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Address: 3835 SE Powell Blvd.
Year built: 1985
Square footage: 1,917
Market value: $1.5 million
Owner: RJW Group Inc.
Property tax owed: $37,903
How long it’s been delinquent: 4 years
What those taxes could buy: A guaranteed income of $500 a month for six families for a year
Why it’s delinquent: Doughnut shops fleeing the state
A former Dunkin’ Donuts at the corner of one of Portland’s busiest (and most dangerous) intersections has stood vacant for years, its owner unable to lease it—and accruing unpaid taxes.
“It went vacant with the COVID. We’ve not been able to re-lease it. So we haven’t paid the property taxes,” says Edward Wagner, 81, a retired architect and developer who bought the property 40 years ago. Wagner manages the LLC that owns the property.
He’s had only two tenants since, he says. The first was Dunkin’, which stayed in the location for two decades until the chain abandoned the West Coast in 2004. The reason: “In the Northwest, there are too few stores to do any marketing. The image is old. There’s not enough brand recognition,” the former franchisee Malik Pirani told Oregonian columnist Steve Duin in 2004.
Soon after Duin’s column came out, Wagner’s phone was ringing off the hook, he says. He selected another chain, a payday loan outfit from Kansas, after it flew out a corporate vice president to seal the deal.
The new location ended up being one of the Speedy Cash chain’s top performers, Wagner says.
But lawmakers cracked down on predatory lending in the early 2000s. In 2006, the city of Portland began requiring payday lenders to obtain permits and disclose their fee schedules and interest rates. The following year, state legislators capped interest on short-term loans at 36%.
Lenders claimed the changes would force them out of business. “They’ve been on the shit list with various legislators for years,” Wagner explains.
The chain abandoned the storefront in June 2021. Signs on the building’s glass doors now direct customers to another location, 90 blocks east in the Powellhurst-Gilbert neighborhood.
Meanwhile, the building at the corner of Southeast César E. Chávez and Powell boulevards has been vacant since—and accumulated a $37,000 tax debt on the land and building. “No one’s coming into town. Everybody’s leaving town,” Wagner bemoans.
When asked whether he plans to repay the taxes once he finds a tenant, Wagner said, “Of course.”
That will happen soon, he tells WW. Wagner says he’s giving a sweetheart lease to a nonprofit but declined to identify it or say what it did. “I’m not gonna get gangbuster rent,” he says, “but I’m going to keep the building, and it’ll go into my estate.”