illustration/Margery Niblock
In March, we inducted Joe Soley into the That’s My Dump! Hall of Fame as its inaugural member. Our next inductee … drumroll, please … is “Slumlord Millionaire” Geoffrey Rice, whose serial neglect of his downtown Portland properties was the subject of a cover story in this magazine in November 2021.
When we first wrote about Rice in this feature, it was the year 2012 and we were commenting on the terrible state of the Schwartz Building downtown, across from the Portland Museum of Art and the State Theatre. The property in the center of the Arts District had only been vacant, boarded-up and tagged for about two years by then, so some may have felt our criticism was premature. After all, it was a big project involving historic preservation requirements and such.
When we revisited the Schwartz Building in 2017 for one of our That’s My Dump! Five Year Reunion specials, it was still empty and looked like shit, so, presumably, fewer readers thought we’d been unfair. And four years later, the cover shot of the “rape cave” of a doorway to the Schwartz Building on Congress Street silenced any last critics of our coverage.
Guess what? Great news! Apparently Rice is finally renting the apartments over the Schwartz Building’s ground floor, where indie musicians participating in the impromptu Tower of Song jam sessions used to play through open windows on First Fridays. It’s only been 15 fucking years since restoration work began, but this is progress — I think.
If the signs promoting “12 LUXURY APARTMENTS” turn out to be another ruse by which the spaces are purportedly for lease, but in practice impossible to rent, I wouldn’t be shocked. The street-level retail spaces have had large “for rent” signs in the windows before, only to fade from years of sunlight or just get ripped down after a decade or so. But The Bollard can report, via a confidential source, that an actual human would-be renter was recently shown one of these units late last month! Baby steps…
Last winter, this reporter met a workman for Rice who said the slumlord is preparing to sell all his Portland properties and get out of the game. A month of so prior, the Portland Press Herald had reported that Rice, who’s now pushing or past 90 and notoriously inaccessible to the press, was suing City Hall in an attempt to avoid fines amounting to $150,000 for repeatedly raising rents in violation of Portland’s rent-control ordinance.
Members of the Trelawny Tenants Union, led by former Portland mayor Ethan Strimling, who live in the historic apartment tower near the intersection of Congress and State streets, have been leading the charge to get Rice to pay what the rent-control ordinance says he owes. And Strimling recently beat back Rice’s effort to evict him for opening a window too soon one spring and other petty bullshit.
So partly, it seemed, Rice’s decision to sell it all had been made out of spite. But there may be real market forces at work here.
Given the exorbitantly high cost of renovating Rice’s long-dilapidated properties to current standards, and the limits rent-control puts on landlords, the thinking is that it’s now financially impossible to make a profit by fixing these dumps. Or, more personally, it’d be impossible for Rice to realize gains from them during the years he has left. By the time he recouped the cost of the reno work, he’d be strumming harps with Soley in the Great Blue Yonder (because God forgives all sinners).
That actuarial realization may have led Rice to another astounding decision: his recent offer to sell the Trelawny Building to Strimling.
Well, not Ethan alone — the tenants union would hold the note. Strim didn’t respond to a request for comment, and neither did Frank O’Connor, the local real estate guy who handles Rice’s commercial leases. But according to an informed source, the deal, as laid out by O’Connor, would involve a no-interest loan to purchase the property, arranged by Rice, at its city-assessed value of $15 million.
And that’s not all! The new owners would also get the run of the Trelawny’s basement, which, union members were amazed to discover, is a vast labyrinth of shelved aisles full of apartment junk and replacement amenities (appliances, screens, doors, kitchen sinks, everything but the kitchen sinks, etc.) and informal workshops where Rice’s maintenance people have puttered since the dawn of color TV.
Our source said the union is not inclined to pursue the offer at present, busy as they are ensuring Rice compensates tenants for illegal rent hikes. But wow, it’s come to this. Rice has already sold the building he long owned in Woodfords Corner where The Bayou Kitchen cooks crawdads, and O’Connor has been listing a handsome green two-unit house Rice owns on Deering Ave. for $750,000.
We may not have Rice to kick around anymore if he keeps fixing up and selling off his dumps. But we’ll always have the memories, fond and otherwise.
