What's wrong with West Coast cities?
Nicholas Kristof asked the question:
"What's wrong with West Coast cities?"
Nicholas Kristof was an award-winning New York Times reporter. He grew up in Yamhill, Oregon and some of his recent work described the pathologies in that small agricultural town west of Portland. He described poverty, joblessness, addictions, and despair. It is rural Oregon's version of J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. It is the ongoing story with echoes of Michael Harrington's The Other America, in which Appalachian poverty was brought to national attention in 1962.
Kristof returned to Oregon to grow grapes at the family farm, to run for governor of Oregon, and do journalism and commentary. I subscribe to his Substack blog and am one of his 1.9 million Twitter followers. Here is a link to his article, What's Wrong with West Coast cities?"
Kristof turned his attention to disfunction in Portland and other Oregon cities. It is a top-of-mind issue for Oregonians and candidates for state offices. Portland is going through a rough patch. Kristof led off his article with the story of the beating to death of this kindly-looking 82-year-old retired university professor at a bus stop in downtown Portland.
Kristof noted that the murder rate in Portland was four times that of New York City, that trash is on the sidewalks, that the worst homelessness in America is in West Coast cities including Portland, and that Oregon's school graduation rate was among the worst in the country. He quoted Portland's congressperson, Earl Blumenauer, saying "Portland is broken."
I have written about Portland in prior blog posts. Portland had been the lovely, gracious "Keep Portland Weird" city with parks, food trucks, and a progressive ethic that inspired laughs in the TV program Portlandia. Now there are tents and encampments in the parks and median strips and boarded up buildings from the vandalism of the 2020 rioting. The mood in the city has changed.
I recognize the intractability of the problem of unhoused people. If there were easy solutions they would have been implemented. Tents on sidewalks, people living under plastic sheets, and accumulated garbage change the feel of what had been a gracious city.
But some of the problem with Portland involves the poorly managed rioting in the summer of 2020. The damage from that remains physically in plywood on windows and in closed businesses. The riots damaged the relations between the citizens and the police. They hurt Portland's self-image as a well-managed place. They damaged the reputation of Democrats in 2020 and that damage remains. Night after night voters saw mostly-White anarchist-hooligans dressed in black, acting under cover of George Floyd-related protests, breaking windows and setting fires. Portland became a poster child of uncontrolled disorder in Democratic cities. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, its School Board was the poster child of misplaced priorities, putting their attention on renaming schools.
I wrote a comment attempting to answer Kristof's question, focusing on Democratic reluctance to address disorder. The poor and marginalized have as much need for public safety as do the comfortable. I wrote that I wanted people in public office who would end the excessive moral signaling going on in Portland. Democrats were too afraid of being criticized for being mean, or racist, or racist-adjacent, or not sufficiently anti-racist. Somehow violent anarchists got conflated with peaceful protesters. The net result was a city that was dangerous for people of all races and conditions.
Kristof asked a provocative question. Let me ask readers to comment and add your thoughts. Is there anything wrong with West Coast cities? What needs to change?
The key item missing from this article is that it places all the blame on Antifi - just like Faux News did. But if either of you did a little research you might remember that the brawls and much of the vandalism was because the “Proud Boys” made repeated trips TO Portland from Idaho and Washington to attack the “liberal” protesters. Protesters were carrying the message of Black Lives Matter- so the White Supremacy PB decided they were the perfect target. And Portland thus became ground zero and a microcosm of the anger and division with literally fighting in the streets -
I’m not saying all Antifa members were peaceful protesters- there were definitely those who got carried away and did indeed cause vandalism and havoc- but it would never have exploded into what it became without the PB attacks.
Those same PBoys now being prosecuted for January 6th at our nations capital - did you see any Antifa there?? No, but that didn’t stop the Regressives from lying and trying to say so!? Just like Faux showed Portland engulfed in FAKE flames- the exaggeration and lies continue to be believed- please try harder to encapsulate the entire situation when you want to pour gasoline on a fire that’s already burnt out.