Doom Loop Follies
A tower falls (into limbo of a sort); healing (along with profits for a nonprofit); cramming in more crackerboxes; queries disappear; chutzpah on the Willamette.
Who Won the Developers’ Betting Pool?
A couple of the town’s media dinosaurs reported, sotto voce…
…about a sparkling new tower, until the story dropped in WillyWeek, that had been the subject of typical booster-reporting in the local dinosaur media. Everyone seemed to agree that developer Walter Bowen had proved that Portland could still build big (and sorta phallic).
A few cyncics winced when the behemoth finally topped out: they saw a wild mixture of the latest architectural cliches and wondered if a city with a housing “crisis” really needed a hotel with a starting room rate of $446 and pet fee of $200 per accommodation, along with a $65 daily valet fee for, we’ll guess, your Ferrari.
We’ll bet that somewhere in the city’s tight real estate tribe someone has just won an office pool on when the improbable tower would go belly-up. The New York financiers who decided to put the beast out of its misery will sell off the various components of local mogul Walter Bowman’s ego-trip to…well, who?
They’re going to have to dig themselves outr of a circa $500-million hole. And distressed properties, in this economic climate (in a city on the skids) are a tough sell. As the articles made clear, the building is a flop…
Just 23% of the office space is leased, according to Ready Capital. Nor has Bowen been able to sell many of the 132 Ritz-Carlton condominiums. Only 8% have sold, according to Ready Capital’s earnings report, at an average of $1,105 per square foot.
The Oregonian’s Jonathan Bach traced the tower’s misfortune to familiar Portland tropes…
…a pandemic, crime and relentless negative headlines turned the city’s urban core into what some fear could be fuel for a “urban doom loop.”
The word “riots” and “looting” are not part of the O’s stylebook. Forget about “the strolling feral.” Nor, for that matter, is “hubris” or “another urban renewal scandal.”
None of the scribblers made a visit to their newspapers’ morgues to find out that Bowen had shelled out $7.76-million to the city to avoid including any ”Inclusionary Housing” in the condos. (No one in local media has reported whether or not Bowen actually paid the fee.) Nor that Bowen and the city boosters had claimed that scads of money would flow back to the city: real estate, income, and hotel taxes of $10 million, which would add up to $120 million to the city within ten years. Then there were the promised 2,000 new living wage jobs, including 350 Ritz-Carlton hotel employees at full capacity.
Well—did they materialize?
No one in local media seems to know—or care.
The only apparent success in the project would appear to be the kicky “food hall,” which would have been called a cafeteria in better days. For no compelling reason it is called Flock. It, too, has a checkered history. Reporting on its opening—buried deep in his story—the O’s Jeff Manning observed…
Kurt Huffman, whose ChefStable group has opened dozens of West Coast bars and restaurants, said Flock’s $8.8 million price tag is higher than the similarly sized Loyal Legion Bar opening at Portland International Airport, a notoriously expensive place to build.
“$1,100 per square foot is unheard of in Portland,” Huffman wrote in a text message. “No food and beverage operation in this city has ever been that expensive.”
Despite that, the Prosper Portland bureaucrats doled out $3-million to an obscure local firm, Leeroy & Kimble LLC, to finish the project. There has been tenant-turnover—one Vegan restaurant and the owners are in a nasty PR fight—but at least the bottom-fishing bidders will have eight vendors of trendy food (in a city bulging with trendy cuisine) and a taproom (in a city otherwise drowning in beer halls) to ponder their bids on the moldering stuff upstairs. No wait for tables.
In other urban renewal news…
Haven’t We Been Here Before?
As the Tribune gaily reported…
…by building something that looks suspiciously like…urban renewal.
It’s just what Portland needs: more “Pile ‘em up; cram ‘em in!” One can envision the day that the piles will be torn down in the name of some new Aryan guilt-trip.
In the ‘City Is Broke’ Dept.
You will be very pleased to know that…
As for local streets that time (and the city) forgot…
…good luck. Your local automotive realignment shop thanks you for your support.
But Wait! Twenty Feet of Gravel Will Disappear!
Over here on the east side, our local Montavilla News rapturously reported that four—count ‘em—”townhouses” will be crammed into this narrow half-lot slot on Clay St. It’s all part of the current progressive mania for “density,” and mythical “missing middle” housing.
It’s on a gravel street, but not to worry: the developers of the latest cram-n-jam project (call ‘em Kotekvilles) will, according to correspondent Jacob Loeb…
…pave 20 feet of the street in front of the development. This work will not dramatically transform SE Clay Street, which has no adjacent sidewalks or curbs.1
Personally, we think Clay (apt name) and other streets should petition to become bike lanes.
Problem solved!
PS: Each little cubicle will have around 900 square feet, and will be a hefty 20-feet wide (the front will bulge out to 1,000 square feet). Everyone gets a six-by-eight-foot “patio.”
No parking.2
We dispensed with this nonsense back in Nov. 2021, in Let's tickle the LTIC. The state of those 50-miles of streets hasn’t changed since then, which caused Loeb to muse that…
The City mandated infrastructure updates are costly for developers and sometimes prevent home builders from taking on a project due to the added expense.
How true!
Which brings us to…
Give Us a Call, But First…
We wanted to query one of our 25-percenters, councillor (district three) Steve Novick, who was the author of the city fee referred to by reporter Loeb. The self-styled smartest guy on the city council (back in his first term in what seems like prehistoric times) purported to solve the gravel crisis with a nutty fee called the LTIC.3
To reach the creator of the housing-busting fee, we turned to the city of Portland’s website …
to ask whether the Tiny Terror had changed his thinking about the fees he invented to—somehow—pave the 50 or so miles of gravel that the city ignores.
We encountered a handy-dandy form (above) that demands your name, company (?), email address, country (??), phone number4, address, city, and state to ask a question:
Does counselor Novick have any new thoughts about figuring out a way to slap some asphalt—even the “pirate” kind that’s on many other miles of city streets—down within our lifetime?
The query was sent, and received…
That was on Feb. 10. No answer. Yet.
Chutzpah Award ‘o’ the Week
…in which the Oregonian’s Shane Dixon Kavanaugh detailed city administrator Michael Jordan’s really bad news about how many jobs will have to be cut to balance the city’s budget, but didn’t point out that just seven days earlier he had reported…
Think Jordan will offer to give it back in the name of socialist working class solidarity5?
AI didn’t think so…
…proving, once again, that computers are smarter than us.
Actually, the developer is only responsible for half the width of the almost-nonexistent street. Weird—but that’s the way things work in the City That Works.
GuvTina thinks we need 36,000 more of these. Single family homes with—gasp!—yards are officially disfavored.
It didn’t.
The website says, “Your number will never be sold or given away but may be included in public records requests.” Do you believe that?
…which will make our three socialist city councilors ever so happy. (But then again, they haven’t pledged any of their $133K-a-year stipends to the working stiffs.)
"Strolling feral" I love it. Who ever said " I want to buy a 3 M dollar condo in a war zone that leaving the front door puts me in mortal danger crossing the street. Oh ya Portlandia
As reported briefly on Koin 6 Tuesday The Gov has introduced a bill and is feverishly pushing it to essentially override local land use/ building permitting regulations (more loss of local control ) to make it easier as Richard put it, to “cram in more cracker boxes” aka by progressives as “middle housing”. My condolences to Montavilla and other areas that are experiencing this and in the process losing their unique neighborhood identity. Gov T is also excluding current traffic studies in this bill for these builderamas which just further illustrates her lack of acknowledgement of the negative impacts that added density has on infrastructure/ livability. Ya I know, she’s convinced these people won’t have cars right? Now who is running a dictatorship…out of Salem?