He's giving away free "land" to developers for $1 dollar!
For example, the Portland Office of Transportation, which Adams oversees, is proposing to lease “air rights” over an East Burnside Street sidewalk to a developer for 30 years for just $1 annually.
The council is due to vote Wednesday, Nov. 14, on the lease. In New York City and other densely populated cities, air rights trade just like other real estate.
Here's the problem in a nutshell. The architects on this are the same ones who are doing Sam's Lofts for Artists and one of the principals (let's call her Carry to not name names) sits on Sam's building a bridge to Vancouver Committee (read - I-5 bridge).
Hmmm. Then the developer they work with gets prime office space without paying for land. To put this into perspective - if a developer buys the land his/her offices sit upon and builds the offices, that's a cost that the developer pays. If the offices extend over the street (in the air) they're not paying for the land. So what they get is a greater profit margin. And it's all about the margin. Looking at Nigel's story, he indicates that the City (read - Commissioner Mentor Me) valued those offices at $20/sqft. Let me get this straight, an office on the new streetcar line, next to the Burnside Bridgehead, getting streetscaped for the Eastside Burnside Couch couplet (and likely on a streetcar line that eventually crosses eastside streetcar) is valued at $20/sqft. Plus you get the view from the above the street, unobstructed by buildings. Yeah, right. It's crap.
So will The Mentor bring this back to Council? Also, looking at the video from the October 31 Council Meeting, Commissioner Sten seemed really excited about the project. Wonder why.
