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ADDRESS: 2169 NW Thurman St.
YEAR BUILT: 1948
SQUARE FOOTAGE: 9,600 square feet
MARKET VALUE: $5.9 million
OWNER: Thurman Associates LLC
HOW LONG IT’S BEEN EMPTY: At least 12 years
WHY IT’S EMPTY: A bad break-in
Tucked between Northwest Thurman Street and the newest Slabtown apartment towers sits a two-story metal industrial building covered in graffiti tags that are nearly impossible to decipher.
The only recent activity on the lot, according to Lisa Freeman, a co-owner of the Freakybuttrue Peculiarium and Museum just down the street, was a large homeless encampment where the building abuts U.S. Highway 30. “It got bigger and bigger. We got broken into a few times,” Freeman says.
Originally built in the late 1940s by the local company Carson Oil, the building was used as a garage for truck repairs and later for oil storage, according to records the original owners filed with the city of Portland before expanding the building.
Eventually, Carson sold the land to Con-way Properties Inc.—a subsidiary of the trucking company that helped transform a swath of Slabtown in the past three decades from a heavily industrial area to a tall, desirable neighborhood with coffee shops and pricey apartments with exposed-brick façades. In 2012, Con-way created the “Con-way Masterplan” to establish a framework for the area’s redevelopment before selling parcels to individual developers. The building at 2169 NW Thurman St. falls within the plan’s boundaries.
It’s uncertain what the building was used for over the past few decades—but according to the current property manager, Mark Hush, it was used for a mix of paper and bicycle storage. (He thinks it even housed a workout room.) Hush says that the previous owners had a number of interested buyers for the land, including a hotel group and a number of apartment developers, but no plans ever panned out.
In June 2021, Con-way sold the property for $2.5 million to Thurman Associates, an LLC whose sole listed member is Thomas Garnier. Garnier is a local businessman who, according to state records, owns an industrial shredder company in Wilsonville, a vineyard in Mosier along the Columbia River, and a number of real estate properties scattered throughout the Portland metro area.
Hush, his property manager, says Garnier still wants to rent out or sell the place. Hush blames their inability to rent it on a break-in roughly a year ago and a homeless camp against the back garage door that made finding tenants a challenge.
“We were marketing it for lease, but there was a break-in with some homeless people that trashed the inside of the building,” Hush says. “Someone had broken into the north-facing door and then graffiti’d the inside of the building, ripped out drywall and just trashed it on the inside.”
The last valuation shows the building has lost value since the break-in. Current assessments of the building put it at $10,000, but the value of the land itself has skyrocketed to more than $5 million.
Hush says the owners hired private security and affixed bars and locks to the exterior doors in order to prevent future break-ins. Freeman says she sees private security on the lot roughly once a day.
Hush and the owner have looked into developing the land for use as a hotel, but given cratering occupancy rates of many hotels in Portland since the pandemic, that’s a gamble for developers. Meanwhile, new graffiti emerges weekly on the building’s walls. A few jars and cartons also litter the area.
Every week, WW examines one mysteriously vacant property in the city of Portland, explains why it’s empty, and considers what might arrive there next. Send addresses to newstips@wweek.com.