Homelessness Inc. cuts a deal

What's good for the Goodmans is good for tweekers

It’s amazing when the kimono opens and gives us mere citizens a glimpse of what’s really going on behind the facade of our local political machine. Particularly when two old political dynasties are cutting deals.

The Tribune, to its credit, ran a story this week that dealt with homelessness (the political nom de guerre for “social collapse”), and managed to do it without prefacing the yarn by trotting out a teary-eyed sidewalk-sleeper’s fall from grace. (And note: it’s always someone else’s fault that the tweeker took their first shot of methamphetamine.)

No, this one was a rather dull account of a seemingly routine land deal. In terms of the money spent yearly by our county government—$3.3-billion—it was chump change: $3.1-million.

The ho-hum headline…

Multnomah County to buy lot next to behavioral health center.

…hardly hinted at the goodies available to the discerning reader.

First, the backstory.

The new downtown “Behavioral Health Center,” typical of progressive machine scams, is grossly misnamed. You might think it was a clinic that would treat or even improve deficient “behavior.” Nope: it is, in essence, a daycare drop-in/drop-out center for downtown’s ample population of tweekers, fentanyl-heroin addicts, sidewalk zombies, psychos, tenters and “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose” derelicts.

Hey! They need a place to go during the times when they aren’t scrounging and begging and, occasionally, scaring the mopes who are going to pay for this. And so, for a mere $31.6 million, according to the latest Tribune calculation, this is what they will get…

The facility will offer respite for people with mental illness and substance use disorders who are experiencing homelessness downtown.

Give the word “respite” a moment’s thought. Then you might want to read the county’s summary of the new center, noting that the Center will be…

…providing laundry and showers, food, peer-led resources, and shelter and transitional housing.

The first and second levels will support a day center, staffed by 10 peer specialists. Open daily from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., the center will provide people experiencing homelessness who also have a substance use disorder or mental illness a place to get warm and dry.

The center will provide lockers for guests to store their belongings while they eat a meal or take a shower. The center will also provide washers and dryers, a living room where people can sit down to watch a TV show, and computers for people to check their email and connect with loved ones and providers.

How very…nice. The county claims (and the number is hardly ever mentioned in their voluminous self-congratulations) that around 150 people a day will use their facility. A very few (the number is between the county and the bedpost) will have little cubicles…but most will get their free services and wonder back out onto the streets.

The latest census of the homeless (widely regarded as a gross undercount) revealed that homelessness is up by 30% in three years at an official 5,228. At the rate of 150 per day..well, do the math. (No one else in the county government has.)

All this for, by the Trib’s calculation, for a mere $31.6 million—a number that has been growing since the project was first announced back in 2019. Props to the county for moving fast to get ahead of downtown’s homeless problem!

Which—taking the county at its own word—will do nothing…

…nothing…

to actually “solve” or even moderate the homeless encampments, drug sales, theft, weirdness on downtown’s streets. It will, to be blunt, support the city’s growing feral population, drawing tweekers from as far away as West Palm Beach, Florida, to Oregon’s wide-open hard-drug markets and beggable citizens and bleeding-heart “advocates.”.

The only question is: how could it not work out that way?

It will also—as with all things progressive—feature many new job openings for the employees of Homeless Inc. These are known as “stakeholders,” although “paycheck-cashers” might be more apt. The usual band of parasitic actors is on board—the list is endless and includes our old friends Center City Concern, along with outfits such as North Star Clubhouse and Bridges to Change, Transition Projects, and the usual gaggle of “advocates” and “activists” and members of the many-tentacled county and city bureaucracies with tongue-twister names such as the “Office of Consumer Engagement for Multnomah County’s Mental Health and Addiction Services Division.”

These may be called, humorously, “peers,” but that is just another torture of the English language. They are, in a word, enablers. Or, co-dependent. Or, opportunists.

And grotesquely self-interested.

The county has already spent (their numbers again) $2.2-million on architects and planners—We’ve got to be sure the elevators can accommodate a gurney! And the firm of Carleton Hart Architects has done a bang-up job of putting lipstick on the old, worn out department store, including a spiffy selection of trees (including “Eddie’s White Wonder Dogwood”) and a pretty pierced steel powder-coated fence around the outdoor paddock for the feral. Perfect for passers-by on SW Park Ave to pass little packets back and forth. Just sayin’…

The project has been percolating along nicely, all sorts of financial two-steps, bonds (check your future property-tax bills) and intergovernment dollar exchanges (keeping the dollar-movers at county fully employed).

And the average taxpayer wouldn’t go there on a bet. It’s not for them…it’s for THEM.

And then came the Trib’s rewrite of what the county was willing to share about yet another purchase of land to plump-out the project.

Multnomah County will acquire a parking lot adjacent to the new Behavioral Health Resource Center in downtown Portland to support the center's workers and other potential uses.

The county board of commissioners unanimously approved the purchase of the nearly 6,200-square-foot lot at 801 S.W. Harvey Milk St. for $3.1 million on Thursday, May 19.

Note: this is a parking lot for the staff. Can’t have ‘em out on the street where cars can be broken into! (By who? Don’t ask.)

And then, this…

The county is purchasing the property from Parcel 18 LLC. The managers of the company are Greg G LLC and Mark G LLC, which are managed by Greg and Mark Goodman, respectively, according to the Oregon business registry. The Goodmans are co-presidents of Downtown Development Group LLC, one of the largest private landowners in downtown Portland.

Of course! The Goodman family. “Dynasty” might be a better term.

Founded 60 years ago, when Portland was a very different city, the Goodmans turned City Center Parking from 30,000 parking spaces into…

Downtown Development Group LLC and its affiliates [which] have an ownership interest in more than 1,800,000 square feet of retail, office and warehouse in addition to over 25 parcels of shovel ready, developable land in Portland’s Central Business District. 

The Trib, to its credit, mentioned sotto voce, that Greg and Mark got $3.1-million for the plot and noted…

According to portlandmaps.com, the real market value of the lot was $1.2 million in 2021. The website pulls data used for taxation purposes from the Multnomah County Assessment & Taxation division. Discrepancies between the county's stated real market value of a property and the price paid during a property transaction are common and can be influenced by factors such as market and economic conditions.

…and…

The county previously purchased a different parking lot on the opposite side of the building, which is being turned into a fenced-in outdoor plaza for center users. The county paid $1.5 million for that parking lot.

And, with that, the Trib quoted…

"The price is very good," Eric Arellano, chief financial officer for the county, told the board.

Think he’d have a job if he said anything else?

Let’s ponder this for a mad moment.

First, consider the Goodman’s statement that they have a plethora of parcels that are “shovel-ready.” Question: where are the shovels?

As KOIN, in a fawning piece on the Goodmans noted in October, 2021…

“I’ve received one call with one potential tenant — probably not going to happen — in the last year-and-a-half,” [Greg Goodman] told KOIN 6 News. “There is no demand right now.”

Goodman blames the pandemic, violence and vandalism — and Portland’s tattered national reputation.

“Downtown has definitely taken a hit. No doubt about it,” he said. There is nearly 7 million vacant square feet of property in central city, space that will not get filled until downtown is an attractive destination again, he said.

Portland has to clean up the crush of homeless and mentally ill people on the streets without enough housing or treatment options, he said.

Hear the kimono flapping?

Bravo for Greg and Mark and the laws of capitalism. Always better to buy (or inherit) low and sell high. But let’s get real: is the downtown real estate market that much better than a year ago? Especially after the last census showed that people are not flocking to the city and that growth—what there is of it—is now in suburban areas that, coincidentally, take a rather dim view of tents. Seen many lately in Lake Oswego?

How much d’you suppose a little slice of land is really worth when it’s plunked down next to the soon-to-be center of feral druggies downtown? Hardly a spot for Class A offices and tenants…”Join your neighbors for free needle night!”

Then you might wonder: has anyone ever heard the legal term “condemnation?” As in a “taking” for public use, with the value of the property set by a jury and not a comfy negotiation by the (presumably) well-paid brokers at CBRE Group, Inc, the world's largest commercial real estate services and investment firm.

Then the truly cynical might note that the new Center will inexorably move the feral from their lairs in downtown, away—let’s just say—from the Goodman’s long-term plans to make their Ankeny Blocks, now home to a catch-all of older buildings, into a…

…unique opportunity to build millions of square feet upon 11 proximate land sites. In a city defined by its creativity, we view this as the ultimate creative opportunity: a chance to build a city-defining, multi-site project in the heart of Portland.

Let’s get those shovels digging!

The added bit of spice is that the sale was a deal between of two of the city’s dynasties: The Goodmans and the far-flung Kafoury clan. In this case county chair Deborah Kafoury, who rammed through the Center’s “negotiations,” and stiff-armed the use of the old Bybee Lakes Jail, with hundreds of permanent beds, as an alternative to fixing up an old derelict department store. Bybee is now up and running.

But it doesn’t accept druggies who want to do drugs.

Kafoury clearly sees this as her legacy which might just top her mother, the late Gretchen Kafoury, who was a Portland and Multnomah County commissioner; or her father, Stephen Kafoury, who served in the Legislature and as a lobbyist in Salem.

It’s a fair bet that these folks know one another. (Do they like each other? See: Capitalism, real world of.)

Don’t let any of this bother you; Portland voters certainly don’t. They’re the ones feeding the beasties.

But—please. Lose the nonsense about “behavior.”