The Doom Loop, Measured: What Big Pink's $45 Million Fire Sale Says About Portland and Seattle

01A tower at twelve cents on the dollar

The U.S. Bancorp Tower, the pink-granite, 42-story landmark that Portlanders call Big Pink, sold in July 2025 for about $45 million in an all-cash deal. That number needs context to land properly: the same building traded for $372.5 million in 2015, which was, at the time, a record price for any office building in the Portland area. The 2025 buyer paid roughly 12 percent of the prior sale price. Oregon's largest office building, 1.15 million square feet of Class A downtown real estate, changed hands for less than many suburban single-family compounds sell for in California.

The buyer, Jeff Swickard, runs Swickard Auto Group, a multi-state dealership network, and is a University of Oregon graduate who says he interviewed for one of his first jobs inside the tower. His framing of the purchase as a full-circle moment is a human-interest angle. The economics are the real story. When a 43-year-old, 42-story office tower loses 88 percent of its value in a decade, that is not a building-specific problem. That is a market repricing, and the market is repricing the city around it.

The sale price works out to roughly $39 per square foot for a building that cost $324 per square foot a decade ago. There is no renovation budget, no interest-rate story, and no remote-work narrative alone that closes a gap of that size. What closes it is a decade of policy: the Measure 97-era business tax fights, Multnomah County's metro-area business income tax and preschool-for-all levies, a city council that spent 2020 defending street violence as a "summer of love," and a regulatory climate that the tower's own new owner describes as the primary deterrent to businesses staying.

02"Because we really want you to stay"

The most revealing moment in the source video is a small-business owner recounting a conversation with city officials. Asked what incentive a business has to stay in Portland when staying costs roughly $68,000 more per year in taxes than relocating to Clackamas County or Oregon City, the city's best answer was, in the owner's telling, "because we really want you to stay." That is the entire incentive structure of a city government that has run out of arguments and is left with sentiment.

Swickard himself is blunter in his public statements. Portland is not organically attracting businesses, he said when announcing the purchase. People are leaving because of the tax problem. He is not describing a hypothetical. U.S. Bank, the tower's namesake tenant, declined to renew its lease and moved most of its employees to Gresham. New Relic, SurveyMonkey, and the law firm Miller Nash left as well. By the time the building hit the market, vacancy was around 75 percent, a figure the host of the source video confirms with visible disbelief.

Mayor Keith Wilson's office, asked about the tower's fire sale, responded with a statement about standing ready to support a smooth transition and ensure Big Pink continues contributing to Portland's dynamic future. The same mayor wants $15 million for office-to-residential conversions, drawn from the Portland Clean Energy Fund, a voter-approved pot of money earmarked for climate projects, in a city that has spent years warning about budget crises. Redirecting climate money to clean up the office-vacancy problem is an admission that the vacancy problem now outranks everything the city said it would fund instead.

03Rents down 70 percent, and why that drags every other building down

Swickard disclosed a number that matters more than the sale price: to attract tenants back, rents at Big Pink are down roughly 70 percent from where they were. At a $45 million basis with, plausibly, little or no debt service, he can afford to charge almost anything. The building becomes a low-cost city within a city, complete with planned fitness facilities, coffee shops, restaurants, and a proposed rooftop observatory with views the source video lovingly describes: Hood, St. Helens, Rainier, the Columbia and Willamette rivers.

That is great for Swickard and terrible for everyone else. Every competing landlord in the central business district is now quoting rents against a building that can undercut them indefinitely. Tenants facing renewal look at Big Pink's rates and ask the obvious question the source video poses: why would we renew here when we can rent there for 30 cents on the dollar? Those landlords lose tenants, fall further underwater, sell at discounts of their own, and the new buyers reset rents again. This is the doom loop, stated precisely: falling values beget falling rents beget falling values, and the property tax base that funds city government erodes at every turn of the cycle.

Portland's central business district now carries the highest vacant office inventory on record, more than 10 million square feet, per the Portland Metro Chamber's 2026 State of Downtown report. Colliers puts overall Portland office vacancy near 27 percent against roughly 18 percent nationwide, with the CBD worse. Vacancy is projected to keep climbing through the end of 2026 before it peaks. The market is not pricing in a recovery. It is pricing in how much further the floor is.

04Seattle: the same loop, one tax ahead

Seattle is running the same experiment with the dial turned further. In 2020 the city council passed the JumpStart payroll tax on large employers and high earners, over a mayoral veto, and it took effect in January 2021. Five years later the Downtown Seattle Association's 2026 economic report counts what it costs: roughly 30,000 downtown jobs gone since the tax regime arrived, an office vacancy rate that Cushman & Wakefield measured at 36.5 percent, the highest of any major U.S. city, and nearly 20 million square feet of empty office space.

The natural experiment sits across Lake Washington. Between 2023 and 2025, Seattle shed 1.3 percent of its jobs while Bellevue, which did not impose a comparable payroll tax, gained 12.6 percent. Between 2020 and 2025, Seattle office property values fell 48 percent while Bellevue's rose 7 percent. Bellevue's vacancy rate has risen too, to about 24 percent, because remote work is real everywhere. But a 24 percent vacancy next to a 36.5 percent vacancy is the difference between a market struggling with a structural shift and a market that has compounded the shift with policy.

Mayor Katie Wilson, facing a projected budget shortfall now estimated near $488 million over three years, has responded by putting more revenue on the table: a possible local capital gains tax, an expansion of the JumpStart tax, with nothing off the table ahead of her September budget proposal. The DSA's Jon Scholes argues the city has not spent within its means for five or six years and that the answer is not more business taxes but more businesses located in Seattle paying taxes. With commercial values at roughly half their 2020 level, the tax base that would fund the shortfall is precisely the thing being taxed into departure.

05The burden shifts to residents

The doom loop's cruelest arithmetic lands on people who own nothing downtown. When office towers lose half their assessed value, the property tax levy does not shrink to match. The shortfall shifts onto homeowners and renters, a dynamic the DSA report makes explicit for Seattle, and the same mechanics apply in Portland, where the city has already leaned on utility fees and property taxes to paper over budget gaps. The people least able to leave carry the cost of the exodus of those who could.

This is also why the doom loop is politically self-sustaining. A shrinking tax base argues for higher rates on what remains; higher rates accelerate the shrinkage. Every turn of the cycle produces fewer employers, a larger dependent population, and a electorate more inclined to vote for the redistribution that the remaining employers are fleeing. The source video's host calls San Francisco the counterexample: a city that bottomed, elected a moderate mayor in Daniel Lurie, cracked down on street disorder, and is now riding an AI-boom recovery, with businesses and foot traffic returning. What the host adds, correctly, is that San Francisco's rebound is substantially AI money, an engine Portland and Seattle do not have. Portland's recovery cannot be imported. It has to be built, from policy, and nothing in either city's current trajectory suggests it is being built yet.

06The buyers who bet on the bottom

What happens next depends on people like Swickard. He is buying distressed Portland towers, Big Pink plus at least two other properties, spending on private security the video describes as a mini police department, modernizing a 43-year-old building, and floating a rooftop observatory and a ground-floor food hall while cautioning that FAA airspace rules and Portland's permitting process make the observatory a low-probability idea. He is explicit that attracting businesses back downtown is squarely on the politicians, and equally explicit that he will invest his own money in the meantime.

Bargain-basement basis gives him the holding power the previous institutional owners lacked. At $45 million, all cash, the building does not need 2015 rents to survive. That is a bet that Portland eventually elects leadership that wants employers back, the way San Francisco did, or that enough time passes that the market clears regardless. Either way, the price he paid is the market's honest verdict on the last decade of Portland governance. The city sold its tallest symbol of what was possible for twelve cents on the dollar, and the buyer's first obstacle to doing something with it is not demand, not capital, and not construction. It is the tax code, the permitting office, and the question of whether anyone downtown wants him to succeed badly enough to change anything.