The rise and fall of Pierce County’s real estate titans

The founders of Tacoma real estate development company Prium were enigmas in Pierce County’s business community. But boom times made questionable business dealings easier to overlook. A bankruptcy filing allowed me to pull back the curtain by analyzing thousands of pages of court documents and conducting dozens of interviews.

An excerpt:

Riding the wave of real estate, the two men – with little experience in commercial real estate development – took other people’s money and grew their company with little help.

Along the way, Price and Um acquired trophies to signal their success: brand-new Bentleys, private schools for their children, and million-dollar homes they rent from themselves for $100 a month. One son got a Porsche for his 16th birthday.

The men built their empire using hundreds of millions of dollars of borrowed money, and they paid themselves monthly salaries of $20,000 each.

Paying their contractors was much harder.

“I was prepared for slow pay, but not prepared for no pay,” said Greg Bailey, a Thurston County general contractor who is owed about $65,000 for work he did two years ago.

Bailey is in a long line of people waiting for Price and Um to settle up.

The men are in bankruptcy. Together their debts – as much as $350 million – amount to one of the largest bankruptcies in the state.

Their biggest creditors are lenders who are owed tens of millions of dollars. A handful of contractors have legal judgments against Prium, but it’s impossible to know how many others went unpaid.

Click here to read the full article at The News Tribune.

What’s really going on here?

By the time some crosswalk-painting vigilantes contacted me, I was a well-respected business reporter with a long track record of stories that revealed the shades of gray in situations often presented as black and white.

An excerpt:

They were already annoyed. Then along came an anecdote.

The story said a bicyclist was hit by a car on St. Helens Avenue, near The Mix restaurant, sometime in April. He was hurt, hospitalized. Lots of people saw it.

It wasn’t all true, but gossip prompted action. Two weeks later, a hand-painted bike lane marker appeared on the asphalt nearby, the signature of well-meaning vigilantes.

Who was the injured cyclist? The painters didn’t know. “It was just an anecdote,” the group’s ringleader said. Did it matter that the man wasn’t on a bicycle? That he was a guy on foot on a cold rainy night in January, retrieving his debit card from the bar and restaurant, darting across the street just as a car drove by?

It didn’t really matter. The story fueled the painters’ frustration over streets they believe aren’t fit for anything but cars, despite years of rhetoric about walkable and bike-able neighborhoods.

They filled a paint tray, grabbed a brush and sketched a stylized bicycle that resembled the accepted design for such markers — except this one, at the corner of Sixth Avenue and St. Helens, had a mouse on the seat.

That marker led to citizen-painted crosswalks at the same intersection, which led to Tacoma city workers grinding them out and scarring the road, which led to news coverage, which led to more unauthorized crosswalks appearing across the Stadium District.

Which led to city workers removing them all, city leaders declaring them vandalism and threatening to prosecute the painters. City officials say the citizen crosswalks create a false sense of security and could put people who use them in danger.

Click here to read the full article at The News Tribune.