Dispatch from Portland 2022: Frosting the Rotten Cake
I landed in Portland, Oregon this week and immediately started to receive messages from people wanting to know if I’d seen the homeless encampment under the Morrison Bridge; to tell me about the rats teeming along the bike paths; to discuss the Apple store downtown, molested so many times during the protests it was now surrounded by a stories-high fence that made it look like a penitentiary.
It is true that unhappy people complain, but I would not characterize these people, none of whom I had previously met, as unhappy. I would characterize them as fed up with a city whose policies are, in the words of one, “trying to put new frosting on the same rotten cake.”
All but one of them told me they are leaving, or thinking of leaving. For some, it’s the mandated COVID restrictions. “My son did not attend one day of ninth grade in school,” one woman told me. For others, it’s the pressure from activists to hang signs about inclusivity and tolerance, or else.
“And I did it,” the coffee shop manager said, scrolling through screenshots of the threats to businesses near his that had not complied.
He and his husband had been supportive of the early demonstrations, had participated in the marches, had voted the blue-ticket, of course they had. Now, they are looking to move to North Carolina; a former employee had emailed to say the people there were friendly, they said good morning and liked to laugh.
“In Portland you have to watch everything you say,” the husband said. “I’d hate to go to a comedy club here.”
I spent my first days back in Portland, where I lived from 2004-2019, with the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams. Thomas is an American living in Paris. Before coming to the city, he’d been told — as you will be told by some locals and most of the national media — that the devastation in Portland is consigned to two square blocks, and that anyone who says it’s more than that is either right-wing or has an agenda.
The insistence that you not believe what you see, but rather hew to what others are telling you to see (or else) lost all its tread for me in 2020…