I needed a new career after more than four decades as a planning and design professional. So I became a writer. The first book was about the last 20 years I spent working on the Bandon Dunes Golf Resort.
Fall 2014 saw the release of Beyond the Dream—an insider’s story about how the golf resort was conceived, planned, designed and built. The Scottish Links style golf courses built by developer Mike Keiser changed the golf industry in America.,
Reflections on an Adolescence. This was a veiled memoir of events that occurred in a small town in Northern Minnesota where I grew up. The narrative reflected many true events, but because I had introduced some fictional events to bring the story to a specific ending the book turned into a novel. The book encompassed stories gleaned from others that reflected the human condition of adolescence and the realization that adolescence occurs within a cultural crucible that allows experimentation in a container woven of social boundaries.
After that I decided to write about the history of the Pearl District in Portland, Oregon. I’d been a property owner and developer in what was called the Northwest Triangle District back in the 1980s and 90s when the transformation of an old manufacturing-industrial area on the doorsteps of downtown Portland began. I had formed an investment group and purchased the Gadsby Building, an old four-story warehouse located at NW 13th and Hoyt Streets. The idea was to convert the building to condominium lofts with an open plan layout. Unfortunately, we were not able to obtain any construction or take-out financing for condo buyers because of high interest rates. Rates were in the 14-16 percent range. No bank in Portland, Oregon would lend money for this type of development. Instead, we subdivided the floors into a range of spaces and rented primarily to artists looking for studio spaces and young entrepreneurs just starting out in the business world. They all next raw, inexpensive space.
Working with other nearby property owners, a group of us hired a historic preservation consultant. He prepared a nomination for a limited historic district focused on a number of properties that fronting onto NW 13th Avenue. Eventually the city and state found this nomination appearing and a national historic district was formed and approved by local and state authorities. NW 13th Avenue was ground zero as the transformation of what was then called the Northwest Industrial Triangle District later became known as the River District and eventually the Pearl District.