Portland's unassisted suicide
In 2004, when I visited 'progressive' Portland, it had no nightly riots. But it was a fake city whose sickly economy, and bankrupt future were invisible to tourists.
You may have stopped paying attention months ago, or maybe you don’t give a shit about how the people in charge of Portland have allowed their central city to be taken over and torched nightly by thuggish, nihilist white spoiled children. But in case you do care, here’s a tremendous dispatch in Reason magazine by a good journalist who’s been actively observing the nightly riots in a city that allowed its woke progressivism to lead it to commit civic suicide. I wrote this ‘travel op-ed’ about Portland for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in 2004.
Postcard from a Potemkin City
2004
Portland tricked me with her charms.
The geography was beautiful. The roads, despite how much Oregon's liberal lawmakers hate cars, were smooth and uncongested. And the funky neighborhood my daughter Billie lives in had wide sidewalks, big houses and enough greenery to qualify as a rain forest.
Living 10 minutes southeast of downtown Portland, where gleaming light-rail cars feed a bustling central shopping core anchored by a Nordstrom department store, Billie could be living in the one of the Pittsburgh’s best neighborhoods, urban Highland Park or suburban old Mt. Lebanon.
Portland and Pittsburgh -- their picture postcard versions, anyhow -- are often compared favorably. Both are relatively small river towns. Portland's also known for its pleasant small-town feel.
Most urban planning experts think Portland is enlightened because of its slow-growth policies designed to make the city denser with people, more dependent on public transit and less friendly to unplanned (i.e., market-driven) development.
I know Portland's 540,000 residents pay dearly for these "urban growth boundaries" with higher land and housing costs, more noise, more pollution, more congestion, restricted property rights, less economic freedom and more arbitrary government rules.
But I must admit Portland looked pretty livable during my Dec. 8 day trip. Lots of coffee shops and bookstores and neighborhoods of quaint bungalows. No conspicuous slums or homeless encampments.
Portland's healthy image is as fake as a post-card from 1988 East Berlin, however. Its sickly economy, clueless political leadership and bankrupt future are not visible to tourists.
Nor are its onerous income taxes, business taxes and zoning regulations. Nor are the insane development charges that hit a neighborhood pizza joint with a $27,000 traffic-impact fee for moving its location across the street.
Nor are Portland's transit rules that prohibit company parking lots from being built too close to a light-rail stop (not built yet), which is why Columbia Sportswear Co. moved its 400 jobs across the county line.
John Charles is an expert on Portland phoniness. A 1976 Pitt grad and Pittsburgh native, he's acting president of the Cascade Policy Institute, a regional free-market think tank.
He calls Portland "a Hollywood set," a "gigantic Monopoly board" of costly "postcard projects" that have been over-planned and mismanaged by know-it-all politicians, just like Pittsburgh's.
Unemployment in Portland is high -- 6.5 percent. Population is barely rising. Charles says almost everything downtown is heavily subsidized. Portland has $1.5 billion in unfunded pension liabilities for police and firemen. Its schools are going broke. Businesses are fleeing -- or not coming - in droves.
Portland and Pittsburgh's problems have similar causes and are similarly unsustainable, Charles says. And they can only be solved with remedies neither city's power brokers will ever be smart or brave enough to try: less government, lower taxes, fewer regulations, more competition and more choice - especially real school choice.
He calls Portland a "Potemkin City" - a fancy fake that, like those elaborate pretend villages Minister Potemkin built to fool Catherine the Great of Russia, impresses the gullible with things they don't have to pay for.
Which is something else Portland has in common with Pittsburgh.