It’s hard to watch isn’t it…The drugs, the crime, the things we loved about going downtown. The city we all love disappearing. How brave do you have to be to ride MAX anymore. Go out at night. We all see the drug deals every day. People huddled, smoking pipes, selling drugs. I’m beginning to feel like Travis Bickel, hoping that “Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets”
The every day joy for the ordinary citizens is just chipped away and chipped away by the drug addicted, criminal minded, thieves, thugs and felons destroying our neighborhood. Thanks city, you're awesome.
It is mind boggling and infuriating that Portland has approx 6,750 individuals who are dominating how spending, zoning, taxing, and law enforcement is done, how the commons are being destroyed, and how the overall quality of life is for the other 700,000 plus individuals.
Yes, it’s pathetic that the Pearl now has to be further and further “drug proofed”, meaning our common areas that we tax-paying residents fund, have the amenities stripped away so they aren’t used criminally or destroyed over and over again. This includes benches, parks, drinking fountains, bike racks, newspaper receptacles, even the electricity that lights the trees in winter.
This doesn’t even touch on the inherent safety and sanitation problems that we now deal with daily just trying to live in our own neighborhood. Does anyone else hear people screaming EVERY night now and randomly throughout the day? We’ve somehow just accepted that we must try to function within what amounts to an open air asylum at this point. And we get to pay top tax dollar to do it!
Is everyone tired enough of it yet to vote all the current enabling grifters out of their government positions?
The bench is a symbol, but the deeper problem lies beneath it. Cities have always faced disorder. What feels different now is the possibility that elements within the governing and nonprofit apparatus tolerate this level of degradation because it aligns with their ideological commitments.
By ideology, this means a governing mindset that treats enforcement as inherently suspect and visible disorder as morally secondary to larger structural injustices. In recent years, Portland has leaned heavily into a harm-reduction and decriminalization framework. In theory, this approach seeks to reduce incarceration, avoid criminalizing addiction, and acknowledge systemic causes of poverty. Those are legitimate concerns for some citizens.
In practice, however, that mindset can evolve into a reluctance to impose boundaries in public space. When minimizing coercion becomes the overriding value, ordinary civic norms — such as keeping sidewalks passable or a bench usable — cease to be actively defended. Disorder is reframed as an unfortunate but tolerable byproduct of compassion.
An institutional ecosystem reinforces this orientation. Many NGOs are structured around outreach, housing navigation, and harm reduction; restoring order in public space is not their mandate, and some explicitly resist enforcement as counterproductive or unjust. Bureaucracies often default to process, pilot programs, and equity language rather than decisive action. Elected officials operate within and respond to that framework.
The result is not necessarily bad faith, but a hierarchy of values in which minimizing state force ranks above maintaining visible civic order. For residents who depend on shared public spaces, that hierarchy can feel inverted.
There is also a transparency problem. Many of the policies and programmatic choices that shape this environment — de-emphasis of enforcement, contracting models for services, siting decisions, prioritization frameworks — are developed within bureaucratic and nonprofit ecosystems that most residents neither see nor meaningfully influence. The language surrounding them is often abstract and process-heavy. The practical consequences, however, are concrete and immediate for the neighborhoods that absorb them.
It is difficult to imagine that a clear majority of Portlanders would affirmatively vote for a city in which parks are unreliable, sidewalks function as encampments, basic street furniture cannot survive, and everyday public order is treated as negotiable. Yet that is the lived reality in many areas. The disconnect between policy formulation and lived experience creates the suspicion that widespread decay is not merely a failure of capacity, but the predictable outcome of decisions made without broad democratic consent.
The issue is not compassion versus cruelty. It is whether a city regards public order as a public good worth defending — and whether officials are willing to act on that belief.
Dismantling the cultural rot within the bureaucracy here in Portland, which you write so well about, is at the heart of Portlands future identity if it is to have one. It is dystopian now. Socialist now. These people burning the benches are just unfortunate victims of capitalism in their minds, a tool, to be used for a while, until they too are thrown under the bus on the way to utopia. Perhaps the best strategy is to hollow and shout and write and demand that the wooden bench be rebuilt immediately. Fight for a symbol of what is but a small example of a much larger social problem here. REBUILD THE WOODEN BENCH!!!
Check out that picture! Where are the pedestrians? The streets are owned by people who don't drive. If the nice people really want to reclaim their neighborhoods they're going to have to walk in them. All the time. We need an urban life in which pedestrians rule, rather than being something exotic and weird. Perish the thought of not taking your car to go a few blocks...
Yet one has to feel safe to walk in them, in their neighborhoods. My wife and I debated about taking TriMet to the Portland Auto Show, we decided to split the difference, not feeling safe to ride TriMet, and decided walk to the Portland Auto Show. We parked approx one mile from the Convention Center and proceeded to walk past Holladay Park and down NE Holladay. We came across people huddled in alcoves using drugs and groups of homeless that made it difficult to walk through. I quickly started to rue my decision, lamenting how I had put my wife into this position. Afterwards, we decided to walk to Burgerville to eat. There was a woman in there who was obviously responding to internal stimuli, and became combative when others refused her offers of a honey packet. We got up and left our meals there. The walk back was the same picture. It was at this moment that I questioned my own sanity, why am I tolerating living in this city, where as others have said, has elected ‘leaders’ who promote ideology that fosters this environment? When one is thinking they need to be carrying a gun to safely navigate their city, you know the city has lost its way.
Some people are unable to walk to their destination. And if they need a wheel chair feel vulnerable with street activity. And don't get me started on bicycle theft. Demonizing cars, which continue to be stolen and vandalized, is not the source of this problem.
Respectfully, what are you even talking about? The Pearl (even in its current gross state of degredation) probably has more pedestrian traffic than 90% of the city. It was literally designed to be walkable and that was why the majority of us chose to live there in the first place. Unfortunately, I no longer feel safe walking to places even a few blocks from where I live, which is the point being made here. Do you even live in the neighborhood? If you did, you would know that drug dealers and addicts have zero problem peddling and doing drugs mere feet away from people drinking coffee at tables outside Sisters and people just generally trying to go about their day - they’ve been so emboldened by our pathetic “leaders” here who choose them every time over law abiding, tax paying citizens. You sound like part of the problem.
Take a look around you. Where are the pedestrians who aren't the poors? Since the nice people of Portland don't feel safe outside of their cars, they're not going to be the ones walking anywhere. The drugs! The needles! The tents! The filth! The bla-bla-bla. And don't talk about the bus. The bus! Who wants to ride the shame train with the poors? And no, people in wheelchairs or on bikes or even those very brave Seniors who can't afford an Uber won't save us. Cities with pedestrian cultures -- or even just parts of cities where people are out on foot -- have plenty of other problems, as cities always have, but not ones like this. I guess the solution for Portland is to have more police... but even they don't want to get out of their cars! When's the last time you saw a cop "walking a beat" like they used to do in olden times?
I want to try and understand your position. So are you saying we are the perpetrators in some way because we don’t walk the neighborhood streets? And are you saying that if we walked en mass, the homeless problem would go away? If we all as a mass of walking humanity, confront the open drug users, and mentally ill people in some way? What would that look like? Beating them up? Shooting them? And are you saying that we are the problem because we have wealth and won’t interact with the unwashed masses?
I recently left the Schnitz after the Symphony, walking with a group of well heeled patrons. Probably several thousand people. Yet right across the street was several groups of people openly smoking drugs off of tin foil and blowing the smoke towards the walking masses. I sure wanted to grab a bunch of people and do street justice. Yet where does law and order and the justice system fit in here?
Yes. just leaving the Symphony and headed for their cars. That's not what I think of pedestrians in a neighborhood. The unwashed masses aren't stupid -- they can tell the difference.
Yet you don’t answer my questions. And being a pedestrian is walking. Is it car ownership that has you in a tizzy? So the unwashed masses would be able to sniff out the car keys in the pockets of the pedestrians who may have taken mass transit vs those who choose to drive? And because the unwashed masses don’t have cars or use cars, it justifies their criminal and destructive behaviors? You don’t make much sense.
Yes, now police don't walk their beat, individual businesses hire private security. Back then there were laws against public drunk, vagrancy, loitering, spitting on the sidewalk. Maybe we need to reinstate the old laws as there is general lawlessness.
It's a democracy. For some reason Portlanders far too often vote for leaders who permit these things to happen. It's not an Act of God. It's the result of bad leaders, bad policies and the non-profits that appear to have a stranglehold on local policies. We finally have a DA that gets it, but many local judges are a problem, the county chair aids and abets this type of thing every day she goes to work and the new form of city government gives added power to people who are responsible for this kind of thing. It will be a long struggle to improve the situation.
I agree with you 100%. Serving on the PDNA Livability and Safety Committee as well as the PDNA Board until 2020, entailing countless interactions with mostly City but also some County staff members convinced me that there is little or no resolve by elected officials to actually demonstrate results. It seems like it is all about getting elected and then doing relatively little to address the obvious and visible issues well described in daily NW Examiner stories. That is why my wife and I decided to exit the Pearl in 2023, suffering a gigantic loss in the sale of our condo in the Pearl, and moving to Clackamas County where county and city governments are held accountable by voters on all aspects of livability and safety. I hate to say it, but the situation in the Pearl shows no signs of improving year after year after year. Same old same old prevails.
Respectfully... (when people say that, they mean just the opposite) I still go to the Pearl, although not so much anymore -- since, thanks to Amazon.com, so few businesses are left. Yes, there used to be pedestrian traffic and the Pearl was designed with that in mind, but not these days. And the Poors of the Pearl have been emboldened, not by the City government, but by the "pathetic" law-abiding, tax-paying citizens and other keyboard warriors who are obviously scared to death of them.
You’re correct, I did mean the opposite but can’t write what I really feel like saying to you on a public forum. It’s very hard to read a comment so completely off base by someone who obviously doesn’t even live in the Pearl and doesn’t have any idea what’s going on. The fact that you think businesses have vacated because of Amazon and not the unrelenting crime, filth, and open drug usage that has darkened their doors increasingly for the last 6 years (at least), further cements your tenuous grasp of reality. The fact that you don’t visit the neighborhood as much because “all the stores are gone” while chastising the people who LIVE HERE for not wanting to wade through drug addled criminals to grocery shop, is the height of cluelessness.
The silver lining, I guess, is that you aren’t in our neighborhood as much.
I moved to the Pearl from NY in 2024 because I wanted to be able to ‘walk everywhere’, and I can indeed -with fear and trepidation and being screamed at by derelicts and ccrrrazies who think you glance at them the wrong way before they bend over in their fentanyl stupor, in front of the parking garage of your building, so now your car is definitely not enabling you to drive out of this hell hole.
I have no idea how you can come up with so much nonsense in your comments Mr. Magnus, you have no idea what you’re talking about.
My concern is that this is exactly what the Peacock/DSA gang wants. They want the current form of governance to fail, so that they can install/justify their socialist agenda. They care nothing about the business community, they are anti police, and view home ownership as a major part of the problem. They only listen to the DSA community.
I’ve seen the city lose a lot of public benches over the last four years. Removing them is often a first choice in dealing with drug issues. It would be nice if we didn’t cede public amenities instead of addressing misbehavior.
It’s hard to watch isn’t it…The drugs, the crime, the things we loved about going downtown. The city we all love disappearing. How brave do you have to be to ride MAX anymore. Go out at night. We all see the drug deals every day. People huddled, smoking pipes, selling drugs. I’m beginning to feel like Travis Bickel, hoping that “Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets”
Yep, Travis Bickel or the Falling Down guy. How much more can decent people take?
The every day joy for the ordinary citizens is just chipped away and chipped away by the drug addicted, criminal minded, thieves, thugs and felons destroying our neighborhood. Thanks city, you're awesome.
It is mind boggling and infuriating that Portland has approx 6,750 individuals who are dominating how spending, zoning, taxing, and law enforcement is done, how the commons are being destroyed, and how the overall quality of life is for the other 700,000 plus individuals.
Yes! Their needs are prioritized, while the needs of decent, taxpaying, working citizens are ignored. I would leave if I could.
Yes, it’s pathetic that the Pearl now has to be further and further “drug proofed”, meaning our common areas that we tax-paying residents fund, have the amenities stripped away so they aren’t used criminally or destroyed over and over again. This includes benches, parks, drinking fountains, bike racks, newspaper receptacles, even the electricity that lights the trees in winter.
This doesn’t even touch on the inherent safety and sanitation problems that we now deal with daily just trying to live in our own neighborhood. Does anyone else hear people screaming EVERY night now and randomly throughout the day? We’ve somehow just accepted that we must try to function within what amounts to an open air asylum at this point. And we get to pay top tax dollar to do it!
Is everyone tired enough of it yet to vote all the current enabling grifters out of their government positions?
Yes, I hear the crazy addicts every day or every night. We need to dismantle the new City Council. Ranked voting stinks.
The bench is a symbol, but the deeper problem lies beneath it. Cities have always faced disorder. What feels different now is the possibility that elements within the governing and nonprofit apparatus tolerate this level of degradation because it aligns with their ideological commitments.
By ideology, this means a governing mindset that treats enforcement as inherently suspect and visible disorder as morally secondary to larger structural injustices. In recent years, Portland has leaned heavily into a harm-reduction and decriminalization framework. In theory, this approach seeks to reduce incarceration, avoid criminalizing addiction, and acknowledge systemic causes of poverty. Those are legitimate concerns for some citizens.
In practice, however, that mindset can evolve into a reluctance to impose boundaries in public space. When minimizing coercion becomes the overriding value, ordinary civic norms — such as keeping sidewalks passable or a bench usable — cease to be actively defended. Disorder is reframed as an unfortunate but tolerable byproduct of compassion.
An institutional ecosystem reinforces this orientation. Many NGOs are structured around outreach, housing navigation, and harm reduction; restoring order in public space is not their mandate, and some explicitly resist enforcement as counterproductive or unjust. Bureaucracies often default to process, pilot programs, and equity language rather than decisive action. Elected officials operate within and respond to that framework.
The result is not necessarily bad faith, but a hierarchy of values in which minimizing state force ranks above maintaining visible civic order. For residents who depend on shared public spaces, that hierarchy can feel inverted.
There is also a transparency problem. Many of the policies and programmatic choices that shape this environment — de-emphasis of enforcement, contracting models for services, siting decisions, prioritization frameworks — are developed within bureaucratic and nonprofit ecosystems that most residents neither see nor meaningfully influence. The language surrounding them is often abstract and process-heavy. The practical consequences, however, are concrete and immediate for the neighborhoods that absorb them.
It is difficult to imagine that a clear majority of Portlanders would affirmatively vote for a city in which parks are unreliable, sidewalks function as encampments, basic street furniture cannot survive, and everyday public order is treated as negotiable. Yet that is the lived reality in many areas. The disconnect between policy formulation and lived experience creates the suspicion that widespread decay is not merely a failure of capacity, but the predictable outcome of decisions made without broad democratic consent.
The issue is not compassion versus cruelty. It is whether a city regards public order as a public good worth defending — and whether officials are willing to act on that belief.
Dismantling the cultural rot within the bureaucracy here in Portland, which you write so well about, is at the heart of Portlands future identity if it is to have one. It is dystopian now. Socialist now. These people burning the benches are just unfortunate victims of capitalism in their minds, a tool, to be used for a while, until they too are thrown under the bus on the way to utopia. Perhaps the best strategy is to hollow and shout and write and demand that the wooden bench be rebuilt immediately. Fight for a symbol of what is but a small example of a much larger social problem here. REBUILD THE WOODEN BENCH!!!
Check out that picture! Where are the pedestrians? The streets are owned by people who don't drive. If the nice people really want to reclaim their neighborhoods they're going to have to walk in them. All the time. We need an urban life in which pedestrians rule, rather than being something exotic and weird. Perish the thought of not taking your car to go a few blocks...
Yet one has to feel safe to walk in them, in their neighborhoods. My wife and I debated about taking TriMet to the Portland Auto Show, we decided to split the difference, not feeling safe to ride TriMet, and decided walk to the Portland Auto Show. We parked approx one mile from the Convention Center and proceeded to walk past Holladay Park and down NE Holladay. We came across people huddled in alcoves using drugs and groups of homeless that made it difficult to walk through. I quickly started to rue my decision, lamenting how I had put my wife into this position. Afterwards, we decided to walk to Burgerville to eat. There was a woman in there who was obviously responding to internal stimuli, and became combative when others refused her offers of a honey packet. We got up and left our meals there. The walk back was the same picture. It was at this moment that I questioned my own sanity, why am I tolerating living in this city, where as others have said, has elected ‘leaders’ who promote ideology that fosters this environment? When one is thinking they need to be carrying a gun to safely navigate their city, you know the city has lost its way.
Some people are unable to walk to their destination. And if they need a wheel chair feel vulnerable with street activity. And don't get me started on bicycle theft. Demonizing cars, which continue to be stolen and vandalized, is not the source of this problem.
Respectfully, what are you even talking about? The Pearl (even in its current gross state of degredation) probably has more pedestrian traffic than 90% of the city. It was literally designed to be walkable and that was why the majority of us chose to live there in the first place. Unfortunately, I no longer feel safe walking to places even a few blocks from where I live, which is the point being made here. Do you even live in the neighborhood? If you did, you would know that drug dealers and addicts have zero problem peddling and doing drugs mere feet away from people drinking coffee at tables outside Sisters and people just generally trying to go about their day - they’ve been so emboldened by our pathetic “leaders” here who choose them every time over law abiding, tax paying citizens. You sound like part of the problem.
And don't forget the human and dog feces...
We do! Most of us who live here do not have cars.
Take a look around you. Where are the pedestrians who aren't the poors? Since the nice people of Portland don't feel safe outside of their cars, they're not going to be the ones walking anywhere. The drugs! The needles! The tents! The filth! The bla-bla-bla. And don't talk about the bus. The bus! Who wants to ride the shame train with the poors? And no, people in wheelchairs or on bikes or even those very brave Seniors who can't afford an Uber won't save us. Cities with pedestrian cultures -- or even just parts of cities where people are out on foot -- have plenty of other problems, as cities always have, but not ones like this. I guess the solution for Portland is to have more police... but even they don't want to get out of their cars! When's the last time you saw a cop "walking a beat" like they used to do in olden times?
I want to try and understand your position. So are you saying we are the perpetrators in some way because we don’t walk the neighborhood streets? And are you saying that if we walked en mass, the homeless problem would go away? If we all as a mass of walking humanity, confront the open drug users, and mentally ill people in some way? What would that look like? Beating them up? Shooting them? And are you saying that we are the problem because we have wealth and won’t interact with the unwashed masses?
I recently left the Schnitz after the Symphony, walking with a group of well heeled patrons. Probably several thousand people. Yet right across the street was several groups of people openly smoking drugs off of tin foil and blowing the smoke towards the walking masses. I sure wanted to grab a bunch of people and do street justice. Yet where does law and order and the justice system fit in here?
Yes. just leaving the Symphony and headed for their cars. That's not what I think of pedestrians in a neighborhood. The unwashed masses aren't stupid -- they can tell the difference.
Yet you don’t answer my questions. And being a pedestrian is walking. Is it car ownership that has you in a tizzy? So the unwashed masses would be able to sniff out the car keys in the pockets of the pedestrians who may have taken mass transit vs those who choose to drive? And because the unwashed masses don’t have cars or use cars, it justifies their criminal and destructive behaviors? You don’t make much sense.
Yes, now police don't walk their beat, individual businesses hire private security. Back then there were laws against public drunk, vagrancy, loitering, spitting on the sidewalk. Maybe we need to reinstate the old laws as there is general lawlessness.
I guess the solution for Portland and the state of Oregon will be a Republican mayor and governor.
It's a democracy. For some reason Portlanders far too often vote for leaders who permit these things to happen. It's not an Act of God. It's the result of bad leaders, bad policies and the non-profits that appear to have a stranglehold on local policies. We finally have a DA that gets it, but many local judges are a problem, the county chair aids and abets this type of thing every day she goes to work and the new form of city government gives added power to people who are responsible for this kind of thing. It will be a long struggle to improve the situation.
I agree with you 100%. Serving on the PDNA Livability and Safety Committee as well as the PDNA Board until 2020, entailing countless interactions with mostly City but also some County staff members convinced me that there is little or no resolve by elected officials to actually demonstrate results. It seems like it is all about getting elected and then doing relatively little to address the obvious and visible issues well described in daily NW Examiner stories. That is why my wife and I decided to exit the Pearl in 2023, suffering a gigantic loss in the sale of our condo in the Pearl, and moving to Clackamas County where county and city governments are held accountable by voters on all aspects of livability and safety. I hate to say it, but the situation in the Pearl shows no signs of improving year after year after year. Same old same old prevails.
It’s mind-boggling how so few people can do so much damage to a once-great city without any repercussions.
Respectfully... (when people say that, they mean just the opposite) I still go to the Pearl, although not so much anymore -- since, thanks to Amazon.com, so few businesses are left. Yes, there used to be pedestrian traffic and the Pearl was designed with that in mind, but not these days. And the Poors of the Pearl have been emboldened, not by the City government, but by the "pathetic" law-abiding, tax-paying citizens and other keyboard warriors who are obviously scared to death of them.
You’re correct, I did mean the opposite but can’t write what I really feel like saying to you on a public forum. It’s very hard to read a comment so completely off base by someone who obviously doesn’t even live in the Pearl and doesn’t have any idea what’s going on. The fact that you think businesses have vacated because of Amazon and not the unrelenting crime, filth, and open drug usage that has darkened their doors increasingly for the last 6 years (at least), further cements your tenuous grasp of reality. The fact that you don’t visit the neighborhood as much because “all the stores are gone” while chastising the people who LIVE HERE for not wanting to wade through drug addled criminals to grocery shop, is the height of cluelessness.
The silver lining, I guess, is that you aren’t in our neighborhood as much.
I moved to the Pearl from NY in 2024 because I wanted to be able to ‘walk everywhere’, and I can indeed -with fear and trepidation and being screamed at by derelicts and ccrrrazies who think you glance at them the wrong way before they bend over in their fentanyl stupor, in front of the parking garage of your building, so now your car is definitely not enabling you to drive out of this hell hole.
I have no idea how you can come up with so much nonsense in your comments Mr. Magnus, you have no idea what you’re talking about.
How very sad.
LOL Well written! This is why we cannot have nice things, right?
Loitering, vagrancy, public drunk/intoxication used to be jailable offenses. SMH.
Leadership is weak. This is sad. When will someone in authority say, enough is enough. We have to protect this city. It is our land.
As the property values erode, and the tax base declines, eventually the local governments will run out of other people's money to spend.
My concern is that this is exactly what the Peacock/DSA gang wants. They want the current form of governance to fail, so that they can install/justify their socialist agenda. They care nothing about the business community, they are anti police, and view home ownership as a major part of the problem. They only listen to the DSA community.
I’ve seen the city lose a lot of public benches over the last four years. Removing them is often a first choice in dealing with drug issues. It would be nice if we didn’t cede public amenities instead of addressing misbehavior.