Tag Archives: Willamette Week

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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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Is Carrick Flynn’s Money Going To Do The Trick? Maybe Not.

All those millions donated to Carrick Flynn and a new poll shows he is, at best, tied with Andrea Salinas in the Democratic primary for Congress in Oregon’s 6th District.

On behalf of Salinas’s campaign, Public Policy Polling, a respected and reliable polling firm, polled 591 Democratic voters in the district earlier this week. Across the district, 18% of potential Democratic voters supported Salinas, 14% Flynn and no other candidate exceeded single digits.

The margin of error of the pole was +/- 4 percentage points, so it’s possible Flynn and Salinas are actually tied.  Salinas’s lead increased to 39% to 23 % among voters who have already cast their ballots, according to The Hill.

Of those who had already mailed back their ballots, Salinas led Flynn 39% – 23%, but that may not mean much because fewer than 10% of Democrats had returned their ballots by Thursday. 

Carrick Flynn’s crypto-financed rise in the polls has run into a few potholes lately. 

After the Democratic House leadership campaign arm, the House Majority PAC, injected $1 million into Flynn’s campaign, the other candidates lambasted the action.

Six of the nine Democrats seeking to win the Democratic primary rapidly issued a statement denouncing the House Majority PAC’s donation to Flynn. “We strongly condemn House Majority PAC’s unprecedented and inappropriate decision…” the joint statement said. “We call on House Majority PAC to actually stand by our party’s values and let the voters of Oregon decide who their Democratic nominee will be.”

Then CHC Bold PAC , a Democratic-aligned PAC supporting the election of Hispanic Democrats to Congress, condemned the House Majority PAC’s donation to Flynn. The PAC reminded  others that Latina women have been critical to Democratic victories and the PAC’s support for Flynn ignored a highly qualified Latina, Andrea Salinas, was in the primary battle. 

“HMP is tasked with defending the House Majority by boosting Democrats and holding Republicans accountable, not with spending critical resources against a woman who has spent decades fighting for progressive causes and who will excite Democratic voters in November,” a Bold PAC statement said. Bold PAC then put its money where its mouth was, donating $1 million to Salinas.

Flynn may also have undercut some of his momentum by making some politically ill-advised comments questioning environmentalist’s support for spotted owl protections. According to E&E News, Flynn said protecting the owl made him “indignant or angry” because it hurt livelihoods.

Rubbing salt in the wound, Flynn was accused of expressing sympathy, on  a podcast “Oregon Bridge”,  with Timber Unity, a group formed to oppose climate change policies, and was later accused in Mother Jones of having  “… had no qualms associating with violent extremists and far-right groups.”

In a May 4, 2022 , Willamette Week article, Flynn disputed allegations he had shown support for Timber Unity. “So, I’m emphatically not a Timber Unity supporter,” he said. “I do have concerns about the economic effect conservation had on timber communities. But I have concerns about economic effects of any large economic trends or any government regulation on communities.”

To bolster his case, Flynn urged people to listen to the April 13, 2022 podcast and hear what he said.  He’s such a fast talker on the podcast he can be hard to follow, but his remarks are, in fact, not consistent with the characterization of his views by critics as anti-environmentalist.

Nevertheless, with nuance hardly a hallmark of political debate, E&E News headlined its story, “Ore. Democrat slams spotted owl protections, rakes in cash,” and a group of Oregon environmental organizations issued a joint statement blasting Flynn, saying they were .”..stunned and deeply saddened to hear Carrick Flynn, a Democratic candidate running for Congress, make comments mocking critical environmental protections.” 

Willamette Week’s disclosure that Flynn has rarely voted in Oregon probably hasn’t helped him either. Reporters Nigel Jaquiss and Rachel Monahan discovered that Flynn has voted just twice in the past 30 elections and did not vote in 2020, despite being registered to vote in Oregon since he was a teenager. “I’m not political,” Flynn said on the Oregon Bridge podcast. “I’m solutions oriented.” Flimsy excuses for his voting record, essentially “I was out of town,” haven’t helped either.

“That raised questions about, why people are dropping $7 million, $8 million for this candidate who seems to have very little connection to the district?” said James Moore, a political science professor at Pacific University. “Who is this guy, and what’s going on?”

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Will The Oregonian survive?

Local news coverage is dying.

dyingnewspapers

The latest casualty — the entire staff of the New Orleans Times-Picayune. All 161 of them, , including reporters and editors, are losing their jobs.

On May 2, the Times-Picayune’s rival, the New Orleans Advocate, bought the Times-Picayune and plans to merge the papers under a single masthead and website. The seller — Advance Local Media LLC, the parent of Oregonian Media Group.  Even winning  two Pulitzers for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina didn’t serve the Times-Picayune.

Randy Siegel, CEO of Advance Local, assured the New York Post’s Keith J. Kelly that the sale of the Times-Picayune was a one-time thing. But what if it’s not? Is The Oregonian/OregonLive at risk, too?

Daily newspapers like the Times-Picayune and The Oregonian were once pervasive throughout the United States, with many communities having both a morning and evening paper, and sometimes a weekly local paper as well. But daily local newspapers are now in decline, dealing with cratering circulation, a reduction in print editions and drastic staff cuts.

According to the Wall St. Journal, nearly 1,800 US newspapers shut down between 2004 and 2018, including more than 60 dailies and 1,700 weeklies. Hundreds of communities have lost their local newspapers. Between 1,300 and 1,400 communities that had newspapers of their own in 2004 now have no news coverage at all, according to the UNC Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media.

It was once unthinkable that papers such as the Cincinnati Post, the Albuquerque Tribune, the New York Sun, the Rocky Mountain News, and the Tampa Tribune would close, but they are all gone now. Nicco Mele, former director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, predicts that half of remaining titles will disappear within the next two years.

Newspaper consumption in Oregon is already dropping precipitously, with daily and weekly circulation combined falling from 1.4 million in 2004 to 796,000 in 2019, the UNC Center says.

Some of the remaining Oregon papers are what the UNC Center calls “ghosts”  because their newsroom staffing has been so dramatically pared back, often by more than half,  that the remaining journalists cannot adequately cover their communities.

In January 2018, when Willamette Week broke that The Oregonian was laying off another 11 newsroom staffers, the Portland Mercury observed, “After repeated rounds of layoffs, it’s hard to imagine The Oregonian having anywhere else to cut. But the news business’s grim prognosis marches on, so the cuts continue.”

“For those inclined to point fingers at The Oregonian or our parent company Advanced Publications: Ad revenue across our industry continues to plummet precipitously. Layoffs in local newsrooms are happening everywhere. And it fucking sucks,” Oregonian reporter Shane D. Kavanaugh tweeted.

Compared with its breadth and depth in the 1990s, The Oregonian/OregonLive has become a ghost. When I was a business reporter at The Oregonian in the 1980s and 1990s, the business team of reporters and editors was a robust 8-10 individuals covering a panoply of topics from energy and healthcare to labor and retail. OregonLive’s list of staff today includes just one reporter, Mike Rogoway, specifically devoted to business coverage , unless you also count Jeff Manning, who is listed as a reporter covering Health Care Business, OHSU.

Sports coverage is still robust, with 12 reporters and editors, but just one reporter, Gordon Friedman, is specifically assigned to covering everything going on at Portland City Hall.

When the Jan. 2018 layoffs were announced, The Oregonian/OregonLive’s editor and vice president of content, Mark Katches, said to the paper’s staff, “You’re probably asking yourself, when will these cuts end? I wish I could answer that. Although we have made progress growing our digital audience while also producing award-winning, and important journalism, the revenue picture continues to pose challenges for our company – as is the case across the media landscape.”

In August 2018, Katches abandoned ship himself to take a new job as executive editor of the Tampa Bay Times, another paper that has had its own struggles both before and since it acquired its competitor,  the Tampa Tribune, in 2016 .

With all the strife in the newspaper business, is The Oregonian/OregonLive ripe for the same fate as the Times-Picayune.

Don’t think it can’t happen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Trump’s Not The First To Try To Control the Drip Drip Drip

leaks

Media are joining in on the hysteria about the Trump Administration’s efforts to control federal government communications.

“Federal agencies are clamping down on public information and social media in the early days of Donald Trump’s presidency, limiting employees’ ability to issue news releases, tweet, make policy pronouncements or otherwise communicate with the outside world, according to memos and sources from multiple agencies,” Politico reported today, Jan. 25.

Willamette Week jumped on the bandwagon today as well, telling readers, “Send us tips, oppressed comrades!”

“Got information that would make a great story, but worried about revealing who you are? (Because you work for, say, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under President Trump?) WW has two new ways to send tips without disclosing your identity,” WW said.

“It’s a dark time right now,” because of Trump Administration restrictions on the use of social media and other channels by government employees, a former Obama administration spokeswoman told Politico. “From what we can tell, the cloud of Mordor is descending across the federal service,” added Jeff Ruch, executive director of the watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

Before everybody goes off the deep end on all this, assuming it’s something new under the sun with the evil Trump, let’s step back a bit.

Every administration in recent memory has tried mightily to control the flow of information it doesn’t want disclosed from its agencies, with varying degrees of success.

In 1962, President Kennedy approved the wiretapping of a New York Times reporter and then set in motion Project Mockingbird, illegal CIA domestic surveillance on American reporters.

Richard Nixon fought leaks to the media with a vengeance. After an initial honeymoon with the media, he later distrusted them and fought them tooth and nail, believing coverage of him was deeply biased. And, frankly, it was. As Politico’s John Aloysius Farrell wrote in 2014, “Just because he was paranoid doesn’t mean the media wasn’t out to get him.”

A recent report commissioned by the Committee to Protect Journalists blasted the Obama administration for being overly aggressive in controlling government communications with the media, too, saying its information disclosure policies had a“…chilling effect on accountability.”

“The war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration,” said Leonard Downie, a former Washington Post executive who authored the study.

David Sanger, the chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times, said in the report: “This is the most closed, control-freak administration I’ve ever covered.”

The report told of how the Obama administration used the 1917 Espionage Act to prosecute leakers and created the “Insider Threat Program” requiring government employees to help prevent leaks to the media by monitoring their colleagues’ behavior.

The report also described how the Justice Department secretly subpoenaed and seized all the records for 20 Associated Press telephone lines and switchboards for two months of 2012, after an AP investigation into a covert CIA operation in Yemen.

“Put all these together and it paints a pretty damning picture of an administration that talks about openness and transparency but isn’t willing to engage with the media around these issues,” said Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

So before everybody goes ballistic, singling out Trump’s efforts to tightly manage public pronouncements and minimize leaks, consider that he’s part of a long line of presidents who have fought hard to do the same.

That’s just a fact. Depressing, isn’t it.

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Is Motor Voter Promoting Voter fraud in Oregon?

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown was thrilled when she signed the automatic motor voter registration bill on March 16, 2015.

motor-voter-law-brown

But does it have a flaw that could enable fraud?

Under Oregon’s Motor Voter law, when an eligible unregistered voter (over 17 years old, an Oregon resident and a US citizen) visits the DMV to apply for, renew, or replace an Oregon drivers’ license, ID card, or permit, that person receives a mailing from the Oregon Elections Division explaining their options for registering to vote.

Recipients of the mailing can:

  • Do nothing. In that case, the person is registered to vote as a nonaffiliated voter (not a member of a political party).
  • Choose a political party by returning the card. Joining a political party will allow the person to vote in its primary elections.
  • Use the card to opt-out and decline to register to vote.

On Oct. 25, 2016, Willamette Week ran a story that reviewed the new voter numbers. It noted that since the start of 2016, the Motor Voter law has added 247,501 newly registered voters. The story also noted that 9,292 DMV-generated voter registration cards could not be delivered.

Who are those 9,292 people? Could that mean that 9,292 people were fraudulently registered to vote?

According to Dr. Russell Terry, a Voter Engagement Advocate in the Oregon Secretary of State’s Elections Division, cards returned to the Elections Division as undeliverable can be because:

  • the address does not adhere to the USPS standardization for mailing addresses
  • the individual provided DMV with an address before updating their address through USPS
  • the individual is not identified as being at the address to which the mail is delivered

You might expect that a few addresses would be invalid if it took a while to send out the cards and people moved in the interim. But Terry said the transfer of data from the DMV to the Elections Division “…is only a few days, before or right around the time DMV would be mailing a driver’s license to that address as well.”

Is there a way, then, to check whether the people whose cards were undeliverable are legitimate voters?

I asked if I could access a list of all the names and addresses on those cards so a sampling could be checked.

Nope. “The Oregon Vehicle Code prohibits the disclosure of those individuals and their information,” Terry said.

So were up to 9,292 registered Oregon voters not eligible voters on Nov. 8? Who knows?

Given that situation, should the names of the 9,292 people whose cards were undeliverable be struck from the voter rolls?

Yes.

 

 

 

 

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Why is Val Hoyle smiling?

moneyinpolitics

Like Hillary Clinton, Rep. Val Hoyle, D-Eugene, who’s running for Secretary of State,  wants to get the obscene amounts of money out of politics…..later.

 

That way, she can rake in bundles of money now while running for Oregon Secretary of State as a champion of fundraising reform.

hoyle-mobile

Val Hoyle (D-Eugene)

In the past, Hoyle has said she supports enacting a constitutional amendment to limit campaign contributions, so long as the limits aren’t “unreasonably low”.

She has also blamed Democratic losses outside Oregon on “fear and cynicism” among voters fostered by large political contributions “from a small handful of special interests”.

So much for worrying about special interests.

According to state records, Hoyle has raised $587,000 to date, putting her at the top of the fundraising pile among the Secretary of State candidates.

Val Hoyle (D)……………………..$592,728

Brad Avakian (D)…………………$387,482

Dennis Richardson (R)………….$297,413

Richard Devlin (D)……………. ..$172,315

Sid Leiken (R)……………………..$ 45,104

Hoyle’s biggest contributor is Michael Bloomberg, a New York businessman who supports aggressive gun control measures. On April 29, he gave Hoyle $250,000 in appreciation for her support of legislation that passed in the last session expanding background checks to almost all private firearm transfers.

“Mike is supporting Val Hoyle because her leadership in passing Oregon’s background check bill is truly notable,” Howard Wolfson, a spokesman for Bloomberg, told Willamette Week in an email. “No one in the country has worked harder —or more successfully—to take on the NRA than she has.”

Hoyle has also received $105,000 in contributions from Emily’s List, a Washington, D.C.-based political action committee that supports female candidates.

Without those two large contributions, both from out-of-state, Hoyle would have raised just $237,728, which would have put her behind both Brad Avakian and Dennis Richardson in fundraising totals.

 

P.S.: The other candidates aren’t exactly pure in their fundraising either, although they’re collecting nothing comparable to Hoyle from individual donors.

Brad Avakian’s larger contributions

  • $40,000 from United Food and Commercial Workers Local 555
  • $30,000 from Oregon School Employees Association – Voice of Involved Classified Employees (2307)
  • $10,000 from Pacific NW Regional Council of Carpenters, SSF
  • $10,000 from Oregon League of Conservation Voters PAC (2352)
  • $7,500 from Peter Goldman, a Seattle attorney
  • $6,000 from Naral Pro-Choice Oregon PAC (172)
  • $2,500 from Mt. & M Gaming, operator of The Last Frontier Casino in La Center, WA

 

Dennis Richardson’s larger contributions 

  • $25,000 from Sherman and Wanda Olsrud of Medford, OR
  • $15,000 from Larry Keith of Salem, OR
  • $15,000 from James Young of Lebanon, OR
  • $15,000 from Freres Timber, Inc. of Lyons, OR
  • $10,000 from Stephen M Greenleaf of Medford, OR
  • $10,000 from Richard E Uihlein of Lake Forest, IL
  • $10,000 from Murphy Co. of Eugene, OR
  • $5,000 from Zidelle Collin s of Shady Grove, OR
  • $5,000 from David A deVilleneuve of Central Point, OR
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If it matters to Oregonians, it’s in (The Washington Post) Willamette Week

For those of you who don’t remember, Bob Packwood was the first.

Former Senator Bob Packwood (R-Ore)

Former Senator Bob Packwood (R-Ore)

On Nov. 22, 1992, the Washington Post reported that 10 women had accused Sen. Bob Packwood of sexual harassment. Even though one of The Oregonian’s own reporters was among the 10, and the paper had gotten tips about Packwood’s behavior, incredibly it had failed to aggressively pursue the matter. The Oregonian’s failure to break the story was mortifying for the entire paper.

Adding to the shame was a bumper sticker that began appearing around Portland:

washPoststicker

Oregonian editor, Bill Hilliard, later told the Washington Post, in a massive understatement, that his paper “should have been a little more aggressive… We were worried about ruining a man’s career.”

Neil Goldschmidt was second.

Neil Goldschmidt

Neil Goldschmidt

Nigel Jaquiss, a reporter at Willamette Week, was researching the role of former Oregon Governor, and later power player, Neil Goldschmidt, in efforts to take over Portland General Electric. He was making good progress on the story, but got hints there was more.

“It was shaping up to be a pretty good story,” Jaquiss told the American Journalism Review, “but I kept getting pushed by people… ‘There’s more you ought to be looking at… There’s a girl..'”

Jaquiss’ aggressive digging eventually revealed that Goldschmidt, when he was the married Mayor of Portland, had begun raping a neighbor’s 14-year-old daughter on a regular basis over a three-year period. Sources said Goldschmidt often took the girl to her parents’ basement, to hotels and other private spots for sex.

When Willamette week posted a summary of the story on its website, it spread like wildfire. The Oregonian had been beaten again.

Not only had The Oregonian been beaten again, this time by a local alternative weekly, but The Oregonian made things even worse. When it ran the Goldschmidt story it appeared to many readers to soft-pedal Goldschmidt’s actions as “an affair” with “a high school student”. Oregonians went ballistic.

A memo of a staff meeting at the Oregonian revealed that there was a lot of internal angst, too. The memo noted: “Steve Duin felt strongly that our coverage today was too reverential. We are dealing with a child molester. He made a very impassioned plea for doing the who knew what when story — lots of people became rich riding Goldschmidt’s coat tails — and why they kept it secret. He suggested that readers might think we’d learned nothing from Packwood and that we are hands off people in power.”

And now the Kitzhaber-Cylvia Hayes scandal.

John Kitzhaber and Cylvia Hayes

John Kitzhaber and Cylvia Hayes

Again, it was Nigel Jaquiss and Willamette Week that broke the story and followed up with bombshell after bombshell.

The Oregonian followed up with some revelations, but it was late to the party. It’s most significant role in the evolving saga was to run an editorial on Feb. 4, 2015 calling on Kitzhaber to resign, arguing, “…it should be clear by now to Kitzhaber that his credibility has evaporated to such a degree that he can no longer serve effectively as governor.”

What’s happening to The Oregonian, once the state’s dominant paper of record, now a mere shadow of its former self?

It may sound hackneyed, but great newspapers like the Oregonian were once the indispensable guardians of our freedom. Seasoned reporters have served as watchdogs to ensure good government and reinforce good citizenship. The Oregonian has been a key ingredient of  civic dialogue and discourse in the state.

David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun reporter who created the award-winning HBO series The Wire, warned at a U.S. Senate hearing on the “Future of Journalism”, that “high-end journalism is dying in America.”  Oregon can’t afford for The Oregonian to be among those at death’s door.

 

Disclosure: I worked as a reporter at The Oregonian during the 80s and 90s.