Instant Downtown: Atwater Place at left

Atwater Place, a condominium project in the South Waterfront district near downtown Portland, will tomorrow be auctioning off 40 of the 150 or so units it has failed to sell, at prices starting at a bit less than half of what the 60-odd original buyers paid just two years ago.  It’s another victim not just of the recession, but rather of the boom preceding it, wherein otherwise reasonable developers, city officials, and the state’s largest employer, OHSU, all succumbed to the extraordinary popular delusion that a fallow industrial district a mile south of downtown could, with the right improvements and transit connections, overcome its bad location, access issues, and complete lack of urban amenities to become The Next Big Thing.  Well, it’s big, anyway.

South Waterfront from the aerial tram

It all looked so good on paper back in the day.  OHSU was growing by leaps and bounds, and continually threatening to expand in suburbia, since its Marquam Hill site was full to bursting.  The city had had enormous success in redeveloping former rail yards and industrial blight north of downtown into the glittering Pearl District, merely by adding two parks and a streetcar through the magic of tax-increment financing, and letting developers do the rest.  Condos were selling at ever-escalating prices, faster than they could be built.  Biotechnology was touted as the growth sector, and OHSU planned to take a leading role, establishing a biotechnology campus in South Waterfront that would provide upscale employment to go with the upscale condos.

Kind of a lot of space out here...

A yawning gap in the Willamette River Greenway that lay between Riverplace to the north and John’s Landing to the south was aching to be filled with a glitzy, eco-friendly “neighborhood” in a forbidding no-man’s land where they used to scrap ships.  What could go wrong?  Plenty.

First of all, the streeetcar would have to be extended a mile, from CHNN Headquarters on Park Avenue to the site.  No problem.  Second, and somewhat more problematically, some way had to be devised for all those doctors and scientists to get from OHSU to the waterfront, where nearly 1000 feet of elevation, a freeway, and a dizzying array of boulevards and bridge ramps made the trip take up to 20 minutes by car.

The tram is snazzy, and a mere $4 for a round trip.

How about a $50 million aerial tram?  Go for it.  It all happened so fast.  No sooner was the tram completed than OHSU started cutting back.  Turns out you don’t create a “Biotechnology Center” out of thin air, and OHSU stopped building after one facility was complete.  Condos, one thirty stories high, popped up like mushrooms after a rain, and here, in the middle of nowhere, a high-rise district appeared as if by magic, and sold like hotcakes with similarly magical money.  The boom was on, and then it was off, just like that.

If you lived here, you'd be broke now....

Riding the streetcar down there today, I was struck by the raw distance that separates South Waterfront from anything resembling urbanity.  One must nervously pass under a roaring tangle of the Marquam Bridge’s overhead freeway ramps, then past an enormous Superfund site, once described to me by a soil scientist as “a mess,” under  yet another bridge, and past a barge factory to get to the island of sparkling green Nirvana we Portlanders have come to expect of our downtown neighborhoods, only to be greeted by a spookily uninhabited fake urban paradise, devoid of any life except increasingly desperate real estate offices.

Atwater Place itself looks pleasant enough for the mandatory glass box of the era; it’s lushly landscaped and has a nifty fountain court.  But to those 60 buyers who paid upwards of $700,000 for units now being offered at $350,000, I must ask, have y’all every heard of the first three rules of real estate? Location, location, and location, and this joint ain’t got it.  You can’t create “urban living” where none existed before, and had the boom gone on for the twenty years it might take to connect your district to downtown, the constant construction entailed would still make your life a living hell in the process.  Back when the boom was still on, newly minted South Waterfront “residents” proudly called themselves urban “pioneeers.”   Yeah.  Like the Donner party.  Real urban pioneers that have revitalized old industrial districts like the Pearl across the country endured homeless, hookers, and drug dealers to live in areas close to downtown that had both historic character and people, whether desirable ones or not, and have been remarkably successful at it.

The pioneers of South Waterfront weren’t so adventurous…  they wanted “urban” living untainted by urban realities, and chose a Disney version of city living, where the only (imagined) inhabitants would be just like themselves, a gamble which clearly has come up snake eyes.  But what are they worried about?  The low prices will bring in the riff-raff.  Who’d a thunk?