I was in Big Pink once. For some idiotic training session when I worked for the anchor tenant. My new boss had socialist leanings and my libertarian view was something he just couldn’t comprehend. I would soon be hired away and our discussions ended.
The U.S. Bancorp tower in downtown Portland is now half empty, with the bank, while leaving its name on the building, relocating most of its employees. “The property, once a premier address in the city, was afflicted with ‘vagrants sleeping in hallways of vacant office floors.’ They were ‘starting fires in stairwells, smoking fentanyl and defecating in common areas,’ according to papers the company filed in a lease-termination lawsuit,” wrote Peter Grant for the Wall Street Journal.
As reflected in the series Portlandia, the city is liberal and laid back. When I was there decades ago, homeless people were everywhere downtown. Eventually they took over the bank headquarters.
The building gets its nickname not from the political leanings of the city’s population but “because of its pink-hued Spanish granite and pink glazed glass.” The 42-story tower is up for sale at an asking price of about $70 million. “That is more than 80% below what the owners paid for it a decade ago,” Grant explained.
Pre-pandemic Portland attracted technology companies with the area’s natural beauty and low housing costs compared with Seattle and San Francisco.
The U.S. Bancorp Tower enjoyed growing rents and high occupancy levels. “The value of the 42-year-old tower kept rising as a series of institutional owners purchased and sold the property leading up to the 2015 purchase by Unico and the UBS fund.”
Tech tenant “Digital Trends signed a lease in 2013 and kept growing in the building, upgrading its space with a special kitchen, laundry room, bathroom and home theater for testing consumer products.” The company is now litigating to break its lease
But the pandemic, combined with the rampant homelessness and “the state’s botched experiment with drug decriminalization,” has led to a 35% vacancy in the downtown Portland office market. The city’s budget is dwindling due to the fall in property values. But, the city government has a tin ear and is piling on other taxes to house the homeless and provide pre-school for all.
Portland’s office market turmoil is not confined. The town’s residential market is also hurting. “A $600 million development including condos, office space and a Ritz-Carlton hotel that opened in 2023 is struggling. A lender is trying to take title to the property, partly because condo sales have been weak,” writes Grant.
In its court filing, Digital Trends said that Big Pink became a “cesspool of criminal activity and vandalism,” forcing it to vacate the property.
Natalie Fertig wrote for Politico last October, “This proudly liberal city has endured more than 100 days of often-violent protests, a fentanyl and homelessness crisis, a pandemic — and, in arguably the nation’s boldest progressive policy experiment in recent history — decriminalization of all drugs.”
Portland’s voters decided to throw out their entire government structure and replace it with a weaker mayor, expanded City Council and ranked choice voting.
The new mayor is considered pro-business. He’s likely too late for Big Pink.
