German Billionaire Lamenting NW Home Now Is Too Crowded

TACOMA - It was the endless forests, the salmon jumping in sparkling Puget Sound and the wildness of Mount Rainier that drew Erivan Haub to the Pacific Northwest after World War II.

But now there are too many cars jamming the Narrows Bridge, too many people climbing Mount Rainier, says the German billionaire and Gummi Bear producer.

"Quite simply, it became crowded," Haub, ranked by Forbes magazine as the world's seventh-richest individual, said recently.

"It is not as clean anymore as it was. It became . . . industrious."

About 40 years after he first saw the area, Haub, 62, may be shifting his focus to a ranch he recently bought in Wyoming.

That dismays civic boosters who have hoped for years that the legendary entrepreneur would revitalize his adopted city, where he has served as a member of the Executive Council for a Greater Tacoma and contributed to projects like fixing up Union Station, getting the Tacoma branch campus of the University of Washington started and other endeavors.

They envision the goose flapping off and laying its golden eggs elsewhere.

Haub is chairman, chief executive officer and owner of the Tengelmann Group, the world's largest food retailer. The multinational conglomerate based in Mulheim, Germany, has 6,800 outlets, 200,000 employees and sales of $32 billion.

He is also the producer of Gummi Bear candies. And he holds a 53 percent share of Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Co., A&P, which

operates 1,123 food stores in the United States and Canada.

Haub's family emerged from World War II with hundreds of grocery stores intact in Germany. After the war, he came to the U.S. as an exchange student and stayed on to learn the American supermarket business, which he correctly saw as Europe's retailing future.

A chance meeting in 1953 at a Sun Valley, Idaho, ski resort led to friendship with a Tacoma family and visits to the state.

In 1960, Haub and his wife, Helga, flew to Washington to have their first child delivered at Tacoma General Hospital. The medical care was better than that in Germany at the time, and his son was a U.S. citizen at birth.

The couple bought a waterfront house west of Gig Harbor soon after, and the family now owns millions of dollars worth of prime real estate in downtown Tacoma and Gig Harbor.

But the Northwest is no longer the paradise it was.

"When we first came there, the whole valley between Tacoma and Seattle was empty," he said. "Now if you fly over, it you see that everything is solid city, from Tacoma to Seattle."

Haub says he is not about to abandon Pierce County, but there is less and less for him here. And without a personal stake in the region's future, his investment decisions likely will be made from the perspective of a businessman, not a benefactor.

He says Tacoma eventually will prosper because of its port and proximity to Asia.

"It will take time, unfortunately, it will take time. But one of these days it's going to happen. The whole downtown area, I think, can be really revived. I've seen it in Baltimore, I've seen it in Boston, I've seen it in a number of cities."

Haub's property in downtown Tacoma, worth nearly $2 million, was singled out as a prime candidate for development.

"If I construct anything there," he said, "it must be something extraordinary, something Tacoma can be proud of."