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“There is one girl here who they are trying to get her out of here. She has tried to stab me twice and I filed reports on that”

“The problems with this building happen to be TPI moving in drug addicts who are not rehabilitated, and need to be rehabilitated, but they are not.”

In the past month, there have been two homicides in front of the the Home Forward Louisa Flowers building in the Pearl – and an egregious animal abuse case caught on camera in their elevator. The building has graffiti on walls and windows. Residents report apartments that smell of fentanyl, unwanted guests are often found in the building, and residents shared multiple photos from inside of trash piling up in the hallways and stairwells.

The response?

On Thursday the building leadership had a pizza party for all residents where they invited case workers and other community resources to connect with the residents. Home Forward workers said they hope to ‘foster strong, supportive networks among the residents,’

Sounds like exactly like the kind of comically ineffective plans we’ve come to expect when dealing with homicidal residents, serious drug addiction, and a quickly deteriorating living environments in Portland. Instead of experts coming in to deal with serious drug addiction and violence – we’ll have a pizza party and talk about it. Meanwhile, animals are being abused openly, fentanyl is wafting around the building, and other residents are having their lives threatened on a daily basis.

Sadly, this is what happens time and again when largely untrained non-profit employees (non-profits who are switched out every time the money runs out) try to deal with very serious criminal and drug abuse issues in Portland.

Articles:

• https://www.kptv.com/2024/09/13/lloyd-district-apartment-residents-raise-concerns-over-safety-security/

Portland just tried ranked choice voting. It was an interesting experience. I’m not sure if I’m 100% sold just yet, but it seems to have worked reasonably well. If nothing else – it’s a fascinating dive into the data.
On the plus side: I did like having the ability to pick 2nd and 3rd choice candidates. In one case, my 2nd choice candidate won.
On the down side: it required a LOT more work. There were almost 20 candidates for mayor alone, and a decent number of them didn’t submit any information about themselves, were odd-ball one-issue candidates, or were borderline quacks. This easily took me 2-4x the time I would have normally spent. Doing this for a dozen candidates at state and local levels would be exhausting.

As with all things, the unintended consequences are likely what is most interesting. I suspect it’s going encourage candidates to start overlapping on stances in order to steal/appeal each other’s 2nd and 3rd votes – especially if they are not a front runner. This could make the voter’s work even more tough as it’s more like splitting hairs than decisive differences. I think it’s also going to encourage candidates to be more homogenous. Outliers and more extreme ends – on both the left and right – were very soundly defeated. This is probably a good thing in such a far left state like Oregon that’s had some pretty extreme candidates in previous elections. It’s definitely going to make campaign strategy much more interesting, and likely break up the entrenched homogenous political structure of Portland.

Anyway, if you’re curious how to see how each round of voting went, the Multnomah website has a neat visualization how each of the rounds worked out:

Alternatively, a local forum user put together a Sankey diagram of the way the votes flowed from one candidate to the next as candidates were eliminated:

The district 4 councilor race was even more crazy:

Here was district 2 with Kanal starting out a resounding 3rd and ending up bubbling to the top, while Guiney started first and ended 2nd:

Bonus:

KGW8 did a great mayoral candidate interview. I liked the format a LOT. They had some pre-canned questions, but I loved the fact they asked audience submitted ‘raise your hand’ questions that made the candidates actually state their opinions in a yes/no fashion instead of just waffling around like the career candidates usually do.

Dustin Witherspoon, Portland mayoral candidate