.
The county currently has just one 16-bed crisis center on Northeast Martin Luther King Boulevard, but there is no housing to house people after their stay. (These facilities have a magic number of 16 beds, beyond which the operators cannot bill Medicaid.)
Sturgeon hopes to open the new complex within 18 months. If she is successful, the Premier Gear and Machine Works Building would be one of the first office buildings in the city to find an alternative use. Portland residents are calling on city leaders to turn vacant office buildings into much-needed housing, but they say they don't have enough windows to meet housing standards and require prohibitively expensive seismic retrofits. In many cases, it is impossible to reuse most office buildings.
The Sturgeon building has lots of windows and is earthquake-proofed with huge steel columns. Ms Sturgeon said each unit in the building would cost about $215,000 to construct. According to him, the average price of an affordable home in Portland is $490,000. City estimates.
“Compared to what's out there, this is a bargain,” Ms Sturgeon said.
Sturgeon does not expect Premier Gear and Machine Works to turn a profit in the new structure. “We're not trying to make money from this,” she says. “There's no chance.”
Sturgeon needs an additional $22 million to divide the cavernous space into apartments. She plans to have everything from studios to her three-bedrooms so customers can live with their families if they have them. To get that cash, she's talking to cities, counties, states and private funders.
“This is exactly the kind of idea we're looking for,” said Jillian Schone, chief of staff to Mayor Carmen Rubio, who oversees the Portland Housing Authority. “Commissioner Rubio directed me to start looking for funding sources. We're really excited about that.”
Crisis care and low-income housing are new areas for Sturgeon's company, Sturgeon Development Partners. Sturgeon is best known for building and operating the 27-story Fox Tower and his 30-story Park Avenue West Tower. He is also the chief executive officer of TMT Development. Sturgeon's grandfather, Tom Moyer, who was a professional boxer in the 1930s, founded the company in 1992, and Sturgeon took over his leadership in 2003.
To support this new venture, Sturgeon is partnering with Jackson House, a for-profit company that operates drug treatment and mental health centers in California. Its new Pacific Northwest region is being run by Jim Secrist, who joined the company in July from Alameda, Calif.-based Telecare, which operates an emergency care facility on Northeast Martin Luther King Boulevard.
The problem with Crisis Assessment and Treatment Centers (CATCs) is that there is no reliable “back door” through which people can continue to receive care once their acute symptoms are over, Secrist said. Many end up back on the streets.
“We thought, 'What if we built CATC with a built-in backdoor?'” Sechrist says.
The back entrance of the Premier Gear & Machine Works Building leads to temporary and permanent housing.
If she can pull it off, Ms Sturgeon hopes the site will serve as a model for others. Many buildings in Portland have that space. Just a block away stands a brand new 290,375-square-foot field office complex, but in July he defaulted on a $73.8 million loan and couldn't find a buyer.
