Mendacities and mediocracy; Thoughts on the Wimp State

Sure, folks; write your representative. Good luck with that.

Boo-Hoo-Hoo…

The ‘stacks are humming with bitching about that “Titanic Tax” transportation measure, heading for your wallet like a bunker-buster. Every Instagram pundit is screaming about the ripoff, playing videos of machine hacks behaving like, well…machine hacks. Dudgeons are in high gear. We’re all supposed to write little notes to the guys ‘n’ gals with their hands already deep in our pockets. Only saps think they’ll listen—since the apparatchiks know better than we do that memories are short.

We really shouldn't be surprised that a political machine behaves like...a political machine. It has unlimited power to do whatever it (and its clients) damn well want. Usually the gloves don't come off, but when it's necessary, you'll get a knuckle sandwich just to remind you that you don't count, so shaddup!

Machines in our democratic republic are as old as the republic. Back then, the founders believed that the US was above “faction,” but the machines formed up even before the sainted President Washington went back to his slaves and crops. They’ve never disappeared. That’s because, once embedded, they are almost impossible to dislodge, since they control the justice system and the voting mechanisms and the machinery of wealth-extraction and redistribution.¹

Sometimes, they're so linked to a dominant person (Daley/Chicago) that reform is possible when the owner dies. But the Oregon machine is far more supple and dangerous—to say GuvTina is the Big Boss is ludicrous. Instead, it runs on mutual dependencies and clear career paths. It's now two generations old and very, very healthy. Want a “career”² in politics? There’s only one path available, which is why only pols with huge personal fortunes (say, the Roosevelts)(or Musk)(or Soros) have any hope of nudging the foundation-stones. The problem is that most people who have made the Big Bucks are used to being surrounded by yes-people and don’t have the patience to play the long game. They get bored—the heart of any machine’s basic defense strategy.

Meanwhile, the machine neatly adapts and incorporates new players: ethnicity³ is the flavor ‘o’ the decade now that the feminists and gays have been seamlessly incorporated. This is different than race-politics, which tends to create block-captains who get a cut of the freebies, which are really devices to maintain dependency. In the case of Oregon blacks, this has been a spectacular success.

You can adapt like the typical Portlander, taking refuge in sour beer, pot, marching around with silly signage, tattoos, and cute little overpriced restaurants. It’s a “pay no attention” kind of lifestyle, which is why newcomers with man-buns and nose-rings came out here and are gradually displacing the oldsters. When mortgage rates come down, look out below! The rush to the exits (and a place where it’s not 56-degrees on June 21st) will make the current trickle look like a spring shower. Or more like yesterday’s deluge.

If you live out there where the state is painfully beautiful (but, please! for the love of god, don’t cut down any trees!), you don’t count, and you’re not going to have dollars that you might put to some productive—maybe even entrepreneurial—end. It would have been your choice, since dollars are the basis of private property, but the machine really doesn’t like concepts like “choice.” People who start thinking that way are tougher to control (the old gloves-on/gloves-off thingy).

Those dollars will be taken away from you because the kind of people who start things—the “break things and move fast” dudes—are anathema to the machine, which runs on predictability, hierarchy, and “wait your turnism.”⁴

You really have to admire the “write your representatives” crowd; they’re part of what makes life charming, on the margins. But, please remember, all of those people marching around on the streets in Portland a couple of weeks ago⁵—a one-shot demo favored by great weather—were “protesting” the wrong target, as usual. “No Kings?” We’ve got a super-majority of ‘em. Right down there in Salem.

You’ll never see a march about that.

One More Thing…

In our two-parter on the gift of $8.5-million dumped on black people deprived of their “integenerational wealth”—courtesy of the city’s biggest block-captain stampeding the 11 other 25-percenters on council—we forgot to mention one of the most fascinating stats discovered as we turned over the rocks.

Despite the now-universal proclamation that sainted Albina was the very beating heart of the city’s black community, one of the official reports on the Emanuel Project had this to say…

Of the family and individual households displaced who owned homes, the majority, 71%, were black households.

…and noted that, overall…

Of the 171 households displaced, 74% of these were black…

…so a quarter of the victims were…well, we dare not say it.

Think their vaguely-related descendants will ever get paid?

Oxymoronic Headline ‘o’ the Week

As WillyWeek reported with a straight face…

…in her letter to Vega Pederson, Kotek outlined a trend she saw as “unsustainable” in the county. Multnomah County’s high income earners shoulder the second-highest income tax rate nationwide, at 13.9%, she wrote. She added that the Preschool for All tax seemed to be discouraging these top earners from calling Portland—and Multnomah County—home.

…this from the governor who will sign the “Titanic Tax” bill.

Once again proving our legacy media has trouble with irony.

Nice to Know We’re Not Alone…

Out on the East Coast, there’s a big-deal election coming up in New York City…

The city that never sleeps fell for the rank choice voting scheme a few years ago and—in a weird echo of our first tussle with that strange way of voting—opponents of ex-Guv Cuomo, currently trying to pull the political stake out of his heart, are urging supporters of the socialist candidate for mayor…

Our now-forgotten mayoral candidate Rene Gonzalez should sue for copyright infringement.

Trans Magic!

Here’s a little item from the Portland Business⁶ Journal…

…further evidence that waving the magic wand of “affordability,” can get a developer’s⁷ blood pounding. Three “market rate” apartment buildings—no doubt as architecturally outstanding as all of the other file-cabinet piles around town—will become cheaper, we suppose, and will also transfer risk, tax exposure, and financing from private hands to…guess who?

You.

Here’s how the Journal explained the hustle…

The Goose Hollow Lofts, Paramount Apartments and Acqua Apartments were selected through the Portland Housing Bureau’s Fall 2024 Rapid Acquisition Request for Proposals.

The RFP followed the passage of Measure 26-199, which authorized Metro to issue up to $652.8 million in general obligation bonds for affordable housing development or acquisition.

In non-developerspeak, this means…

• They’ll be built using bond money, paid back by your property taxes…

• …that will fatten the pockets of the very people our local socialists pretend to hate…

• …and the apartment owners won’t be paying property taxes since they’re “nonprofits,” including our old friends at Albina Vision Trust and Home Forward, plus another nonprofit that will—we’re not making this up, “…serve housing-insecure post-secondary students and their families…

• …which means that the city’s tapayers—you—will be losing $176,000 yearly for Goose Hollow Lofts; $64,436 for the Paramount; and $250,638 for the Acqua…

• …and, in the case of the Vision Trust, new tenants who have “generational” ties to various Albina urban renewal projects will be moved to the head of the line (we’re betting that the unmentionable 25-percent won’t make the cut)…

• …which raises the question: how about current tenants—will they be moved out to make room for the favored officially poor?…

• …and, irony of ironies, the Vision Trust is getting a big chunk ‘o’ change to enlarge its real estate portfolio from…wait for it!—the Interstate Corridor Urban Renewal Plan. Talk about a deal with the devil.

We’ll bet that none of the recipients of city council’s $8.5-million payoff (at $360,000 per) will be trolling for a rent deal.

The Real Question…

It’s a rule of political physics that progressives tend to march forward with moral momentum without any guardrails or limits. And so we are in the midst of an “affordability” fad that will plunk down a possibly unlimited number of neo-Stalinist apartment piles (we dare not call it “public housing,” a term that ran aground on the reality of piling up poor people in soulless high rises), with early returns looking a little iffy…

…reported back in 2023 in WillyWeek; which prompted a report from the Cascade Institute, which we reprinted here…and since then, if you root around in the search engines, not much has changed. The boom goes on. The officially poor tend to act out—as a wise person once said, “They’re poor for a reason.”

Which leads to yet another question: just how many officially poor are out there, yearning for apartments built for top dollar by big multinational corporations (here’s lookin’ at ya, Related Northwest) before the city runs out of clients? Or—as with Measure 110—will the el-cheapo housing put out a nationwide siren-call for more financially deficient people to hit the road?

Fact is, building actual “market rate” housing is in one of the real estate industry’s periodic browses. Businesses are leaving, the suburbs are sucking up the higher-paid types, and Idaho beckons. Heard about any go-go entrepreneurial businesses started locally that aren’t on the public teat?

And what about the taxpaying property owners in the lower-end of the rental market? They’re now in competition with the state. Clearly, unleashing that flood of bond money (talk about income-redistribution!) was a blunt attempt to distort that sector of the market.

Anyone who follows the real estate/development game knows that it’s a boom-bust business, prone to overbuilding (think downtown’s Block 216 ghost highrise full of condos no one wants), wishful thinking, and the vagaries of the mortgage market. Portland is, by any measure, in a bust phase…

…but the affordable game is totally different. No nosy banks. No sudden shifts in the interest rate for bridge loans. No bridge loans…and no uncertainty. Instead, naive (and politically aware) bureaucrats, beholden to approximately no one, are shoveling out the money, which is then taken off the tax rolls, with “ownership” going to nonprofits that are, at best, opaque money launderers.

It’s a great scam.

Too bad it involves real people. And the look, feel, and fabric of what used to be a great American city.

1. The people doing the extraction always like to tell us that the commies would be worse…unless they’re in the nascent socialist machine here in Portland.

2. Another idea the founders thought was ludicrous.

3. So many 1st generation Vietnamese and Somalis who have forgotten why their parents started new lives here in the US.

4. Kinda like universities.

5. …which brought the umbrella people out again, thus giving our new mayor a chance to look just as wimpy as the old one.

6. Golly! Another oxymoron.

7. In honor of long-silent blogger Bojack, they’re “weasels.”