re: Progressive Portland may lose businesses over public homeless

I have noticed a lot more of downtown Dallas smells like piss since the Dems took over a while back.

Don’t believe me?

Walk a couple of blocks south or east of the west end

I live in a suburb of portland. I go down there to eat every once in a while. Already got my car broken into.

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Whatever the multi-block park is called was absolutely dripping with homeless. One of the days driving through DT on our way to the zoo, they were out with feeding tables. I am not sure, but it looked almost like a city effort to set up food service to cater to the homeless. I equated it to feeding stray cats, and my wife and I both agreed it would reach critical mass at some point and scare off tourists and business completely.

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You were in the area right down by the river, probably near the Burnside bridge. That area has the Portland Mission that feeds, clothes, and provides these people with a place to sleep, when it's too cold to sleep outside. A couple of blocks from the mission, there is an area where they set up grills to cook food for the homeless and pass out clothes - it's right where the China Town sign is. That area is particularly bothersome.

As you can see, it is quite beautiful down there.


Some of these people are batshit crazy and/or drug addicts, but others are just wanderers. Regardless of the reason, they leave trash, harass people, and defecate in the streets. It's a real problem


If you go further away from the river, and get away from the free food and shelter, you won't see many homeless (at least not large groups of them). It is a problem for businesses, though.

Whatever you say about Portland, Seattle is worse. I predict that Portland will clean up it's act, eventually, and at least clear them out of the downtown areas. I harbor no hope that Seattle will do the same.

RC - That link to Google Earth starts out directly across the street from the Portland Mission that I mentioned in my earlier post. If you rotate that shot 180 degrees, you'll see it. That is homeless central.

Those people think they are helping the homeless, but they are really enabling them. They don't expect the homeless people getting services from them to do anything to clean up their lives and become "not homeless".

I was down in Portland last month. It's reached the point that homeless are living on the shoulders of the interstate. I've never seen that before.

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Whatever you say about Portland, Seattle is worse.

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Disagree. The homeless are more concentrated to certain areas in Seattle and easier to avoid.

Get off the 880 in Oakland. It will blow your mind.

The homeless problem is the biggest one facing all the west coast.

I do get a sense that the people of Portland are getting fed up with it. Just as Columbia Sportswear is pulling out, I think that people are growing weary of the constant trashiness and smell of human debris.

There is a small, but very vocal support for the homeless in Portland. Most people put up with it, but as Ronald Reagan once said, "If you want more of something, then subsidize it", and Portland has been subsidizing the homeless. This has led to the problem getting out of control, and I think the city will take measures to clean up the downtown. It will be painful, and you may see some ANTIFA protests, but something needs to be done.

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Get off the 880 in Oakland. It will blow your mind.

The homeless problem is the biggest one facing all the west coast.

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If I were homeless I'd head down to LA or the Bay. It seems like it would be miserable to be homeless in the PNW. If Portland and Seattle weren't so accommodating to them they'd probably be gone in six months.

I just went to Portland at the beginning of the month, and my Uber driver kept warning me about the homeless. I told him that if I can walk around Houston at night they wouldn't intimidate me at all.

Yeah there's tons of them, and they're fairly aggressive.