Portland Developer Challenges the Political Class

At 70, developer Joe Weston has seen it all in Portland, and done much of it himself. In the 1960s, he noticed that many east-Portland single-family neighborhoods were actually zoned multi-family. So he started buying two or three adjacent homes, which he ripped down and replaced with “Weston specials”: two-story, apartment buildings that resembled cheap motels.

Today, he owns 2,800 units of such apartments. But he is also one of the main developers of the heavily subsidized Pearl District. He just opened one of Portland’s newest condo towers, and he owns many office buildings. Before the crash, his real estate empire was valued at $300 million.

With his focus on dense housing, you would think he would be in the thick of Portland politics. So it was surprising to read a recent letter castigating Portland’s mayor and city commission for being out of touch with the public.

“It appears that the Mayor and the majority of the City Council has taken the position we know what is best for the city and the citizens of Portland and they should have limited input” (emphasis in original). In particular, Weston is upset that the mayor is pushing through an idiotic plan to spend millions in public money to turn a baseball stadium into a soccer stadium, and another idiotic plan to build a publicly financed hotel next to the city’s idiotic convention center.

But what really ticks off Weston is that the city is reorganizing the bureau that issues building permits for the third or fourth time in Weston’s memory. “When I first started building in the early 1960’s I remember going to the City Hall 4th floor and could obtain a building permit on the same day and obtain all of the required sign offs by the various departments.” Today, of course, it can take years to get permits, and often only with the support of the politicians — which creates a cozy relationship between campaign-fund-seeking officials and developers on the inside.

Weston himself benefited from both the easy-going process of the 1960s and the politically driven process of the 1990s and early 2000s. Still, he clearly prefers the former.

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As it happens, the Antiplanner successively lived in two of Weston’s apartment buildings in the 1970s, though they were older apartments that he had purchased, not Weston specials that he built. I generally paid the rent in person and so I had a few opportunities to meet Weston, who was also running a real-estate school at the time.

It is easy to bad-mouth the Weston specials, which many people felt brought down the neighborhoods in which they were built. They were ugly, cheaply built, and introduced transients into previously stable neighborhoods. Plus today’s planners are revolted by all the parking space Weston provided for his tenants.

Yet Weston reported late last year that these apartments are 99 percent occupied — partly because the credit crisis was preventing people from buying single-family homes. Meanwhile, his latest “green certified” Pearl District condo had sold less than 10 out of 177 units (and no wonder, with prices ranging from $376 to $812 per square foot).

The significance of Weston’s letter is that it reveals that Portland’s political structure is in disarray. Neil Goldschmidt’s light-rail mafia — in which Weston was a peripheral player — is out of power. Sam Adams, the new mayor, is certain to be recalled from office as soon as the voters are legally allowed to do so; according to the Recall-o-Meter on Jack Bogdanski’s blog, the process will begin in less than two months. No one knows what the power structure will look like after that.

Until he is recalled, Adams is trying to push through a ridiculous agenda of sports stadiums, streetcars, and the convention center hotel. The stadiums will cost taxpayers tens of millions and mainly benefit Merritt Paulson, the son of the former Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson. The hotel is supposed to rescue the convention center, which had 50 percent occupancy until Metro doubled its size (despite voter rejection of the plan); now it has 25 percent occupancy. The goal of the streetcar is to increase the area available for dense (and inevitably subsidized) housing developments.

Weston’s objection to the political system that brought this about is a voice from the past. The Antiplanner hopes it will also be the voice of the future.