A conversation with Greg Goodman: Don’t call him a ‘magnate’
by Kennedy Smith
12/08/2006
The family of Greg Goodman is the largest property owner in downtown Portland. Goodman’s company, City Center Parking, manages hundreds of parking spaces in the downtown core, and there’s enough capital coming in that the Goodman family has been able to shape the city by partnering with developers on various projects around town.
The Goodman family has been in the parking business since 1955 and in the development business since the 1960s, when the company partnered with Melvin Mark to build the Crowne Plaza Hotel Portland in Lake Oswego.
But Greg Goodman himself worked his way up to the top, he says. Early on, he accepted jobs within the company, first starting out in the lots themselves. “I was washing cars, then I parked cars, and then I became a lot manager, then a supervisor, then I did virtually every job that wasn’t too technical within the office. And then I became president of the company. I’ve been doing that for 20-something years now.”
He’s having fun doing what he does and, he says, looking out not only for his business but also for the city as a whole.
DJC: What are your current partnerships with developers?
Greg Goodman: We’re doing one right now with Gerding Edlen, which is going very well. … We’ve got good developers in Portland, and we’ve done some investments with Gerding Edlen in Portland and in California. We’ve done some with Melvin Mark here. We’ve invested with John Carroll on various things, and they’re good people; they know their business. In a lot of cases they bring in people with expertise that we don’t have, so that’s great.
DJC: What’s the Gerding Edlen project?
Goodman: It’s 12th and Washington. (There will be) 316 underground parking stalls, a floor of retail, 86,000 square feet with Zimmer Gunsul Frasca’s office space – they’re our partners on the project with Gerding Edlen – and then 274 apartments on top of that.
DJC: So, as a partner, is your capacity just within the parking aspects of a development?
Goodman: No. We’re pretty hands-on people. But at the same time we’re not developers, so Gerding Edlen is doing the development, but we sit in meetings with them and so on. We have the resources to do our own deals, but our mentality is that we’d rather own 50 percent of something great than 100 percent of something that we might have made a mistake on. So we partner with good people.
DJC: When I read about you, you’re often called a “magnate.”
Goodman: Yeah, I don’t quite get that. There’s always a perception of people that you don’t know. I think if you look at my family, I mean, I think our big strength is that we’re very personable people and we’re not elitist in any way. We don’t wear ties to work. We’re pretty casual.
I don’t know where the magnate deal came in. I know they called my father a “magnate” before I became involved. We brought a lot of parking, so I guess somebody coined us as that. But there’s nothing that we hang on the walls up here. We kind of laugh, jokingly say it’s “maggot,” not “magnate.”
DJC: So, how much land does the Goodman family actually own?
Goodman: Downtown, if you pushed them all together, you’d have about 25 blocks.
DJC: A couple of years ago, the company decided it was going to start selling off some of the parking lots. Is that correct?
Goodman: No, we didn’t sell any. We were looking for joint-venture opportunities or land-lease opportunities. We weren’t willing to sell. We’re not sellers.
DJC: How are those partnerships going?
Goodman: I think they’re going well. We’ve got 12th and Washington, and we’ve got a lot of interest down along the waterfront, but the heights are too low, so we’re going to the city to ask for (a floor-area ratio) increase. I think you’re going to see a lot of things over the course of the next 15 years happen on our properties.
At the same time, you have to understand, in Portland, there’s not a massive influx of anything remarkable. The market will only take so much of one product. Time is our ally. Our goal is to leave Portland a lot better. We don’t want to just slap stuff up. We want to put up quality buildings.
DJC: Last time we talked, it was about the Burnside-Couch couplet and Commissioner Sam Adams’ plans for a streetcar there. I’m wondering how streetcar lines, the Transit Mall and public transportation in general affect your business as one who deals with parking.
Goodman: We’ve led light-rail efforts here in Portland, and we’ve always been a huge advocate of light rail. It’s also part of the sustainability of Portland. If you look at light rail, the streetcar, development occurs around it. They’ve been attractors and catalyst projects.
Buses, I talked to Fred Hansen (general manager of TriMet) the other day, and I told him I’d like to get involved in an initiative to get all the buses hybrid. I think buses are great, but they stink and they’re noisy. I was down in Southern California a few weeks ago and I’m riding my bike, and right next to me is a hybrid bus, and I’m not hearing anything, and I thought, “Well, this is pretty cool.”
I talked to Fred about it, and I guess the technology is not where they need it to be yet. But if that technology comes around, it would be great to see if we can be cutting-edge for Portland and perhaps have a bond measure where hypothetically in five years all buses will be hybrid or a different, cleaner form of technology.
Everything that we do from now on we’re going to try to do in a sustainable, environmentally conscious way.
DJC: It’s sort of strange to hear that because, especially in Portland, a very sustainable-minded place, people have the saying, “Pave paradise; put up a parking lot.” People wouldn’t necessarily think a person in your position would be thinking about that.
Goodman: It’s actually just the opposite. You can’t just look out for your business. We look out after our business by making sure Portland is a great place, not looking at the parking lot but looking at what’s around it. We don’t have a piece of dirt that we don’t plan on developing. We’ve got demand here.
If you look at the young intellectual capital that we’re getting here between ages 25 and 36, you know, getting those people here. … To me, Portland is like the country’s largest petri dish. You want to give these people the creative opportunity, and if we get that we’ll be in great shape.
DJC: How do you see this happening in the city?
Goodman: We want to make the West End kind of an urbane type, have an element of almost grit. You go down to Second and Third (avenues) and Couch and you can see it there. You can see it in the neighborhoods happening over by Clarklewis (at Eastbank Commerce Center in the Central Eastside). That area has a lot of character to it. I think it happens in pods. What you have to do is listen to people. You watch where they’re walking; you watch what they’re buying, what interests they have, and so on.
It’s an opportunity to have fun and create and be part of the formation of the city.
DJC: Are there any places in Portland that are disappointing to you, that you feel there really could be things happening but aren’t?
Goodman: I would have said that about the downtown core. I think we’ve been the hole of the doughnut; but I think it’s coming back with housing that Gerding Edlen and John Carroll and Homer Williams and Pat Prendergast have done. I think the Meier & Frank project is a huge deal, and something will hopefully happen on the 10th and Yamhill garage project. So, I would have said the core a couple of years ago. I was really down on the city.
But the mayor has now a sit-and-lie ordinance; we’ve got day shelters to move some people off the street. That’s important to reclaim our sidewalks. People want to feel safe in their downtown.
If I could wish one thing on the core of downtown is that some people would start to look at doing mixed-use projects including housing in conjunction with whatever the use is. Housing is the key. When you do stand-alone office buildings, that’s great because you’re getting people downtown, but the problem with stand-alone office buildings is that at 5 o’clock they’re out of Dodge. I’d much rather see mixed-use, like what we’re doing at 12th and Washington.
DJC: So what would you say now?
Goodman: Honestly, for the first time in a while I’m very bullish. I want to see if we can focus on mixed-use and get the housing down in the core. I want people saying, “I would like to live here.”
DJC: There was a ballot measure that passed in November that now prohibits public agencies from exercising eminent domain for private use. Have you ever been threatened with eminent domain? And what do you think about that?
Goodman: If I have I don’t remember it. I hope it doesn’t happen in the future, no.
But I didn’t think that was good. I think it was too bad that it passed. Look at Pioneer Place – that wouldn’t have happened without eminent domain. It’s something you have to take very seriously; you can’t be haphazard about it. The Eliot Tower that’s up right now and the Safeway project wouldn’t have happened. Once in a great while you need eminent domain for the private sector. At the same time, you should exhaust 99.9 percent of other options before you use it. I was not for the passing of that initiative.
DJC: It’s funny because when I walked in here I had this idea that we would be talking about parking most of the time, and I’m getting a sense that you’re much more invested in Portland as a whole.
Goodman: Absolutely. To me it’s our future. How do you leave it better off? I’m not that great at detail, I’m better at vision stuff. Well, I always think I’m good at visioning until I meet up with Homer Williams; he’s light years beyond me. But we have an uncut diamond here. I’ve been fortunate enough to travel around, and I think it can be the coolest, best city.
DJC: Where does parking fit in to livability in Portland?
Goodman: If you’re parking downtown and you’re working downtown you are actually helping the environment because you’re not out in the suburbs where 97 percent of the people are driving. You’re downtown where 60 percent of the people are driving. I think that number is probably dropping now.
I like light rail – to me it’s awesome. But I would have Wi-Fi, where if you sit down in a chair, you can have a mini-desk checking e-mail on your laptop while you’re going to work. The more things you can do like that, I think the better off we are.
DJC: Along with the couplet that you’re for and the Gerding Edlen project that you’re involved with, what are some other things that are at the forefront of your mind right now from a development standpoint?
Goodman: There are some things, but it’s a little too early to say.
DJC: What about the future of City Center Parking?
Goodman: Well I think there is going to be less surface parking lots. We’re in the parking management business. We’ve done a great job and invested millions of dollars of technology within our company. In my mind we’re light years better than our competition. If you’re doing something, you want to be the best at it, and you want to have fun along the way. The way I look at it, if something happened to me tomorrow, I’d die thinking I led the best life anyone could ever live.
DJC: The longer we talk the less able I am to put a label on you. How do you describe yourself?
Goodman: I guess I’m a civic activist and a realist. It’s too easy to be told “no” on things. If we all got out there and did something … the thing that I get most frustrated by is, sometimes I jokingly say (Portland is) like the Taliban – we try to keep everything the same. We have changed. What made us great in the ’70s isn’t what makes us great now. We were cutting-edge on everything in the ’70s. We did stuff that was controversial. Now everybody wants unanimity, and if you don’t get it, you don’t do it. Well, anybody can ski on glassy water, but great things happen on choppy water. So, don’t be afraid to take a stand and push for it.
DJC: With the obvious passion you have for Portland, do you find yourself getting more interested in politics?
Goodman: It’s interesting you say that. I’d love at some point to be mayor or to run for mayor, but my wife told me she’d divorce me, so I wouldn’t even get a vote in my own house; and anyway I like Tom Potter.
Besides that, it would be fun to be there for four years with two other people that had your same vision and just say, “These are the things we’re going to change,” and then walk; but you’ve made the changes that you believe in.
But, sometimes it’s easier to shape things from the outside than from within. But if I could, if somebody said, “What’s your fantasy?” I’d want myself and two other people that share a common vision to be City Council members for one term, and we say, “All three of us or none, and these are the things that we’re promising you that we’re going to do, and we’ve got the votes to do it.”
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