Learn from your Mistakes or Repeat Them

I often find myself wondering if there's anyone driving this bus.  First, in spite of completely failing to get Craig Mecham off the dime with his Sugar House pit, Salt Lake City has greenlighted Red Mountain Retail Group's mixed use redevelopment of the rest of that block and the one adjacent.  I'm no fan of the Granite Furniture Warehouse, but we don't exactly need another chain-linked hole in the ground on that block.  The City says this one is different because Red Mountain has all its financing in place.  Yeah, right.  Mecham said the same thing.  So did General Growth Properties with the Cottonwood Mall.  Show me the money.

Meanwhile, on the South End Sand Pile, R&B SunCrest has walked out of negotiations to take over the SunCrest development, claiming Draper is not acting in good faith.  What that really means is that Draper, to the shock of everyone, is not rolling over, taking R&B and Zions Bank off the hook, and agreeing to stick the already thoroughly ripped off citizens of Draper with the entire bill to fix that mess.  Bully for Draper.  Unfortunately, Draper has done little if anything to change the ordinances and procedures that made SunCrest possible in the first place, so it continues to permit time bombs and will be crisis hopping for awhile.

As an aside, I have to wonder about Zions Bank.  As a result of the SunCrest collapse, Zions ordered Draper to close its accounts and find another bank.  That's the sort of "take your ball and go home" behavior one expects on a playground, not from a major financial player.  It could be a blessing in disguise for Draper, though.  Zions has taken some serious hits in the last year, from having to pull off-book garbage back onto its books to having to take over busted banks at the FDIC's "request" to seizing crap collateral like SunCrest.  There's only so much that any business can absorb.  Maybe it's good that Draper moves on.

It Isn't Just a Residential Crisis

There's been a lot of noise about the housing market, bad mortgages, and banks failing as a result. People haven't been paying as much attention to the next real estate tsunami: commercial loans. The retail failures and dark spaces have been chipping away at commercial, though, and now it can't be ignored. The state seized commercial development lender MagnetBank Friday. If that isn't bad enough, the FDIC is having to eat this one because it can't find a buyer. What does that mean? Game over. In spite of the bailout money, no other bank could be convinced to buy in. The commerical picture is that grim. And what does that say about the effect the downtown mall and office buildings will have on the market? Or the odds of completing Cottonwood, Valley Fair, Sugarhouse, or the downtown Ogden projects? Or of filling the growing collection empty, faux-Tuscan commercial buildings that have sprouted up everywhere? There will be blood.

"Mr. Mecham, Fill Up This Hole"

Well, everyone's least favorite swimming hole in the making, the Mecham pit in Sugar House is back in the news. The City wants Mecham to fill that hole by Winter. Mecham's first line of defense is that he's being singled out when there are other projects out there that are out of compliance. His second line is that he's finding financing harder to get than he expected.

First, I can't think of a project out there that's as big a mess in as bad a location as Mecham's. It's prime real estate that two years ago was one of our prime, independent shopping districts, and it's been nothing but a chain link fence and a hole in the ground for months, including this entire construction season. So, no, he isn't being singled out. Even if he were being singled out, his argument is about like telling the cop who pulls you over for speeding, "Hey, you can't ticket me. Other people are speeding too." Good luck with that.

Second, financing is always a gamble on projects like this. Mecham isn't Don Trump; he can't snap his fingers and make it rain money. Even Trump can't do that any more. This problem was completely foreseeable a year ago when he knocked the block down, and even before then when he evicted all his tenants. This isn't even the first time he's made this excuse. He said the same thing back when the City was imposing some frankly reasonable restrictions on his demolition permit.

Sorry Mr. Mecham, I can't sympathize. Either clean up your mess, or sell that property to someone who can.

Sugar House Sour

In the interest of full disclosure, my office was in these buildings until Mecham Investments booted me out so it could make its big hole in the ground. Nothing I'm reading in the paper this morning surprises me.

Craig Mecham (aka The Great Developer) has a hole in the ground that half of what's left of Sugar House could fall into, and apparently isn't going to do anything about it. At least the City is stepping up, threatening to take the performance bond and fill up the hole itself. I hope the bond covers the cost, but I'm thinking it might not.

Oh, and Mecham is hinting that, due to the downturn in the real estate market, he's having to rethink the project. Boy am I shocked. If he's just going to leave a mess there, I think the City really ought to step up, fill and landscape the hole, and use its status as a creditor to toss the project into bankruptcy, where it can be sold to someone with the wherewithal to finish it. Unless the City wants the center of Sugar House to be a full block of urban blight.