Portland council’s openly socialist progressive bloc (Candace Avalos, Jamie Dunphy, Mitch Green, Sameer Kanal, Tiffany Koyama Lane, and Angelita Morillo) has been voting in lockstep.

As part of an Oregon Ethics Commission investigation to see if they violated either city and state law on negotiating outside of public meetings, a huge block of Teams messages has been acquired by public records request by Willamette Week. It reveals councilmembers discussing plans for government appropriation of buildings as well as airing grievances and annoyances at their colleagues as well as constituents. Even worse, they make it clear some of them lack even the most basic governance knowledge.

For example, on July 9th, Candace Avalos sent out a link to a story about the office tower Big Pink selling for $45 million – an astronomical collapse of 88% in value (It was last purchased in 2015 for $370 million). This was the exchange:

Dunphy: $45 million dollars? THAT’S IT??? Holy shit are we in market correction mode.

Candace Avalos: What does market correction mode mean?

Dunphy: Meaning that our real estate prices have been wildly out of control, and that the values of these buildings don’t match their worth, so now we’re seeing prices reduced to firesale levels, which will reduce property taxes etc

Candace Avalos: Reduce property taxes and therefore revenue the city gets?

Dunphy: Yes. Plus it will impact the evaluation of value for other buildings in the area,
Dunphy: It’s not inherently a bad thing, it’s not great, and we all knew our real estate prices were detached from reality, but this kind of a market correction can hurt. I’m less concerned about the biggest buildings be devalued, but it could have ripple effects to individual homes or condos etc

Candace Avalos: Forgive my ignorance here because this is NOT my area of expertise, but isn’t it good for these prices to go down? And if buildings are this cheap we can capitalize and do more buying as a city like we did recently with those 3 apartment buildings?

Dunphy: There are definitely some opportunities that could be beneficial, yes.

Candace Avalos: People’s individual homes have skyrocketed in value, making it so much harder for new people to get homes, so don’t we want them to go down?

Dunphy: Well, the problem then becomes having homeowners “underwater,” where the value of their home is worth less than the outstanding principal on their mortgage, so they won’t be able to refinance. There’s also a lot of these larger buildings that are owned by retirement accounts, so if the value of their portfolios decreases, retirees would see their investment portfolios decrease rapidly.

Candace Avalos: Hmm ok I see

This is a city councilmember, in charge of Portland’s $8.6 billion dollar budget, that doesn’t understand even the most basic concept of a real estate correction (one of the worst corrections in the entire country) and how it will utterly decimate the budget they are making. Instead, they look at it as an opportunity for the government to buy up buildings for their social programs cheaply.