The sort of people who are now drawn to Portland
- Residents say they are sick of crime, drug use and homelessness in the center of Portland, Oregon
- They could be about to do the unthinkable and elect a Republican as governor for the first time in 40 years
- They blame ‘woke policies’ and years of Democratic leadership for allowing people to use hard drugs in public
- The result is a city where drug casualties crash out on street corners and tented encampment are growing
- Business owners say the problem is keeping tourists away and turning down town into a no-go area
- Joe Biden could have seen it all for himself if he had walked just a few blocks from his Friday night hotel
Rob Crilly – DailyMail.com Oct 18, 2022
When President Joe Biden flew into Oregon to try to shore up his party’s nominee for governor he would not have had far to look to see the problem.
He spent Friday night at the luxury Duniway Hotel in downtown Portland, a property at risk of foreclosure as visitors stay away from the city center.
The decriminalization of hard drugs is blamed by many for changing the tone of the city. Drugs are on open display. Click to enlarge
And if he had taken a morning stroll, he could have seen for himself the results of the 2020 decision to decriminalize hard drugs such as cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine.
The casualties were everywhere. Two blocks from the hotel lobby a man was folded up on a street corner, his body draped around a rolled-up sleeping bag.
Shoppers pretended not to notice his unconscious figure as they headed towards a Nordstrom department store.
‘You walk with blinders,’ said Charlene, a 21-year-old student, who carried a Zara bag. ‘Otherwise you wouldn’t come here at all.’
Two blocks further on, a woman covered in a gray robe stood frozen at a drinking fountain, her clothing and drug-induced state turning her into a living statue.
In a small city center park, morning dog walkers strolled past benches filled with droop-headed drug users.
One man flattened a piece of foil before putting a lighter to it, and inhaling the results through a pipe in plain view of a children’s playground.
This is Portland, where hipsters line up for at Voodoo Donuts for their world famous confections next to an abandoned theater where rake-thin drug users sit on the sidewalk waiting for their next fix – or for their last one to wear off.
The hotels are near empty and restaurant owners say their customers don’t feel safe.
A coffeeshop where an oat milk latte would sell for $5 is closed, its doorway filled with sleeping bodies and the scent or urine in the morning.
Portland set a record for murders last year. It reported 90 homicides – shattering the previous high of 66 – and could be about to surpass it this year.
Street sleepers dot the Pearl District, formerly known for its fancy restaurants and shops but which is hit hardest by the problems. Click to enlarge
Such is the level of anger that liberal Oregon could be about to do the unthinkable and elect its first Republican governor since 1982.
The Democratic candidate Linda Kotek has seen a 16-point win for Biden two years ago eaten away by independent candidate Betsy Johnson who has described how the City of Roses has become a ‘city of roaches.’
Kotek helped introduce legislation that placed restrictions on what the state’s cities could do to remove homeless people from the streets, at about the same time that hard drugs were decriminalized.
As a result Christine Drazan, the Republican candidate, has seized on anger and resentment at the way downtown has filled with homeless encampments and drug casualties.
‘They just don’t seem to get it,’ she says in a 30-second ad released this week. ‘It’s time for a change, like declaring homelessness the emergency that it is.’
On Monday morning, 77-year-old Rosemary Silen was making a rare foray into downtown.
She used to love visiting Powell’s City of Books. That was until she parked her car one time only to return and find a bullet hole in its side paneling.
‘I could have been in it,’ she said. ‘I told my kids what had happened and they told me not to come here any more.’
Another time, she said she had pointed out what she thought was dog poop on the sidewalk to her friend. ‘That’s not from a dog,’ came the response.
She was visiting to hear Johnson make her pitch for more policing and an end to the state and city government’s woke policies.
‘Oregonians I think are compassionate and kind and empathetic people,’ she told DailyMail.com ‘They have gotten this laissez faire attitude about live anywhere, do anything.
She said she had quit the Democratic Party to run as independent because it had become ‘too weird.’
‘We have taken woke to an exponential extreme and I think that’s an exacerbating factor,’ she said after a discussion with restaurant and bar owners who said their businesses were suffering.
One man described how his store had shut down after it had been broken into 17 times. A restaurateur said her customers simply did not feel safe. And all of them said tourists were staying away.
Later that day a nearby Starbucks announced it was closing permanently because of safety concerns.
The city was hit by violence in 2020, amid nationwide protests over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Fortifications still surround the federal courthouse, a reminder of the Molotov cocktails that flew through the air.
Across town, in a gentrifying neighborhood, James Posey, a black community leader, said he could date the change to the start of the pandemic. As the city closed down, drug restrictions were lifted and a different population moved in.
‘Why did we decide to do this? This has become a Mecca for people want to live like this,’ he said.
He said he did not want to see a Republican take power, but could not bring himself to vote Democrat this time around.
Policing had fallen by the wayside, he continued.
‘They want to bill themselves as progressive. They want to see themselves as out in front of all the racism,’ he said. ‘But at the end of the day, we’ve seen this this whole state with a precipitous decline in the quality of life.’
From his porch, near Dawson park, he can watch cars pull up, buy drugs and move on in seconds. All in front of a Baptist church.
Almost on cue, half a block away a black sedan with tinted windows stopped in the middle of the street. A mini-skirted woman leaned through the window before strolling slowly to a parked car to collect something.
Meanwhile, a gaggle of men in ragged clothes clustered together, sharing around a small wrap of meth.
A recent poll found that a whopping 82 percent of voters in Portland want more police on the beat, cleaning up streets and making the city safer.
Police say they are doing their best but there is only so much they can do when political leaders shy from tough decisions.
Loretta Guzman, 52, knows what happens when you try to support the police. Her coffeeshop was hit by vandals after she publicized a ‘Coffee with a Cop’ event.
She said her hope had been for officers to hear the complaints of residents who are tired of living with crime.
‘Some are scared. Some are mad or sad, some feel helpless,’ she said.
‘Some feel like they have no voice. Nobody’s listening to them. They’re tired, they’re ready for change.
Her security cameras captured the attack, showing six hooded figures lining up in front of her storefront in the early hours. They pause, as if conferring on their plan.
Then they begin pounding on the windows with clubs. Something breaks and a figure steps forward with what looks like a fire extinguisher, shooting a stream of white paint through the broken window.
He or she moves moves to a second window.
At that point they are startled. They turn to run.
One of Guzman’s neighbors had been woken by the noise and appeared on the scene with a handgun.
‘I was just numb,’ said Guzman, who arrived minutes later, crunching over broken glass.
—
Inside she was confronted by devastation. The paint had coated Native American art and matted the fur of a huge bison head.
The cleanup goes on two weeks later. Guzman plans to install bulletproof glass.
From her coffeeshop, it is a short drive to a homeless encampment. Broken down RVs, tents built from shopping carts and cars without wheels line a mile-long stretch of 33rd Drive.
She said years of mismanagement had blighted the city, and turned her own views upside down. ‘I’m politically homeless,’ said a woman who had once backed socialist Bernie Sanders for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.
‘There’s no consequences. Those who do go to jail, they get right back out,’ she said.
‘They’re free to sit on the street and shoot right up up right. They’re free to stand there. Right there and smoke right in front of you.’
So all this came about after two years of Biden, did it? What BS. The rot began years ago under Reagan and his supply-side economics, and Biden is as much a result of the rot as is the sidewalk faeces.
If not for the rot there could have been no President Biden.
Well if the elites continue to evade taxes and cause a dramatic drop in wages for ordinary people you should expect this.
If the government allows whole industries to be exported to Asia causing a dramatic drop in the tax take.
You could go on….especially allowing the the drug barons to remain at large….where the money from drug dealing eventually enters the “legitimate” economy….
Guess what…..the top ten percent get greatly enriched…..like the absolutely corrupt Pelosi….who is now conservatively estimated to be worth over $100,000,000 Dollars.
Who the fuck votes for this haggard old crone?….they must be out of their tiny minds.
It is well recognised that local government in places like Los Angeles are systemically corrupt.
It is NOT a conspiracy theory to suggest that Trump actually did win the last election….like Le Pen DID win the French election.
As for the current business in British politics it is beyond belief.
And people are going to be stupid enough to vote in Liebour next time!.The very least they could do is vote for the LibDems as an interim measure…..on the basis they have not been in power and so are not yet as corrupt as the other two.
This is not Laissez-faire, because gov. is encouraging it all whereas Laissez-faire means letting the markets decide: gov. can come in and do what it wants, with or against the markets. Jews feed harmful drugs into White areas, and there is a racial component to drug preferences
good that they understand demoncrates
follow jewish politics . one learns by
pains .
our young FFF brainpissed will learn
that green leftists are their gravediggers !
It’s coming here, and it’s entirely due to government MALICE. They want us dead, and millions of newly-homeless people will succumb this winter.
The police, what’s left of them, are more interested in forbidden words than actual crime, and it’s been known for years that the government is behind the “illegal” drugs trade. Ask James Casbolt, who was once involved in this lucrative trade.
http://whale.to/b/casbolt_b.html
Brighton, a queer town in Southern England, has a mixture of genuinely homeless people, for which no real help is available, and drug addicts who can find no better way of passing the endless, empty days, devoid of hope.
Just a week or two ago, there were reports of a homeless person (drunk or on drugs?) sleeping it off IN THE ROAD. A (blind?) taxi driver pulled away from the kerb, ran over and killed the man.
Photos of the scene show it happened outside a shop called “WELL DONE”, and I’m sure there are plenty of uncaring sub-Humans in Brighton that would agree with that message.
Here’s the photo
https://www.brightonandhovenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/North-Street-crash.-Picture-by-Daniel-Moon.jpeg
Voting ‘Republican’ wont help them…in fact these imbeciles and their circumstances are well past any sort of ‘correction’..
You see… as the hollow men try to swing the herd to the ‘right’ and bio-security ‘police state’..(thereby getting the peons to acquiesce for safety and security etc just like they used vaxxxines)…
these ‘voters’ will eventually end up incarcerated in the same facilities as the antifa druggies employed by the CiA and Gorgy Soreass…
that created the situation…
Same problem in Vancouver. Same kind of secular humanist, moral-relativist idiots running everything. Last month I was wondering what I could do to help the homeless and I spoke to a woman who has been providing shelter for the homeless, and she told me there are few on the streets they can help. Most of them either want to be there or are incapable of living in a home with others.
There are those that are insane who mainly have no place to go because a number of decades ago the socialist government, and secular humanist, moral-relativist idiots deemed that the public-funded asylums should not be responsible for those who fell through the sanity cracks, and rather that relatives or charities should take up more of the slack. As a result, we began seeing more and more bag people with their portable shopping-cart homes. More cops and facilities were in any case necessary to contain the problems.
In the same period of time, there were more and more relaxations on restrictions to hard drugs and gateway drugs like marijuana, to the point in the 1990’s when I would go to work in Chinatown, once a clean place at least on the streets, the heroin addicts had spread out from their haunts a few blocks over in the old downtown core and would be shooting up in the open, and leaving their used syringes all about. Crimes and muggings of course dramatically increased in the areas as well as people sleeping in alcoves where they could.
It was not long after when it became apparent that most of the homeless were mainly not those who with severe mental disorders, but simply drug addicts. The spread of open use, spread with the increasing number of addicts, exercising their alleged rights to do what they wanted with their own bodies. My friend who helps run a few of the refuge houses for the homeless told me very clearly that there was little you could do for the drug addicts, because when you took them in, they were generally unruly and would thrash the place.
The social workers who work to get places for people who are clean, and mentally are able to live in houses with others have their hands full, and at least our governments are assisting in that manner. However, first responders, paramedics, and cops in all of our downtown cores also all have their hands full mainly with the drug addicted and those with such severe mental problems. The problem spread from the old downtown core around Hastings and Main to the more uptown area of the city core around Granville and Davie Street.
The many addicts who get into the government “housing projects” (i.e., office buildings turned into living unites) generally turn them into horror shows you do not want to enter, and the surrounding landscapes to the buildings are also thrashed. In a society which does everything possible to see that the addicted get their daily fix, it is now politically incorrect to refer to an addict as someone with a drug “abuse” addiction, but rather as a person with a drug “misuse” problem.
The problem just continues to grow. City administrations in interior cities and neighboring provinces still continue to load their homeless on busses and send them off to the streets in the Vancouver area so they won’t clutter their own streets. They use the excuse that their cities are too cold in the winter. However, as in Vancouver they are decision makers of the same airy-fairy cloth and are very soft illegal drug use, many of whom use pot as a recreational drug.
There was never any real war on drugs back in the 1980’s or 90’s. There was just too much money in it and what the cops generally did all down the West Coast was to beat back the completion for the traditional sources and families running the trade which they protect.
As much as I am anti communist, at least the authorities in Hong Kong and mainland China are more adept at controlling and containing the problem. Marijuana is still considered as a gateway drug and there are harsh penalties even in Hong Kong for its use. In the mainland for trafficking in any illegal drug you get a lot of time and with a repeat offices you get the bullet.
I lived in the Portland metro area for twenty years. When I first moved there I registered as a Democrat. As the party gradually and opportunistically climbed onto the identity politics bandwagon, I changed my voting registration first to independent, and later to Republican.
Portland was lovely and a fun place to visit for most of my time living there. The city’s decline is absolutely a result of the fact that Democrats have had a super majority in both of houses of the legislature for years and have used it to push through a great deal of socially destructive legislation. The Democrat DA in Portland releases many obvious criminals as soon as they are arrested, creating a revolving door for crime, and thoroughly demoralizing the police.
More recently the Democrats have used their legislative control over covid relief funds to bribe Republican legislators by promising to allocate funds to Republican counties that vote their way– tough luck for counties that vote against them, regardless of need.
It is conceivable that Democrats took control of Oregon because of President Reagan’s policies. True or not, this observation does nothing to explain the kinds of socially disruptive legislation the Democrats have introduced in Oregon over the last few years. Today, Oregon Democrats cynically manipulate Oregonians’ empathy for the disadvantaged and underdogs to maintain the party’s political power.
Thankfully Oregonians are finally waking up to the ongoing emotional manipulation and may elect new Republican leadership. It cannot possibly be worse than the current leadership.
The white liberals & Commie scum of Portland deserve what they get…
A vote for a Democrap in the mid-term election is a vote for the Satanic Jew Death Cult that seized control of America with massive voter fraud on 3 Nov 2020.
@BishopMuzawayra
No one here in Kalifornia votes for these Klown Killers like Nancy. It’s all RIGGED.
As Stalin said: “It’s not who VOTES it’s who COUNTS that matters.”
@fossil fool
Pull your head out. Presidents had nothing to do with Portland. It is a city just like Chicago, Baltimore, and San Fran…ran by democrats and progressives for decades. They got what they wished, and deserve…fuck’em all
There are some parts of the West where methamphetamine and cocaine are now being made available to the public for free. Brave New World predicted that people would be given meth every day. Your overlords are rarely ever your friends
@ FONG BO LO
as i am informed the CIA had his hands in
heroin business since Nam war + Afganistan
to finance their secret arms + terrorist business
worldwide . i am asking myself how those
human wrecks are able to finance their addiction .
If I walked up my street drunk and a general nuisance , then I would be expected to be arrested and taken away by the police. I am not into control of others , however citizens have a right to be safe and protected in their own neighborhoods. They need to make substance abuse in open public places illegal and detain anyone in the open doing it that is clearly infringing on others. Governments need a social system that has trained people to deal with these people and if they don’t want to be helped then they still need to be removed and held in custody away from the general populace. Tough love here is the stance needed, if they keep infringing, keep detaining them.
Nico X , For once I fully agree with you !
So there’s still hope for you …
Nico X
that is the first time I think I agree with what you said. Something more or less rational. Keep it up, You’r big brother
A lot of excellent commentary above. Fong Bo Lo and a few others went above and beyond.
I have had some good times in Portland years ago, Vancouver also. I hung out in Portland in the late 90s when one of my shags was a busty redhead local, and an intelligent biochemist, with a rather libertine spirit. She introduced me to some cool people and we had a grand old time. You couldn’t pay me to go to the shithole it has turned into now.
Well, I suppose you could pay me to go, but I would have to be paid handsomely AND given free license to mow down the depraved degenerates who infest that city now. Portland is a perfect example of what happens when you have, as Fong Bo Lo perfectly described above, “secular humanist, moral-relativist idiots running everything”.
Vancouver, man what a naturally beautiful place British Columbia is, and I loved Vancouver on my first couple visits there. I went back around 2017 and the degradation was obvious. I’m sure it is a lot worse now. It’s a real shame because that city and area has so much going for it…until the ring of fire volcanoes and earthquakes will inevitably destroy the whole area. Of course, that area getting soaked from the Fukushima stew can’t be helping either. It is now another place you’d have to pay me to go.
Oh, and every woke libtard, Burn Loot Murder backer, social justice imbecile, pro vaxxxer, and virtue signaler in Portland should be made to look like the lumped up guy in the lower left photo at the top, but with more of their teeth being eventually ejected out their poop-chutes.
I will tell you my theory as to why Oregon is getting a Republican governor – the secession movement is gaining strength and 80% of the state wants to merge with Idaho or the State of Jefferson.
https://www.greateridaho.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_%28proposed_Pacific_state%29
It’s being voted on now, and it is a big threat to Oregon, so they need to stop it by switching to conservatives. The way it is being down is a 3 way race:
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/governor/2022/oregon/
Oregon also has it’s own Randy Weaver incident with the Bundys. Oregon is very conservative except for Salem and Portland, Eugene, Corvallis, and Ashland, which are all tranny towns.
Oregon is run by Jews just like Californica, there are more Jews in Amerika than Israel, that ought to tell you Amerika is so f-cked
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/largest-jewish-populated-metropolitan-areas-united-states
The Daily Mail is the populist mouthpiece of the British Establishment. This a a classic deflection article – making readers feel better because it’s ‘worse elsewhere’. In reality, all British cities are just the same.
Each of the two parties, the Republicans and Democrats, has an assigned agenda. If the Republicans get control, you’ll see another type of evil implemented.
Both parties agree on the de-industrialization of America, however, and both actively worked hand-in-hand, and still do, to hand over our industrial base and technology to China.
Don’t run from one party to the other…neither is your friend. They are pawns of the Illuminati, which is ultimately responsible for this and a multitude of other evils.
This is not to say, however, that these two parties, and their leadership in particular, should not be held accountable. They are traitors and whores. It’s up to us, however, to hold them accountable, and that will be one hell of a dust-up I can assure you, and most Americans are not nearly ready for that yet.
You get what you pay for, and the Tribe always gets paid
@ Fong Bo Lo
‘There are those that are insane who mainly have no place to go because a number of decades ago the socialist government, and secular humanist, moral-relativist idiots deemed that the public-funded asylums should not be responsible for those who fell through the sanity cracks, and rather that relatives or charities should take up more of the slack. As a result, we began seeing more and more bag people with their portable shopping-cart homes.’
Same issues all over Ontario.
It cannot be fixed at the voting booth… too late…the nation is toast….