Speaking of that, someone needs to organize a jackhammer party on S.E. Division to destroy the curb push-outs that are eating up parking spaces that residents, visitors and businesses need desperately.
At a tune of $55 million 😖. Delaying the 82 avenue project would provide much needed relief for the City’s budget crisis, with no negative impact whatsoever, except for a delay in reducing vehicular traffic on yet another extremely busy commercial street.
How about easier cuts…like eliminating Black Male Achievement Analysts, the entire Office of Civic Life and the squadrons of highly paid DEI specialists?
Once again, PDX Real comes through with the story no other outlet will touch.
The homeless crisis in Portland isn't letting up. If anything, it is getting worse. Here's how I know. We left our condo home in close-in NE Portland five years ago this week for my sister's place on the coast to reduce our pandemic risk. It worked. Once the COVID vaccine became widely available, we began returning to Portland about once a month. Coming back after being away for a while makes the changes that take place while you're absent more apparent.
What I saw in downtown Portland and inner Northeast and Southeast during our December 2024 visit made me think for the first time that the situation was hopeless.
Third Avenue between the Steel Bridge and Burnside looked like a zombie apocalypse. The amount of filth and the number of badly broken people in the street and congregating on the sidewalks were appalling. In other parts of town, I had to stop several times to avoid hitting walking blankets staggering under the influence of fentanyl. The tents and other makeshift shelters in the southeast industrial district gave the area the look and feel of a Brazilian favela. Downtown, the streets were practically deserted at mid-afternoon on a weekday. Security guards were present in force at a half-vacant Pioneer Place. For good measure, signs informed shoppers that dogs were on duty to detect firearms and keep visitors safe. The authorities' failure to shut down the open-air drug market close to the downtown Portland Clinic cost me my long relationship with a specialist who used to practice there and cost that specialist my business. There is no way I am going to spend an hour or more in the car to visit him at his new clinic in remote suburbia. Our condo building has been broken into enough times and some of the residents are so on edge that a neighbor who did not know me challenged me aggressively at the entrance from the outdoor parking lot. That was a heck of a note after the afternoon I'd had.
I feel a sense of despair every time I read a story in the newspaper with two names about yet another quagmire mayor Keith Wilson has stepped into voluntarily. The time Mayor Wilson wastes schmoozing with the front man for an anonymous contender for a Portland MLB franchise is time that Wilson isn't spending taking Jessica Vega Pederson and the JOHS to the woodshed for their obstructionism. I fear that Wilson's promise to get the homeless off the streets by 12/31/25 is going to end up like Tina Kotek's silly pledge to produce 36,000 new housing units per year. It ain't going to happen.
There is now a well established homeless underclass with its own norms and ways of coping in Portland that only Kevin Dahlgren seems willing to describe. The question isn't whether the city and county have sufficient funding to relieve Portland's hard-working voter-taxpayers of the terrible burden of having the feral homeless, the deeply addicted and the profoundly mentally ill living in our midst. The question is whether any of our elected officials have the slightest notion how to go about connecting with each and every damaged person who has found their way to the streets of Portland, assessing their willingness and ability to live like normal human beings and then applying the correct combination of resources to make that happen.
JVP and Dan Field are just whistling past the graveyard hoping that a majority of voters don't figure out that the homeless, addicts and mentally ill are here to stay.
Wilson has always struck me as kinda a Wheeler clone without Ted's toxic masculinity; Kinda a no macho mucho guy with even less sense and more delusional. Between Wilson and the 9 or 10 mental muchkins on the councel ( I'll give Ryan and Novick some grace ) along with JVP etc shooting holes in the bottom of the ship of state that is Portland I don't see much hope for a recovery.
I await the realization from Portland's wise folk that the truly "most vulnerable" citizens are the few remaining taxpayers of Portland, and they are mobile.
I thought Wheeler finally got it in his 7th year in office, but of course, it was too late by then. At the end, he realized who really ran the city: the NGO's and the unions, and there was no possible way for him to wrestle the stranglehold they had on power.
Well Wheeler gave them the power. Look at who he appointed to the Charter Commission, who he chose to run it (Julia Meier) and which nonpofit the city paid hundreds of thousands to promote it (Communities of Color) who then tried to hold BIPOC only informational "public" meetings.
I've always thought of Wheeler as an entitled pussy who was put out that all he got for his illustrious lineage and fancy degrees from exclusive universities was a public-facing job as a public servant where he had to deal with all sorts of common people his family had never heard of. His mama and papa were probably hoping their dear Tevis would end up heading the World Bank. Instead Ted found himself fleeing arsonists and fending off insults at restaurants.
DiLorenzo needs to get the city back in court. They clearly are NOT keeping our sidewalks clear of tents. I’d love for him to sue the County as well as they are contributing to the ADA violations by enabling unsanctioned camping.
NW 7TH Ave, between the Park Blocks and the Old Town Clinic and the Old Town Recovery Center has had a homeless encampment completely blocking the entire sidewalk and part way into the street for about 3 weeks before it was removed 3 days ago. The fact that the tents, tarps, and mounds of “belongings”, existed for so long in spite of it being a complete barrier to everyone who intended to walk down the sidewalk, and in spite of uniformed officers I saw visiting with the residents of the camp, is clear evidence of a lack of coordinated efforts by our government and its agents that is the first step in solving these problems.
I have a hard time believing that any City Council member, or even any City Employee can willfully disregard the fact that we have already been sued, and lost, an ACLU lawsuit to enforce Federal ADA Rules intended to protect the mobility of our less than fully able citizens. How do these people think a blind person, or one confined to a wheelchair can navigate these homeless jungles? More importantly, how do they live with themselves after they have been shown how impactful a complete blockade of our public sidewalks are to our severely disabled friends and neighbors?
I think we as the LNLA should request money for cleaning up homeless camps. At $150 an hour we could make a killing. I just cleaned up one today. I spent about 1-1/2 cleaning it up. Do you think I would get anywhere if I sent them an invoice? 🤣
Thanks for your continued attention to our horrible problems... Deep breaths... Saw a new thing in the last couple days-- homeless folks with a long stick, and a sack tied to the stick, just like the 1930s cartoons. Meanwhile, there's some movement toward a solution (adding the jail option) elsewhere -- San José mayor proposes jailing homeless people who repeatedly refuse shelter... https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-03-06/san-jose-mayor-proposes-jailing-homeless-people-who-repeatedly-refuse-shelter ....including this: "Roughly a third of the people who have been offered interim housing are refusing those offers, according to the mayor’s office."
Yes - that's called a bindle. I saw one last week. Maybe we can start calling them hobos instead of "houseless," though that would be an insult to the memory of hobos.
San José probably does not have an insubordinate county sheriff like Multnomah County's who has defied the will of the people's elected representatives and decided that she'll make the rules and be the judge and jury as to whether a homeless person gets jail time.
Poor mayor Wilson--he's finally realized that he missed his one (and only) chance to have any practical power when he allowed the city council to deadlock on its president and didn't have the stones to step in--as the city charter makes clear--and break the tie. It's been all downhill since then, which is just as Julan Meier, City Club and the Coalition of Communities of Color designed it. Had he actually read the new charter he never would have run for mayor.
He has no real power, and the city's "administrator," the wily (and well-paid) Michael Jordan is already dealing directly with the 25-percenters on the council.
Fearless prediction: Wilson will run for re-election and win because no serious pol thinks the job is worth the effort.
Portland is now embarked in a truly weird eexperiment: people elected with a minority of the vote, by an obscure computer algorithm, are running the show. All they need to do to keep their $133K jobs is appeal to the nutty minorities that put them into office. Which means that anyone else is outta luck. Including super-lawyer DiLorenzo.
Bye-bye Portland. (PS: Austin, TX, just displaced us as the nation's 25th biggest city.)
Well, Wilson does have one power, the power of hiring and firing the city administrator. From what I have seen of him so far, he will be too timid to use it.
Javier, I have met with Keith Wilson several times, beginning 3 years ago about the homeless camp he had established in 1/10th the amount of time and with about 1/29th the cost of even our best government constructed facility. My personal opinion is that he doesn’t lack energy, intelligence, or integrity, to do the Job, but his lack of political experience sometimes makes it seem so. I am convinced that he is assessing the situation he finds himself in very carefully and applying his MBA program skills in considering all of the factors that will affect the outcome of his decisions before he makes them. I have complete confidence that when replacing the City Administrator is the best thing to do, he will have no trouble in doing so. I can say with certainty that Keith is doing this for the same reasons as you and I and the rest of the Substack community are, because he cares about Portland and has decided he had to do what he could to try and save it.
I think that Wilson does have the best intentions for succeeding as mayor. I just don't see it in him. It takes a special kind of person to get through all of the red tape and the other leadership. You need a tough, type-A leader. He seems too timid to me to be effective.
That’s good to hear Tim. The thing is Keith seems to be having a very difficult time bringing his “cheap and easy” shelter ideas to fruition. Makes sense as the people he housed actually wanted to be housed. Not the case for most of those currently living on the streets of Portland. They’re used to being enabled by the nonprofits and Multnomah County. Unless that changes Wilson doesn’t have a chance to keep his promise to Portland. (8.5 month left).
The way to be Portland’s mayor for change would be to show up everyday at city hall, unfold the chaise lounge, get comfy, hang out all day, invite the press and citizens to bring their loungers to recline along. Then, one day, the voters who remain could potentially determine that the new, current form of our City government needs to be wholly restructured, whereupon the lounger could be literally and symbolically jettisoned, having served its primary, functional purpose.
Always the same. Ask politely, over and over and over. They do nothing.
DiLorenzo filed a suit and still he just sits back and asks nicely. No urgency. No one ever gets told “no” except people who go to work, pay taxes and utilities, and aren’t criminals. We’re the enemies.
It would great to see the city become proactive instead of reactive. As PPD patrols, they undoubtedly observe many sidewalk ADA violations, but seem to only react to complaints. The city also needs to take a hard line with UP to enforce them keeping their right of way clear.
Great reporting job!! You have clearly pointed out what, and who, are the problems that are destroying our neighborhoods and our City. Other Substack posts have pointed out that we are essentially a dying City and have no chance of recovery as long as our voters continue their now decades long tradition of accepting unacceptable behavior, both on our streets, and even worse, in our elected leadership positions.
So, Portand Street Response has gotten a second chance after their wilderness years. Let's hope all the badass PSR cadres who moonlighted as black bloc vandals left after Jo Ann Hardesty wasn't around any longer to stoke their hatred of police and normies.
I have a question. Why don’t the plaintiffs in the ADA lawsuit bring an additional suit against Multnomah County? The County is clearly responsible for a lot of the encampments blocking city sidewalks. Why should it be able to evade legal responsibility?
DiLorenzo, who filed the original lawsuit on behalf of the plaintiffs, has been trying to figure out a way to sue the county. I'm not sure why it more difficult to go after the county.
Move those tents into the bike lanes and they will all be gone tomorrow.
Speaking of that, someone needs to organize a jackhammer party on S.E. Division to destroy the curb push-outs that are eating up parking spaces that residents, visitors and businesses need desperately.
Coming soon to 82d!
Time for dissidents to super glue themselves to the pavement.
At a tune of $55 million 😖. Delaying the 82 avenue project would provide much needed relief for the City’s budget crisis, with no negative impact whatsoever, except for a delay in reducing vehicular traffic on yet another extremely busy commercial street.
How about easier cuts…like eliminating Black Male Achievement Analysts, the entire Office of Civic Life and the squadrons of highly paid DEI specialists?
If that happened JVP and her enablers at JOHS will be right there passing out more tents.
Once again, PDX Real comes through with the story no other outlet will touch.
The homeless crisis in Portland isn't letting up. If anything, it is getting worse. Here's how I know. We left our condo home in close-in NE Portland five years ago this week for my sister's place on the coast to reduce our pandemic risk. It worked. Once the COVID vaccine became widely available, we began returning to Portland about once a month. Coming back after being away for a while makes the changes that take place while you're absent more apparent.
What I saw in downtown Portland and inner Northeast and Southeast during our December 2024 visit made me think for the first time that the situation was hopeless.
Third Avenue between the Steel Bridge and Burnside looked like a zombie apocalypse. The amount of filth and the number of badly broken people in the street and congregating on the sidewalks were appalling. In other parts of town, I had to stop several times to avoid hitting walking blankets staggering under the influence of fentanyl. The tents and other makeshift shelters in the southeast industrial district gave the area the look and feel of a Brazilian favela. Downtown, the streets were practically deserted at mid-afternoon on a weekday. Security guards were present in force at a half-vacant Pioneer Place. For good measure, signs informed shoppers that dogs were on duty to detect firearms and keep visitors safe. The authorities' failure to shut down the open-air drug market close to the downtown Portland Clinic cost me my long relationship with a specialist who used to practice there and cost that specialist my business. There is no way I am going to spend an hour or more in the car to visit him at his new clinic in remote suburbia. Our condo building has been broken into enough times and some of the residents are so on edge that a neighbor who did not know me challenged me aggressively at the entrance from the outdoor parking lot. That was a heck of a note after the afternoon I'd had.
I feel a sense of despair every time I read a story in the newspaper with two names about yet another quagmire mayor Keith Wilson has stepped into voluntarily. The time Mayor Wilson wastes schmoozing with the front man for an anonymous contender for a Portland MLB franchise is time that Wilson isn't spending taking Jessica Vega Pederson and the JOHS to the woodshed for their obstructionism. I fear that Wilson's promise to get the homeless off the streets by 12/31/25 is going to end up like Tina Kotek's silly pledge to produce 36,000 new housing units per year. It ain't going to happen.
There is now a well established homeless underclass with its own norms and ways of coping in Portland that only Kevin Dahlgren seems willing to describe. The question isn't whether the city and county have sufficient funding to relieve Portland's hard-working voter-taxpayers of the terrible burden of having the feral homeless, the deeply addicted and the profoundly mentally ill living in our midst. The question is whether any of our elected officials have the slightest notion how to go about connecting with each and every damaged person who has found their way to the streets of Portland, assessing their willingness and ability to live like normal human beings and then applying the correct combination of resources to make that happen.
JVP and Dan Field are just whistling past the graveyard hoping that a majority of voters don't figure out that the homeless, addicts and mentally ill are here to stay.
Great comment! I couldn't have said it better myself. You should be writing articles!
Thanks!
Wilson has always struck me as kinda a Wheeler clone without Ted's toxic masculinity; Kinda a no macho mucho guy with even less sense and more delusional. Between Wilson and the 9 or 10 mental muchkins on the councel ( I'll give Ryan and Novick some grace ) along with JVP etc shooting holes in the bottom of the ship of state that is Portland I don't see much hope for a recovery.
I await the realization from Portland's wise folk that the truly "most vulnerable" citizens are the few remaining taxpayers of Portland, and they are mobile.
I thought Wheeler finally got it in his 7th year in office, but of course, it was too late by then. At the end, he realized who really ran the city: the NGO's and the unions, and there was no possible way for him to wrestle the stranglehold they had on power.
Well Wheeler gave them the power. Look at who he appointed to the Charter Commission, who he chose to run it (Julia Meier) and which nonpofit the city paid hundreds of thousands to promote it (Communities of Color) who then tried to hold BIPOC only informational "public" meetings.
Tevis "Ted" Wheeler possesses toxic masculinity?
I've always thought of Wheeler as an entitled pussy who was put out that all he got for his illustrious lineage and fancy degrees from exclusive universities was a public-facing job as a public servant where he had to deal with all sorts of common people his family had never heard of. His mama and papa were probably hoping their dear Tevis would end up heading the World Bank. Instead Ted found himself fleeing arsonists and fending off insults at restaurants.
Sarcasm my man, almost a lost art
DiLorenzo needs to get the city back in court. They clearly are NOT keeping our sidewalks clear of tents. I’d love for him to sue the County as well as they are contributing to the ADA violations by enabling unsanctioned camping.
Or take the county to court.
NW 7TH Ave, between the Park Blocks and the Old Town Clinic and the Old Town Recovery Center has had a homeless encampment completely blocking the entire sidewalk and part way into the street for about 3 weeks before it was removed 3 days ago. The fact that the tents, tarps, and mounds of “belongings”, existed for so long in spite of it being a complete barrier to everyone who intended to walk down the sidewalk, and in spite of uniformed officers I saw visiting with the residents of the camp, is clear evidence of a lack of coordinated efforts by our government and its agents that is the first step in solving these problems.
I have a hard time believing that any City Council member, or even any City Employee can willfully disregard the fact that we have already been sued, and lost, an ACLU lawsuit to enforce Federal ADA Rules intended to protect the mobility of our less than fully able citizens. How do these people think a blind person, or one confined to a wheelchair can navigate these homeless jungles? More importantly, how do they live with themselves after they have been shown how impactful a complete blockade of our public sidewalks are to our severely disabled friends and neighbors?
I think we as the LNLA should request money for cleaning up homeless camps. At $150 an hour we could make a killing. I just cleaned up one today. I spent about 1-1/2 cleaning it up. Do you think I would get anywhere if I sent them an invoice? 🤣
I've always wanted to do that after I've cleaned up a mess such as this. I wonder what the response, if any, would be?
🤣🤣🤣 I could send one and let you know.
Please send them invoices. At the least it will be public record!!!
Thanks for your continued attention to our horrible problems... Deep breaths... Saw a new thing in the last couple days-- homeless folks with a long stick, and a sack tied to the stick, just like the 1930s cartoons. Meanwhile, there's some movement toward a solution (adding the jail option) elsewhere -- San José mayor proposes jailing homeless people who repeatedly refuse shelter... https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-03-06/san-jose-mayor-proposes-jailing-homeless-people-who-repeatedly-refuse-shelter ....including this: "Roughly a third of the people who have been offered interim housing are refusing those offers, according to the mayor’s office."
Yes - that's called a bindle. I saw one last week. Maybe we can start calling them hobos instead of "houseless," though that would be an insult to the memory of hobos.
San José probably does not have an insubordinate county sheriff like Multnomah County's who has defied the will of the people's elected representatives and decided that she'll make the rules and be the judge and jury as to whether a homeless person gets jail time.
Poor mayor Wilson--he's finally realized that he missed his one (and only) chance to have any practical power when he allowed the city council to deadlock on its president and didn't have the stones to step in--as the city charter makes clear--and break the tie. It's been all downhill since then, which is just as Julan Meier, City Club and the Coalition of Communities of Color designed it. Had he actually read the new charter he never would have run for mayor.
He has no real power, and the city's "administrator," the wily (and well-paid) Michael Jordan is already dealing directly with the 25-percenters on the council.
Fearless prediction: Wilson will run for re-election and win because no serious pol thinks the job is worth the effort.
Portland is now embarked in a truly weird eexperiment: people elected with a minority of the vote, by an obscure computer algorithm, are running the show. All they need to do to keep their $133K jobs is appeal to the nutty minorities that put them into office. Which means that anyone else is outta luck. Including super-lawyer DiLorenzo.
Bye-bye Portland. (PS: Austin, TX, just displaced us as the nation's 25th biggest city.)
Well, Wilson does have one power, the power of hiring and firing the city administrator. From what I have seen of him so far, he will be too timid to use it.
Javier, I have met with Keith Wilson several times, beginning 3 years ago about the homeless camp he had established in 1/10th the amount of time and with about 1/29th the cost of even our best government constructed facility. My personal opinion is that he doesn’t lack energy, intelligence, or integrity, to do the Job, but his lack of political experience sometimes makes it seem so. I am convinced that he is assessing the situation he finds himself in very carefully and applying his MBA program skills in considering all of the factors that will affect the outcome of his decisions before he makes them. I have complete confidence that when replacing the City Administrator is the best thing to do, he will have no trouble in doing so. I can say with certainty that Keith is doing this for the same reasons as you and I and the rest of the Substack community are, because he cares about Portland and has decided he had to do what he could to try and save it.
I think that Wilson does have the best intentions for succeeding as mayor. I just don't see it in him. It takes a special kind of person to get through all of the red tape and the other leadership. You need a tough, type-A leader. He seems too timid to me to be effective.
That’s good to hear Tim. The thing is Keith seems to be having a very difficult time bringing his “cheap and easy” shelter ideas to fruition. Makes sense as the people he housed actually wanted to be housed. Not the case for most of those currently living on the streets of Portland. They’re used to being enabled by the nonprofits and Multnomah County. Unless that changes Wilson doesn’t have a chance to keep his promise to Portland. (8.5 month left).
The way to be Portland’s mayor for change would be to show up everyday at city hall, unfold the chaise lounge, get comfy, hang out all day, invite the press and citizens to bring their loungers to recline along. Then, one day, the voters who remain could potentially determine that the new, current form of our City government needs to be wholly restructured, whereupon the lounger could be literally and symbolically jettisoned, having served its primary, functional purpose.
Wilson is Ted Wheeler 2.0.
"Deeply unserious people." I love that. Great article Jeff!
Always the same. Ask politely, over and over and over. They do nothing.
DiLorenzo filed a suit and still he just sits back and asks nicely. No urgency. No one ever gets told “no” except people who go to work, pay taxes and utilities, and aren’t criminals. We’re the enemies.
It would great to see the city become proactive instead of reactive. As PPD patrols, they undoubtedly observe many sidewalk ADA violations, but seem to only react to complaints. The city also needs to take a hard line with UP to enforce them keeping their right of way clear.
Great reporting job!! You have clearly pointed out what, and who, are the problems that are destroying our neighborhoods and our City. Other Substack posts have pointed out that we are essentially a dying City and have no chance of recovery as long as our voters continue their now decades long tradition of accepting unacceptable behavior, both on our streets, and even worse, in our elected leadership positions.
So, Portand Street Response has gotten a second chance after their wilderness years. Let's hope all the badass PSR cadres who moonlighted as black bloc vandals left after Jo Ann Hardesty wasn't around any longer to stoke their hatred of police and normies.
Great idea!!! Move the tents into the bike lanes 😄
I have a question. Why don’t the plaintiffs in the ADA lawsuit bring an additional suit against Multnomah County? The County is clearly responsible for a lot of the encampments blocking city sidewalks. Why should it be able to evade legal responsibility?
DiLorenzo, who filed the original lawsuit on behalf of the plaintiffs, has been trying to figure out a way to sue the county. I'm not sure why it more difficult to go after the county.
Well I do see DiLorenzo is planning a new ballot initiative. Where do I sign? https://www.wweek.com/news/2025/03/17/portland-lawyer-again-files-ballot-initiative-that-would-make-county-pay-crime-victims/