Only in the new Portland would a restaurant have 100 parking places and a 82-apartment box apartment developer get away with providing only 18.

And even the Pealrlies are complaining about retail vacancy rates in that area. The City has done its very best to discourage any business, and now as the saying goes, "the chickens have come home to roost".
Except not, as all the chicken coops are emptying out!

I guess the Dussins should have stuck with Old Spaghetti Factory.

I love that graph. It looks as if Some Guy tells everyone what the market rate is supposed to be, and then reality intrudes until Some Guy makes another proclamation.

Part of the problem is the insistence on mixed-use. When you do that it forces you to build retail space that may be unneeded. In a good market you need 15 SF of retail per person. build a full-block apartment, put retail on the ground floor, & you would need to lease housing space out for 2,000 people. That's an 84 story building.

The math of mixed use just doesn't work. Especially now that people are spending 5% of their money online.

Yikes is right. Next time someone wants to complain about the bad landlord, it should be about something illegal that the person did, not about the price that is charged for rent. Sometimes we make money, and sometimes we don't, but for private property owners, the risk is all ours. Ouch!

"Part of the problem is the insistence on mixed-use."
Social engineering proponents in PDX will never admit to that truth.

With those SF Rates, no wonder budding foodies are shunning the traditional brick and mortar restaurants for the food cart concepts. That overhead is a killer.

The current issue of the NW Examiner has an interesting article on the number of empty mixed-use storefronts in the Pearl. (See page 10.)

A planned economy typically fails as shown multiple times around the globe over the last 50 years. But the morons in Portland City Hall refuse to pay attention to history. They continue to think they are smarter than everyone else.

The city is so ruinous in many ways. I know a person who just leased a restaurant space and now has to wait two months to get city inspectors in there for his license. Thank the admiral for that.

Well, now I know where Leverage's "Lonely Hearts Job" was filmed -- before, I couldn't place the restaurant and its surroundings.

It certainly looks great on film. Was the restaurant ever open?

Yes it was open but for only a very short time.

...and now has to wait two months to get city inspectors in there for his license.

That is insane.
How many of us would want to open a business
with the current situation in Portland now?

I checked out the NW Examiner. On Page 7, there's a half-page ad from the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability reminding you to "Include the Food" in your green bin.

The artwork is unintentionally informative -- it looks like that green bin is ... well, throwing up. That was certainly how I felt whenever I had to get close to mine.

Now everything is bagged like it should be. Public health isn't to be toyed with, this is why smart folks came up with trash bags and related technology to begin with.