WS Journal article roasts Portland

Taxpayers Association of Oregon
OregonWatchdog.com

Dennis Kneale wrote a scathing critique of Portland as a guest opinion article for the Wall Street Journal with the superb title “How much more ‘progress’ can Portland endure?”

Here is a sample:

“I saw this firsthand during a weeklong visit in November. The city is reeling from a series of growth-killers: high taxes, union contracts, an unaccountable government, surging vagrancy and drug addiction. Walk through downtown and you’ll see a raft of vacant storefronts and empty office buildings riddled with graffiti. Local officials estimate the metropolitan area is losing $1 billion in annual income as high earners flee. In Portland, I drove past an open-air drug market where fentanyl pills are so common that their cost is three for $1. I spotted hundreds of tents and tarps—on sidewalks, at building entrances, in parks, at highway underpasses. Many of these makeshift shelters likely came from the county government …  The city also allows organizations to hand out clean needles, syringes and crack pipes.”

And also …

“Kristin Olson, a longtime Democrat, lawyer and host of the podcast “Rational in Portland,” worked downtown for two decades until she was assaulted last year while walking from her car to her office building. She never returned and moved to new space elsewhere.During the Black Lives Matter riots that ravaged the city in 2020, protesters damaged Multnomah County’s Democratic Party headquarters. Ms. Olson says Portlanders are “left of the Democrat Party, which, as a Democrat, just blows my mind, because to me the Democratic Party is insane. It is progressive insanity, and we’re left of that.”

Read more here.