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The Wall Street Journal reported on May 20 that “Big Pink,” the 42-story pink skyscraper in downtown Portland (photo below) had been offered for sale for a price 80% below what the present owners paid for the building ten years ago.

U.S. Bancorp Tower, a.k.a. "Big Pink" in Portland, Oregon. Source: Cacophony, via Wikimedia under CC 3.0 License.

The Journal repeated criticisms of downtown Portland in an article entitled “A Fire Sale of Portland’s Largest Office Tower Shows How Far the City Has Fallen,” with the following subtitle: “The once-premier building is now over half empty, reflecting how the Oregon city’s downtown is struggling with crime and other quality-of-life issues.”

The Journal reported that downtown Portland has the highest office vacancy rate of any of the nation’s 25 largest central business districts. Former tenant Digital Trends said that it left because the building was afflicted with “vagrants sleeping in hallways of vacant office floors” and that they were “starting fires in stairwells, smoking fentanyl and defecating in common areas” These allegations were contained in the Digital Trends lease termination lawsuit.

Digital Trends’ added that Big Pink became a “cesspool of criminal activity and vandalism.”

Big Pink had been built for US National Bank four decades ago. US National is in the process of leaving the building. The Journal article noted that a number of firms have moved out of Portland, which before the pandemic was considered to be among the most favored of cities among urban planners.

New Portland Mayor Keith Wilson is considered to be pro-business. Downtown newspaper, Willamette Week reported that the Mayor responded in an email to constituents: “I wish they’d covered our rapid improvements in public safety, new residents, business opportunities, regional destinations, and creatives,” Wilson wrote. “Instead, they focused on the upcoming sale of ‘Big Pink,’ an iconic part of the Portland skyline, and a business tenant who left over safety and livability concerns.”

The Mayor (who was not Mayor when the problems were the worst) is right to be concerned. Restoring a reputation for central city safety is difficult, as decades of less than desirable results have shown around the country. We wish him well.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a Senior Fellow with Unleash Prosperity in Washington and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985), which was a predecessor agency to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro). Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

This 3 minute presentation explains why both aircraft engine design and subdivision design remain stagnant.

Rick Harrison is President of Rick Harrison Site Design Studio and Neighborhood Innovations. Rick has been instrumental in advancing land planning techniques as well as technology for almost all professions tied to land development.

Amid the talk about tariffs and other Trumpian foibles, little attention has been paid to America’s festering housing crisis. This could prove a more lasting political issue in the US, as well as throughout much of the West.

These trends are the focus of a new report (to which I contributed an introduction) on global housing prices by Wendell Cox. High housing prices, he notes, are widely linked to strict regulatory policies, mostly seeking to hamper suburban growth and force development into urban cores. Almost all the US cities with the highest prices — San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego — have enacted these urban containment or compact city strategies, which force people to live in denser, smaller, and more expensive inner-city housing.

Such approaches are widely popular with planners, progressives, and green activists. However, by restricting development on the more affordable suburban fringe, they drive up housing costs across entire metropolitan areas. This has deepened a stark and unprecedented divide between US regions. In much of the country — especially the Midwest, parts of Pennsylvania, and the South — home prices remain affordable, with median prices roughly three times the median income. By contrast, in coastal California and much of the Northeast, that ratio has surged to around nine to one.

All of this has turned housing into a potent political issue. In a Gallup survey last month, Americans ranked housing as their top financial worry behind inflation. In a Harvard poll of 18- to 29-year-olds last year, housing ranked as the third-most important issue overall, after inflation and healthcare. Meanwhile, around 65% of California residents consider housing costs a major concern — an astonishing figure.

Prices also affect levels of homeownership, long a linchpin of middle-class aspiration. January home sales were down 5% from last year’s dismal numbers. Record numbers of first-time buyers are stuck on the sidelines as housing affordability stands at its lowest level in 40 years, and one in three pay over 30% of their income in mortgage or rent.

The young — tomorrow’s voters — are the most directly hit. According to US Census Bureau data, the rate of homeownership among young adults aged 25–34 was 45.4% for Generation X, but dropped to 37% for Millennials. This decline comes despite nearly three in five Millennials viewing homeownership as a core part of the American dream.

Ultimately, the differential in housing will upset America’s long-term political balance. Housing costs are driving young people, immigrants and minorities to Sun-Belt and even Rust-Belt locales, while the Northeastern and West Coast metros continue to lose domestic migrants. Few young people can expect to afford living in California, where the rich now dominate the housing market, and more than a third of all real-estate transactions in recent years topped $1 million.

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

As the Feudal Future podcast marks its fifth anniversary, hosts Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky examine how dramatically our society has evolved since they first warned about the emergence of neo-feudalism—a concentration of wealth and power resembling historical feudal systems.

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President Trump announced that the federal government would no longer provide financial support to the California High-Speed Rail project, according to the New York Times.

According to Trump, “That train is the worst cost overrun I’ve ever seen,” “It’s, like, totally out of control.” He added: “This government is not going to pay.”

Izzy Gordon, spokesman for Governor Gain Newsom responded: “With 50 major structures built, walking away now as we enter the track-laying phase would be reckless — wasting billions already invested and letting job-killers cede a generational infrastructure advantage to China.”

In fact, the recklessness was California’s alone, which chose to spend billions of money that it did not have, apparently on the assumption that the taxpayers of the other 49 states would have no alternative but to continue funding. The “unused 50 major structures” could ultimately become a memorial to an overly costly project that had been oversold from the start. An appropriate name could be “Stonehenge in the Valley.”

Recently, Unleash Prosperity released my report (“California High-Speed Rail: Still Stuck at the Station”) suggesting that the presently estimated $128 billion ultimate cost to link Los Angeles to San Francisco could double that amount ($250 billion), if the cost escalation of the first third of the project continues. As the state established Peer Review Group has said, so far the work has been in the easy part. The much more complicated segments from Palmdale to Los Angeles

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a Senior Fellow with Unleash Prosperity in Washington and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.