Oregon, My Oregon

 Nate Hochman at NR, generously cited at Haut Hair on The tragedy of Portland

This, in other words, is the face of a decaying city. “If you go downtown, it’s a ghost town, except for zombies that are walking around pushing carts because they have nowhere else to go,” Rogers said. “There’s no signs of life, except for these junkies — they’re the only people that occupy it. There’s no real business being done in downtown anymore.”

The most tragic thing about Portland’s sorry fate is just how avoidable it was. The city’s decline is a policy decision — or more specifically, a series of policy decisions, leveled on the working and middle classes by powerful activist groups and feckless politicians insulated from the real-world consequences of their acquiescence. In the burst of utopian ideological fervor that swept the city in 2020, Portland slashed its police budget by $15 million, disbanded three of its units — public-school policing, TriMet (the commuter bus and rail system) policing, and the Gun Violence Reduction Team — and cut eight of its Special Emergency Reaction Team positions. When the predictable consequences of those policies led to mass resignations in the Portland Police Bureau, the city government scrambled to restore the funds it had cut a year before, but the change of heart was too little, too late. Amid its worst staffing shortage in decades, PPB can no longer find officers to hire; Portland currently has fewer cops on the street than at any point in the last three decades. In an exit interview, one of the countless officers leaving the city put it poignantly: “The only difference between PPB and the Titanic? Deck chairs and a band.”

There is a sense that city officials have lost control of the forces they unleashed in summer 2020. Mayor Ted Wheeler initially defended the BLM protests, in fact praising them as part of Portland’s “proud progressive tradition.”

They all got caught up in the myth of Portlandia, and forgot to pay attention to reality. Then, they voted poorly. And they're dragging the rest of the state down with them.