Nicholas Kristof asked the question:
"What's wrong with West Coast cities?"
Nicholas Kristof was an award-winning New York Times reporter. He grew up in Yamhill, Oregon and some of his recent work described the pathologies in that small agricultural town west of Portland. He described poverty, joblessness, addictions, and despair. It is rural Oregon's version of J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. It is the ongoing story with echoes of Michael Harrington's The Other America, in which Appalachian poverty was brought to national attention in 1962.
Kristof returned to Oregon to grow grapes at the family farm, to run for governor of Oregon, and do journalism and commentary. I subscribe to his Substack blog and am one of his 1.9 million Twitter followers. Here is a link to his article, What's Wrong with West Coast cities?" https://nickkristof.substack.com/
Kristof turned his attention to disfunction in Portland and other Oregon cities. It is a top-of-mind issue for Oregonians and candidates for state offices. Portland is going through a rough patch. Kristof led off his article with the story of the beating to death of this kindly-looking 82-year-old retired university professor at a bus stop in downtown Portland.
Kristof noted that the murder rate in Portland was four times that of New York City, that trash is on the sidewalks, that the worst homelessness in America is in West Coast cities including Portland, and that Oregon's school graduation rate was among the worst in the country. He quoted Portland's congressperson, Earl Blumenauer, saying "Portland is broken."
I have written about Portland in prior blog posts. Portland had been the lovely, gracious "Keep Portland Weird" city with parks, food trucks, and a progressive ethic that inspired laughs in the TV program Portlandia. Now there are tents and encampments in the parks and median strips and boarded up buildings from the vandalism of the 2020 rioting. The mood in the city has changed.
I recognize the intractability of the problem of unhoused people. If there were easy solutions they would have been implemented. Tents on sidewalks, people living under plastic sheets, and accumulated garbage change the feel of what had been a gracious city.
But some of the problem with Portland involves the poorly managed rioting in the summer of 2020. The damage from that remains physically in plywood on windows and in closed businesses. The riots damaged the relations between the citizens and the police. They hurt Portland's self-image as a well-managed place. They damaged the reputation of Democrats in 2020 and that damage remains. Night after night voters saw mostly-White anarchist-hooligans dressed in black, acting under cover of George Floyd-related protests, breaking windows and setting fires. Portland became a poster child of uncontrolled disorder in Democratic cities. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, its School Board was the poster child of misplaced priorities, putting their attention on renaming schools.
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Kristof asked a provocative question. Let me ask readers to comment and add your thoughts. Is there anything wrong with West Coast cities? What needs to change?
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15 comments:
What’s wrong with West Coast cities now is the same thing that was wrong with New York City in the early 1990s. They are populated by and run by liberals. Whatever you might want to say that’s good about liberals, they are extremely bad at maintaining law and order; it goes against their emotional orientation. Just look at Portland’s response to the “mostly peaceful” George Floyd Antifa riots of 2020.
It got so bad in New York City that even the liberals there couldn’t stand it anymore, and in 1994 they elected Rudy Giuliani to come in and straighten things out. I see the same process working in Portland at the moment. Pretty soon, either Portland will follow the path that New York City took, or the middle class will leave and Portland will turn into Detroit.
Liberals are perceived as being extremely bad at maintaining law and order. Conservatives are perceived as being extremely bad at addressing the conditions that breed crime, such as poverty, ignorance and disease. They need to work together and hold criminals to account for their crimes while also correcting the causes.
In the richest, most powerful nation on earth, everyone should have shelter. Everyone should have access to affordable education and/or job training. Everyone should have access to healthcare. That may not eliminate crime, but it would certainly help.
All liberals have an "emotional orientation"? Lol
Apparently the QAnon, MAGA, gun worshipping, anti-female-rights, anti-LGBT, climate change denying Holy Rollers are the intellectual ones. Lol
Since women are more attracted to the Democratic Party, the misogynistic code is noted. After all, everyone knows that women are more emotional than men. That is why women commit most crime and the incarcerated population is 90% female...Lol
We all want the drug addled and mentally ill homeless to go away…. somewhere else. But none of us want them housed in our neighborhoods. None of us want to pay the cost of housing them and providing them services. None of us want to be responsible for rounding them up and putting them in secure facilities or camps where they would be out of sight and out of mind. Our capitalist system is not set up to solve problems that don’t result in profit. And our political system is too fractured.
A couple of common misapprehensions and false distinctions need to be pointed out here. First, between the chronic homeless in places like Portland, and crime, including of the worst sort. Second, between Floyd protesters and Floyd rioters.
It has proven impolitic in area news media sources to note what is a matter of public record in two recent, otherwise well-publicized, topical and arguably emblematic cases: the arrestee in this professor's deadly beating AND the arrestee in the violent hate crime visited upon a Japanese tourist and child are longtime members of Portland's houseless community.
The Floyd riots were hardly sui generis, but a continuation of the Occupy and WTO-protest movements. Activist left-wingers, black and white alike, Antifa and BLM alike, share convictions that America is so oppressive and corrupt that it must be burned down and built anew. Milder-mannered Democrats marched with and also cravenly deferred to these types as if well-intended, and their violent politicized excesses as unfortunate but largely understandable or unavoidable. Kamala Harris herself urged donations to bail funds for the worst offenders in all this, crowing that the mayhem must and will continue.
Suddenly many grown-up Democrats wonder, like bad parents, why the spoiled, tantruming adolescents continue to maim and destroy and degrade and demand, on ever more nebulous or unserious pretexts. They wonder why the people they indulged with tolerance and patience, from ingrate ersatz anarchists, to money-grubbing hustlers and hostile ignoramuses in BLM leadership positions nationwide, even after asinine calls to abolish police and prisons were uttered with a straight face in adult policy debates, NOW they wonder why these folks refuse to moderate their views and their conduct one jot for the common good.
Democrats sowed the wind, further wrecked the cities they have long run, and they will reap the election-year whirlwind.
There needs to be a balance between liberal and conservative. Right now, west coast cities like Portland are way out of balance towards the liberal side.
Attention Low Dudgeon,
I expect to use your comment here as a Guest Post comment in an upcoming blog post. Contact me at peter.w.sage@gmail.com if you want revisions or credit by name.
Peter
I don’t think that as a liberal, I need to be soft on crime. On the contrary, I think liberals should be hard on crime. Put money into mental health, treatment services, make living in homeless camps illegal, arrest them and eventually place them in cheaper care centers. Liberals want to walk around cities and feel safe, at least I sure do.
Portland has changed dramatically in the last 70 years. Some aspects remain but mainly in the minds of our older citizens. Evolving from a few thousand resident urban populations to one approaching one million within the Portland boundaries proper, Portland has yet to cast off its mayor-city council form of home rule to a city manager style handling the nuts and bolts of a major city.
The overlapping governmental agencies, jurisdictional boundaries, and siloed responsibilities produce a crazy-quilt of policies, rules, procedures, and political and business owners' egos complicate the most basic functions of running a city. Something as basic as street cleaning overlaps the park bureau, ODOT, Port of Portland, the water bureau, Portland bureau of transportation, railroads, TriMet, a consortium of downtown businesses, and Metro, to name just a few overlaps for a simple task like street and sidewalk cleaning.
The street cleaning example is not new. The problems were the same under Republican and Democrat mayors.
Attempts at change frequently are resisted by NYMB (not in my backyard) attitudes. The classic problem of the johnny-come-lately demanding in a sense they got theirs now don’t impact what I have! Most frequently encountered as resistance to infrastructure and low-income housing. Pitting one group of citizens against a lawyered-up group blocking needed development sets in motion the very worst of the human condition.
Portland Police are not alone on the streets of what is commonly called Portland. Policing is affected as suburban incorporated areas each has its police department. Portland itself overlaps three counties, each with its own Sheriff’s department and patrol officers, US Government buildings have on-site the US Protective Service, Portland of Portland has its police force, military security at the Portland Air Base, and the US Coast Guard handles security on the Columbia and Willamette Rivers.
Coordination is possible and does occur, but when the situation is less than routine, emergency management is not well coordinated and dispatched.
These problems have nothing to do with city leaders' political stripe. The issues develop and grow unmanageable by delay and handoff.
Changing the city charter has been on the ballot before and will be on the November ballot this year. If the measure passes, the situation may worsen as siloed power bases vie to maintain their hold on power with their fiefdom.
Change is painful. The problems are visible. Not everyone will or can be satisfied. We can have security and business opportunity and growth opportunities for everyone if we quit looking at Portland in the rearview mirror and pay attention the the road (problems) in front of us.
Maybe we should just move to Kansas, listen to County music and become sharecroppers.
Whats wrong with west coast cities?
The last two weeks I have been on the east coast in Boston and Maine.
Boston reminds me a lot of Portland in the 1990s. By that I mean, vibrant and full of life. The core of Boston is a live and intact. With over 70 colleges and universities the citiy pulses with youthful energy and opportunity. In Boston you do see some homelessness but no thing to the extreme of tents on the streets. Boston feels very safe in the parts of town I visited.
As a life long Portland resident the over arching theme of all west coast cities is wanting to not offend anyone and as a result everyone gets burned with inaction. Its important to note the humanity of all regardless of income status, race or gender. I believe the core value of Portland is we want Portland to be welcoming place to all.
Unfortunately Portland is going through some growing pains.
What we see happening in Seattle, Portland and San Francisco is a symptom of the canary in the coal mine. Years of inaction has created a layer of gritty low level crime. In a sense; dealth by a thousand papercuts.
Here is what West coast cities need ASAP:
1. Increased accessed for mental health and addiction support programs.
2. Ban tents on streets and offer shelter and support programs.
3. On a national level we should create a mandatory program for all 18 to 22 years olds. For 4 years all citizens must inslist in a civil or military program. These programs will instill an ownership qualify that we are all citizens of this nation ave it is up to all of us to lend a hand to improve our country.
Homelessness and crime aren't the same thing. Both are problems for Portland, obviously. And just look around here in Jackson County; we have drive-by shootings in Medford and 100 people attended (by Zoom or in person) a library district board meeting recently to express concern about, among other issues, whether children are safe in the library. For what it's worth, homeless people were sitting in the lobby of the Medford library talking to no one in particular last Saturday afternoon when I went there, and I suppose that there are regularly such people at the library, but no one was threatening me and no one appeared to be committing a crime. Would it be best to focus on homelessness and crime as separate issues in separate blog posts? I assume you'll invite Low Dudgeon to write about crime, not homelessness, but correct me if I'm mistaken.
I often make this observation. I never tire of it.
Something I learned relatively late, from corporate America no less, but still profited from:
Most problems can be fixed with money, you just have to make sure you spend enough.
Not spending enough usually makes the problem worse because you've spent the money, it didn't work, and now everyone thinks you f***ked up.
Yes, it mostly applies to dating, but useful other places too...
No one would ever advise building a rocket ship on the cheap, but politicians don't apply the same logic to societal problems. If we approached homelessness/addiction with a rocket ship mentality we would fix the problem and in the end no one would complain about how much it cost because the friggin' thing would fly...
This is how we got to the moon. Does anyone even know how much it cost? Or care?
(The total cost of the Apollo Program, including Apollo 11, was $25.4 billion, about $200 billion today)
If we approached homelessness/addiction with a rocket ship mentality …
Once we put them on the rocket, where should we send it? 😀
Cut the food stamps. Cut the disability checks. Avoid paying taxes. Ship all manufacturing off shore. No more free school lunch programs. Don’t fund schools with a rise in property taxes. Log the National forests. Catch salmon with nets. Kill endangered species. Mine in river beds. Shoot offenders on sight.
I have friends that agree with most of the above. Add round up the homeless, divide them into deserving and undeserving.
Crazy over there, feeble minded over there, criminals and ex cons over there, addicts and drunks over there, society losers over there, children over there, old over there, unemployed trained workers over there, broken families over there, dogs over there.
What other categories and what are the great solutions for this great society that has bombed out?
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