Tom Moyer dug a hole deep under downtown Portland last year, betting that buyers, lenders and renters wanted 32 stories of luxury real estate.
He found renters to fill the offices and shops. But Moyer — a 90-year-old self-made millionaire, owner of 9 million square feet of real estate and builder of the Fox Tower — couldn’t get a loan to get out of the ground.
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For more photos and to read a 1999 profile of Tom Moyer, visit Ryan Frank’s real estate blog.
Moyer’s four decades of empire building smacked into a wreck of a recession April 10, when he halted construction on his $170 million Park Avenue West tower. That morning, Moyer paid 100 workers in the pit spiked with rebar. On Wednesday, the final three workers climbed out of the hole for the last time.
The shutdown hit 2,000 construction workers who had expected paychecks from Moyer’s project over the next 16 months. A web of subcontractors had to figure out how to deconstruct their own work.
No one can recall such a thing happening before, not in Portland.
No one believed it would happen, not to Tom Moyer.
Moyer launched the work based on his intuition and his own fortune. He figured that once he dug the hole, the tenants would sign on, followed by the lender.
But when it came time to find a lender, Moyer ran into banks turned timid by loan defaults and stock market drops. Homeowners with tarnished credit and subprime mortgages get turned down for loans, but millionaires with a golden real estate touch normally don’t.
Moyer has plenty of company. Federal Reserve data show commercial real estate lending in the fourth quarter of 2008 fell 85 percent from a year earlier.
“It was a function of everything bad that could happen did, through no fault of Tom Moyer,” said Bruce Korter, who manages pension funds in Portland and once worked for Moyer.
Park Avenue West was supposed to show off the city’s rising wealth. It was to be Portland’s fourth-tallest building at the city’s center, passed every seven minutes by a MAX train. The condos, offices and retail shops were designed to set new standards of opulence for a town wrapped in fleece. “This will be a sentinel to downtown,” Lloyd Lindley, former chairman of the city’s design commission, declared in 2007.
Instead, the pit shows off the depths of Oregon’s economic troubles, No. 2 in the country for unemployment.
Moyer’s company executives say they expect to restart work in early 2010 once credit comes back and the architect erases 10 floors of condos.
For now, the economy makes the pit a civic eyesore. Plywood, barbed wire and Jersey barriers provide their own kind of sentinel. The top concrete parking floor — 40 feet below ground — stops in midspan. One column pokes up wearing a coat of concrete, then the next is naked rebar.
The site, 728 S.W. Ninth Ave., is framed as a snapshot of the era when easy credit and booming real estate busted.
Even for Tom Moyer.
Born in Portland’s Sellwood neighborhood in 1919, Moyer returned to the city after a world-class boxing career and World War II to build a movie theater business that raked in millions of dollars.
He positioned his company to capture the entertainment spending of a sprawling suburbanized nation. In 1966, he built Portland’s first theater with more than one screen, the Eastgate on Southeast 82nd Avenue. He followed that a year later with Beaverton’s Westgate theater. Over the next two decades, his Luxury Theaters chain grew into the nation’s ninth biggest.
Michael Lloyd/The Oregonian/2007MoyerIn 1989, he sold out for $192 million. Not bad for a guy who dropped out of high school.
The sale launched Moyer’s next career as a real estate developer.
As a kid of the 1920s and 1930s, he is obsessed with the bright lights of downtown’s Broadway. Every property Moyer owns downtown is within a few blocks of the street, including the 1000 Broadway office tower. …
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