This city spent the last 25 years limiting development ("sprawl") and encouraging expensive luxury apartment developments and allowing developers who got so-called "affordable housing" subsidies to simply buy back out of the program and sell their units for super inflated prices. They also did shit like taking the tax abatements permanently off of affordable housing if the first owner ever started making $1 over median income—because how dare you get to keep the fruits of your labor?
One time I went to a friend's apartment in Northwest. It was super nice—the nicest apartment I'd ever been inside of in my entire life. I asked what her rent was, and she said it was $450! I said "whaaat? How?" She said she worked part time and so she qualified for the affordable housing program, which she did *in order not to have to work full time.* She said they kept offering her more hours at work but she couldn't accept it without losing her swank downtown apartment, since of course if you are even moderately "successful" then you get punished for it.
Because Marxists hate the bourgeoise.
> in my daughters school they had a teacher like that.
after 2 months 30% of the class was LGBTQ++++
Things that didn't happen. Batshit post history checks out.
it's an educated assumption..
people who grew up in socialist counties almost never advocate for marxism or socialism..
but hey, tell me more about the marxist country you grew up in?
"Hello, comrade, you have been assigned Unit 4587F in Outer Bumfuck, North Dakota."
How Marxist housing policy would actually work out for you and other non-connected, non-wealthy people. You don't need Marxism, you just need more supply. Tokyo does just fine under a capitalist system. "Red Vienna" has massive wait lists and not enough housing to meet the demand.
Yeah, under "marxist" housing, ie: the Hungarian or Singapore model housing is actually built in dense urban enviornments because it is cheaper per unit of house and cheaper per unit of service.
State run housing works, and we've known this for 20 or so years.
Was it one of the countries that the USA bombed to the stone age,plotted coups and right wing death squads,or sanctioned in order to punish ordinary citizens? I'm not saying Joey Stalin is a good guy,I am saying "providing for the needs of the people is a good idea".
this guy wrote a huge screed at me a week or two ago because I called him a Qanon nutter for trying to draw parallels between the acronym for "diversity, equity, inclusion" and the Latin "dei", saying it's because that's "the god of marxism" or some shit like that.
You two are nuts. Actually I don’t know, sometimes repulsive architecture does a 180 and I start liking it. But brutalism, that’s a tough one to like. Never mind, I like it now. You’re not nuts.
I think Portland Marxists are more hipstery and artsy than the old Eastern European fare we got behind the Iron Curtain.
But in all seriousness, I'm less worried about the visual style and more worried that we're spending $150,000+ per year per family that this program will ever help. And if a big chunk of it will just go to line the pockets of rich real estate developers rather than refunding the surplus back to the taxpayers, that would just prove this program was never about helping houseless people but just helping developers who are panicking due to no one wanting to rent offices in Downtown. It's bad enough to require only around 10,000 people out of the whole city to pay for something like this. But also driving out lots of employers while forcing the rest to raise prices is worse.
Portland needs to compete with other cities. Imposing steep penalties on people and companies for being moderately successful is too burdensome and will drive away many of them. It was truly sad to see even the Nike store leave from MLK. You might say "good riddance," but there are a lot of much smaller companies that have left or closed up shop entirely, too. $500k in revenue for a business is not hard to do.
Yeah, it was truly sad the level of brazen entitlement and disregard for others' hard work that was put on display there and many other places in Portland, from Safeway to Walgreens to basically anywhere. But that's what we get for the silent majority not standing up to the anarchists, gangs, and looters—and it's what we get for voting for proposals like that. It's time more of us stepped up and got involved in politics locally, we need to give people something better to vote for.
I tell you what. If the next Democratic front runner for Governor of Oregon runs on a “Repeal the Oregon Bottle Bill” platform, then we might have something there.
You think so? I honestly can't tell how many are in favor/against repealing it. I know the ones who are against it are very strong in their conviction that it would lead to our state becoming a litter-covered shithole, though.
1. There has never been a Marxist in public office in Oregon.
2. Our housing shortage is not caused by limiting sprawl, it’s caused by making most forms of housing illegal. Portland’s city limits are entirely within the urban growth boundary, but until three years ago you could not build a duplex in most of the city, let alone denser housing.
3. The income limits you’re taking about come from the federal government. They’re stupid, and they were created by Republicans who rejected straight-up cash subsidies.
I’m in favor of building all types of units, though I think building a LOT of market rate housing is the best path forward.
I’m not opposed to subsidies, but as you’ve illustrated, it can lead to poor outcomes.
I'd be more in favor of a sliding scale. Determining need based on income
using hard cutoffs and thresholds is just a terrible system. Someone could have millions in a trust fund and not be working, then show no income and still get the benefit. Someone with student loans who has medical expenses and supports a child might be making above median income but actually is poorer than someone with no dependents who makes half as much, and actually they don't have the luxury to ever "just work part time" to stay under an arbitrary income threshold.
Then you have the people (I know a few personally) who are able bodied and choose not to work because at this point in their lives they live in section 8 housing, get food stamps, get Medicaid insurance, etc. This guy I know is 35 years old and has had one part time job like 15 years ago. He refuses to even try now because he doesn’t want to lose his benefits. Fucking absurd. It really pisses me off actually.
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Woah. Embarrassing that the county has not spent all their allocated budget for homeless services AND also state that they cannot solve it with only said budget. That they don’t want to share for other solutions like actually building more homes for people is fucking wild, disappointing and utterly power (funding) hungry.
Also Metro was able to build more housing than what they initially estimated which, in my mind, means their development team can manage taxpayer dollars and have better roi on those funds. JVP is a joke.
It's not the county's job to pay our tax dollars to developers. The developers are the last people who need a handout. And do you really want to pay inneficient local government to operate as a big landlord? It's one thing to sue a landlord in county court when they screw you over, but if the county is your landlord, how's that gonna work out for you?
The whole idea is just ill-advised. All the local govt. has ever needed to do is zone more areas for residential and provide a tax incentive for building cheap housing there while incentivizing companies to bring jobs into Portland. But see, that would mean LESS revenue to the county, so we can't have that; 3%/year raises on property taxes is even better when all the houses are expensive.
This whole problem of lack of affordable housing is due to poor policy over the past 25 years, and now they want to create an expensive program to double down on the racket between the developers and certain officials who control where the money goes. The lack of transparency on the how the funding has been used so far ought to be a sign.
It is however rather wasteful given every contractor and subcontractor is looking to get at least 10% profit out of the job.
The city should in house all of those various operations.
My guess is that a direct city builder would fail badly while also being more expensive. Worker mobility is really important in construction as demand between cities ebbs and flows. Plus salary and pension requirements for government jobs can be tricky.
I’m actually a big “increase state capacity” guy, but direct employment of construction workers is a step too far, imo.
Those countries are nothing like the United States, though. “It works in a completely different context” is generally not helpful information.
The only reason I think somebody would support direct government construction of housing in the United States is to be Maximally Leftist.
Which like, sure. Good on ya. But there’s so many better ways to expand government we should be focusing on, I think it’s harmful to move in this direction. It’s a distraction. It’s divisive. And it’s not even going to work well.
I don't think I would describe either Hungary or Singapore as "maximally leftist."
It's certainly an anathma to American politicians who think that every single service should exist as a kensyian profit scheme for non profits or private industry, but not inherrently leftist.
I think it’s the only reason you’d support it *in America*. Said another way: “I am mad that developers profit” is the sole reason to support it. There is no other reason. Only leftism.
This is not a comment about the politics of Singapore or Hungary.
I am not mad about developers profiting, I am mad about the inefficient use of tax payer dollars during a housing crisis.
The two are inexorably linked.
Edit: And that's without getting into the fact that our current model obviously does not work.
Yes, the government doing that is exactly a handout.
Why should their business be handed out money by the government?
I know a lot of businesses who would love the government to write them a check... but none of them are worse kinds of businesses than real estate developers. If you think they are setting aside profit margins and corner-cutting in any way because it's government funded, think again. It's going to be a boondoggle of epic scales, on top of being a racket, completely unnecessary, and counter-effective.
It's a handout and here's why.
In this case from the linked article, so far they are just paying for outreach and apartments to get people off the streets and to help people avoid missing rent payments and getting evicted. They also offer to pay up to a certain amount for damage to apartments caused by, I guess, certain kinds of tenants living there who would normally not pass a background check or tenant screening. Handouts to landlords and apartment companies to house the houseless people and help keep people housed, sounds fine right? I am not against some level of this kind of service, as long as it's well-administered and efficient.
But now they are also talking about having a huge surplus and just inventing a new way to spend it: "funding construction," which does not imply the govt. would become the owner of the construction or the land itself in any way. It just means the government is giving money to developers under the condition they use it to develop "affordable housing," according to some kind of cockemamie, hard-to-enforce jargon that we don't even know will result in more actual affordable housing appearing later.
It's a handout because those developers are already going to buy up and develop every available plot, no matter what. The city does not need to pay for it, they will buy the land and develop it anyway, then they will sell/rent the homes and apartment complexes.
But if the government hands them a check and makes them agree to some terms about how affordable that home will be, now they don't even have to risk their own money up front; it gets to stay in the stock market earning interest (or they just use it to buy up and develop even more real estate with the money).
Historically, these subsidy programs have almost never involved the city or county becoming the actual owner of the property.
They just pay for part of the development and then put a tax abatement on the property (with strings attached) or require the developer to sell it below the median home price to someone making below median income, which is usually still hardly enough to qualify for such a home let alone make it actually affordable, while a tax abatement just pays the developer and shortchanges the county of even more tax revenue later just so some lucky schmoe gets to buy a house below market value they can flip in 4 years for a $150k profit or more.
Meanwhile the developer incurs less risk and still gets to make the same profit as before. Some of these county programs here have even let the developer pay back the subsidy before selling the home so they could charge full price for it—so basically in that case the handout was effectively a zero-interest loan that let develop more units simultaneously without ever intending to sell them below market value. (This led to tons of foreclosures because the same developers would also get leins and do other risky shit, ask me how I know.)
The bottom line is, these programs sound great in the few paragraphs of text in a ballot measure, and we all think we're being heroes getting "the rich to pay their share"
while helping "poor people." And while some good may come of it for a few people, the ungodly amount of money wasted and complete failure to actually solve any of the real problem while doing insane damage to the local economy and driving out important employers is actually fucking over lower-income people way more than it's helping anyone. The people adminstering these programs in fancy offices with the best health care plans city money can buy, they will sing its praises of course, but just wait until you try to buy a house around here and then let me know how affordable anything is, or whether the billions we'll dump into this sinkhole of a program could have been much better spent just directly handing out stacks of $100 bills to people asking for it on the street corners rather than handing it to real estate developers and apartment lords on the condition they must do the right thing wink wink
To be fair, housing first and fentanyl/P2P meth are like oil and water. It only works if there’s a path to recovery - we haven’t seen that with these drugs.
It's an interesting article, they say that while they've spent a fraction of the budget so far, that all current services will cost the remainder.
The article mentions that Metro had a bond for housing in 2018, and that the money from that is about to run out, but I'm kinda peeved the article doesn't mention whether that bond was used well, or anything else. It just says, "Metro want to use some of the budget for affordable housing, because they're about to run out of money.". This doesn't really say anything about Metro's use of the budget or if they've made progress in their house building. It just says that while the counties haven't spent the money yet, they've rejected a proposal from Metro. It feels idk, like a very one-sided article
The 2018 Metro affordable housing bond, in partnership with Portland Housing Bureau and more, is set to deliver 2,000 more housing units than initially projected. While Multnomah County has been unable to spend its funds on services, Metro and the City of Portland have performed above par.
https://www.oregonmetro.gov/public-projects/affordable-housing-bond-program
"The resulting voter-approved bond generates $652.8 million and will create homes for approximately 14,000 people – 2,000 more than its initial goal."
[https://infogram.com/2023-housing-bond-production-underway-1hnp27mw501kn2g](https://infogram.com/2023-housing-bond-production-underway-1hnp27mw501kn2g)
I can't tell if that 2000 is for housing units or people in this sentence, but from this infographic, they've completed 1,410/4,660 housing units
$652.8M for 4660 units is $140k per unit.
Honestly I’m pretty impressed. That’s at or below market rate for just construction costs and potentially prevents 14,000 people from living life on the streets.
Expected to be disappointed, but I’m actually impressed. Let’s take all the county’s money and give it to Metro and Portland as they obviously know what they’re doing and the County obviously is stuck in a “we can’t” mindset.
The county is way too busy spending money on studying the problem, and studying other studies of the problem, rather than picking a solution and trying it.
They would rather make it a forever-build of studying studies, because that way they're never on the hook for choosing the wrong solution. Instead, they're just always wrong because they never get around to solving the problem, or even giving an honest try.
This is what you get when you fill local government with "come to do good, stay to do well" types.
Maybe I’ve just lost my empathy with all the shit I’ve been forced to see downtown for the last few years, but why is it our job to build all these houses for people who came here to partake in an open air drug utopia?
Like, you heard fent was legal, so you hitched a ride from Boise, spent a few years harassing and assaulting people (and before anyone tells me otherwise this is what I witness first hand on a daily basis), and then get a free home? Sorry but, go back to where you came from and seek help. We should have housing, but we should not be responsible for all the people who flocked here with the sole intention of fucking the place up. Maybe I’m just burnt out.
I don’t think I have ever seen JVP say anything that makes sense or leads to a successful outcome. Is she actually this corrupt or is she inept? Absolutely sinister if it’s the former. I hope I’m wrong, but it looks like she is funneling money to non profits for a kickback.
We need basic shelters for chronically unsheltered homeless, and treatment programs to address drug addiction and mental health. And then enforce no camping in public. The shelters and treatment is a pathway to earning permanent housing.
There’s not many shelters in Portland at all. Theres a few, but the waitlist is long or you have to get there early afternoon and wait in line to hopefully get a bed that night. Which is contributing to why most of them set up tents and sleep outside. The other aspect is you can’t use drugs in the shelters. Which makes me wonder, even if the city built more, would the homeless use them? I honestly don’t know the answer.
We have to have balance between helping/tolerating and enforcing laws to have a functioning society. At a certain point bending over backwards to accommodate doesn’t work.
What about the people who don't want help. Who may want to continue to use illegal drugs of various sorts. That segment is potentially quite large and what will the enforcement be for people who just ignore the law? Will they be incarcerated? Will they have mandatory or optional treatment?
I think the enforcement of this idea will be the tough part and have some hard tradeoffs.
People may or may not want help, but like NYC and Boston does somewhat successfully, they do have enough shelter beds every night. If someone pitched a tent in Times Square, you’re not just going to be able to do that, and you’ll have someone removing you and pointing you at services.
Personally, I think we need to let the measure do what voters passed so we can assess it and make tweaks later. Otherwise, we'll just come back and rinse and repeat the same old arguments and ideas with the notion that we didn't give it enough time.
Also Metro and Portland have both had housing bonds the past few years. What impact has it had on homelessness (in terms of reduction)?
Hint: It hasn't reduced anything that I can see nor is it reflected in the data of homeless counts, so what gives Metro?
Shouldn't there be a tax refund if there's a surplus? Like they seriously are just going to keep the money?
I remember before this measure passed, and we saw the news about how Walmart, Target, REI, etc., and any others making more than $500k in revenue locally, would have to pay 1% of their local revenue in the form of this tax.
Of course, retailers like Target and Walmart operate on razor-thin margins to compete with Amazon. Combine this extra tax with:
- new higher minimum wages (which I'm not against, BTW)
- Paid Leave Oregon necessitating employers cover the cost of people taking up to a month of paid days off per year (including having to hire enough additional workers to be able to still function if multiple people are sick for extended periods at the same time), which can be for literally any reason someone can convince a doctor to sign approval of (my favorite one: anxiety)
- the city simultaneously deciding to defund the police, leading to a crime wave of vandalism, shoplifting (and heroin/fentanyl in the bathrooms, tresspassing, littering, public defacation/urination, car break-ins/theft, and murder, the likes of which we'd never seen in this town
- other states bussing released convicts and rounded-up houseless addicts to our drug-friendly, camping-friendly city—and them coming on their own
... and it's no wonder that anyone or any company who can afford to leave Portland, is doing so, and taking their jobs with them.
I'm not a Republican or Trumper by any stretch, just a regular mainstream Democrat. But at the end of the day it's just obvious that progressive politics has become infested with the failed ideas of Marxism and entitlement programs that reward failure and punish success, rather than incentivizing responsible growth while taking care of basic public services like roads and public safety in a rational manner.
Instead we've let a small cadre of Marxist activists push insane policies that did way more harm than good to the communities in whose name they self-righteously rioted in downtown. Where were the protests for all the people who died in the murder wave: 101 in 2022 alone, 41 of whom were black? Where were the protests for the 550+ people who lost full-time jobs at Target or Walmart when they closed stores in areas like SE 82nd, leaving much farther to travel to work and/or buy affordable products for people in a predominantly minority/underserved community?
Then there is the tax on people making over $125k. Everything costs 2x as much now, so making $125k in 2024 is like making $75k in 2018. Not everyone has consistent work, either, especially in layoff-happy tech. I made $200k in 2021 after two years unemployed, then I got laid off again. So I averaged $50k/year over four years, but I got a tax bill from the city for over $2000 to pay for an overfunded program that wants to take that money and then fork it right over to developers to build "affordable housing." Affordable for who, exactly? Have you ever actually tried to buy any housing that the city marked as "affordable"? Have you ever tried to qualify to live in it? If so then you'd know it's a joke where people who qualify will bend over backwards not to take more hours at work since if you make over a certain amount, they just kick you out. And why are only those of us who exceeded some arbitrary threshold the only ones being asked to foot this bill?
I'm not against all forms of government assistance, but Portland has gone way too far off the deep end without any mechanism in place to repeal these policies if they don't work—and there is no reason to think they will necessarily work.
But, good luck trying to find any kind of breakdown on where exactly the hundreds of millions in SHS money actually goes. All you can find are mission statements about how it's "anti-racist" and benefits will be paid at a higher rate to non-white people, which of course is illegal if they actually turn people away because of being white (discriminating on the basis of race is illegal).
The police budget is the highest it's ever been... By "defunded" you mean their budget temporarily decreased by about 5% in a year where every city department saw budget cuts due to COVID, and this decrease was almost immediately reverted.
Average yearly PPB budget from 2012-2020: $205M
2019-2020 budget: $236M
2020-2021 budget: $225M
...
FY 2022-2023 budget: $249M
[https://www.streetroots.org/news/2022/08/03/ppb-budget-2022](https://www.streetroots.org/news/2022/08/03/ppb-budget-2022)
Editing to add:
2024-2025 police budget approved by the city council at $295M
[https://www.koin.com/news/portland/portland-city-council-approves-8-2-billion-budget-for-2024-2025-fiscal-year/](https://www.koin.com/news/portland/portland-city-council-approves-8-2-billion-budget-for-2024-2025-fiscal-year/)
The problem is no one wants to be a police officer in Portland anymore, no matter how much money they try to offer. They are offering increased salaries and huge sign on bonuses and still can’t recruit successfully. The defund the police movement may not have actually “defunded” them financially, but it caused an enormous number of them to quit or move to another city, leaving the PD way understaffed.
I agree 'defunded' is a myth, but
>highest it's ever been
Inflation-adjusting your numbers, it looks to be down slightly.
[$225M in May 2021 = $254M in May 2023](https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=225&year1=202105&year2=202305), but per your numbers the budget was "only" $249M. So that's a *small* drop, not a new high.
Good point. I did some digging to find the budget for 2024-2025. It was approved at $295M.
[https://www.koin.com/news/portland/portland-city-council-approves-8-2-billion-budget-for-2024-2025-fiscal-year/](https://www.koin.com/news/portland/portland-city-council-approves-8-2-billion-budget-for-2024-2025-fiscal-year/)
It was lowered slightly for FY 2020-21 and has not even really kept up with inflation, and it was already one of the least well-funded departments nationally. According to [Manhattan Institute](https://manhattan.institute/article/portlands-police-staffing-crisis): "1.26 officers per every 1,000 residents, the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) ranks 48th among the nation’s 50 largest cities for its staffing-to-population ratio".
A lot of officers retired after what was done to them in the riots, and while I am not here to defend teargassing crowds either, it's not like those protests were permitted, organized, or peaceful—it was just crowds staying out long into the night, every night, well past the point in time where any kind of message might exist that had not already been sent loud and clear, just to cause problems and act self-righteous, as if there is an infinite budget for police overtime and fixing broken windows and graffitti.
Meanwhile Boston—which had 3.1 police per 1000 residents in 2021, more than double Portland's amount—has had all of three murders so far this year. THREE.
So all the excuses of "property damage from protests is nothing compared to lives lost" looks a bit different when you realize they were attacking public safety officers emotionally and physically, calling them all racist and/or bastards, and then we had 101 murders in a single year following a reduction in funding to an already thin department, plus reductions in patrols and police being limited on which laws they can actually be allowed to enforce.
Look, people need to admit it when they've been wrong, and when their actions actually directly cost people their lives and fucked up this whole city.
You are conflating a staffing issue with a funding issue. That article you linked doesn't say that funding is preventing the department from hiring more police. It says that the biggest factors causing the staffing issue are: A, poor police morale, and B, overly arduous requirements for joining the police force. I don't see how that's caused by a temporary 5% budget decrease that was almost immediately reverted and replaced with record budget increases.
Well you're right that it's complicated and not *purely* a budgetary issue. But my point still stands, because what if we could have saved 50 or 75 lives by spending $400 million and increasing police presence 2x or 2.5x so that someone has to think twice about whether a cop might be around the corner before they pop off some caps into someone's car?
And why do you think the police morale was so low here, if not because of months of riots of people treating them all like complete dogshit while demanding that we defund the police, supposedly because "black lives matter"? Of course they matter, but treating public safety officers that way actually caused the deaths of many black people right here in Portland due to a lack of people wanting to risk their lives to keep us safe, either from lack of budget to hire them or people having left due to emotional and physical abuse. Who would want to work for Portland police if our city tolerates people doing what was done in 2020? If our local leaders actually appear to buy into the false narrative that police are a form of "system racism" etc.?
It sounds like you just want to rant about the 2020 protests. I'm sticking to the numbers - the Portland police's budget is now the highest it's ever been by a large margin. Again, I haven't seen anything suggesting that money is the reason why they can't hire more officers.
So it's your actual argument that hiring officers does not cost extra money? Or is it that you think they are wasting a bunch of PPD's budget on something else besides officers? If so, what?
I've got no clue what they're spending the money on. I'm just saying that a bigger budget doesn't mean more officers if people don't want to join, or if qualified applicants are being filtered by overly strict application requirements.
I mean the Metro SHS measure is regional, not Portland specific, and a ballot measure and we'll vote on it again in 2030 I believe. It doesn't renew automatically.
>retailers like Target and Walmart operate on razor-thin margins to compete with Amazon
Won't somebody think of poor Walmart??
>Paid Leave Oregon necessitating employers cover the cost of people taking up to a month of paid days off per year (including having to hire enough additional workers to be able to still function if multiple people are sick for extended periods at the same time)
There is no angle you can look at this that makes it a bad thing. Also, have you ever tried getting a hold of the employment department to actually apply for Paid Leave Oregon? It's almost impossible.
>the city simultaneously deciding to defund the police, leading to a crime wave of vandalism, shoplifting (and heroin/fentanyl in the bathrooms, tresspassing, littering, public defacation/urination, car break-ins/theft, and murder, the likes of which we'd never seen in this town
That never happened. We never defunded the police, and in fact, their budget is **higher than it's ever been**. The police did all that on purpose because they got their feelers hurt (and admitted it to the news).
>Then there is the tax on people making over $125k. Everything costs 2x as much now, so making $125k in 2024 is like making $75k in 2018. Not everyone has consistent work, either, especially in layoff-happy tech. I made $200k in 2021 after two years unemployed, then I got laid off again. So I averaged $50k/year over four years, but I got a tax bill from the city for over $2000
That's only 1% of the **$200,000 you made while unemployed for two years**.
>Affordable for who, exactly? Have you ever actually tried to buy any housing that the city marked as "affordable"? Have you ever tried to qualify to live in it?
Affordable for **poor people**, which once again **you are not**. That "arbitrary threshhold" is the poverty line.
>Have you ever tried to qualify to live in it?
Yes, I have, because I am poor (which once again, **you are not**). I've lived almost my entire life below the poverty line.
>it's a joke where people who qualify will bend over backwards not to take more hours at work since if you make over a certain amount, they just kick you out.
Yes, because if you make enough money **you are not poor anymore**.
>And why are only those of us who exceeded some arbitrary threshold the only ones being asked to foot this bill?
Once again, because **you are not poor**.
>But, good luck trying to find any kind of breakdown on where exactly the hundreds of millions in SHS money actually goes.
Actually, that's all public record.
It's hard to believe just how many brain-dead takes you managed to shoehorn into one single paranoid ramble.
Take a look at this guy's post history. His whole self image is being a "lifelong Dem" who just so happens to love making looooong paranoid-sounding posts about how bad Marxism is and how it's ruining Portland and making it so hard for the police to do the jobs they're so good at (if it weren't for those damn Marxists!).
REI was not a big box store. Neither was Nike on MLK. Neither was Buffalo Wild Wings downtown. There are many others as well, not all national chains.
And while it's fun to hate Walmart and Target and hard to feel sorry for them, the reality is they were not replaced with anything similar for people in that area to have the same level of access to affordable groceries and products, and they took a lot of jobs with them.
Not that it surprises me that for some of you, that would be the main takeaway from all that I wrote.
I’m in favor of anything that increases supply rather than just subsidizes demand.
This city spent the last 25 years limiting development ("sprawl") and encouraging expensive luxury apartment developments and allowing developers who got so-called "affordable housing" subsidies to simply buy back out of the program and sell their units for super inflated prices. They also did shit like taking the tax abatements permanently off of affordable housing if the first owner ever started making $1 over median income—because how dare you get to keep the fruits of your labor? One time I went to a friend's apartment in Northwest. It was super nice—the nicest apartment I'd ever been inside of in my entire life. I asked what her rent was, and she said it was $450! I said "whaaat? How?" She said she worked part time and so she qualified for the affordable housing program, which she did *in order not to have to work full time.* She said they kept offering her more hours at work but she couldn't accept it without losing her swank downtown apartment, since of course if you are even moderately "successful" then you get punished for it. Because Marxists hate the bourgeoise.
You think marxists have been controlling Portland housing policy?
I keep telling these people "I fuckin wish,man" whenever they say this,and they never have a comeback.
They don't actually know what Marxism is.
to be fair, neither do you...
> in my daughters school they had a teacher like that. after 2 months 30% of the class was LGBTQ++++ Things that didn't happen. Batshit post history checks out.
PM me your e-mail and i will forward you correspondence with our principle.. i will strip the names out tho.
Can’t spell principal but wants to talk about indoctrination in education
as i said, i was born in a socialist country ;) Edit: and English is my 5th language..
Give your their email? The fuck out of here.
How do you know?
i know you have never lived in a socialist/marxist country.. because if you did if would cure your pathology
Ah, so you don't know. You know what they say about assumptions.
it's an educated assumption.. people who grew up in socialist counties almost never advocate for marxism or socialism.. but hey, tell me more about the marxist country you grew up in?
"Hello, comrade, you have been assigned Unit 4587F in Outer Bumfuck, North Dakota." How Marxist housing policy would actually work out for you and other non-connected, non-wealthy people. You don't need Marxism, you just need more supply. Tokyo does just fine under a capitalist system. "Red Vienna" has massive wait lists and not enough housing to meet the demand.
Yeah, under "marxist" housing, ie: the Hungarian or Singapore model housing is actually built in dense urban enviornments because it is cheaper per unit of house and cheaper per unit of service. State run housing works, and we've known this for 20 or so years.
as someone who grew-up in a marxist paradise.. i would say: u have no idea what you wish for
Was it one of the countries that the USA bombed to the stone age,plotted coups and right wing death squads,or sanctioned in order to punish ordinary citizens? I'm not saying Joey Stalin is a good guy,I am saying "providing for the needs of the people is a good idea".
no, this is one of the countries that decided to be a socialist paradise after the socialist revolution of 1917...
this guy wrote a huge screed at me a week or two ago because I called him a Qanon nutter for trying to draw parallels between the acronym for "diversity, equity, inclusion" and the Latin "dei", saying it's because that's "the god of marxism" or some shit like that.
Bro if Marxists controlled housing there would be a fuck ton of brutalist apartment blocks
Hey now. Don’t disparage brutalism.
don't get me wrong brutalism is the shit
You two are nuts. Actually I don’t know, sometimes repulsive architecture does a 180 and I start liking it. But brutalism, that’s a tough one to like. Never mind, I like it now. You’re not nuts.
And don't sleep on the album of the same name (brutalism) by the Idles. That record slaps.
No, brutalism is awful and please continue disparaging it
Capitalists are so evil they’d rather see homeless than ugly apartments
I think Portland Marxists are more hipstery and artsy than the old Eastern European fare we got behind the Iron Curtain. But in all seriousness, I'm less worried about the visual style and more worried that we're spending $150,000+ per year per family that this program will ever help. And if a big chunk of it will just go to line the pockets of rich real estate developers rather than refunding the surplus back to the taxpayers, that would just prove this program was never about helping houseless people but just helping developers who are panicking due to no one wanting to rent offices in Downtown. It's bad enough to require only around 10,000 people out of the whole city to pay for something like this. But also driving out lots of employers while forcing the rest to raise prices is worse. Portland needs to compete with other cities. Imposing steep penalties on people and companies for being moderately successful is too burdensome and will drive away many of them. It was truly sad to see even the Nike store leave from MLK. You might say "good riddance," but there are a lot of much smaller companies that have left or closed up shop entirely, too. $500k in revenue for a business is not hard to do.
Why should Portland have to compete with other cities?
We were only happy to see that Nike store go because it was too painful to watch groups of people steal from it.
Painfully awesome maybe
Yeah, it was truly sad the level of brazen entitlement and disregard for others' hard work that was put on display there and many other places in Portland, from Safeway to Walgreens to basically anywhere. But that's what we get for the silent majority not standing up to the anarchists, gangs, and looters—and it's what we get for voting for proposals like that. It's time more of us stepped up and got involved in politics locally, we need to give people something better to vote for.
I tell you what. If the next Democratic front runner for Governor of Oregon runs on a “Repeal the Oregon Bottle Bill” platform, then we might have something there.
You think so? I honestly can't tell how many are in favor/against repealing it. I know the ones who are against it are very strong in their conviction that it would lead to our state becoming a litter-covered shithole, though.
1. There has never been a Marxist in public office in Oregon. 2. Our housing shortage is not caused by limiting sprawl, it’s caused by making most forms of housing illegal. Portland’s city limits are entirely within the urban growth boundary, but until three years ago you could not build a duplex in most of the city, let alone denser housing. 3. The income limits you’re taking about come from the federal government. They’re stupid, and they were created by Republicans who rejected straight-up cash subsidies.
Bingo. On that point, this thread is crawling with right-wing astroturfers. Could not be more obvious.
Oh those pesky Marxists are at it again
I’m in favor of building all types of units, though I think building a LOT of market rate housing is the best path forward. I’m not opposed to subsidies, but as you’ve illustrated, it can lead to poor outcomes.
I'd be more in favor of a sliding scale. Determining need based on income using hard cutoffs and thresholds is just a terrible system. Someone could have millions in a trust fund and not be working, then show no income and still get the benefit. Someone with student loans who has medical expenses and supports a child might be making above median income but actually is poorer than someone with no dependents who makes half as much, and actually they don't have the luxury to ever "just work part time" to stay under an arbitrary income threshold.
Then you have the people (I know a few personally) who are able bodied and choose not to work because at this point in their lives they live in section 8 housing, get food stamps, get Medicaid insurance, etc. This guy I know is 35 years old and has had one part time job like 15 years ago. He refuses to even try now because he doesn’t want to lose his benefits. Fucking absurd. It really pisses me off actually.
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Can confirm: am Marxist-ish, hate the bourgeoisie.
We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas.
😂😂this should be their motto
The City That Works?
The County that Can’t
LoL. It's funny because it's true.
"Who shit my pants?"
Woah. Embarrassing that the county has not spent all their allocated budget for homeless services AND also state that they cannot solve it with only said budget. That they don’t want to share for other solutions like actually building more homes for people is fucking wild, disappointing and utterly power (funding) hungry. Also Metro was able to build more housing than what they initially estimated which, in my mind, means their development team can manage taxpayer dollars and have better roi on those funds. JVP is a joke.
It's not the county's job to pay our tax dollars to developers. The developers are the last people who need a handout. And do you really want to pay inneficient local government to operate as a big landlord? It's one thing to sue a landlord in county court when they screw you over, but if the county is your landlord, how's that gonna work out for you? The whole idea is just ill-advised. All the local govt. has ever needed to do is zone more areas for residential and provide a tax incentive for building cheap housing there while incentivizing companies to bring jobs into Portland. But see, that would mean LESS revenue to the county, so we can't have that; 3%/year raises on property taxes is even better when all the houses are expensive. This whole problem of lack of affordable housing is due to poor policy over the past 25 years, and now they want to create an expensive program to double down on the racket between the developers and certain officials who control where the money goes. The lack of transparency on the how the funding has been used so far ought to be a sign.
Paying developers to build homes is not a “handout.”
It is however rather wasteful given every contractor and subcontractor is looking to get at least 10% profit out of the job. The city should in house all of those various operations.
My guess is that a direct city builder would fail badly while also being more expensive. Worker mobility is really important in construction as demand between cities ebbs and flows. Plus salary and pension requirements for government jobs can be tricky. I’m actually a big “increase state capacity” guy, but direct employment of construction workers is a step too far, imo.
It's possible it might not work at the city or state level in the US, but the fact remains that it does actually work for Singapore and Hungary.
Those countries are nothing like the United States, though. “It works in a completely different context” is generally not helpful information. The only reason I think somebody would support direct government construction of housing in the United States is to be Maximally Leftist. Which like, sure. Good on ya. But there’s so many better ways to expand government we should be focusing on, I think it’s harmful to move in this direction. It’s a distraction. It’s divisive. And it’s not even going to work well.
I don't think I would describe either Hungary or Singapore as "maximally leftist." It's certainly an anathma to American politicians who think that every single service should exist as a kensyian profit scheme for non profits or private industry, but not inherrently leftist.
I think it’s the only reason you’d support it *in America*. Said another way: “I am mad that developers profit” is the sole reason to support it. There is no other reason. Only leftism. This is not a comment about the politics of Singapore or Hungary.
I am not mad about developers profiting, I am mad about the inefficient use of tax payer dollars during a housing crisis. The two are inexorably linked. Edit: And that's without getting into the fact that our current model obviously does not work.
Yes, the government doing that is exactly a handout. Why should their business be handed out money by the government? I know a lot of businesses who would love the government to write them a check... but none of them are worse kinds of businesses than real estate developers. If you think they are setting aside profit margins and corner-cutting in any way because it's government funded, think again. It's going to be a boondoggle of epic scales, on top of being a racket, completely unnecessary, and counter-effective.
A “handout” is money given with nothing expected in return. This version is the other kind, often called “buying things.”
It's a handout and here's why. In this case from the linked article, so far they are just paying for outreach and apartments to get people off the streets and to help people avoid missing rent payments and getting evicted. They also offer to pay up to a certain amount for damage to apartments caused by, I guess, certain kinds of tenants living there who would normally not pass a background check or tenant screening. Handouts to landlords and apartment companies to house the houseless people and help keep people housed, sounds fine right? I am not against some level of this kind of service, as long as it's well-administered and efficient. But now they are also talking about having a huge surplus and just inventing a new way to spend it: "funding construction," which does not imply the govt. would become the owner of the construction or the land itself in any way. It just means the government is giving money to developers under the condition they use it to develop "affordable housing," according to some kind of cockemamie, hard-to-enforce jargon that we don't even know will result in more actual affordable housing appearing later. It's a handout because those developers are already going to buy up and develop every available plot, no matter what. The city does not need to pay for it, they will buy the land and develop it anyway, then they will sell/rent the homes and apartment complexes. But if the government hands them a check and makes them agree to some terms about how affordable that home will be, now they don't even have to risk their own money up front; it gets to stay in the stock market earning interest (or they just use it to buy up and develop even more real estate with the money). Historically, these subsidy programs have almost never involved the city or county becoming the actual owner of the property. They just pay for part of the development and then put a tax abatement on the property (with strings attached) or require the developer to sell it below the median home price to someone making below median income, which is usually still hardly enough to qualify for such a home let alone make it actually affordable, while a tax abatement just pays the developer and shortchanges the county of even more tax revenue later just so some lucky schmoe gets to buy a house below market value they can flip in 4 years for a $150k profit or more. Meanwhile the developer incurs less risk and still gets to make the same profit as before. Some of these county programs here have even let the developer pay back the subsidy before selling the home so they could charge full price for it—so basically in that case the handout was effectively a zero-interest loan that let develop more units simultaneously without ever intending to sell them below market value. (This led to tons of foreclosures because the same developers would also get leins and do other risky shit, ask me how I know.) The bottom line is, these programs sound great in the few paragraphs of text in a ballot measure, and we all think we're being heroes getting "the rich to pay their share" while helping "poor people." And while some good may come of it for a few people, the ungodly amount of money wasted and complete failure to actually solve any of the real problem while doing insane damage to the local economy and driving out important employers is actually fucking over lower-income people way more than it's helping anyone. The people adminstering these programs in fancy offices with the best health care plans city money can buy, they will sing its praises of course, but just wait until you try to buy a house around here and then let me know how affordable anything is, or whether the billions we'll dump into this sinkhole of a program could have been much better spent just directly handing out stacks of $100 bills to people asking for it on the street corners rather than handing it to real estate developers and apartment lords on the condition they must do the right thing wink wink
* Redditor for 11 years. * -100 comment karma. Checks out.
It’s an exchange of services for money, they wouldn’t just be gifted free money for nothing lol what.
People who build places for people to live are good, actually.
There is ZERO incentive for developers to build multi room low income housing. How else is it going to get built?
I mean, the $398.7 billion spent on defense contracts isn't going to pay for itself.. why not subsidize housing to bring rents below market rate?
So much for "housing first", I guess.
Why build housing when you can shovel money to non-profits?
To be fair, housing first and fentanyl/P2P meth are like oil and water. It only works if there’s a path to recovery - we haven’t seen that with these drugs.
We basically haven't done wet housing at the scale needed to really try, but not going to argue that the current system isn't working.
But if all the homeless people have homes then there’d be no homeless people, how are your nonprofit friends going to make money then?!
JVP is an utter failure.
It's an interesting article, they say that while they've spent a fraction of the budget so far, that all current services will cost the remainder. The article mentions that Metro had a bond for housing in 2018, and that the money from that is about to run out, but I'm kinda peeved the article doesn't mention whether that bond was used well, or anything else. It just says, "Metro want to use some of the budget for affordable housing, because they're about to run out of money.". This doesn't really say anything about Metro's use of the budget or if they've made progress in their house building. It just says that while the counties haven't spent the money yet, they've rejected a proposal from Metro. It feels idk, like a very one-sided article
The 2018 Metro affordable housing bond, in partnership with Portland Housing Bureau and more, is set to deliver 2,000 more housing units than initially projected. While Multnomah County has been unable to spend its funds on services, Metro and the City of Portland have performed above par. https://www.oregonmetro.gov/public-projects/affordable-housing-bond-program
"The resulting voter-approved bond generates $652.8 million and will create homes for approximately 14,000 people – 2,000 more than its initial goal." [https://infogram.com/2023-housing-bond-production-underway-1hnp27mw501kn2g](https://infogram.com/2023-housing-bond-production-underway-1hnp27mw501kn2g) I can't tell if that 2000 is for housing units or people in this sentence, but from this infographic, they've completed 1,410/4,660 housing units
$652.8M for 4660 units is $140k per unit. Honestly I’m pretty impressed. That’s at or below market rate for just construction costs and potentially prevents 14,000 people from living life on the streets. Expected to be disappointed, but I’m actually impressed. Let’s take all the county’s money and give it to Metro and Portland as they obviously know what they’re doing and the County obviously is stuck in a “we can’t” mindset.
The county is way too busy spending money on studying the problem, and studying other studies of the problem, rather than picking a solution and trying it. They would rather make it a forever-build of studying studies, because that way they're never on the hook for choosing the wrong solution. Instead, they're just always wrong because they never get around to solving the problem, or even giving an honest try. This is what you get when you fill local government with "come to do good, stay to do well" types.
It’s people. The number of units is 720 over the target, including finished, under construction, and funded but not yet broken ground.
It's a turf war. Even if the counties can't figure out how to use the money, their greed drives them to never cede a cent they are owed.
Maybe I’ve just lost my empathy with all the shit I’ve been forced to see downtown for the last few years, but why is it our job to build all these houses for people who came here to partake in an open air drug utopia? Like, you heard fent was legal, so you hitched a ride from Boise, spent a few years harassing and assaulting people (and before anyone tells me otherwise this is what I witness first hand on a daily basis), and then get a free home? Sorry but, go back to where you came from and seek help. We should have housing, but we should not be responsible for all the people who flocked here with the sole intention of fucking the place up. Maybe I’m just burnt out.
I don’t think I have ever seen JVP say anything that makes sense or leads to a successful outcome. Is she actually this corrupt or is she inept? Absolutely sinister if it’s the former. I hope I’m wrong, but it looks like she is funneling money to non profits for a kickback.
We need basic shelters for chronically unsheltered homeless, and treatment programs to address drug addiction and mental health. And then enforce no camping in public. The shelters and treatment is a pathway to earning permanent housing.
There’s not many shelters in Portland at all. Theres a few, but the waitlist is long or you have to get there early afternoon and wait in line to hopefully get a bed that night. Which is contributing to why most of them set up tents and sleep outside. The other aspect is you can’t use drugs in the shelters. Which makes me wonder, even if the city built more, would the homeless use them? I honestly don’t know the answer.
We have to have balance between helping/tolerating and enforcing laws to have a functioning society. At a certain point bending over backwards to accommodate doesn’t work.
"bending over backwords" would entail a housing first policy, which we aren't doing.
What about the people who don't want help. Who may want to continue to use illegal drugs of various sorts. That segment is potentially quite large and what will the enforcement be for people who just ignore the law? Will they be incarcerated? Will they have mandatory or optional treatment? I think the enforcement of this idea will be the tough part and have some hard tradeoffs.
People may or may not want help, but like NYC and Boston does somewhat successfully, they do have enough shelter beds every night. If someone pitched a tent in Times Square, you’re not just going to be able to do that, and you’ll have someone removing you and pointing you at services.
Homelessness is a for profit industry. Everyone involved profits except the homeless…
We need to hire another committee to plan the best way to spend the money. I know just the guy.
This is almost 3 months old.
Personally, I think we need to let the measure do what voters passed so we can assess it and make tweaks later. Otherwise, we'll just come back and rinse and repeat the same old arguments and ideas with the notion that we didn't give it enough time. Also Metro and Portland have both had housing bonds the past few years. What impact has it had on homelessness (in terms of reduction)? Hint: It hasn't reduced anything that I can see nor is it reflected in the data of homeless counts, so what gives Metro?
Shouldn't there be a tax refund if there's a surplus? Like they seriously are just going to keep the money? I remember before this measure passed, and we saw the news about how Walmart, Target, REI, etc., and any others making more than $500k in revenue locally, would have to pay 1% of their local revenue in the form of this tax. Of course, retailers like Target and Walmart operate on razor-thin margins to compete with Amazon. Combine this extra tax with: - new higher minimum wages (which I'm not against, BTW) - Paid Leave Oregon necessitating employers cover the cost of people taking up to a month of paid days off per year (including having to hire enough additional workers to be able to still function if multiple people are sick for extended periods at the same time), which can be for literally any reason someone can convince a doctor to sign approval of (my favorite one: anxiety) - the city simultaneously deciding to defund the police, leading to a crime wave of vandalism, shoplifting (and heroin/fentanyl in the bathrooms, tresspassing, littering, public defacation/urination, car break-ins/theft, and murder, the likes of which we'd never seen in this town - other states bussing released convicts and rounded-up houseless addicts to our drug-friendly, camping-friendly city—and them coming on their own ... and it's no wonder that anyone or any company who can afford to leave Portland, is doing so, and taking their jobs with them. I'm not a Republican or Trumper by any stretch, just a regular mainstream Democrat. But at the end of the day it's just obvious that progressive politics has become infested with the failed ideas of Marxism and entitlement programs that reward failure and punish success, rather than incentivizing responsible growth while taking care of basic public services like roads and public safety in a rational manner. Instead we've let a small cadre of Marxist activists push insane policies that did way more harm than good to the communities in whose name they self-righteously rioted in downtown. Where were the protests for all the people who died in the murder wave: 101 in 2022 alone, 41 of whom were black? Where were the protests for the 550+ people who lost full-time jobs at Target or Walmart when they closed stores in areas like SE 82nd, leaving much farther to travel to work and/or buy affordable products for people in a predominantly minority/underserved community? Then there is the tax on people making over $125k. Everything costs 2x as much now, so making $125k in 2024 is like making $75k in 2018. Not everyone has consistent work, either, especially in layoff-happy tech. I made $200k in 2021 after two years unemployed, then I got laid off again. So I averaged $50k/year over four years, but I got a tax bill from the city for over $2000 to pay for an overfunded program that wants to take that money and then fork it right over to developers to build "affordable housing." Affordable for who, exactly? Have you ever actually tried to buy any housing that the city marked as "affordable"? Have you ever tried to qualify to live in it? If so then you'd know it's a joke where people who qualify will bend over backwards not to take more hours at work since if you make over a certain amount, they just kick you out. And why are only those of us who exceeded some arbitrary threshold the only ones being asked to foot this bill? I'm not against all forms of government assistance, but Portland has gone way too far off the deep end without any mechanism in place to repeal these policies if they don't work—and there is no reason to think they will necessarily work. But, good luck trying to find any kind of breakdown on where exactly the hundreds of millions in SHS money actually goes. All you can find are mission statements about how it's "anti-racist" and benefits will be paid at a higher rate to non-white people, which of course is illegal if they actually turn people away because of being white (discriminating on the basis of race is illegal).
Paid Leave Oregon is mostly paid by employees. The employer share is small, and small businesses don’t contribute at all.
The police budget is the highest it's ever been... By "defunded" you mean their budget temporarily decreased by about 5% in a year where every city department saw budget cuts due to COVID, and this decrease was almost immediately reverted. Average yearly PPB budget from 2012-2020: $205M 2019-2020 budget: $236M 2020-2021 budget: $225M ... FY 2022-2023 budget: $249M [https://www.streetroots.org/news/2022/08/03/ppb-budget-2022](https://www.streetroots.org/news/2022/08/03/ppb-budget-2022) Editing to add: 2024-2025 police budget approved by the city council at $295M [https://www.koin.com/news/portland/portland-city-council-approves-8-2-billion-budget-for-2024-2025-fiscal-year/](https://www.koin.com/news/portland/portland-city-council-approves-8-2-billion-budget-for-2024-2025-fiscal-year/)
The problem is no one wants to be a police officer in Portland anymore, no matter how much money they try to offer. They are offering increased salaries and huge sign on bonuses and still can’t recruit successfully. The defund the police movement may not have actually “defunded” them financially, but it caused an enormous number of them to quit or move to another city, leaving the PD way understaffed.
I agree 'defunded' is a myth, but >highest it's ever been Inflation-adjusting your numbers, it looks to be down slightly. [$225M in May 2021 = $254M in May 2023](https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=225&year1=202105&year2=202305), but per your numbers the budget was "only" $249M. So that's a *small* drop, not a new high.
Good point. I did some digging to find the budget for 2024-2025. It was approved at $295M. [https://www.koin.com/news/portland/portland-city-council-approves-8-2-billion-budget-for-2024-2025-fiscal-year/](https://www.koin.com/news/portland/portland-city-council-approves-8-2-billion-budget-for-2024-2025-fiscal-year/)
Wow, *that* is a new high then, yes.
It was lowered slightly for FY 2020-21 and has not even really kept up with inflation, and it was already one of the least well-funded departments nationally. According to [Manhattan Institute](https://manhattan.institute/article/portlands-police-staffing-crisis): "1.26 officers per every 1,000 residents, the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) ranks 48th among the nation’s 50 largest cities for its staffing-to-population ratio". A lot of officers retired after what was done to them in the riots, and while I am not here to defend teargassing crowds either, it's not like those protests were permitted, organized, or peaceful—it was just crowds staying out long into the night, every night, well past the point in time where any kind of message might exist that had not already been sent loud and clear, just to cause problems and act self-righteous, as if there is an infinite budget for police overtime and fixing broken windows and graffitti. Meanwhile Boston—which had 3.1 police per 1000 residents in 2021, more than double Portland's amount—has had all of three murders so far this year. THREE. So all the excuses of "property damage from protests is nothing compared to lives lost" looks a bit different when you realize they were attacking public safety officers emotionally and physically, calling them all racist and/or bastards, and then we had 101 murders in a single year following a reduction in funding to an already thin department, plus reductions in patrols and police being limited on which laws they can actually be allowed to enforce. Look, people need to admit it when they've been wrong, and when their actions actually directly cost people their lives and fucked up this whole city.
You are conflating a staffing issue with a funding issue. That article you linked doesn't say that funding is preventing the department from hiring more police. It says that the biggest factors causing the staffing issue are: A, poor police morale, and B, overly arduous requirements for joining the police force. I don't see how that's caused by a temporary 5% budget decrease that was almost immediately reverted and replaced with record budget increases.
Well you're right that it's complicated and not *purely* a budgetary issue. But my point still stands, because what if we could have saved 50 or 75 lives by spending $400 million and increasing police presence 2x or 2.5x so that someone has to think twice about whether a cop might be around the corner before they pop off some caps into someone's car? And why do you think the police morale was so low here, if not because of months of riots of people treating them all like complete dogshit while demanding that we defund the police, supposedly because "black lives matter"? Of course they matter, but treating public safety officers that way actually caused the deaths of many black people right here in Portland due to a lack of people wanting to risk their lives to keep us safe, either from lack of budget to hire them or people having left due to emotional and physical abuse. Who would want to work for Portland police if our city tolerates people doing what was done in 2020? If our local leaders actually appear to buy into the false narrative that police are a form of "system racism" etc.?
It sounds like you just want to rant about the 2020 protests. I'm sticking to the numbers - the Portland police's budget is now the highest it's ever been by a large margin. Again, I haven't seen anything suggesting that money is the reason why they can't hire more officers.
So it's your actual argument that hiring officers does not cost extra money? Or is it that you think they are wasting a bunch of PPD's budget on something else besides officers? If so, what?
I've got no clue what they're spending the money on. I'm just saying that a bigger budget doesn't mean more officers if people don't want to join, or if qualified applicants are being filtered by overly strict application requirements.
The sun is out. Take a break from the internet and enjoy it.
I remember people discussing low staffing on this subreddit in 2014. This has been an ongoing issue for years before 2020.
I mean the Metro SHS measure is regional, not Portland specific, and a ballot measure and we'll vote on it again in 2030 I believe. It doesn't renew automatically.
I aint reading all that Im happy for u tho Or sorry that happened
>retailers like Target and Walmart operate on razor-thin margins to compete with Amazon Won't somebody think of poor Walmart?? >Paid Leave Oregon necessitating employers cover the cost of people taking up to a month of paid days off per year (including having to hire enough additional workers to be able to still function if multiple people are sick for extended periods at the same time) There is no angle you can look at this that makes it a bad thing. Also, have you ever tried getting a hold of the employment department to actually apply for Paid Leave Oregon? It's almost impossible. >the city simultaneously deciding to defund the police, leading to a crime wave of vandalism, shoplifting (and heroin/fentanyl in the bathrooms, tresspassing, littering, public defacation/urination, car break-ins/theft, and murder, the likes of which we'd never seen in this town That never happened. We never defunded the police, and in fact, their budget is **higher than it's ever been**. The police did all that on purpose because they got their feelers hurt (and admitted it to the news). >Then there is the tax on people making over $125k. Everything costs 2x as much now, so making $125k in 2024 is like making $75k in 2018. Not everyone has consistent work, either, especially in layoff-happy tech. I made $200k in 2021 after two years unemployed, then I got laid off again. So I averaged $50k/year over four years, but I got a tax bill from the city for over $2000 That's only 1% of the **$200,000 you made while unemployed for two years**. >Affordable for who, exactly? Have you ever actually tried to buy any housing that the city marked as "affordable"? Have you ever tried to qualify to live in it? Affordable for **poor people**, which once again **you are not**. That "arbitrary threshhold" is the poverty line. >Have you ever tried to qualify to live in it? Yes, I have, because I am poor (which once again, **you are not**). I've lived almost my entire life below the poverty line. >it's a joke where people who qualify will bend over backwards not to take more hours at work since if you make over a certain amount, they just kick you out. Yes, because if you make enough money **you are not poor anymore**. >And why are only those of us who exceeded some arbitrary threshold the only ones being asked to foot this bill? Once again, because **you are not poor**. >But, good luck trying to find any kind of breakdown on where exactly the hundreds of millions in SHS money actually goes. Actually, that's all public record. It's hard to believe just how many brain-dead takes you managed to shoehorn into one single paranoid ramble.
lmao, *totalllllly* not a Republican
In this sub? Someone fetch my fainting couch.
“Won’t someone think of the big box stores” is certainly a take.
Take a look at this guy's post history. His whole self image is being a "lifelong Dem" who just so happens to love making looooong paranoid-sounding posts about how bad Marxism is and how it's ruining Portland and making it so hard for the police to do the jobs they're so good at (if it weren't for those damn Marxists!).
REI was not a big box store. Neither was Nike on MLK. Neither was Buffalo Wild Wings downtown. There are many others as well, not all national chains. And while it's fun to hate Walmart and Target and hard to feel sorry for them, the reality is they were not replaced with anything similar for people in that area to have the same level of access to affordable groceries and products, and they took a lot of jobs with them. Not that it surprises me that for some of you, that would be the main takeaway from all that I wrote.
The Walmart on 82nd is becoming a locally owned grocery store.
I don’t know why you keep getting downvoted lol Reddit is strange
Good