Outstanding summary. Idea: take the money and ‘clean up’ our streets. Figure out a way to convert some of it to fund our operations budget (unlikely due to the way government funding works and the inability of departments to work together not to mention our dysfunctional city leadership) including more police, recovery/ rehab facilities etc… Regardless, we must stop this project.
In a city desperately short of money, with countless far higher priorities, so many other ways to use this money!!! It’s only $200 million for a 10 block streetcar to nowhere extension-WTF?
A few examples:
1. Shift a little to help parks
2. Incentives for new business in so many vacant ground floor retail spaces. Perhaps discounted parking or transit passes for owners and employees of new and existing small independent retailers.
3. City can help fund security at Safeway on NW 13th near new shelters, same with Fred Meyer on Burnside.
4. You can all come up with countless more uses of these funds!
It is hard to believe that this is the priority we want to champion at this moment in time for the Central City. We have invested billions in light rail and transit malls Downtown that are suffering from low ridership. Buildings sit empty due to WFH and safety and livability concerns. The street car suffers from the same issues. Stops are regularly vandalized. They are used for a dry place to smoke Fentanyl and Meth. They are dry places for the homeless to duck the rain. We are not repairing our streets, dealing with behavioral health issues, hiring public safety to keep visitors and riders safe or addressing homelessness in a meangingful way. And the City Council has decided that the expansion of the streetcar to a building that just sold at bargain basement prices is somehow going to make it safer? I think the City has their priorities wrong. It would be nice to do if the City were prospering, but the City Council and Mayor need to explain to the general public how this is going to do anything but exacerbate our most pressing problems.
Each time I read a piece such as this, I shake my head in dismay at the ongoing wasteful spending practices of the City of Portland, stemming from the “my way or the highway” approach to leadership of the City’s elected and appointed officials. The residents and businesses located in the City need this Streetcar extension like a hole in the head while so many other civic needs go unfunded.
Excellent reporting! Can this be petitioned and brought to ballot for the ordinary citizens to vote on? Such a waste of money when our city suffers in so many areas.
I am with you for the most part and have been saying these same things for several weeks - as news of this development progress came out. These things are fact: the $180mil budget in 2025, will rise to $250mil or more by the time they start, at the earliest in 24-36 months. That is the nature of all such public projects. And, yes, the neighborhood, for anyone who knows anything about LIDs will pay the brunt of these costs. Property owners along the route will be asked to tax themselves through a Local Improvement District (LID). The goal here is to keep it quiet and the abutting neighbors stupid, so they can't react to this till it's far too late.
Yes, Montgomery Park has a giant vacancy problem. That's why investors could get it for cents on the dollar. And it makes some sense to return control and lease marketing to locals (rather than a Seattle owner.) But, I cannot imagine where they expect to get new tenants or how they plan to successfully compete with the Cairn Pacific property to be developed immediately west or the ESCO properties immediately to the east - both that will require office tenants too, to meet zoning code. And then add whatever demands a currently closer to 40% downtown vacancy rate will create in buildings looking to claw back lost tenants to the core area - or the needs of the Oregonian blocks on SW 17th and 18th or Lloyd Center or the recently announced Albina Riverside's "The Low End District" planned as 7 acres of mixed-use development. Simply put, there are a giant number of local gamblers looking to lure whatever business tenants remain willing to reside in Multnomah County when the mass exodus finally bottoms out.
That said, remember too that all three NW Portland developments are pushing for this public transportation project (though how it feeds the Cairn Pacific properties is beyond me.) Clearly, the new streetcar line is designed to improve the consumer use and investment marketing of these projects. It's public money to serve private investors - nothing new with that. All improvement projects are motivated by what public money can help fund it. So it's not about going nowhere as this streetcar intends to serve the purposes of three developers. Plus, do not ignore how much property values improve, with the sanctuary lifted and improved transit for all property owners, like Calbags, on the northside of Nicolai. (Calbags owner is an investor in the ESCO gamble.) It would be foolish to assume that development ends on the south side. Think of this as the first of other phases to come.
Where you and I disagree is on the future development.
Sitting currently empty does not imply project failure, merely a slow approach due to challenging economic conditions of all kinds. The housing plan has not vanished and I do not know how you can claim no developer has stepped forward, when at least three of the major investors are giant Portland developers and one is a giant commercial contractor. Yes, high loan rates, increased material costs and skilled labor shortages are certainly stalling immediate action. But, these investors also had to wait 6 of those years to successfully pull insider strings to get the industrial sanctuary lifted. They couldn't do any of their plans without it gone. In the meantime, they are pushing on getting the streetcar plans finalized, a public-paid study is just underway, solidly positioned so no public backlash can threaten this public gift to their investments.
And, yes, the long term financing seems a bit unknown at the moment. Both REITs and Life Insurance companies aren't really publicizing the kind of loss damages they are taking in low-performing and non-performing urban investments where vacancies are high post pandemic. We only see the worst of it, when they divest themselves of these, at huge investment losses (which at least may be a tax shelter loss for their otherwise high-earning investors.)
But, beyond these challenges, it seems likely that none of these investors of redevelopment projects around the city want to jump in right now, not while tenant flight continues to wreak havoc throughout Portland and in record numbers in downtown Portland. None of these well-informed and practiced developers see an advantage in taking on millions in construction debt to begin a project when the uncertainty of crucial unit sales or leasing remains high. And I don't see that changing for awhile. So if anything, these investors may resort to a paper PR war, leaking sensational plans still on the boards, in hopes that these "test balloon" musings will lure a few strong anchor tenants to chose their site over a half dozen others. Right now, they need to take planning slowly, with as little expense as possible, continue to push their projects through the municipal agencies that approve their plans and dole out public subsidy when applicable, all while winning public support (or at least maintaining public ignorance so they do not block their plans) while trying to win a proxy battle for whatever tenant customers remain interested in relocating or returning to the core area. Naturally, if it's mere relocation from elsewhere in Portland to NW Nicolai, the value to government is nil. It merely becomes the success of one developer at the loss of another.
We know the purpose and we know the price, Bob. It is to serve rich investors under the guise of redevelopment (in an area that needed none while an industrial sanctuary remained. Does anyone remember how these same folk fought to keep Costco from building a store on Nicolai a decade ago - when the sanctuary served their needs?) And sadly, unless the abutting neighbors gain new awareness, some serious education and a backbone, these well-connected investors will see that city officials deliver this $250-$300mil project, on the backs of their LID taxed properties.
Lastly, while I agree that the ridership numbers are a joke and completely uncertain and unprovable, I reluctantly believe that when (not if) developments come to these three projects south of Nicolai, there will be some ridership and it will increase the ridership of the existing lines. Not anywhere close to the numbers they pretend. Just for fun, as an arbitrary measure, I'd love to see the daily office population numbers of downtown Portland served by MAX pre-COVID. Would the total ridership be 1% of the daily visitors to downtown? That's a far more realistic measure of potential ridership (were that these projects had identical businesses and services.) Of course, my 1% is a wild guess, but were this accurate, while the other 99% drove, bussed or walked to work, 3,300 projected riders on this line would mean feeding a daytime population along this line of 330,000 people. Yea, that's not happening - not in our lifetime. Someone is a big fat liar.
Outstanding summary. Idea: take the money and ‘clean up’ our streets. Figure out a way to convert some of it to fund our operations budget (unlikely due to the way government funding works and the inability of departments to work together not to mention our dysfunctional city leadership) including more police, recovery/ rehab facilities etc… Regardless, we must stop this project.
In a city desperately short of money, with countless far higher priorities, so many other ways to use this money!!! It’s only $200 million for a 10 block streetcar to nowhere extension-WTF?
A few examples:
1. Shift a little to help parks
2. Incentives for new business in so many vacant ground floor retail spaces. Perhaps discounted parking or transit passes for owners and employees of new and existing small independent retailers.
3. City can help fund security at Safeway on NW 13th near new shelters, same with Fred Meyer on Burnside.
4. You can all come up with countless more uses of these funds!
It is hard to believe that this is the priority we want to champion at this moment in time for the Central City. We have invested billions in light rail and transit malls Downtown that are suffering from low ridership. Buildings sit empty due to WFH and safety and livability concerns. The street car suffers from the same issues. Stops are regularly vandalized. They are used for a dry place to smoke Fentanyl and Meth. They are dry places for the homeless to duck the rain. We are not repairing our streets, dealing with behavioral health issues, hiring public safety to keep visitors and riders safe or addressing homelessness in a meangingful way. And the City Council has decided that the expansion of the streetcar to a building that just sold at bargain basement prices is somehow going to make it safer? I think the City has their priorities wrong. It would be nice to do if the City were prospering, but the City Council and Mayor need to explain to the general public how this is going to do anything but exacerbate our most pressing problems.
Each time I read a piece such as this, I shake my head in dismay at the ongoing wasteful spending practices of the City of Portland, stemming from the “my way or the highway” approach to leadership of the City’s elected and appointed officials. The residents and businesses located in the City need this Streetcar extension like a hole in the head while so many other civic needs go unfunded.
Excellent reporting! Can this be petitioned and brought to ballot for the ordinary citizens to vote on? Such a waste of money when our city suffers in so many areas.
So how do we turn this mega-tanker around?
Can litigation against the streetcar project be far away?
We need to get Bob on the city council or elect him mayor in the next election.
I am with you for the most part and have been saying these same things for several weeks - as news of this development progress came out. These things are fact: the $180mil budget in 2025, will rise to $250mil or more by the time they start, at the earliest in 24-36 months. That is the nature of all such public projects. And, yes, the neighborhood, for anyone who knows anything about LIDs will pay the brunt of these costs. Property owners along the route will be asked to tax themselves through a Local Improvement District (LID). The goal here is to keep it quiet and the abutting neighbors stupid, so they can't react to this till it's far too late.
Yes, Montgomery Park has a giant vacancy problem. That's why investors could get it for cents on the dollar. And it makes some sense to return control and lease marketing to locals (rather than a Seattle owner.) But, I cannot imagine where they expect to get new tenants or how they plan to successfully compete with the Cairn Pacific property to be developed immediately west or the ESCO properties immediately to the east - both that will require office tenants too, to meet zoning code. And then add whatever demands a currently closer to 40% downtown vacancy rate will create in buildings looking to claw back lost tenants to the core area - or the needs of the Oregonian blocks on SW 17th and 18th or Lloyd Center or the recently announced Albina Riverside's "The Low End District" planned as 7 acres of mixed-use development. Simply put, there are a giant number of local gamblers looking to lure whatever business tenants remain willing to reside in Multnomah County when the mass exodus finally bottoms out.
That said, remember too that all three NW Portland developments are pushing for this public transportation project (though how it feeds the Cairn Pacific properties is beyond me.) Clearly, the new streetcar line is designed to improve the consumer use and investment marketing of these projects. It's public money to serve private investors - nothing new with that. All improvement projects are motivated by what public money can help fund it. So it's not about going nowhere as this streetcar intends to serve the purposes of three developers. Plus, do not ignore how much property values improve, with the sanctuary lifted and improved transit for all property owners, like Calbags, on the northside of Nicolai. (Calbags owner is an investor in the ESCO gamble.) It would be foolish to assume that development ends on the south side. Think of this as the first of other phases to come.
Where you and I disagree is on the future development.
Sitting currently empty does not imply project failure, merely a slow approach due to challenging economic conditions of all kinds. The housing plan has not vanished and I do not know how you can claim no developer has stepped forward, when at least three of the major investors are giant Portland developers and one is a giant commercial contractor. Yes, high loan rates, increased material costs and skilled labor shortages are certainly stalling immediate action. But, these investors also had to wait 6 of those years to successfully pull insider strings to get the industrial sanctuary lifted. They couldn't do any of their plans without it gone. In the meantime, they are pushing on getting the streetcar plans finalized, a public-paid study is just underway, solidly positioned so no public backlash can threaten this public gift to their investments.
And, yes, the long term financing seems a bit unknown at the moment. Both REITs and Life Insurance companies aren't really publicizing the kind of loss damages they are taking in low-performing and non-performing urban investments where vacancies are high post pandemic. We only see the worst of it, when they divest themselves of these, at huge investment losses (which at least may be a tax shelter loss for their otherwise high-earning investors.)
But, beyond these challenges, it seems likely that none of these investors of redevelopment projects around the city want to jump in right now, not while tenant flight continues to wreak havoc throughout Portland and in record numbers in downtown Portland. None of these well-informed and practiced developers see an advantage in taking on millions in construction debt to begin a project when the uncertainty of crucial unit sales or leasing remains high. And I don't see that changing for awhile. So if anything, these investors may resort to a paper PR war, leaking sensational plans still on the boards, in hopes that these "test balloon" musings will lure a few strong anchor tenants to chose their site over a half dozen others. Right now, they need to take planning slowly, with as little expense as possible, continue to push their projects through the municipal agencies that approve their plans and dole out public subsidy when applicable, all while winning public support (or at least maintaining public ignorance so they do not block their plans) while trying to win a proxy battle for whatever tenant customers remain interested in relocating or returning to the core area. Naturally, if it's mere relocation from elsewhere in Portland to NW Nicolai, the value to government is nil. It merely becomes the success of one developer at the loss of another.
We know the purpose and we know the price, Bob. It is to serve rich investors under the guise of redevelopment (in an area that needed none while an industrial sanctuary remained. Does anyone remember how these same folk fought to keep Costco from building a store on Nicolai a decade ago - when the sanctuary served their needs?) And sadly, unless the abutting neighbors gain new awareness, some serious education and a backbone, these well-connected investors will see that city officials deliver this $250-$300mil project, on the backs of their LID taxed properties.
Lastly, while I agree that the ridership numbers are a joke and completely uncertain and unprovable, I reluctantly believe that when (not if) developments come to these three projects south of Nicolai, there will be some ridership and it will increase the ridership of the existing lines. Not anywhere close to the numbers they pretend. Just for fun, as an arbitrary measure, I'd love to see the daily office population numbers of downtown Portland served by MAX pre-COVID. Would the total ridership be 1% of the daily visitors to downtown? That's a far more realistic measure of potential ridership (were that these projects had identical businesses and services.) Of course, my 1% is a wild guess, but were this accurate, while the other 99% drove, bussed or walked to work, 3,300 projected riders on this line would mean feeding a daytime population along this line of 330,000 people. Yea, that's not happening - not in our lifetime. Someone is a big fat liar.