PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) – Vanessa Sturgeon literally has a bird's eye view of downtown Portland.

From her offices on the 20th floor of the Fox Tower, the president of TMT Development has seen the changes in downtown Portland and will be a big part of the city's future.

Sturgeon develops and manages high-rise offices, retail and apartments in Portland. She's also a philanthropist sitting on a number of professional and volunteer boards.

According to Colliers, the office vacancy rate in Portland's central city is among the highest in the nation at nearly 34% and rising. Some say it could go as high as 40%.

“Similar things happened across the country after Covid shutdowns,” Sturgeon said. “The states that had the most restrictive Covid shutdowns ended up with more difficulties in getting office workers back to the office.”

But a lot of these office workers aren’t coming back, so Sturgeon said the vacant space is in its first phase of getting repurposed.

“There’s a re-setting of value of downtown office buildings,” she said. “The values have dropped enough at this point potentially for a new buyer to come in and convert that into a different kind of space.”

Meanwhile, public safety is a concern for people coming downtown. Mayor Ted Wheeler recently said in his “State of the City" address recently that downtown is improving in regard of homelessness and open drug use.

But how do we continue this improvement? Sturgeon said it starts with tax incentives, regulations, permitting, and fees -- adding that “we need to be creative and thoughtful about that.”

“My biggest concern is, at this point, tax revenue is really on the decline for property taxes in downtown Portland, and that affects the entire state, because that revenue makes up a lot of the state’s property tax revenue.” she said. “We really need to find a way to backfill that tax revenue.”

Meanwhile, Sturgeon said the loss of major tenants like U.S. Bank, when they announced their departure from the U.S. Bancorp building, is "disappointing and a major blow."

“Not altogether too surprising given the issues with safety and security on the Burnside corridor,” she said. “In the short term, it seems like the focus on safety would really help retain some of these local tenants.”

See the full interview by watching the video player above.