Two years ago, my wife went on her morning walk past the school across the street, when she saw the school’s custodian—dead on the sidewalk of what we later learned was a heart attack.
I lived just south of Salem from 2007 until 2019. Elections have consequences. Poor oversite has consequences. Oregon was, and is, a government office posing as a state. When government is the number one employer in your state, freefall is the only way it's going to go. Oregon has two, that's right, two fortune 500 companies.
Government has been the biggest employer in Alaska for its entire history. (Which of course doesn't keep it from posing as the home of rugged, self-reliant individualism.)
They’re a criminal organization that fleeced good-hearted people and used the money to buy their leaders palatial homes. Declared Marxists as usual - some people are more equal than others. Apparently you were sucked in. Sorry to hear it.
Actually it started a lot earlier. PERS guarantees a growth rate in funds the defines the payout retirees get. Even the later tiers are unattainable by their investors (I’ve lost track but I believe Tier 2 guarantees an 8% growth rate, higher if they have a good year and never lower). So when those people retire, districts have to pay the monthly pension.
Unfunded pension promises are no joke, and it’s a long road down.
And no, I don’t begrudge the public employees their pensions. But the law doesn’t require their employers to put up the money against the liability of future payouts.
It’s a great deal for public sector employers - keep wages lower than the private sector and buff it up with pension benefits - until it isn’t. It’s like pretending you’re gonna retire on $10k/month without saving up few million it takes to support that income. If you do that you’re screwed, and so is your city.
BLM was an exercise in calling out government on their failure to stop killing people and lying about it. If you want civic leaders to do call outs, then it's a great example of how that happens.
Illegal police violence is a serious issue. Playing racial savior with a problem that is neither widespread nor racially based is self-indulgent stupidity. Progressives are engaged in public emotional masturbation with racial saviorism as their fetish.
Glau, the idea that there is a "good chance that government agents would kill you" for asking for help is demonstrably false and, frankly, an indication that you are a brainwashed simpleton.
The Washington Post has been tracking fatal police shootings. What would you guess is the rough number of unarmed black men shot and killed by police annually? It’s around 20, in the whole country. And most of those are justified—like Michael Brown, who was a 290lb man shot when, after committing a robbery, he assaulted a police officer and tried to take the officer’s gun. The lie wasn’t from the government on that one; the lie was “hands up don’t shoot”—Brown never said that nor put his hands up.
Might have been one of the factors, after reading this essay there is reason to believe that there are many factors that continue to multiply without behind addressed. It is not just a Portland problem.
My wife and I walked miles through downtown Portland a few years ago. We’ll never go back. We were stepping over drug addled kids, walking around tents on the feces strewn sidewalk crossing the street to avoid people having psychotic episodes. Stores were empty, the few people around were wary. No thanks. Our forefathers who gave so much for the opportunities we have would turn away in disgust.
You lost me where you said the national economy gained millions of jobs during the last year. Job growth under Trump has been flat or negative since he took office.
Yeah so many commissaries laid off that promoted dei and us aid about 300,000 complainers. But me as an engineer I get so many job openings in my email I just delete that's because I was before I retired a worker a contributor to the civilization not a leech that the Trump administration is getting rid of
AI Overview +8 The Trump administration significantly reduced the federal workforce in 2025-2026, with reports indicating over 300,000 positions were eliminated through buyouts, attrition, and firings, often referred to as the "Doge chainsaw" cuts. This reduction, aimed at increasing efficiency and reducing the size of government, was targeted at 1 in 8 civilian employees.Key Details on Federal Workforce ReductionsScale of Reductions: By the end of 2025, approximately 300,000 federal jobs were cut, with some reports noting over 385,000 left while total headcounts decreased by just under 300,000 after hiring."DOGE" Initiative: The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) played a central role, driving aggressive downsizing efforts to cut "excessive" personnel.Method of Reductions: Over 150,000 employees took "Fork in the Road" buyout offers or voluntary separations, with many others forced out.Impact on Agencies: Large-scale downsizing affected numerous agencies, including the IRS and USDA, leading to backlogs in services.Defense of Policies: The administration defended these cuts, arguing that former federal employees could earn higher pay in the private sector and that the government was overstaffed.Controversies: The workforce changes faced legal challenges, with some employees claiming illegal terminations, and studies suggested impacts on, or "harms to," science-related sectors, including agricultural research and public land management.
"Oregon lost more than 18,000 jobs over the past year, while the national economy added millions"
The national economy only added 181,000 jobs last year. It doesn't change your overall point, but the idea that there's strong growth elsewhere is false.
"This represents a direct vote of no confidence in the county’s service delivery relative to its tax burden."
Also known as free riding. Like what happened to Detroit with it's wealthy suburbs. People looking to get the benefits of living near a big city without having to pay any of the costs.
It seems like the whole article has this as an underlying point: both the real estate tax increase cap and the pensions are state-level policies, but it's the city which is directly suffering from them. Feels like the state is trying to milk it's biggest city without paying for it.
What benefits are those exactly? Going to a red wings game? Prior to bankruptcy, the only reason to go to Detroit was jury duty. It was a cesspool of crime and decay. Still is, but has improved.
The economics of agglomeration are the only reason cities were ever wealth engines. COVID finally showed humanity that the internet broke that system a couple of decades ago.
Perhaps, but in the case it of Detroit it's because all the wealth fled and moved to the suburbs. Detroit until very recently has been a basket case for the last 60 years.
Yes, and the suburbs are suburbs and not separate, small towns for a reason. Even in Detroit the wealth in the suburbs came from the actual city of Detroit. It's well-proven that cities create more wealth. All social outcomes like GDP, patents, but also crime scale with a factor of 1.15.
Wealth from the suburbs fled decades ago. The suburbs generate their own wealth now. The top revenue generators for Detroit are taxes and state revenue sharing.
It’s been incredible to watch the magnitude of the damage done, led by a constituency that’s in a terrible ideological trap. The leadership they elect produces bad decision after bad decision. So far, that constituency’s tolerance for bad outcomes is stunning.
From the article, it seems like the constituency causing the problems (state wide pensions, property tax restrictions) is not the same one suffering the consequences. (City residents.)
This would explain a lot about the failure of pain to change anything.
I agree that the pension system (which has $29B in unfunded liabilities and is in trouble) and unions contribute to the problems (or cause them). I don’t agree that a 3% cap on raising property taxes is a problem (I hope you don’t think massive property tax increases would fix anything ).
The issue is a voting population that wants to protect drug addicts and people suffering from mental health crises and offering no help to them. This directly leads to the destruction of those same people’s city.
Address the problem, deter bad behavior (that’s what laws have done historically ), welcome business don’t castigate it and start rebuilding.
Unfortunately, the entire West coast (and east coast) voting majorities are victims of idealogical capture
and TDS so strong that shitting in their own nests feels to them like the right thing to do.
There is plenty of very strong criticism of Prop 13 in California. Capping property taxes for long-time incumbent owners is REALLY bad policy, and this problem gets attention in California while it flies under the radar in Oregon just because Oregon isn’t as big of a deal. The problem is that it’s almost impossible to fix, because old people and homeowners vote more than young people and renters.
They are not capped in California. They go up every year. Furthermore, municipalities have developed workarounds where they tack local projects onto the property tax roles.
If property taxes were tied directly to home appreciation, which is artificially inflated due to restrictive building regulations, most people would be forced out of their homes.
California’s income tax structure is heavily skewed towards the “rich” paying most of the taxes. The highest 1% of earners, who also provide many good paying jobs, pay 40% of the state’s income taxes. That makes the state extremely dependent on a small number of taxpayers, who are increasingly decamping to other more work friendly states. It’s not a good model for how to fund things.
Like this back and forth on property tax issue - I live in FL where eliminating property taxes is going on the ballot this fall - really don’t know how to feel about it
If the value of a property goes up more then 3% then not having taxes go up proportionatly is just a subsidy. And it's one that grows every year the value grows, until the lack of services causes the price to fall.
And honestly, you may want to look into just giving drug addicts and people with mental health issues bus tickets to texas. It the solution red states have settled on: make them someone else's problem. Failing that, the gap between hoi polli willingness to pay for cops to be brutal and unwillingness to pay for living spaces and care is going to net a lot of dead bodies.
It’s a “subsidy” in the Progressive/Leftist mindset in which there’s no such thing as private property. In their thinking, your property and your income belong first to the state. Anything they choose to let you keep is a gift.
Like many west coast cities homelessness is out of control in Portland.
The major issue in homelessness is not the lack of housing. It's the refusal of society to say no. No, you can't camp in this city. No, you can't shit in the streets. No, you can't panhandle aggressively. No, you can't shoot up publicly and leave your used needles lying around. The fact that we are not going to allow you to destroy our city by doing these things is not our problem. It's your problem. You can solve your problem by not doing drugs, getting help for your mental problems, getting a job, and sharing rent with others so inclined until you can afford a place of your own, probably in a lower cost community.
This is not going to happen because the people we have elected allow the homeless to wallow in their victimhood rather than accept personal responsibility for their self destructiveness.
What specific steps should be taken by cities to deal with the problem? Cities should use all existing shelters and further provide simple shelter space with surplus military tents with mess and recreational tents, a medical tent and restroom and shower facilities (the way I lived in the army) on leased or purchased unused commercial or industrial sites on the outskirts of the city. Hire an ex Army or Marine company First Sergeant to run the operation and ex mess and platoon sergeants as staff. As many homeless who want to and are able to work should be hired to help feed others and to maintain the facilities. Individuals could use surplus military squad tents or their own for sleeping. Residents would be given full freedom to live their lives short of harming others and the use of drugs and alcohol would be tolerated as it is on the streets. When those facilities are available the city should send in crews to clean up existing encampments, without arresting anyone who does not physically resist.
Custodial care should be mandatory for those who are so mentally or drug addicted that they cannot care for themselves. We did a huge disservice to the mentally ill when we closed rather than reform our state mental hospitals. We need them back. This approach actually would cost far less and be far more effective than the current housing first attempts to fix the problem. Most of the homeless lack the capacity to live unassisted in modern society but that is not an excuse to destroy our beautiful cities and drive out our productive citizens.
Luv this!!! SO many people luv to complain but have 0 specific policy recs and that’s what we need!!!! Would luv to get these recs in front of a city council to see if they’d work 👍
Until Grants Pass v. Johnson was decided by the Supreme Court in June 2024, the West Coast was operating under a Federal District Court ruling that literally prohibited cities from "saying no" the way you suggest.
I don't know about Portland, but SF has shifted dramatically since then and is improving every day.
We are lucky that our rich guy mayor was willing to keep London Breed's policies going.
Fuk all y’all. I quit Wall Street and took a huge pay cut to “do gods work” and teach calculus in a high needs area. I watched all my buddies retire early with hedge fund wealth reallocation money. And note you fuckers want to take the ONLY benefit I was promised!? You have no idea how hard my job is. Maybe just maybe if every city has pension problems, then the issue is structural. Maybe the blue states should stop funding fucking rural moochers. Maybe that’s been the problem all along. 🤡
You don't go to school to learn, Hamilton. You go to school to learn HOW to learn.
You have no idea how much the average person struggles with the concept of a rate vs a value.
Show someone constant velocity graph and then ask them "is the object moving" and they will say "no" because they see a flat graph. Explain the answer to them, and they will get it, laugh, and then make the same mistake the next day, week, and month until it really sinks in. Basic rate integration is a core concept in every field.
There are so many calc concepts that are priceless, basic literacy.
- Every geometric statement has an algebraic equivalent.
- Basic concepts, once proven, become building blocks for others.
- Even just learning how to write cleanly to track all the negative signs.
I have students who asked to skip precalc to join my calc class because the pre-calc teacher is sub-par and I work hard to show the signal in the noise - the patterns in the solutions.
Everybody needs calculus. First of all, that’s when math becomes fun. Secondly, calculus is super practical and helpful in all sorts of careers. I’m a visual artist, for example, and I love calculus. Great thinking never hurts anyone.
It's the rare person that thinks at ALL these days.
The average definition of "attention" comes from the military.
Can you "focus on your homework". Derr. That's bullshit.
Real attention is awareness. It's curiosity. It's making connections. It's asking questions.
If you don't think you need it, don't take it. But this is like saying basketball players don't need to lift weights because it's rare that they ever curl a barbell in a game.
Thank you for pointing me to "the Curley effect" (w8942.pdf https://share.google/OdmeuZ7jZEKdmwJzH). If you substitute the woke/normie axis today for the Irish/English axis used in the study, you can posit that the draw of jobs in the nonprofit sector (government, NGO's, etc.) is being used to offset the jobs disappearing with departing normies.
At some point, bankruptcy will end the madness but I didn't want to wait for that. Those of us in the Greater Idaho movement (greateridaho.org) can see the train wreck coming and pray that we can escape before it brings hardship to us all.
Big difference: Pittsburgh isn’t populated with insane assholes like Portland is. It’s too late for Portland, and I’ll fight like hell i/when some fed bailout is proposed. They made their bed b
I had the chance to spend a week in Portland several years back with my daughter who was involved in a figure skating competition. I splurged at a posh hotel downtown excited to see the views of Mt. Hood and experience the “vibes” as my middle school daughter said.
I was totally unprepared for the sad state of the city. The homeless encamped seemingly everywhere including steps from the entrance of the hotel where my then 11 year old daughter got to see drug use “irl”. I remember her saying this “is far more useful than years of DARE classes with Officer Murphy”.
I’ve had the opportunity to return and I’ve declined.
Let’s sabotage all public transit in urban areas and bleed them dry for rural car culture and then blame unions when high density areas collapse. Morons. Let me guess… global warming is a hoax amiright? Car culture must endure.
Try taxing the rich for once. The solution was never meant to be at the municipal level because the problems were caused by federal sabotage. The fix must therefore be federal as well. Leave labor alone, bitch. Quit squeezing blood from a stone to please capital. Cut pensions my ass.
Only Wall Street gets the federal bailout. Labor can NEVER be too big to fail.
You don't live here. You don't know what you are talking about, you just have your pet issues that you are using to come to a conclusion not supported by the facts. In other words, you would fit in well here with the rest of the voters.
And don’t pretend like this is the opinion of a “serious economist making tough decisions”.
I switch into teaching 20 years ago after I cashed out. I’m set for life but that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve been kicking into my pension every paycheck. That’s my money.
There’s an opportunity cost for me not putting it in the market. A market that’s been growing exponentially. If you don’t pay it back to me, that’s theft. Right?
Right?!
And even if there were an employer contribution, that’s a benefit. I was busting ass for $35-45k AND that future benefit. Meanwhile my niece made more than me on her first day on the job at Data Dogs. LOL.
You literally want to mug old people. That’s what cowards and weaklings do. They mug the elderly. There’s nothing tough or serious about that.
Why don’t we take money from the billionaire class? Trust me, there is money in NYC that is well beyond mere mortal. People have no idea. Why don’t they help patch your budget in Portland?
“Because… how would that work? We can’t just steal from them.”
The fact that people can’t even imagine that solution is by design.
Portland is not falling off a cliff. Our entire car culture is. Last I checked global warming was real. Call me crazy but maybe we should kill two birds with one stone and begin federal investment for something more sustainable.
Again. I get it. Something has to give.
Just don’t pretend that in the age of oligarchy mugging the elderly isn’t a path of least resistance.
"Pet issues". Yeah, my pet issue is not stealing the promised pensions of senior citizens while Wall Street is always too big to fail. LOL. Call me crazy.
Dude. I'm not a moron. I worked at a Swiss bank and built and sold a dot com. I'm from Chicago. Same shit there. I get what you are saying.
I also live in New York City. No passion problem here! Why?
Because we have such an AMAZING public transportation system that when all the wealthy bitches threaten to leave - they don't! Because they all love the culture that comes with the trains and the artists that ride them. Everyone. Rides. The. Subway.
Have you been following Mamdani's new Pied-à-terre tax? How about congestion pricing? No one's leaving, bro!
"Well Portland is not New York City..." No shit! Because red America hollowed it out!
This article put all the blame on the municipalities with ZERO acknowledgement of the parasitic Federal policies that got us here. It's like that old David Foster Wallace Joke - "How's the water". Look it up.
The truth is that YOU are "swimming in water" and you've forgotten it's there. Urban destruction was a by design. The pensions are the symptom, not the problem.
So do what you have to to save Portland. I get it it. I love the city and the people. You've been fucked by the Federalist Society and the fossil fuel industry.
But fuck me if I'm going the same conservative assholes who bled our cities dry and sabotaged public transit lecture me about how they know what's best without ANY real acknowledgement of how we got here.
Mamdani can kill New York City. No city is too big to fail any longer. The world has changed. The economics of agglomeration no longer apply. The dinosaurs inhabiting them won’t change—but they will eventually die.
Toronto’s headed in this direction - except that it’s also got the added problem of 1. the province siphoning off what seems like 90 cents of every Toronto tax dollar to fund projects elsewhere in Ontario, and 2. the province vetoing any attempts Toronto makes to find new funding sources if they alienate suburban voters.
I came to Portland around 08 in search of a career and owning a home. It was the beginning of the ski jump takeoff of real estate prices. I was a web engineer at leading Portland web agencies downtown. I could only afford rent in an old house with 6 roommates. Property prices ran away from my earning ability. Rents kept increasing. After 10 years of working towards home ownership and being further from it than when I started, I had enough. Literally risking my life every time stepping outside over bodies, avoiding screaming zombies that want to attack you, stepping over rivers of piss on sidewalks and dodging tents. I left to the rust belt of New York and the mortgage of my two properties combined is about what the rent of a nice studio apartment in Portland costs.
That white flight you’re talking about is not merely people who don’t want to pay taxes. They are as you point out going to Clackamas and Clark counties, two highly racist counties. Clark county may hate taxes, but that doesn’t stop residents from driving back to Multnomah county, where they pay NO sales tax. And they’re happy to send bovver boys to Portland to create trouble. And Clackamas county doesn’t want to pay a toll on a bridge only they use, and they don’t want to pay for MAX, because they don’t want to provide transportation for black people to come from Portland. So until you’re going to address racism and white supremacy and its centrality to conservative policy formation, you’re just going to keep running the same right-wing shock jock talking points of “urban death spirals” without ever offering genuine community-oriented solutions. Those white counties hate taxes, but what they really hate is taxes for healthy integrated communities.
Almost every major city has economic problems of varying degrees. Many are due to the ridiculous pensions public employees were given by liberals in control, in exchange for their votes.
But the remaining population keeps voting for the same people, so I guess that is what they want.
I lived just south of Salem from 2007 until 2019. Elections have consequences. Poor oversite has consequences. Oregon was, and is, a government office posing as a state. When government is the number one employer in your state, freefall is the only way it's going to go. Oregon has two, that's right, two fortune 500 companies.
Government has been the biggest employer in Alaska for its entire history. (Which of course doesn't keep it from posing as the home of rugged, self-reliant individualism.)
Alaska has the absolute luxury of massive oil and gas funds propping everything up. Oregon has vibes. They are not the same.
It all started with BLM and the failure of civic leaders to call them on their BS.
They’re a criminal organization that fleeced good-hearted people and used the money to buy their leaders palatial homes. Declared Marxists as usual - some people are more equal than others. Apparently you were sucked in. Sorry to hear it.
Actually it started a lot earlier. PERS guarantees a growth rate in funds the defines the payout retirees get. Even the later tiers are unattainable by their investors (I’ve lost track but I believe Tier 2 guarantees an 8% growth rate, higher if they have a good year and never lower). So when those people retire, districts have to pay the monthly pension.
Unfunded pension promises are no joke, and it’s a long road down.
And no, I don’t begrudge the public employees their pensions. But the law doesn’t require their employers to put up the money against the liability of future payouts.
It’s a great deal for public sector employers - keep wages lower than the private sector and buff it up with pension benefits - until it isn’t. It’s like pretending you’re gonna retire on $10k/month without saving up few million it takes to support that income. If you do that you’re screwed, and so is your city.
BLM was an exercise in calling out government on their failure to stop killing people and lying about it. If you want civic leaders to do call outs, then it's a great example of how that happens.
Illegal police violence is a serious issue. Playing racial savior with a problem that is neither widespread nor racially based is self-indulgent stupidity. Progressives are engaged in public emotional masturbation with racial saviorism as their fetish.
If there was a good chance government agents would kill you if you ask for help, you'd think differently.
Oops. You got your facts wrong.
You disagree with what I've said. That's a different thing than you wrote.
Glau, the idea that there is a "good chance that government agents would kill you" for asking for help is demonstrably false and, frankly, an indication that you are a brainwashed simpleton.
Actually statistics do not support your accusation.
Which stats are you thinking of?
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/assault-empiricism-wilfred-reilly
The statistics embedded in this article did example
Assertion. Can you back it up?
The Washington Post has been tracking fatal police shootings. What would you guess is the rough number of unarmed black men shot and killed by police annually? It’s around 20, in the whole country. And most of those are justified—like Michael Brown, who was a 290lb man shot when, after committing a robbery, he assaulted a police officer and tried to take the officer’s gun. The lie wasn’t from the government on that one; the lie was “hands up don’t shoot”—Brown never said that nor put his hands up.
Yes I suggest you look at the work of Wilfred Reilly who has looked into this in depth. And can you back up your assertion?
Might have been one of the factors, after reading this essay there is reason to believe that there are many factors that continue to multiply without behind addressed. It is not just a Portland problem.
What BSare you referencing?
😂😂😂
My wife and I walked miles through downtown Portland a few years ago. We’ll never go back. We were stepping over drug addled kids, walking around tents on the feces strewn sidewalk crossing the street to avoid people having psychotic episodes. Stores were empty, the few people around were wary. No thanks. Our forefathers who gave so much for the opportunities we have would turn away in disgust.
Grants Pass v. Johnson hadn't been decided then.
I don't know the specifics about Portland, but the "tent cities" in SF were a direct side effect of a Federal Court ruling.
True, plus lax SF city policies.
The policies were lax because they were compromises to keep out of court.
The Progressive wing on our Board of Supervisors basically won the "give them an inch and they take a mile" award.
You lost me where you said the national economy gained millions of jobs during the last year. Job growth under Trump has been flat or negative since he took office.
But Trump!
But he’s right!
Yeah so many commissaries laid off that promoted dei and us aid about 300,000 complainers. But me as an engineer I get so many job openings in my email I just delete that's because I was before I retired a worker a contributor to the civilization not a leech that the Trump administration is getting rid of
This is gibberish.
AI Overview +8 The Trump administration significantly reduced the federal workforce in 2025-2026, with reports indicating over 300,000 positions were eliminated through buyouts, attrition, and firings, often referred to as the "Doge chainsaw" cuts. This reduction, aimed at increasing efficiency and reducing the size of government, was targeted at 1 in 8 civilian employees.Key Details on Federal Workforce ReductionsScale of Reductions: By the end of 2025, approximately 300,000 federal jobs were cut, with some reports noting over 385,000 left while total headcounts decreased by just under 300,000 after hiring."DOGE" Initiative: The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) played a central role, driving aggressive downsizing efforts to cut "excessive" personnel.Method of Reductions: Over 150,000 employees took "Fork in the Road" buyout offers or voluntary separations, with many others forced out.Impact on Agencies: Large-scale downsizing affected numerous agencies, including the IRS and USDA, leading to backlogs in services.Defense of Policies: The administration defended these cuts, arguing that former federal employees could earn higher pay in the private sector and that the government was overstaffed.Controversies: The workforce changes faced legal challenges, with some employees claiming illegal terminations, and studies suggested impacts on, or "harms to," science-related sectors, including agricultural research and public land management.
$$$40000000000000==USA DEBT Oh I Forgot Barbie says MATH IS Tough--let's go to the MALL
The private (i.e. productive) economy did add “millions of jobs.” The bureaucracy didn’t. See https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1VMU0
"Oregon lost more than 18,000 jobs over the past year, while the national economy added millions"
The national economy only added 181,000 jobs last year. It doesn't change your overall point, but the idea that there's strong growth elsewhere is false.
"This represents a direct vote of no confidence in the county’s service delivery relative to its tax burden."
Also known as free riding. Like what happened to Detroit with it's wealthy suburbs. People looking to get the benefits of living near a big city without having to pay any of the costs.
It seems like the whole article has this as an underlying point: both the real estate tax increase cap and the pensions are state-level policies, but it's the city which is directly suffering from them. Feels like the state is trying to milk it's biggest city without paying for it.
What benefits are those exactly? Going to a red wings game? Prior to bankruptcy, the only reason to go to Detroit was jury duty. It was a cesspool of crime and decay. Still is, but has improved.
There's a reason the suburbs there are extremely rich and random places in, say, Nebraska are not. Cities generate wealth.
The economics of agglomeration are the only reason cities were ever wealth engines. COVID finally showed humanity that the internet broke that system a couple of decades ago.
You do, of course, have research showing this and not just an assertion from some rando on the Internet?
Perhaps, but in the case it of Detroit it's because all the wealth fled and moved to the suburbs. Detroit until very recently has been a basket case for the last 60 years.
Yes, and the suburbs are suburbs and not separate, small towns for a reason. Even in Detroit the wealth in the suburbs came from the actual city of Detroit. It's well-proven that cities create more wealth. All social outcomes like GDP, patents, but also crime scale with a factor of 1.15.
Wealth from the suburbs fled decades ago. The suburbs generate their own wealth now. The top revenue generators for Detroit are taxes and state revenue sharing.
It’s been incredible to watch the magnitude of the damage done, led by a constituency that’s in a terrible ideological trap. The leadership they elect produces bad decision after bad decision. So far, that constituency’s tolerance for bad outcomes is stunning.
From the article, it seems like the constituency causing the problems (state wide pensions, property tax restrictions) is not the same one suffering the consequences. (City residents.)
This would explain a lot about the failure of pain to change anything.
I agree that the pension system (which has $29B in unfunded liabilities and is in trouble) and unions contribute to the problems (or cause them). I don’t agree that a 3% cap on raising property taxes is a problem (I hope you don’t think massive property tax increases would fix anything ).
The issue is a voting population that wants to protect drug addicts and people suffering from mental health crises and offering no help to them. This directly leads to the destruction of those same people’s city.
Address the problem, deter bad behavior (that’s what laws have done historically ), welcome business don’t castigate it and start rebuilding.
Unfortunately, the entire West coast (and east coast) voting majorities are victims of idealogical capture
and TDS so strong that shitting in their own nests feels to them like the right thing to do.
There is plenty of very strong criticism of Prop 13 in California. Capping property taxes for long-time incumbent owners is REALLY bad policy, and this problem gets attention in California while it flies under the radar in Oregon just because Oregon isn’t as big of a deal. The problem is that it’s almost impossible to fix, because old people and homeowners vote more than young people and renters.
They are not capped in California. They go up every year. Furthermore, municipalities have developed workarounds where they tack local projects onto the property tax roles.
If property taxes were tied directly to home appreciation, which is artificially inflated due to restrictive building regulations, most people would be forced out of their homes.
California’s income tax structure is heavily skewed towards the “rich” paying most of the taxes. The highest 1% of earners, who also provide many good paying jobs, pay 40% of the state’s income taxes. That makes the state extremely dependent on a small number of taxpayers, who are increasingly decamping to other more work friendly states. It’s not a good model for how to fund things.
Like this back and forth on property tax issue - I live in FL where eliminating property taxes is going on the ballot this fall - really don’t know how to feel about it
Where will the state get its funding? It seems much more lean than most states. We would trade anything for a DeSantis here.
If the value of a property goes up more then 3% then not having taxes go up proportionatly is just a subsidy. And it's one that grows every year the value grows, until the lack of services causes the price to fall.
And honestly, you may want to look into just giving drug addicts and people with mental health issues bus tickets to texas. It the solution red states have settled on: make them someone else's problem. Failing that, the gap between hoi polli willingness to pay for cops to be brutal and unwillingness to pay for living spaces and care is going to net a lot of dead bodies.
I suspect your voting record may be part of the problem
How can my own property rising be a “subsidy?” BTW, every state I know of does the free bus pass trick.
It’s a “subsidy” in the Progressive/Leftist mindset in which there’s no such thing as private property. In their thinking, your property and your income belong first to the state. Anything they choose to let you keep is a gift.
Exactly.
You get a tax break if your value goes up more then your taxes do. This is a subsidy.
That's maybe one of the most economically- uninformed comments I've ever heard.
I suspect your voting record may be part of the problem
I suspect your voting record may be part of the problem
Like many west coast cities homelessness is out of control in Portland.
The major issue in homelessness is not the lack of housing. It's the refusal of society to say no. No, you can't camp in this city. No, you can't shit in the streets. No, you can't panhandle aggressively. No, you can't shoot up publicly and leave your used needles lying around. The fact that we are not going to allow you to destroy our city by doing these things is not our problem. It's your problem. You can solve your problem by not doing drugs, getting help for your mental problems, getting a job, and sharing rent with others so inclined until you can afford a place of your own, probably in a lower cost community.
This is not going to happen because the people we have elected allow the homeless to wallow in their victimhood rather than accept personal responsibility for their self destructiveness.
What specific steps should be taken by cities to deal with the problem? Cities should use all existing shelters and further provide simple shelter space with surplus military tents with mess and recreational tents, a medical tent and restroom and shower facilities (the way I lived in the army) on leased or purchased unused commercial or industrial sites on the outskirts of the city. Hire an ex Army or Marine company First Sergeant to run the operation and ex mess and platoon sergeants as staff. As many homeless who want to and are able to work should be hired to help feed others and to maintain the facilities. Individuals could use surplus military squad tents or their own for sleeping. Residents would be given full freedom to live their lives short of harming others and the use of drugs and alcohol would be tolerated as it is on the streets. When those facilities are available the city should send in crews to clean up existing encampments, without arresting anyone who does not physically resist.
Custodial care should be mandatory for those who are so mentally or drug addicted that they cannot care for themselves. We did a huge disservice to the mentally ill when we closed rather than reform our state mental hospitals. We need them back. This approach actually would cost far less and be far more effective than the current housing first attempts to fix the problem. Most of the homeless lack the capacity to live unassisted in modern society but that is not an excuse to destroy our beautiful cities and drive out our productive citizens.
Luv this!!! SO many people luv to complain but have 0 specific policy recs and that’s what we need!!!! Would luv to get these recs in front of a city council to see if they’d work 👍
Until Grants Pass v. Johnson was decided by the Supreme Court in June 2024, the West Coast was operating under a Federal District Court ruling that literally prohibited cities from "saying no" the way you suggest.
I don't know about Portland, but SF has shifted dramatically since then and is improving every day.
We are lucky that our rich guy mayor was willing to keep London Breed's policies going.
Fuk all y’all. I quit Wall Street and took a huge pay cut to “do gods work” and teach calculus in a high needs area. I watched all my buddies retire early with hedge fund wealth reallocation money. And note you fuckers want to take the ONLY benefit I was promised!? You have no idea how hard my job is. Maybe just maybe if every city has pension problems, then the issue is structural. Maybe the blue states should stop funding fucking rural moochers. Maybe that’s been the problem all along. 🤡
Teaching calculus to people who won’t need it
You don't go to school to learn, Hamilton. You go to school to learn HOW to learn.
You have no idea how much the average person struggles with the concept of a rate vs a value.
Show someone constant velocity graph and then ask them "is the object moving" and they will say "no" because they see a flat graph. Explain the answer to them, and they will get it, laugh, and then make the same mistake the next day, week, and month until it really sinks in. Basic rate integration is a core concept in every field.
There are so many calc concepts that are priceless, basic literacy.
- Every geometric statement has an algebraic equivalent.
- Basic concepts, once proven, become building blocks for others.
- Even just learning how to write cleanly to track all the negative signs.
I have students who asked to skip precalc to join my calc class because the pre-calc teacher is sub-par and I work hard to show the signal in the noise - the patterns in the solutions.
Sorry if your Calc teacher scarred you.
Everybody needs calculus. First of all, that’s when math becomes fun. Secondly, calculus is super practical and helpful in all sorts of careers. I’m a visual artist, for example, and I love calculus. Great thinking never hurts anyone.
That's pretty funny.
Most people don't read. Should we stop teaching that also?
Calculus is the mathematics of the physical world. If you don't have a basic grasp of that, then you are stuck in a faith based world.
That is 98% of people. It’s a rare person who is thinking about calculus ever.
I'll one up that. I'm an actual teacher.
It's the rare person that thinks at ALL these days.
The average definition of "attention" comes from the military.
Can you "focus on your homework". Derr. That's bullshit.
Real attention is awareness. It's curiosity. It's making connections. It's asking questions.
If you don't think you need it, don't take it. But this is like saying basketball players don't need to lift weights because it's rare that they ever curl a barbell in a game.
But you do you.
The best thinkers were homeschooled. School is a major factor driving the lack of thinking.
And what percentage of people actually think about high school literature?
Or high school history or government for that matter.
When cities are filled with people who think like this, it’s no wonder they’re failing.
Fuck off and pay for your own damn roads, bitch. We've been the red state piggy bank forever.
Thank you for pointing me to "the Curley effect" (w8942.pdf https://share.google/OdmeuZ7jZEKdmwJzH). If you substitute the woke/normie axis today for the Irish/English axis used in the study, you can posit that the draw of jobs in the nonprofit sector (government, NGO's, etc.) is being used to offset the jobs disappearing with departing normies.
At some point, bankruptcy will end the madness but I didn't want to wait for that. Those of us in the Greater Idaho movement (greateridaho.org) can see the train wreck coming and pray that we can escape before it brings hardship to us all.
Big difference: Pittsburgh isn’t populated with insane assholes like Portland is. It’s too late for Portland, and I’ll fight like hell i/when some fed bailout is proposed. They made their bed b
I had the chance to spend a week in Portland several years back with my daughter who was involved in a figure skating competition. I splurged at a posh hotel downtown excited to see the views of Mt. Hood and experience the “vibes” as my middle school daughter said.
I was totally unprepared for the sad state of the city. The homeless encamped seemingly everywhere including steps from the entrance of the hotel where my then 11 year old daughter got to see drug use “irl”. I remember her saying this “is far more useful than years of DARE classes with Officer Murphy”.
I’ve had the opportunity to return and I’ve declined.
I pray the city can redeem the charm it once had.
Let’s sabotage all public transit in urban areas and bleed them dry for rural car culture and then blame unions when high density areas collapse. Morons. Let me guess… global warming is a hoax amiright? Car culture must endure.
Try taxing the rich for once. The solution was never meant to be at the municipal level because the problems were caused by federal sabotage. The fix must therefore be federal as well. Leave labor alone, bitch. Quit squeezing blood from a stone to please capital. Cut pensions my ass.
Only Wall Street gets the federal bailout. Labor can NEVER be too big to fail.
You don't live here. You don't know what you are talking about, you just have your pet issues that you are using to come to a conclusion not supported by the facts. In other words, you would fit in well here with the rest of the voters.
And don’t pretend like this is the opinion of a “serious economist making tough decisions”.
I switch into teaching 20 years ago after I cashed out. I’m set for life but that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve been kicking into my pension every paycheck. That’s my money.
There’s an opportunity cost for me not putting it in the market. A market that’s been growing exponentially. If you don’t pay it back to me, that’s theft. Right?
Right?!
And even if there were an employer contribution, that’s a benefit. I was busting ass for $35-45k AND that future benefit. Meanwhile my niece made more than me on her first day on the job at Data Dogs. LOL.
You literally want to mug old people. That’s what cowards and weaklings do. They mug the elderly. There’s nothing tough or serious about that.
Why don’t we take money from the billionaire class? Trust me, there is money in NYC that is well beyond mere mortal. People have no idea. Why don’t they help patch your budget in Portland?
“Because… how would that work? We can’t just steal from them.”
The fact that people can’t even imagine that solution is by design.
Portland is not falling off a cliff. Our entire car culture is. Last I checked global warming was real. Call me crazy but maybe we should kill two birds with one stone and begin federal investment for something more sustainable.
Again. I get it. Something has to give.
Just don’t pretend that in the age of oligarchy mugging the elderly isn’t a path of least resistance.
"Pet issues". Yeah, my pet issue is not stealing the promised pensions of senior citizens while Wall Street is always too big to fail. LOL. Call me crazy.
Dude. I'm not a moron. I worked at a Swiss bank and built and sold a dot com. I'm from Chicago. Same shit there. I get what you are saying.
I also live in New York City. No passion problem here! Why?
Because we have such an AMAZING public transportation system that when all the wealthy bitches threaten to leave - they don't! Because they all love the culture that comes with the trains and the artists that ride them. Everyone. Rides. The. Subway.
Have you been following Mamdani's new Pied-à-terre tax? How about congestion pricing? No one's leaving, bro!
"Well Portland is not New York City..." No shit! Because red America hollowed it out!
This article put all the blame on the municipalities with ZERO acknowledgement of the parasitic Federal policies that got us here. It's like that old David Foster Wallace Joke - "How's the water". Look it up.
The truth is that YOU are "swimming in water" and you've forgotten it's there. Urban destruction was a by design. The pensions are the symptom, not the problem.
So do what you have to to save Portland. I get it it. I love the city and the people. You've been fucked by the Federalist Society and the fossil fuel industry.
But fuck me if I'm going the same conservative assholes who bled our cities dry and sabotaged public transit lecture me about how they know what's best without ANY real acknowledgement of how we got here.
Mamdani can kill New York City. No city is too big to fail any longer. The world has changed. The economics of agglomeration no longer apply. The dinosaurs inhabiting them won’t change—but they will eventually die.
Toronto’s headed in this direction - except that it’s also got the added problem of 1. the province siphoning off what seems like 90 cents of every Toronto tax dollar to fund projects elsewhere in Ontario, and 2. the province vetoing any attempts Toronto makes to find new funding sources if they alienate suburban voters.
I came to Portland around 08 in search of a career and owning a home. It was the beginning of the ski jump takeoff of real estate prices. I was a web engineer at leading Portland web agencies downtown. I could only afford rent in an old house with 6 roommates. Property prices ran away from my earning ability. Rents kept increasing. After 10 years of working towards home ownership and being further from it than when I started, I had enough. Literally risking my life every time stepping outside over bodies, avoiding screaming zombies that want to attack you, stepping over rivers of piss on sidewalks and dodging tents. I left to the rust belt of New York and the mortgage of my two properties combined is about what the rent of a nice studio apartment in Portland costs.
That white flight you’re talking about is not merely people who don’t want to pay taxes. They are as you point out going to Clackamas and Clark counties, two highly racist counties. Clark county may hate taxes, but that doesn’t stop residents from driving back to Multnomah county, where they pay NO sales tax. And they’re happy to send bovver boys to Portland to create trouble. And Clackamas county doesn’t want to pay a toll on a bridge only they use, and they don’t want to pay for MAX, because they don’t want to provide transportation for black people to come from Portland. So until you’re going to address racism and white supremacy and its centrality to conservative policy formation, you’re just going to keep running the same right-wing shock jock talking points of “urban death spirals” without ever offering genuine community-oriented solutions. Those white counties hate taxes, but what they really hate is taxes for healthy integrated communities.
Almost every major city has economic problems of varying degrees. Many are due to the ridiculous pensions public employees were given by liberals in control, in exchange for their votes.
But the remaining population keeps voting for the same people, so I guess that is what they want.