They patched the law to make it plausible to infer car theft from possession again now (For a while if they caught a tweaker in a stolen car with car theft tools he’d be like “uhh, Bryan gave it to me” and then prosecutors would have to prove there was not in fact another homeless junkie car thief in Portland named Bryan who stole it first. That’s why possession is nine tenths of the law.)

So that’s back down, catalytic converter thefts are up which makes sense cause that’s a second-best way to make money from crime against a parked car, also license plates too. They say it’s to replace the trucks they steal to do even heavier crime in, but plates stolen off a car in the driveway seem to get reported almost as fast as the car itself so not really sure what that helps

Honestly, Portland disbanded its mounted police team a few years ago because they were really ceremonial/reward duty (and the PPB has never been made whole from late-2000s cuts let alone kept up with growth, though there’s a drive to correct that now). I remember as a kid Philly, which still had institutional memory of ‘60s riots, used them pretty well for (potentially hostile) crowd control, maybe they’ll get brought back for that.

Used to see a bunch of anarchist graffiti and wheatpasting around the neighborhood, then circa the unrest downtown last year it disappeared cause they were presumably busy with that but it never returned.

Understated Portland story of the pandemic is how Pacific (Asian, but Hawaiian too) communities and cuisines took advantage of the shift from neighborhood commercial street storefronts to delivery apps to claim a significantly bigger share of casual dining mindshare

It is so dumb that switching my supermarket makes me so much more positive about Portland(ers)

Hearing people suddenly talk about homelessness and drugs, like “oh, it’s supermeth!” / “no, idiot, it’s not supermeth, it’s housing prices”

Okay so when I arrived around 2010 there was agreement that the downtown homeless thing was def. addiction, they had opened a non-sober housing project for long-termers in conjunction with the redevelopment of the Pearl District warehouses

The thing is… the Pearl District had been a working waterfront, docks and a railyard, it had always been a place the lowliest cutouts & castaways (The Decemberists came from Portland!) could find cheap lodging and support themselves and the monkeys on their strong backs, just after containerization the ones who had it together enough to leave did and were replaced with de- or postinstitutionalized mental cases, and all the nonprofit service providers focused there, and it was a self-sustaining and conceivably interruptable cycle

Now they’re like “oh the new homeless are just previous regional residents that were priced out of their homes everywhere in a hot market” and like okay, but when pressure cranks up they get knocked out basically the most marginal and weakest networked first, which is disproportionately addicts. Like, that “Faces of Meth” campaign came from Portland, when I first showed up by Alberta the pitiable addicts were mostly crack but I know what a Portland methhead looks like, and even as you get into the methier outskirts of town they’re a visibly higher share of the car encampments

Like, are they homeless cause of meth? Well, the equivalent figure not on meth might have held onto a home, yeah. Are they homeless cause of the housing market? Well, even in 2015 a disability check fixed income would keep a roof over a methhead’s head at like, 128th Street, yeah.

People for Portland’s First Lobbying Report to City Hall Shows Half a Million Dollars Spent in Three Months

So far it’s only been slightly less of a half-remembered cardboard cutout caricature of politicking than Mayor Wheeler himself, but the establishmentarian machine is up and running, legitimating a big plug of police hiring (the PPD never backfilled late-2000s cuts, and population only went up since)

They could stand to turn it over to Jefferson Smith, he could probably lend it more grace, but if the power brokers had that wisdom they coulda had him as mayor in 2012. I suppose “local politics unites in total opposition to side you dislike, scrambles into action while yawningly needy for new blood” could be worse

The frequency with which I have to get cavities drilled or deal with tooth fractures really IS significantly higher than when I lived places that fluoridated their water, I do wish that referendum when I first showed up had gone the other way

So Beverly Cleary’s “Ramona” books were set in Portland, among an eastside family that once had to go for free student haircuts and screwed up the turns off Burnside, or had their dad on a runaway wheat barge on the Columbia once

Some houses on my street with 60-something Asian families backed up to appropriately-aged Asian restaurants on the next block, so wonder if they’re the same people holding the packages to develop with density. Asian immigrant real estate developers around Portland seem to specialize in taking C-grade locations in upcoming areas and maxing them out, which I guess makes sense as a niche if your sense of urbanism comes from the internationally-facing cities of Asia

Hm, school board stuff has finally come to Portland. Like the street stuff years before it’s often peripheral/hinterland rightists coming in to stir, but this government process needs to get done, the Powers That Be can’t just let opposing sides scuffle out of the way and now realize that “leave the leftists hegemonic” (what would that even mean at school board meetings?) is also a problem

Understated success in Portland branding as the “Jade District” the Asian immigrant area around 82nd and Division that are really all sorts of communities that have lots of historic tension over national definition between them but would all agree that if they were throwing some sort of traditional culture fair it would involve the mineral jade

This place came up replacing a marginal diner in a marginal location, parts of the outfitting and siting (optimized flow for the delivery trade) suggest calculated commerce, but that trash panda logo makes me curious how, uh, food, folx, and fun it’s gonna be

wumblr:

wumblr:

wumblr:

today in local news… um… what

Neighborinos say ‘hi-diddly-ho’ to new Ned Flanders Crossing in NW Portland

ned world. mercy

Portland removes ‘Merge Simpson’ sign from NW Portland freeway ramp

i wish we could have ANY consistent policies in this city

The most characteristic cuisines of Portland, in that I find them most overrepresented in restaurants here vs. anywhere else, are German and Hawaiian.

kontextmaschine:

slatestarscratchpad:

kontextmaschine:

So after the dust settles from Election Day, it seems that the lasting impact of the protests was to shift Portland politics and government in the most conservative way possible

Can you explain? When I Google I just get articles on Portland’s election-related riots, plus lists of “nonpartisan” candidates.

Hm. OK. So to set the scene, Portland is governed by a five-person council who are each assigned portfolios of city departments to oversee. They’re elected citywide on staggered 4-year terms, one is the mayor, which mostly just means they assign the portfolios.

The last few mayors and honestly consensus-focused councils have been fairly tied to a downtown establishment, including the PBA (our chamber of commerce), property owners, old money timber heirs in the west hills, etc.

Incumbent mayor Ted Wheeler, a fairly technocratic centrist who assigned himself police oversight, was himself a timber heir turned establishment fixture.

Portland has a liberal reputation, city elections are formally nonpartisan but broadly Democratic, but lately that had mostly cashed out as sunny good government, a Scandanavish concern for welfare (retrospectively enabled by cheap real estate prices), and a co-option of inner eastside nonprofits

The left had been getting more restive as the cost of living rose, though. 4 years ago elected an outsider Chloe Eudaly to council on a renters’ platform, 2 years ago harder agitation from the outer eastside and minority activists helped lift a black ex-state legislator named Jo Ann Hardesty onto the council

Wheeler, realizing he’s kind of on the outside of this, grabs onto Orange Man Bad #Resistance rhetoric, a little clumsily, to paper over the gaps, meanwhile the street leftists seek to run rightists out of downtown, which just reinforces their drive to show up there, and Wheeler has to balance his ra-ra rhetoric with his duty to keep the city safely open to all political expression

Meanwhile this whole time there’s this smug goody-good on Portland political Twitter named Sarah Iannarone. She was a public policy grad student at PSU - which is kind of like a 4-year community college training the cadre for public service, and it shows, taking snotty potshots at people not adopting her preferred Goodthing!Policy and not at all engaging with how you would possibly assemble the support for it

She had run for mayor in 2016 I think, and again this year, and only got like 26% in the primary as the only rival really trying but that was #2 and Wheeler didn’t break 50% so she advanced to the runoff.

Mingus Mapps, an establishmentarian black guy, also goes to general against Eudaly.

Then, everything went to shit.

At first Wheeler was out of town and Hardesty locked the city down. Then, with the election hanging over him and not wanting to look like the bad guy, he kept acceding to demands to soften police response to the minimum necessary to defend the courthouse, which meant without a crackdown things were kept in stalemate just short of critical

Then the feds came in, and Wheeler had to deal with the fact for all his “#Resist Trump” rhetoric, he can’t really kick federal forces out of an American city in the name of an anti-government mob, but he can at least make some noises and get tear gassed as a photo op

So at this point Hardesty, who has endorsed Wheeler, asks him for control of the police, with the intent of remaking it. He waves her off, maybe later. At some point she retracts her endorsement, mighta been then.

So left-liberals angry that the mob of ruffians are being suppressed at all while the police force (which has never been fully made whole from late-2000s cuts) still existed at all channeled that into supporting Sarah. Also, there’s a black activist named Theresa Raiford many street types are fond of; with a history of marginal campaigns, including missing the mayoral runoff, they pump her up as a write-in

Now, the feds leave, replaced by state troopers who soon pull out in disgust the new “reform DA” isn’t even trying to prosecute their arrests, but by then the downtown courthouse has been pretty pacified speeches, but rougher types march nightly to menace police buildings on the eastside

This is where Wheeler seems to do some thinking, realizes this isn’t just some blowing-off-steam he can draft off like the Women’s March, that he can’t satisfy the left at any acceptable cost, but his straddling has both encouraged them and prevented him from cultivating the moderate base he needs to act against them.

And this part is more speculative, but you start to see signs that this centrist coalition is being built behind the scenes. Downtown businesses talk about costs incurred, or tourist authorities put out statements about reputational damage, and they get written up in the conservative-as-in-old newspaper or the Gen X centrist alt-weekly. We are made to feel the loss - as sports fans and business owners- that the protests might have cost us the NCAA Final Four. You can see the consensus being built, congruent with Portland identity, that Something Must Be Done

On council, Hardesty has moved away from Wheeler and formed a bloc with Eudaly, its clear that if Iannarone joins them it’d be a sharp leftward majority.

A September? poll shows Iannarone winning and you can see the downtown establishment realize it needs to pull Wheeler over the line and whir into action.

Just before the election Hardesty and even Bernie endorse Sarah, but Oregon’s been vote by mail for decades and most ballots are already in. Coming down to the wire, Eudaly and Hardesty push a measure to move police funding over, Wheeler and neighborhood character-type Amanda Fritz vote to hold it off, the deciding vote is Dan Ryan, who won a special election with Hardesty’s endorsement… but he goes with the establishment!

Election Day

Mapps turfs Eudaly, and returns suggest the ticket-balancing “our black guy” approach kinda worked, Wheeler beats Iannarone, but within the margin of a sizeable write-in vote. Which means:

• Ted Wheeler is still mayor, only this term he realizes he needs to position against the left and cultivate a base to do so
• After loudly staking out a left position, Hardesty is totally isolated, her allies defeated or never there, she’ll serve 2 years with 2 colleagues she endorsed against and then almost certainly face a massive removal effort, because
• The establishment has received a wake-up call that it can’t sit on its laurels anymore, it needs to put in actual effort shoring up its position
• The left is brought low by its PMC/underclass split, the people most invested in the result will receive it as a lesson against unrealistic activist ultraleftism

It’s unreal. There was an initiative reworking police oversight, though, that passed but the cop union’s gonna put it through the wringer in court. The defunding vote was rescheduled for today, the result was “no”.

Yeah, since then Hardesty’s been on the losing side of several 4-1 votes, Mapps is pushing a move to hire back up to the 2000s police staffing trendline and is being mooted for next mayor on NextDoor, you can see with some stuff like homeless camp sweeps they’re not even pretending the rabble left have something useful to contribute, and the voter-facing portion (party?) of the establishment drive, “People For Portland” just debuted. Also, former and honestly better mayor Sam Adams has been brought in as ideas guy to replay his role bridging the establishment and the hip future, with the side benefit that this, not joking, lures the radicals into age gap discourse.

Hm, been having a “get tired and go to bed before midnight, iffy sleep for 7 hours, wake up enough you can’t fall back, get tired” cycle

That emotional rush totally worn off, back to “still a little frayed but better all the time!” Realizing some of that “weakness” might be I’ve developed my ankles to the point of arched walking being natural, but I still feel their unseasonedness in the final push-off of my stride

Still find it hard to worry, but I now have an amorphous sense of possibly-earned threat out there I can’t link to anything specific, so yay. Might be related to the looming imperative to resolve the new personality with human society, both in a “what is my role in Culture and constructs of power” existential and a “what do I do with people in the evening” practical sense.

In the last few months been to places I recognized from years ago and was appalled by how much they had been turned to appeal to new yuppies (who, disorientingly, are often younger and less elite-marked than me), on the other hand seen some bars open in easy walking distance that are practically beer halls or gardens, so if the money’s remaking the city and they designate my area the new at-scale hip district could be worse

kontextmaschine:

There is an authentic Italian street cuisine food cart in one of the closer pods, which is to say it’s mostly combinations of meats, cheeses, and herbs folded up into a grain shell as served by a small man overexcited about soccer who is always playing the trashiest dance music

Which goes with the inexplicably Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho-themed cart staffed by a rotation of twinks dressed to suck dick in the bathroom of a goth club

Had a few worst-yet-in-Portland bad service industry encounters lately, some were them exercising comprehensible prerogative in ways I’m not used to in Portland, Where Everyone’s Aggressively Reasonable but some of them were just gratuitously hostile reflecting a bafflingly confrontational understanding of the employee-customer relationship

I mean I guess that’s what a labor shortage and thus seller’s market looks like for one, also I’m realizing the background context, that the timber industry and thus rural Oregon emptied out in the 80s and a lot of the more “town” types relocated to Portland

And over the time in between the real git-‘r-done types left for pipeline work in Alaska, or drilling in the Marcellus, or the military, which they knew was just more of the same fixing/driving/operating dangerous heavy machinery outdoors

And so you were left with basically people who were fine in the slimmed-down city, people that were too fucked up to escape but were basically propped up in a context of low rent, people who actively wanted to live in Portland, and all their kids

So your 45yo lifetime bartender in 2011 was someone who had grown up immersed in a rural working-man’s culture that fell apart in high school but it was all good, she owned a tiny house in North and you showing up just put more money in her pocket. A lot of newer businesses I realized were local-boy-made-good chasing a come-up in the 2000s but the Portlandia era rescuing them after a crash.

Like, when I got here I lived with two high school dropout kitchen monkeys from fucked up childhood situations, and everyone in that world had it together enough to not fall below the level of kitchen worker, which apparently it’s possible to do, but not enough to climb on to something else but that meant you were okay, your life and scene were okay

And now I definitely feel that divide across the counter, between service workers and anyone so not- as to frivolously interact with businesses to spend my disposable cash on things I like, and like, okay in a sense we are kinda rivals then. I don’t think any of those kitchen guys still live inside city limits, sure not in that black-turned-artsy-hipster neighborhood

It is shocking how fast and completely the season changed upon the first rain to end summer