Once-booming city offloads office tower at 80% discount amid urban decline as woke policies backfire

Daily Mail​

21-05-2025

The West Coast city of Portland, Oregon, is being forced to slash the sale price of one of its biggest office buildings after it became overrun with homeless people.
Portland, known for its liberal politics, has seen its downtown suffer after a failed attempt at drug decriminalization.
The city's office vacancy rate was 35 percent in the first three months of the year, the worst of the top 25 central business districts in the country, according to real estate firm Colliers.
Now one of the most telling signs of its downtown decline is the sale of its U.S. Bancorp Tower at a list price of 80 percent less than its previous valuation, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The tower, known locally as Big Pink because of its rose tinted stone and windows, is more than half empty.
The recent exit of a high profile client laid bare the desperate state of the building and its surrounding area.
The technology publisher Digital Trends filed a lease-termination lawsuit claiming its staff were unsafe as the building had been taken over by the homeless population of downtown Portland.
The publisher claimed in its lawsuit that the building had 'vagrants sleeping in hallways of vacant office floors... starting fires in stairwells, smoking fentanyl and defecating in common areas.'
The building became a 'cesspool of criminal activity and vandalism,' they alleged.
Digital Trends follows the exit of the building's namesake U.S. Bancorp, which pulled most of its employees out last year after more than a century in Portland.
The 42-story tower is up for sale for $70 million, 80 percent less than its owners -Unico Properties of Seattle and a fund managed by UBS - paid for it in 2015.
However, despite the steep discount, even distressed property investors are avoiding Big Pink.
'I don't see a way to get it into the green in the next five to seven years,' one such investor, Jordan Menashe, told the Journal.
Big Pink has suffered more than other office buildings in the city as it is located next to a public plaza that became an epicenter of drug use and sales.
However, the building's decline is emblematic of the rest of Portland's downtown which, like other cities such as San Francisco, has descended into a doom loop since the pandemic.
Big firms cutting back on office space has hurt local businesses who rely on workers' footfall. As they too pull back, the homeless population has expanded, damaging the area's reputation and safety further.
Major businesses such as Unitus Community Credit Union and Wells Fargo have both exited Portland in recent years, and others such as Adobe have announced plans to leave.
The loss of property-tax collections from the declining value of its downtown offices is putting the rest of Portland's budget under pressure.
Last year Oregon was forced to end the state's decriminalized drug laws after overdose rates soared.
Portland's new mayor Keith Wilson is also considered to be more pro-business and his district attorney, Nathan Vasquez, tougher on crime.
Wilson has offered permits and support for a bridge into Big Pink from a nearby parking garage that would allow workers to get into the building without having to go into the dangerous surrounding streets.
'Right now we're largely focused on retention,' Raihana Ansary, deputy chief of staff to Mayor Wilson, told the Journal.