I live near the Louisa Flowers apartments on Grand & Holladay. This affordable housing project shows in its own short history the problem with airbrushing away criminality in service of woke idealism. Those problems include murder, drug dealing, and random violence. The virtuosos of social work even put insanely uncomfortable benches in front of it to honor the woke hysteria from 2019 that apartment buildings be forced to include resting places for the homeless.
There are low-income workers living there but the more typical resident is someone with a diagnosed disability such as mental illness or maybe a neurological condition of some kind. Once you're in the system, Section 8 housing vouchers are easy to obtain. In truth, there is some intrinsic merit in these diagnoses. Few of us are perfect but the amount of dysfunction among the impoverished is disproportionately high.
The idea that if we simply build enough housing for the dysfunctional all their other problems will self-correct is a perennial delusion on the woke left. The sad truth is that their concentration in certain Portland neighborhoods makes those areas less attractive to the sane and functional. The entire Lloyd District is now threatened to become a huge dumping ground for these "victims". And if there's one thing we have learned about the left's victimology, it's that there is no nobility quite so pure and admirable as a marginalized person of color or gender dysphoria having to live near white racists. But you need more than approved thoughts or even those yard signs you might see in Irvington to compensate. Fortunately, a dispensation is available to "anti-racists", so get Kendi and DiAngelo on your reading list pronto.
The merry wokesters of Portland shall not rest until complete equity has been achieved, either in this lifetime or the next. In the meantime, we oldtimers need to give up our nostalgia for a saner past. If it's Portland's fate to become one hot mess of a once-beautiful city, so be it. Someone has to pay for 1619 so it might as well be us. But the morally superior angels on the woke left still can't explain is who's going to pay the costs of this runaway train to the promised land. Once Portland becomes Oakland, there simply won't be enough rich people left to pay that freight cost.
Well said. We are not allowed to point out these simple, self-evident truths. The idea that piling up crackerboxes in an expensive apartment block will be somehow therapeutic is admitted by the advocates of housing themselves when they talk about having permanent custodians on board to re-educate the inmates.
I'd been overlooking your subtitle. Personally, I left rather than proffer succor.
I'd like to think that I would have helped The South rebuild after The War. Or Detroit after the riots. Or San Francisco after the '06 quake. But, Portland? Portlanders? They fabricated reasons to destroy their fellow citizens, to gut their businesses, and to hollow out their children's education. They went way the hell and gone out in the woods to piss in their own drinking water, figuratively speaking. They then stood smirking with satisfaction in the ruins and called it good.
They? the Portlanders who nourished the hypoxic so that we might have our very own inland dead zone.
If ever the town should get aid or recompense for what it has done to a decent community it will not be from me, it cannot be from me. What they have done to themselves is a transgression out of my league.
We aall have our reasons for the fight-or-flee response. Mine are entirely family-related. I've lost count of the times when Ive said, "If iit wasn't for (fill in the blanks) I'd have left long ago.
Problem is, if I'm stuck somewhere because of people I love, why not extend that to people beyond our little campfire? Not everyone in PDX is a raving lunatic--they jusst don't shout as loud.
At some point--and soon--the places where a sane person can flee to will be gone. (Check the history of the USSR).
"Thar she blows!"
I live near the Louisa Flowers apartments on Grand & Holladay. This affordable housing project shows in its own short history the problem with airbrushing away criminality in service of woke idealism. Those problems include murder, drug dealing, and random violence. The virtuosos of social work even put insanely uncomfortable benches in front of it to honor the woke hysteria from 2019 that apartment buildings be forced to include resting places for the homeless.
There are low-income workers living there but the more typical resident is someone with a diagnosed disability such as mental illness or maybe a neurological condition of some kind. Once you're in the system, Section 8 housing vouchers are easy to obtain. In truth, there is some intrinsic merit in these diagnoses. Few of us are perfect but the amount of dysfunction among the impoverished is disproportionately high.
The idea that if we simply build enough housing for the dysfunctional all their other problems will self-correct is a perennial delusion on the woke left. The sad truth is that their concentration in certain Portland neighborhoods makes those areas less attractive to the sane and functional. The entire Lloyd District is now threatened to become a huge dumping ground for these "victims". And if there's one thing we have learned about the left's victimology, it's that there is no nobility quite so pure and admirable as a marginalized person of color or gender dysphoria having to live near white racists. But you need more than approved thoughts or even those yard signs you might see in Irvington to compensate. Fortunately, a dispensation is available to "anti-racists", so get Kendi and DiAngelo on your reading list pronto.
The merry wokesters of Portland shall not rest until complete equity has been achieved, either in this lifetime or the next. In the meantime, we oldtimers need to give up our nostalgia for a saner past. If it's Portland's fate to become one hot mess of a once-beautiful city, so be it. Someone has to pay for 1619 so it might as well be us. But the morally superior angels on the woke left still can't explain is who's going to pay the costs of this runaway train to the promised land. Once Portland becomes Oakland, there simply won't be enough rich people left to pay that freight cost.
Well said. We are not allowed to point out these simple, self-evident truths. The idea that piling up crackerboxes in an expensive apartment block will be somehow therapeutic is admitted by the advocates of housing themselves when they talk about having permanent custodians on board to re-educate the inmates.
Let's save a great American city.
I'd been overlooking your subtitle. Personally, I left rather than proffer succor.
I'd like to think that I would have helped The South rebuild after The War. Or Detroit after the riots. Or San Francisco after the '06 quake. But, Portland? Portlanders? They fabricated reasons to destroy their fellow citizens, to gut their businesses, and to hollow out their children's education. They went way the hell and gone out in the woods to piss in their own drinking water, figuratively speaking. They then stood smirking with satisfaction in the ruins and called it good.
They? the Portlanders who nourished the hypoxic so that we might have our very own inland dead zone.
If ever the town should get aid or recompense for what it has done to a decent community it will not be from me, it cannot be from me. What they have done to themselves is a transgression out of my league.
We aall have our reasons for the fight-or-flee response. Mine are entirely family-related. I've lost count of the times when Ive said, "If iit wasn't for (fill in the blanks) I'd have left long ago.
Problem is, if I'm stuck somewhere because of people I love, why not extend that to people beyond our little campfire? Not everyone in PDX is a raving lunatic--they jusst don't shout as loud.
At some point--and soon--the places where a sane person can flee to will be gone. (Check the history of the USSR).
A ton of liberals are covert racists. They will support BLM with their hashtags and black boxes but will destroy your home equity.