NEWS STORY
Endangered Spices
A summer rent hike may limit the menu of downtown vendors who sell their carnitas, crepes and cappuccino from parked trailers and vans.

BY MATTHIAS FRIPP
243-2122

 

Carrie Calhoun says her mission is simple: to serve downtown workers the best possible organic, vegetarian burritos. Working out of a stand barely larger than a phone booth, she and a friend first set up their business, The Girl Next Door, in half a parking space on a lot at Southwest 9th Avenue and Alder Street two years ago. Business was good, but at the beginning of this summer Calhoun got a nasty surprise. The manager of the City Center Parking lot she rented space from gave her three weeks' notice that her monthly rent would increase June 1 from $150 to $275.

Faced with higher rent and new competition--Chinto's Burritos had moved its trailer to the same lot in March--Calhoun decided to seek a new patch of asphalt. She packed up her tortillas and moved north nine blocks, to a Diamond Parking lot at Northwest 9th Avenue and Hoyt Street, where her rent is about what she had been paying City Center.

Leaving the downtown core, however, hurt business. Calhoun, who was already tiring of the burrito biz, is calling it quits next month, and she says the City Center rent hike is responsible. "Basically it put me out of business," she says.

Calhoun isn't the only vendor feeling squeezed. From the espresso vendor on Southwest 9th Avenue and Alder Street to the burrito makers on Southwest 5th Avenue, almost all of the folks who dish out food from downtown food trailers faced a big rent increase this summer. Some say the hike demonstrates City Center's greed. Others say the rent boost was long overdue. Everyone agrees, however, that Calhoun won't be the last culinary casualty of Portland's parking monopoly.

The dozen or so businesses selling food from vans and trailers downtown represent a unique niche in Portland's food industry. Unlike downtown's ubiquitous pushcarts, the customized trailers and vans can operate as complete restaurants. While pushcart vendors must do much of their cooking and cleanup at a separate location, trailers have full kitchens, giving owners the experience needed to run a restaurant, something that most of them aspire to.

There's another big difference between carts and trailers. Carts, which operate from publicly owned sidewalks, pay a nominal annual fee to the city. Trailers, which require at least one parking space, are at the mercy of their landlords; the past eight months have been tough.

In the parking lot at Southwest 5th Avenue and Oak Street, nine vendors are lined up in a kind of informal food court, vying for the bustling lunchtime traffic on the transit mall. Last year there were only three. They received a 10 percent rent increase in December, followed by a 30 percent boost in April. As a result, spaces that cost $250 a month last summer now cost $350. To make matters worse, City Center, which operates the lot, added several new vendors on the lot in June. The rent increase and unexpected new competitors are challenging the older businesses, leaving some ill will toward City Center.

"I don't like the feeling that you're totally at their mercy," says one vendor, who asked not to be named. "They won't sign a lease with you. They're just in it for the money. If they could get someone else in here who would make twice as much as you, they'd kick you out tomorrow."

Mark Goodman, vice president of City Center, says that the city and his company value the vendors who operate on his lots. In fact, he says, City Center receives dozens of requests for rental space from food vendors. The company could dole out its limited locations to the highest bidders but instead has remained loyal to its established vendors.

Still, Goodman says, City Center specializes in parking cars, not hawking burritos; the company had long neglected the rates it charges vendors.

Even with the higher rent, Goodman says, City Center provides an opportunity for people to get started in business without the up-front costs and lease agreements they would otherwise face downtown. "I think it gives these vendors a very good opportunity to have prime retail locations at a price that is very attractive compared to other space downtown," he says.

While some vendors say they would prefer a long-term lease, Goodman says the month-to-month arrangement is in everyone's interest. "If they're not happy from their end," he says, "they can just go."

Unfortunately for downtown vendors, the only place to go may be out of business.

Several vendors told WW that the City Center rent hike prompted them to consider moving, but they soon found there was nowhere to move. City Center owns or operates almost every available surface lot central enough to receive the foot traffic on which vendors depend. (Mazatlan Taqueria operates a booth on the Diamond parking strip at Southwest 3rd Avenue and Ash Street. Pioneer Square has long-term arrangements with four vendors and room for no more.)

City Center's monopoly on downtown surface lots is exacerbated by the city's transportation management plan, which imposes some of the nation's strictest limits on the number of parking spaces downtown. Existing surface lots are being torn up for development and not replaced. Rich Cassidy, Portland's senior transportation manager, says a dwindling supply of spaces combined with increased demand is driving up the rent for food vendors. "We have intentionally pinched parking downtown," he says, "and this is the result."

With nowhere else to go, the vendors are toughing it out. For now, during the busy summer season, they are able to pay the new rent and face the new competition. Limin Tian, the owner of the Snow White House crepe stand at Southwest 9th Avenue and Yamhill Street, sees the rent hike as an overdue business cost. "They told me they would raise the rent," says Tian, whose monthly bill jumped from $440 to $700 in June. "I said, 'OK, you should have raised it a long time ago.'"

Most other vendors, however, are worried about what will happen in the winter, when business slows down. David Alvarez, co-owner of the 10th Street Espresso Bar, saw his rent rise from $250 to $500 June 1. He can't raise his prices because of intense competition from other downtown coffee shops. Alvarez says he's staying for now but still thinking about selling the stand or moving. The new rent is eating up his summer savings and may be impossible to pay in the winter. "There's no way with $500 rent," he says. "It's definitely going to eat into any profit we might make."

 

originally published July 29, 1998