Monthly Archives: March 2025

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I Told You So: The Ritz-Carlton Portland Goes Bust

Two years ago I wrote a post about the likely failure of the Ritz-Carlton Residences in Portland:

THE RITZ-CARLTON RESIDENCES IN PORTLAND: A TOWERING MISTAKE

Now we know it was a towering mistake, indeed, a fiasco, a classic misreading of the market.

Keller Williams Realty Professionals began marketing individual condos at prices ranging from $1,1000,000 for a one bedroom 2 bath 1,105 sq. ft unit to $8,999,000 for a 3 bedroom 4 bathroom 3,256 sq. ft unit. Principal and interest on the mortgage, plus property taxes and condo fees, could have translated to an $8000 a month expense for the 1 bedroom.

Willamette Week’s Anthony Effinger reported today that only 8% of  the 132 Ritz-Carlton condominiums have sold, a failure of massive proportions that could have potentially major repercussions for the City of Portland  and its struggling downtown core. His entire article is reproduced below:

In July 2025, Ready Capital Corp., based in New York, said it had taken possession of Block 216, the 35-story building in Portland’s West End that has ground-floor retail, five floors of office space, a 251-room Ritz-Carlton Hotel and 132 Ritz-Carlton residences.

Lender to Ritz-Carlton Tower Says Foreclosure Best Option for $503 Million Loan

By Anthony Effinger

The lender to Block 216, Walter Bowen’s gleaming West End skyscraper, sounded an ominous note about the property in an earnings report Monday.

New York-based Ready Capital said the best strategy for its $503 million construction loan would be to take possession of the property, instead of waiting for repayment.

“Ownership is [the] best net present value outcome for RC,” Ready Capital wrote in a 25-page supplement to its fourth-quarter earnings.

Ready Capital CEO Thomas Capasse went into more detail on a conference call.

“While the original strategy was to refinance the construction into a bridge loan, the current appraisal and other factors favored ownership and serial asset disposition on the components as the best net present value outcome,” Capasse said, according to a transcript of the call.

Translation: foreclose on the 35-story building and sell it in chunks.

Block 216 has ground-floor retail, five floors of office space, a Ritz-Carlton Hotel and Ritz-Carlton Residences. Ready Capital acquired the Block 216 loan in March 2022, when it bought Mosaic Real Estate Credit LLC, the building’s original construction lender.

Like so many downtown towers, Block 216 has struggled to land office tenants. 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 hotel is underperforming, too, Ready Capital said. Its average revenue per available room was $188 in 2024, compared with $343.28, the average for all Ritz-Carlton hotels during the same period. The chain is owned by Marriot International Inc., which provided the average figure in its full-year earnings report.

Ready Capital said it plans to stabilize the three components of the angular glass tower—commercial, condo and hotel—then sell the office space and hotel portion within two years. Unloading the condos will take three years, Ready Capital said.

Neither Block 216 management nor Bowen’s company, BPM Real Estate Group, returned calls and emails seeking comment. Ready Capital’s press office didn’t return an email. Nor did its chief financial officer, Andrew Ahlborn.

One bright spot: Block 216’s retail space, where a food hall called Flock opened in January, is 100% leased, Ready Capital said.

The earnings report spurred a 27% decline in Ready Capital shares on Monday, mostly because the company halved the quarterly dividend it pays to investors to 12.5 cents a share to “better align the dividend with projected cash earnings in the short-term and to preserve book value,” Capasse said on the conference call.

Concern about the Block 216 loan also may have also weighed on the stock. In addition to the $503 million loan, Ready Capital also owns $62 million of preferred equity in the project, for a total of $565 million.

Ready Capital said it has set aside $130 million to cover the declining value of Block 216. Given that reserve, Ready Capital values it at about $435 million. At that valuation, Block 216 accounts for about one-quarter of common shareholders’ equity in Ready Capital.

Ready Capital shares closed at $4.95 today, down from $8.39 a year ago.

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Trump’s Climate Change Denial Hits Key Federal Agency

Humans to blame for bulk of Arctic sea ice loss, study finds | news.com.au — Australia's leading news site

OK, Mr. Trump, now you’ve gone over the line. You’ve callously attacked a critical federal agency I worked for earlier in my career and that works to protect the Pacific Northwest, where I live.. 

An administration that has demonstrated its resistance to science has taken another ill-advised step, firing 800 probationary employees at the of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In addition, about 500 employees left the agency on Friday after taking a so-called deferred resignation offer, the New York Times reported. 

This follows a Trump administration order to NOAA earlier this month to search for climate change-related keywords in its grant programs. The Commerce Department instructed NOAA and its divisions to review grants for specific terms like “climate” and “greenhouse gas” without clearly saying why, although there were suspicions it was tied to the new administration’s hostility toward climate change research.

It also follows an Associated Press report that Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin, appointed by Trump, has privately urged the Trump administration the  to reconsider a scientific finding that has long been the central basis for U.S. action against climate change. 

According to the Associated Press, in a report to the White House, Zeldin “called for a rewrite of the agency’s finding that determined planet-warming greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, according to four people who were briefed on the matter but spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the recommendation is not public. The 2009 finding under the Clean Air Act is the legal underpinning of a host of climate regulations for motor vehicles, power plants and other pollution sources.”

The Trump administration is particularly resistant to climate science because taking the subject seriously would mean reducing the use of fossil fuels, an industry that supported and helped pay for Trump’s return to office and his commitment to American energy dominance.

The probationary employees pushed out at NOAA—who have been in their jobs for a short period and lack the protections afforded to staff members with longer tenure—received a blunt dismissal email on Thursday, according to Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA), ranking member on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and transportation, which oversees NOAA. The email read in part: “[T]he Agency finds that you are not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge and/or skills do not fit the Agency’s current needs.”

“The firings jeopardize our ability to forecast and respond to extreme weather events like hurricanes, wildfires, and floods—putting communities in harm’s way,” Cantwell said. “They also threaten our maritime commerce and endanger 1.7 million jobs that depend on commercial, recreational and tribal fisheries…This action is a direct hit to our economy, because NOAA’s specialized workforce provides products and services that support more than a third of the nation’s GDP.”

“American science, in other words, had performed a remarkable feat: it had given us a timely early warning of the single greatest danger our species has ever faced,” Bill McKibben wrote in the New Yorker. “I listed all the players involved because those agencies—the N.S.F., NOAA, NASA—are precisely the institutions now being told to scrub their Web sites and re-examine their grants for projects that run counter to the Administration’s diktat on climate—and “diversity.”

The attack on NOAA, one of the more visible signs of the Trump administration’s opposition to climate change activism, seems to foolishly reflect a view that blocking research will also halt the reality of long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns.

NOAA’s Climate Change Program’s office manages competitive research programs in which NOAA funds high-priority climate science, assessments, decision support research, outreach, education, and capacity-building activities designed to advance our understanding of Earth’s climate system. It also aims to foster the application of this knowledge in risk management and adaptation efforts. The research is conducted across the United States and globally.

Project 2025, a policy blueprint published by the Heritage Foundation that is reflected in many of the actions taken by the Trump administration, says the agency is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry” and calls for it to be dismantled.

During his presidential campaign, Trump firmly disavowed any connection with, or even detailed knowledge of, Project 2025. He has nevertheless filled his new administration with numerous Project 2025 authors and contributors and is pursuing many of the project’s recommendations.