The Rent That Filled Bellweather Street Is Emptying It Again
A 41-year-old ship chandlery closes in September as ground-floor asking rents climb 79 percent, and the council takes up a lease-stabilization pilot it may not be able to afford.
Halvard & Doon Ship Supply will close on September 30 after forty-one years at the corner of Bellweather and Third, and the reason is not the one the waterfront usually gives.
Sales are up. The chandlery finished last year with $1.31 million in revenue, its best figure since 2016, helped by a run of refit work in the small-boat yards and by a decision three years ago to stock rigging hardware for the racing fleet. Owner Petra Halvard-Doon, whose father opened the store in 1985, said the business was profitable in every quarter of the last two years.
The lease renewal quote she received in May asked for $34 a square foot, up from the $19 she had been paying since 2019, plus a common-area charge that rose from $3.10 to $5.75. On 2,900 square feet, that is a jump from roughly $64,000 a year to roughly $115,000.
“I ran it eleven ways,” Halvard-Doon said, standing behind a counter with a brass ship’s clock screwed to the end of it. “There is a version where I raise prices nine percent and cut Saturday hours and I survive. There is no version where I survive and I am still a chandlery. I would be a gift shop that sells some shackles.”
Her landlord, Bellweather Holdings, declined to discuss the specific negotiation. In a written statement, managing partner Cyrus Ohm said the firm had “made a good-faith renewal offer at market” and noted that the building’s property tax assessment rose 31 percent in the last cycle and its insurance premium 38 percent.
## The success problem
Bellweather Street is, by the standard measures, a recovery story. Vacancy along the central retail spine fell to 7.4 percent in the second quarter, the lowest reading since 2019, according to the Coastal Property Council’s survey. That number has been quoted approvingly in three grant applications and one mayoral address.
What the vacancy figure does not capture is who filled the space. Of the 14 ground-floor storefronts that changed hands on Bellweather in the past eighteen months, nine went to service tenants — two physical therapy practices, a dental group, a co-working annex, a children’s coding lab, an audiology clinic, a title company, and two hybrid office suites. Service tenants can carry higher rents because their revenue per square foot is not constrained by inventory turns. A physical therapy suite does not need a stockroom holding $340,000 of bronze fittings.
“We have a composition problem that looks like a rent problem,” said Nadia Ferro, the property council’s research director, who is careful to say she is not defending the outcome. “Rents did not rise and then push out retail. Service tenants bid, retail could not match, and the average asking rent moved because the winning bids moved it. If you cap the rent, you have not changed who can pay it.”
Ferro’s data supports the point uncomfortably well. Median asking rent on Bellweather rose 79 percent over five years. Median achieved rent for tenants who sell physical goods rose 22 percent. The gap is not landlords squeezing shopkeepers; it is shopkeepers dropping out of the bidding entirely.
Nobody drafts an ordinance against arithmetic.
## The pilot before council
Councilmember Junot Ashworth has introduced a legacy business lease-stabilization pilot that would apply to ground-floor commercial tenants meeting three tests: twenty or more continuous years at the same address, fewer than fifteen employees, and a majority of revenue from goods sold on premises. Qualifying tenants could apply for a five-year rent supplement covering up to 40 percent of the increase at renewal, capped at $28,000 a year per business.
The pilot is budgeted at $600,000 annually for three years and would cover an estimated 21 to 26 businesses citywide. It cleared the economic development committee 4-1 on July 30 and is scheduled for a full council vote on September 15.
Ashworth is blunt about the limits. “This does not fix the market. It buys time for about two dozen storefronts while we argue about whether ground-floor use requirements are legal here,” he said. He has separately asked the city attorney for an opinion on whether Port Meridian can impose retail-use covenants on new construction along the spine, a question the office has been sitting on since March.
The dissenting committee vote came from Councilmember Rowan Devi, who called the pilot “a subsidy to landlords with extra steps.” Her objection is mechanical: if the city guarantees 40 percent of an increase, a landlord negotiating with a qualifying tenant knows the tenant’s effective ceiling has risen, and the asking rent rises to meet it. Devi wants the money spent on a revolving acquisition fund that would let a nonprofit buy two or three buildings outright.
“One is rent control for twenty-six people that pays the landlord,” Devi said. “The other is ownership. I would rather own one block than rent twenty-six doors.”
The acquisition fund’s problem is scale. At current Bellweather valuations, $600,000 a year is a down payment on roughly one mid-block building every four years, and only if a seller appears.
## What happens to the inventory
Halvard-Doon has been quietly moving stock since June. The rigging hardware went to a chandlery two harbors south that agreed to take it at cost. The charts and the electronics went at a discount to the small-boat yard on Ferrous Lane, which has been talking about opening a counter of its own and now has the inventory to do it — a shift that may relocate the function without preserving the store.
What has not moved is the wall of small drawers behind the register: 312 of them, labeled in her father’s handwriting, holding fittings for vessels that mostly stopped being built in the 1970s. An auction house valued the contents at $4,100 and the cabinet itself at considerably more, on the grounds that people want the cabinet for their kitchens.
She has decided not to sell the cabinet. She has also decided not to keep it, because there is nowhere to put it, and she is not sentimental enough to rent a unit for a piece of furniture.
Instead she is taking one drawer. Number 118, bronze cotter pins in four sizes, the drawer her father sent her to when she was seven and asked what she wanted to do that day. The rest goes to whoever bids on the cabinet, contents included, which she has stipulated must be sold together and not emptied first.
“Somebody should have to open all of them,” she said.
Reporting for this story was prepared for The Harbor Ledger’s business desk. Tips:newsroom@theharborledger.com