Conveniently delayed until after the passage of a massive $1.8 billion bond measure, the 2023-4 PPS audit report was released with 23 improvement areas identified. In what is a continued trend of leadership failures and overruns, it called out PPS’s significant project delays and major cost overruns.
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Looking for a specific fruits, berries, or vegetables to pick yourself (as well as other farm produce such as milk or meat)? The Pick Your Own website maintains and updated lists of what items local farms all over your state are currently allowing for picking. It’s very extensive and seems to be updated all the time. Someone is doing a lot of work to help save you a lot of time digging around on your own.
Oregon fairs and festivals: https://www.oregonlive.com/events/2025/05/summer-events-guide-2025-more-than-55-fairs-festivals-rodeos-other-top-events.html
List of Portland city sponsored events – movies in the park, music, festivals, and other special events: https://www.portland.gov/parks/arts-culture/summer-free-all/cultural-events
Other event lists (concerts and plays): https://www.portland-theater.com/dates
In many states (such as California, New York, Oregon, and Illinois) Democrats control all the levers of power from governor, to house of representatives/senate, and even city government. They run the government. They write the laws. Yet, in key areas, many blue states are actually doing worse than red states.
Oregon is one of those states. Despite one of the highest funding rates per student in the country, Portland Public Schools are nearly dead last – much worse than southern red states on all metrics of student achievement. Despite record spending on homelessness, Portland has some of the worst homelessness in the country. Oregon has some of the worst mental health systems in the country. Many blue states are some of the least affordable despite decades of rent programs and development restrictions. The list goes on. What’s going wrong?
New York Times dives in to find out why.
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.
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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.
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