Portland Boarded Up, For Lease
November 3rd, 2024I wonder which banks have the most of this slop on their books?
Via: Metal Leo:
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I wonder which banks have the most of this slop on their books?
Via: Metal Leo:
Holy crap! Having lived in Portland from late 2007 through early 2022, this is something to see. I got there when the city was still affordable, coming out of a depression a lot like this…but you could get a room for 300 (I landed in a nice spot for 450 a month plus utilities).
Over the course of those 15 years, the changes were amazing. The first 5 or 6 years were great, but then slowly all that zero interest QE bullshit money began to do its magic. It was really sad to watch as really cool businesses were driven out by yuppie/tech bullshit artists. In 2007, plenty of counter-culture weirdos, but by the mid teens it was tech-bro programmers writing code for “self driving cars”, be still my beating heart.
There used to be an amazing bookshop across the street from Powell’s called ‘Countermedia Books’. All the oddball stuff you could want. John Water called it the coolest bookshop in America. Tiny two rooms, stuffed to the gills. Then the landlord raised the rent and the backroom went. Then he raised it again, and the entire shop had to go, to be replaced by a yuppie clothes boutique. Be still my, etc.
THAT yuppie nothing shop was gone in a year, because who needs it when there are so many others? The business that replaced that is probably gone now too. But Countermedia could have held on, I’m sure of that, he’d seen a lot worse.
On Alberta Ave. there was a Blues bar / fish and chips place, (one writer described it as “The best fish and chips in america”. Maybe, maybe not, but certainly the best I’ve ever had, anywhere. The guy who ran it lived in a VW van for years to save the money to start it. But didn’t make enough to buy the building. You know the story: rent gets raised, he moves out, shitty generic Italian restaurant replaces him, I think they were out of business last I checked. He’s still going though, runs a food cart, and fish n chips are as good as ever.
Hail Mary, a quirky Goddess shop on Killingsworth, driven out because the fancy restaurant beside her wanted her space for a spillover room for ‘fine diners’. She’d been there when kids were gang-banging, kids up the road from where I lived used to flash Uzis (before I got there, happily). She’s done a lot of work putting in flower beds to make the intersection appealing for visitors. But fuck her, right? And the shit business that drove her out? You guessed it. Gone in 6 months (this, around 2018 or 2019, this has been going on for a while).
You’d see it played out everywhere. Resilient businesses that started in the previous bad times driven out to be replaced by the commerical equivalent of Hothouse Flowers, dying when the temperature goes 5 degrees below normal.
Truly sad to see. My wife and I determined that we wouldn’t stay beyond 2023 at the latest, as 2024 was not an experience we wanted to try. She’s American, and was keen to leave the USA. So we found a cottage on the Mayo/Roscommon border, on 1/2 acre, and are hanging in.
Sadly, some of the insufferable far right bullshit has followed us here. A nearby town (pop 1500) recently had some anti-migrant riots based on a wild rumour. So even here, things fall apart.
At least you’re in a place where the citizens have the courage to riot. In the US, we’re all afraid of the Gestapo.
In the video, that guy is mainly circling one block. The ‘Washington Center’ building is owned by a real estate family that let it become a decaying drug den, and they kept pointing fingers at the city. Meanwhile, they are making bids on other troubled buildings, such as the Montgomery park building. The rest of downtown isn’t all boarded up, but there is lots of unoccupied office space and lots of companies have left downtown Portland. He also is not covering all the tent cities in east Portland, and the large numbers of mentally ill people living on the light rail system
Here is a random video of a theft ring right next to the Washington Center building that popped up https://x.com/kevinvdahlgren/status/1855384629823594700