Councilwoman Mosqueda has argued for an end to the sale of city land
but I wonder if she knows how much this deal left on the table? It may been to the highest bidder but I don’t think it was the highest bid.
My reading of the RFP was that the eventual buyer offered a ground rent option that would have paid about $1 million per acre per year for the 3 acre parcel.
Maybe $3 million/year didn’t look like a good deal against $143 million but by those calculations, whoever negotiated that deal left more than $1 billion (with a b) on the table. True, it would have taken 99 years to collect it all but think of what kind of financial position that puts you in, to have a guaranteed revenue stream of more than $400 million per acre for one parcel. Imagine that across the full 500 acres set aside for downtown. That’s $4.25 million annualized, every acre, every year.
I’ve never been able to learn who negotiated this on behalf of the city but I wonder if they ever ran the offer through a future value analysis and if so, how they opted for the fee simple sale.