According to the Willamette Week article:

[Gold] and fellow investors couldn't get a restaurant tenant unless the city evicted homeless camp Right 2 Dream Too, which sits across Northwest 4th Avenue from the Grove.

I recommend watching the PDC Board meeting that took place on November 14, 2012. This meeting is where the PDC board decided to provide additional public funding for the Grove Hotel project:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mtps4ag6kzI

Grove Hotel discussion starts at 29:05. David Gold, the developer, speaks at 39:40

$3.7 million on this mess. Tell me: was this with or without the various bonuses paid to the CoP people who swore that this was a done deal? I ask because the children sure seem to be enthralled with awards for participation, no matter how incompetent...

Looks like that plan just vibrated right off the napkin it was scribbled on. The Portland Development Crumbission strikes again.

If Portland's new mayor is interested in setting this city on a path to prosperity and solvency he will disolve this agency immediately and dismiss its staff from public payroll....sure, youbetcha.

This is what Charlie Hales' campaign web site said about urban renewal in July 2012:

http://charliehales.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/URA-White-Paper.pdf

Portland now owes nearly half a billion dollars to pay off current urban renewal debt/projects, with our overall City’s debt
having grown to over $3 billion. With only one Urban Renewal Area projected to stop issuing long-term debt in the next five
years, the level of debt from Urban Renewal is expected to rise for close to a decade. We have committed ourselves to a
seemingly never-ending, expensive approach that will continue to keep us in the hole for years to come.

You guys are looking at this whole thing all wrong. It's at worst a typical fail, and at best, a PDC success. It's certainly not an epic fail, because at least two key features of epic failures aren't present.

First, only $5 million appears to have been spent, or "squandered," for the pessimists among us. Even assuming the real limitation on future positive cash flow is in the $20 million range, that's still a full order of magnitude less than the PDC is capable of investing on a project. In a way, we should be thankful that cool heads prevailed on this one. Whew!

Second, if the Creative Hostel: Asian project was actually built, it would have subsidized lodging options for tourists, which would have undermined Airbnb revenue that Portland homeowners depend on. So, really, the PDC saved us from a big mistake, frustrated some people who probably deserved to be frustrated in the process, and did all this for the relatively bargain price of only $5 million.

C'mon, you bunch of Debbie Downers! What more do you want from a development agency? Chalk this one up in the success column!

I'm just glad there was no criminal activity here. That would be awful, and I was reassured to read how upset the players were that this project didn't go through. I just hope they can find it in themselves to get over how worn down they feel from the process, so they can proceed to their next projects refreshed and ready to go.

Oh, and if anybody made any money from this, don't worry about it. Just take whatever you made as a token of our appreciation for even trying. Maybe spend some of it on a little vacation to help you get over how badly you feel. Darn it. It's so sad that not every vision can come true - and no amount of money you got from this, can completely cover your emotional sense of loss. I know you're just sick about how this turned out so get well soon.

The PDC planning bureaucrats are like all others throughout the region.

They come up with hair brained ideas and throw money at them as if they are sprinkling fairy dust.

The surrounding communities all seem to have been asking "What would Portland do?" before adopting all of the
same dumb axx ideas.

With the dimmest bulbs all planning & controlling things there is zero learning curve ever exhibited.

And no one wants to be the one to mention it ain't fairy dust.