Norwegian Xplorer has some great videos of driving around the extreme portions of Norway in winter. In this video, he travels through a polar vortex storm as he drives between Vadso and the extreme northeastern city of Vardø. He braves closed roads along the artic ocean. It’s pretty amazing.
Ground Score puts homeless to work cleaning up downtown. They are ‘association of informal recyclers, waste pickers, canners, dumpster divers, and other environmental workers who create and fill low-barrier waste management jobs in Portland, Oregon.’
No word on how to hire them if your business or living complex has been trashed by homeless camps – they only seem to take donations on their website. I sure hope they are helping the city and these folks connect to their communities through solid work – and not part of the growing homeless-industrial complex of Portland.
In the recently published ‘Financial State of the Cities 2025’, Portland is ranked in the bottom five “Sinkhole Cities” along with Honolulu, New Orleans, Portland, Chicago and New York. Not surprising when you know Portland has the highest commercial vacancy rate in the country and has had a declining population for 3 years running.
https://www.truthinaccounting.org/news/detail/financial-state-of-the-cities-2025
From a planner who is now recognizing many blue state policies are regressive and a big part of the reason there isn’t enough affordable housing in western blue states (which like Oregon are shrinking) while many red states have lots of attractive affordable housing (and are growing).
I try to stay off social media. When I do get on forums – I tend to stick to programming forums that don’t have the political vomit. I do, grudgingly, sometimes catch up on local forums to see if there are any cool shows – and ran across this great comment that summed up how I feel about an a growing portion of Reddit.
More and more subreddits are increasingly just becoming the worst of echo chambers. Members openly mock, insult, gaslight, and psychologically attack those who post things not onboard with the accepted political and social views of that subreddit. Contrary evidence and data is downvoted and ignored. More forums are just outright banning people who post things against a political stance. In short, it’s now a walled enclave of double-plus good thought. Even on forums as left-leaning as the local Portland forum. One member complained thusly:
So I’ve been complaining about issues at a corner store in my neighborhood for over three years and PPB FINALLY BUSTED THE OWNER ON SEVERAL NARCOTICS AND FIREARM CHARGES.
I should feel vindicated but quite frankly I’m just angry about how many people tried to gaslight, insult, or victim blame me for things that I and immediate neighbors of the store were onto.
Reddit is nigh on the verge of collapse and no longer the helpful resource it once was. Most of it’s communities are now servants to their rules instead of real human members who aren’t just spewing slop.
Links:
Besides the very public failing of the new Ritz-Carlton in downtown Portland facing foreclosure, now ‘Big Pink’ US Bancorp tower is up for sale for a fraction of it’s original value. There’s a reason Portland has the highest commercial vacancy rate in the country; and the internet company that just moved out didn’t hold any punches
After Digital Trends moved out of the U.S. Bancorp Tower in Portland, Ore., the technology publisher didn’t hold back about why it left.
The property, once a premier address in the city, was afflicted with “vagrants sleeping in hallways of vacant office floors.” They were “starting fires in stairwells, smoking fentanyl and defecating in common areas,” according to papers the company filed in a lease-termination lawsuit.
The building, once a cornerstone of the the city, is now joining a long line of other top building being fire-sold at huge losses:
The 42-story tower was recently put up for sale. The building affectionately known as Big Pink because of its pink-hued Spanish granite and pink glazed glass has an asking price of about $70 million, according to brokers. That is more than 80% below what the owners paid for it when it sold for $372 million in 2015.
The forward outlook continues a multi-year DECLINE as companies flee Portland’s livability, homeless, and harshly anti-business taxes and laws
But Portland’s commercial real-estate market shows few signs of recovering from the fallout of the pandemic, rise in homelessness and the state’s botched experiment with drug decriminalization…. Portland’s first-quarter office vacancy rate at 35% was the highest among the 25 largest central business districts in the U.S., according to real-estate firm Colliers.
Update July 2025: Big Pink, one of the premier properties in downtown Portland, just sold for $45 million – that was a decline of 88% since it last sold in 2015 for $372 million.
Links:
Woof – that was a tough read. Portland continues to suffer since the riots of Covid. In fact, some metrics of decline are increasing in 2025, not stabilizing. It has economists and city officials ringing alarm bells; but few local politicians seem to be able to think of anything besides raising more taxes.
The city has enacted new taxes that has made it the second highest tax rate the in the country. The strong anti-business environment as driven companies out of the city to the point that Portland has the highest commercial vacancy rate of ANY major US city for 2 years in a row. Worse than Southern or even Rust Belt cities. People are fleeting Portland in record numbers. It’s getting to the point that it’s seriously impacting tax revenue and property value/desirability is declining at a record rate. All this while towns just nearby are seeing increases.
Links:
If you live in Portland and like snow sports, you’ve undoubtably sat in multi-hour lines of cars going too or coming back from Mt Hood.
Some folks have captured that joy by calling it the ‘Govy 500’ – as in Indy 500 but to the mountain.
Their Govy 500 instagram site has lots of pictures of the ridiculous things that people do driving up to Mt Hood.
Check out the Govy 500 website to buy some stickers and merch of the joy.
The United States has lost more than one million people to overdoses since 2000 — more than the number of Americans lost in all wars in the past 150 years put together, including both World Wars.
This New York Times article recounts the real story of Drew – an actual addict in Oregon that’s somehow survived the last few years of open legal drug use. In the end, he turned himself into police to be rescued from his addiction. His lawyers knew they could even get him off – but he, and the author, admit that open legalization is killing many more lives than ever before.
The data backs it up. Portlanders will hate this, but incarceration kept more addicts alive than legalization. Our death rates have doubled every year – an exponential growing rate – every year since legalization. Portland literally has around 1800 people dying a year in the streets vs just at 500 for years before legalization. That’s 4 dead bodies a day in the relatively small city of Portland’s 600,000 people.
What I’ve seen is that the fundamental leniency in recent years on the West Coast — toward drugs, toward shoplifting and toward homelessness — didn’t actually improve the well-being of those in desperate need. Our liberal compassion backfired: Instead of helping Drew, it endangered him.
I think the author sums the situation. These are people in deep need of assistance, but are often unable or unwilling to do it themselves. Despite a free treatment, free call center, and countless free resources – only a single digit number of people have gotten help. It doesn’t work voluntarily. The sad reality is that many people never hit ‘rock bottom’ and turn around. The majority of them die. Often die from the elements or an overdose laying in a tent beside an interstate, outside a building, or in a bus stop.
It’s more than time to admit these policies, predictably, are actually killing thousands of people each year in just Portland alone. That’s blood on the hands of those who refuse to realize that compassion alone creates a life of living horrors like Drew was living. If you were to design a policy to kill the most number of people in the most inhumane ways – I think we have achieved it.
Compassion must be tempered with wisdom of addiction behavior and understanding of the true value and dignity of the human person. It is not compassion to allow our brothers and sisters to sleep beside a busy interstate wallowing in the elements, ignorance, crime, poverty, and addiction until they die. The solutions are there – treatment is available. What is missing is the will to act on it. That action, however, may not look all that great. In European countries with legalization; they also throw addicts into prison if they refuse treatment – and they don’t hold punches. You are either getting treatment or jail. If for no other reason that you’re not going to be allowed to die in the streets.
It makes me wonder how many more thousands we will have to kill in the name of progressive policies before we come to the conclusions the data has already said loud and clear.
The price of eggs has become the new ‘Thanks Obama’ rating system for an administration. Interesting question – how many eggs does the average greasy-spoon diner go through in a week?
Make a guess? I think it would be an interesting interview question.
For an answer, it turns out we have some data. Tom’s Pancake House talked to local reporters on how the rising egg prices has affected them. According to the owner, they go through more than 9,000 eggs a week.
When a case of 180 eggs skyrocketed from $45 to $140, that means their weekly egg purchases went from $2,250 to $7,000. Definitely something you would see on the bottom line.
Articles: