kontextmaschine:

morlock-holmes:

There’s a PAC in Portland which wants to deal with the Homeless crisis by introducing a ballot measure requiring the city to use 75% of funds dedicated to combatting homelessness for flash building a huge number of shelters, and then giving people the ability to sue the police if they don’t break up homeless encampments.

Which to me seems to be an implicit admission that the shelters you are building are worse to live in then a tent under the freeway overpass.

I mean like, normally a temperature controlled area with a place to put your stuff and not get rained on would be superior to, you know, a doorway, so if you still need police to force people to get out of doorways and underpasses and into your shelter, it feels like that’s a sign to step back and reasses.

Yeah, a few elections ago there was an initiative for some tax on high earners to fund housing but the people pushing it were more pushing a “housing for locals who would be gentrified out”/housing with wrap-around services/get-back-in-the-public-housing-game tip that’s got fairly high cost and lead time per unit created in a way that does not seem poised to really change the “woah there are suddenly a lot of people living in cars or tents on the sidewalk or elsewhere in numbers that can form sizeable Hoovervilles”

Also Portland’s in a federal judicial district whose precedent is it can’t criminalize public camping unless it can promise somewhere to sleep and as it stands it doesn’t have the capacity and until it does can at best sweep rough sleepers out of individual sites (with like a week forewarning)

So the local powers that be, which have really come together since the 2020 election, have decided that as long as there’s gonna be a surtax on the rich they may as well redirect it away from the housing dreamers (in 2020 they also knocked off unreliable councilor Chloe Eudaly, who was kind of owning that not-as-bad-as-SF-but-at-least-not-YIMBY-*blessed* incumbent resident housing angle) to Dealing With The Homeless Crisis as in getting all these encampments gone

Oh also the initiative would require cities in Metro (the metropolitan-area government that consolidates a lot of county functions) to keep camping bans once they get enough shelter slots, on pain of losing all funds, as enforced through a private cause of action for lawsuits

morlock-holmes:

There’s a PAC in Portland which wants to deal with the Homeless crisis by introducing a ballot measure requiring the city to use 75% of funds dedicated to combatting homelessness for flash building a huge number of shelters, and then giving people the ability to sue the police if they don’t break up homeless encampments.

Which to me seems to be an implicit admission that the shelters you are building are worse to live in then a tent under the freeway overpass.

I mean like, normally a temperature controlled area with a place to put your stuff and not get rained on would be superior to, you know, a doorway, so if you still need police to force people to get out of doorways and underpasses and into your shelter, it feels like that’s a sign to step back and reasses.

Yeah, a few elections ago there was an initiative for some tax on high earners to fund housing but the people pushing it were more pushing a “housing for locals who would be gentrified out”/housing with wrap-around services/get-back-in-the-public-housing-game tip that’s got fairly high cost and lead time per unit created in a way that does not seem poised to really change the “woah there are suddenly a lot of people living in cars or tents on the sidewalk or elsewhere in numbers that can form sizeable Hoovervilles”

Also Portland’s in a federal judicial district whose precedent is it can’t criminalize public camping unless it can promise somewhere to sleep and as it stands it doesn’t have the capacity and until it does can at best sweep rough sleepers out of individual sites (with like a week forewarning)

So the local powers that be, which have really come together since the 2020 election, have decided that as long as there’s gonna be a surtax on the rich they may as well redirect it away from the housing dreamers (in 2020 they also knocked off unreliable councilor Chloe Eudaly, who was kind of owning that not-as-bad-as-SF-but-at-least-not-YIMBY-*blessed* incumbent resident housing angle) to Dealing With The Homeless Crisis as in getting all these encampments gone

Took an Uber to the dentist, GPS is still calling it “Cesar East Chavez Boulevard”, but the houses visible along the side streets have cleaned up a lot since I moved

Warm early enough now I open the window in time to hear recess from the school across the street

Weird situation near me where a street is getting hotter so more stuff showing up but it’s mostly in once-residential homes fronting the street while the existing commercial is like, auto painting or repair or the previous headquarters of a local company, all wrong-sized for retail or hospitality and/or else big enough lots they’re holding out to sell for redevelopment, so it just looks really weird where the businesses live in houses while all the business buildings are blank or don’t interface with the neighborhood at all

Checked out the menu of “Vegan Junk Food” and true to the name it’s all side dishes and fake-meat burgers, they took over an old diner so I expected more complete sit-down plates but apparently it was more for the location for app delivery

space-wizards:

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

There are just a few businesses in the neighborhood – largely beer-related! – that were obviously the realization of the longtime dream of one of the more shit-together young local residents of the pre-Portlandia neighborhood from the rap-rock era and it is honestly a little touching but tragic to see sometimes

Like “aww, you must have been a shining jewel in the rough back when this was meth country! This amateur-hour stuff only made sense on a block with vacant commercial space and there is no chance you exist in three years”

Unless they do! That is also possible.

On a related note, that stupid Doctor Who themed bar still exists (despite being a punchline about a decade ago), and once in a blue moon I see someone in there while walking past it. Presumably whoever owns it & the adjacent ice cream place (also desolate) doesn’t care enough to sell the building, despite being a solid location. Across the street did get developed recently, and it’s a block away from transit, but on the other hand there’s an outright empty lot next to the MAX station.

The TARDIS Room? It’s literally a house inside, it has atrocious layout

There are just a few businesses in the neighborhood – largely beer-related! – that were obviously the realization of the longtime dream of one of the more shit-together young local residents of the pre-Portlandia neighborhood from the rap-rock era and it is honestly a little touching but tragic to see sometimes

Got up to feed Badger and there’s snow blanketing the ground

Ah, Jesus, I forgot about Portland’s annual start-of-spring hail day

Stopped by a new bar the other day and everyone was too tryhard hipster to look Portland so it just looked like the ugliest, least stylish Echo Park crowd I ever saw

The Portland establishment’s coming for Jo Ann Hardesty, the black ex-state legislator and the only non-tame city councilor left, the strategy appears to run two candidates in the primary – real establishmentarian Vadim Mozyrsky (who would also be representation for the big Slavic community in the outer eastside since the end of the Cold War) and vote-splitting Latina Rene Gonzales, who seems to be the one tasked with going negative – and trying to crowd her out of the runoff to begin with

As time goes on from that protest shooting becomes clear that by that point it was so insular because it was the straggling legacy of the 2020 downtown scene struggling to continue to exist as a community, that if it was unclear what marching nowhere in outer borough Portland for Tamir Rice was accomplishing is it was events to service the marching community, like how even when a local pinball tournament has some charity fundraising component we’re really putting it together to service the pinball community.

As a last-gasp barrel-scraping for morale for a scene running on E, means “subjecting those marches to a shock of emotional strain” is exactly the thing that would push enough of the participants far enough into morale deficit they’d become defunct and the scene collapses. Even if everyone in the scene still participated in “support the victims” actions as if they themselves were at full morale, to all the victims’ conflicting preferences, they’re no longer articulated with a community base of reserves that could be mobilized over and above regular capacity in extreme situations.

Call it.

Blackbird

SE Foster Rd.

Portland, OR

As home to some major post-Cold War Russian and Ukrainian immigrant communities, I imagine the Portland area should prepare to take in some more

kontextmaschine:

So the guy who shot the shooter has gotten an official nod from the authorities so I don’t see they can hang a bid against armed marching off it, but you see on Twitter them furious that no second amendment patriot is gonna credit him as a good guy with a gun in the right place at the right time.

And that points to the damage this is really gonna do the local still-marchers: the morale hit of realizing that even if it comes to it, to what they’ve been wailing about all along, no one in the broader city or world outside their subculture cares – I see them contrast with that Charlottesville car attack but yeah, that was part of the main plot, about Trump and the alt-right and the white identitarian realignment. And you guys aren’t the main plot anymore.

And the bridge too far was trying to no-platform Something*Awful types out of the furry fandom, that’s perfect. When Trump came down that escalator it was like the ‘80s saw what was happening and sent an avatar to intervene, now it’s the '90s’ turn.

Yeah no the story of this shooting seems to be the exact kind of guy (well, old-school forum edgy/alt-right version) you’d expect to travel from out of state to shoot Portland leftists had Portland leftists marching across the street from the apartment where he kept all his guns every week for months

Right now, the housing crisis and homelessness

Portland street leftists working themselves up into a lather over the notion that both the shooting and the police reaction to it are the latest episode of great unseen drama about THEM when the truth is they haven’t been central to the Portland plot arc since 2000

…yeah, sure, the shooter was an alt-right furry, why not