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A Tale of Two Portlands: Occupy vs Subsidizing Developers
Contrast these two stories from The Oregonian: In Saturday's (11.19.11) Business section, "A disgruntled California developer is suing Portland's urban renewal agency (Portland Development Commission) for more than $1.7 million" after an upscale remake of an old mill along the waterfront falls apart, and "after taxpayers have already invested $12.5 million into the site, which is no closer to development today than when the (PDC) bought it in 2000. " And then the ongoing story of how the City has allegedly spent some $750,000 on a clearly over-armored police response to Occupy Portland, aggressively clearing several hundred protestors and numerous homeless people out of two downtown encampments.
Not only are the price tags to the taxpayers of these two expenditures shockingly disparate, but, of course, the $12.5 million goes to the 1 percent and the $750,000 goes to sweeping the demands and the obvious needs of the 99 percent out of sight once again. Perhaps we could take that now empty mill site and convert it to affordable housing for the City's many homeless.
The Working Families Party along with a number of unions, churches, veterans groups and other community organizations urged Sam Adams not to evict Occupy Portland, arguing that the problems he cited at the Occupy Portland encampment simply reflected the tremendous income disparity and lack of social services, mental health services, and affordable housing that the Occupy Wall Street movement has so effectively brought to the fore.
In a later Oregonian editorial, Dennis Morrow, of Janus Youth Programs, was quoted as calling the camps a "recipe for disaster" because of the attraction they held for homeless youth. The mayor and city commissioners constantly repeated that argument as justification for the eviction, citing life-threatening drug overdoses and assaults at the encampments. When challenged about why the city was not proposing solutions, Mayor Sam Adams tried to deflect blame onto shrinking federal programs and subsidies. While there is certainly much blame to be placed on the federal government and the vastly disproportionate spending on Wall Street bailouts and tax breaks compared to education, social services and affordable housing, the city of Portland is certainly not without responsibility.
For starters, the city has spent way too much on the luxury developments for Portland's 1 percent. The Pearl, South Waterfront, the tram, the streetcar -- are all aimed at bringing more wealthy people to the inner city. Promised affordable housing has either not materialized at all or at a pace that is way below what was promised or imagined. While there was some private money in those developments, the city highly subsidized all of them either directly or through tax expenditures. The other night I drove through the South Waterfront and found myself laughing in despair as I drove under the Tram and right next to two sets of tracks, one for the streetcar and one for the MAX. Enough already. Meanwhile, the promised veterans housing and other affordable housing in South Waterfront is way too long coming.
Despite the fact that the encampments cost the city in police overtime, they and Occupy Wall Street encampments all over the country have contributed immeasurably to changing the public discourse. Before the occupations began two months ago, one heard little discussion of income inequality. Now it is all we are talking about. That alone is more than worth the price, which pales in comparison to what we have spent subsidizing and bailing out private developers, mortgage lenders and investment bankers.
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28 Comments so far
Show AllA big question in all this, as in all aspects of the Occupy vs establishment matters, is how do we get this information out to the 50% of the population who only watch corporate media? We on CD and other progressive websites, all know this kind of thing is common, but it is a bit too complicated for the simple minded folk who get all of their 'ideas' and 'thoughts' from the corporate talking heads. How to deal with this?
OWS is evolving and drawing in more of the 99%.
B.S.
Oh, that was persuasive.
Just ignore Shade.
Inadvertent tech generated duplication deleted.
Hatfield School of Government is a good name after a great Oregonian, Mark Hatfield. Having personallly met him. He is the real deal or at least was. He stood up against the Vietnam War and did it as a Republican in 1966. He did just fine. Wish we had somebody such as he going after the presidency this year. Yes, the topic-- OWS, and I support it.
Tell them.
I cannot understand why people think this is so difficult.
It is such a tiny percentage of the population who, when offered a more coherent and radical narrative, a narrative that is congruent with easily observable objective reality, will cling to the MSM narrative.
If you are becoming frustrated and having no success with the people in your circle, then move on and talk to other people.
I have a 90% success rate, and I present an extremely radical and left wing narrative.
If you do not have a 90% success rate, then either you are not very strong in what you have to say or else you are restricting your efforts to people from that relatively small percentage of the population who will never listen. Move on.
A couple of other thoughts...
What is the message you are giving people? What are you trying to convert them to, and why? What is your purpose? Are you trying to convert people to the progressive version of the same basic message that is coming from Fox news? Are you hoping people will become "like-minded" and then vote and shop a certain way that you think is superior? Are you trying to get them to change their lifestyles?
Start talking to the have-nots you encounter every day everywhere you go - as equals - and stop looking right through them as though they were not there or looking down on them as "simple minded", and talk about how the bosses and owners are screwing all of us.
If you are trying to persuade people to let the liberals and progressives take over and rule over them, you will not have much success. The fault there is with the program you are pushing, not with your audience.
Exactly! If we treat everyone with respect, no matter their beliefs or life situation, they are more likely to remove their ear plugs and blinders. It is like pulling the curtain back on a very big window. All anyone of us is doing is describing to another what we see on that newly revealed landscape. The other may see what you see, see something else, or want to immediately shut the curtain closed again. It really doesn't matter. Your only intention should be that they just look out the window. What anyone sees is unique to them and no one can "force" anyone else to view only our truth, not their own.
More importantly, if you are talking about property - who has it and how, and what they use it for - virtually everyone can be radicalized. If you are not talking about property - and the entire web of liberal and progressive thinking is predicated on an insistence that the property issue not be discussed - you are merely blowing hot air.
Again, agreed.
Great post two americas. To talking, I would add listening. Really listening.
Yes, good point. I do more listening than I do talking, and feel no need to play the game of replying to absurd right wing talking points. If right wing talking points are the only thing the other person has to say, I move on. But there are not many of those. The MSM wants us to believe that half of the population is in that category, but less than 10% are.
Occupy really needs an unofficial sign like the WWII 'V' sign used in Europe. That one was really first class as it was easily-recognizable in morse code and was used by the BBC when transmitting to the resistance. It is also has a great pedigree as the opening bars of Beethoven's fifth symphony.
Perhaps a big 'O' - or even the Nuclear Disrmamament semaphore sign that has become known as the "Peace Sign".
Something that can be scrawled anywhere to raise awareness.
I sort of like the O idea. It also has a good double meaning:
What do we owe the elites after all of the years of abuse:
O (ie, nothing)
Don'tch just love it when the liberals are in charge and we can finally see their real faces?
Huh?
This story could have been written about hundreds of cities in the US, with a few details changed. It features fake and broken promises by developers in return for taxpayer money, with the only result, if any, being unaffordable luxury housing or more stadia. Thanks for the details Barbara Dudley. You are a true educator..
Excellent piece. Another extremely frustrating part of the Occupy Portland eviction earlier this month is that the 1% owner class and other advocates for eviction had the big mouthpiece in the Oregonian and other local media. They worked over the local public with it for several weeks prior, and eventually, in the days preceding the eviction, many occupiers themselves were cowed enough by all the incessant horseshit "drugs" and "danger" messaging that they packed their own tents and left in advance of the camp invasion - because if they didn't comply with the elites they would be "bad" people now.
In other words, the rich and the compliant city wore down the OP occupation and stole their resolve. I was there on 11/13 when the cop-thugs moved in with batons and hit many, many people, multiple times.
I hope that Los Angeles and Philadelphia occupies don't give into this shit today, and that occupiers around the country, and the public, get the social smarts and the resolve to re-occupy and face down these thugs.
Historically, real estate developers have been among the top contributors to political campaigns. That didn't make sense to me until a coin dropped: Who are the biggest beneficiaries of real estate development? Big banks.
God bless every occupier and occupation for the relief of suffering.
It is interesting that the author considers public transit improvements to be something just for "the 1%". Only in the USA!
I agree that ordinary bus routes are often the far more cost-effective choice - especially for smaller cities like Portland, and having two separate incompatible streetcar/light rail lines (are they different gauges/voltages?) makes no sense, but rich west-coast white people, like the author of this piece, refuse to ride the bus.
So is one of the calls of the down-trodden by the Working Families Party going to be cheap gasoline and cars for all?
You may not be familiar with Portland. The tramway that the author mentions was built mainly to ferry well-off employees of a wealthy university/hospital (OHSU) back and forth to their waterfront condos (South Waterfront). The streetcar connects with nearby downtown, and the MAX train is part of the larger rail system connecting various parts of the city, but the author's point is that this enclave has multiple sets of expensive rails for the convenience of its well-heeled residents, to connect them with shopping and their other tony needs - all government money - while there is such a social crisis in the city and the country. There have been promises to build affordable housing, but, typically, those are getting slow-tracked - not enough $$$ in that for the elite of the city.
Additionally, not mentioned in this article, there has been another rail project in the works, costing about half a BILLION dollars, which would connect the wealthy suburb of Lake Oswego to the south with downtown Portland.
I agree that if the transit is only being developed only to serve specific, yuppie "transit-oriented development" it is poorly conceived. I have visited Portland a few times, and have ridden the MAX (which most people would call a streetcar/trolley/tram depending where they are from) a couple times to the airport. The ridership on the line I rode seemed to be a pretty good economic cross-section.
Transit-racism and classism is a common problem, but public transit remains important. Portland is a stark contrast to here in Pittsburgh, where a formerly good public transit system (mostly bus based) is being dismantled and the decline of some neighborhoods from the decline of transit service is underway. Here, RE and retail developers are going to demand that there be no buses downtown as a condition for redevelopment. They apparently are not aware that half or the workers downtown, including "professionals" take the bus or "T" downtown, and that downtown is not even viable without public transit.
In the United States, everyone seems to be on their sequestered world.
People live in great fear of what the other person might do to their world view.
Yet, when they talk, they do so with complete conviction in their pristine un challenged beleifs.
The corporate media depends on this attitude for their survival.
Simply trying to break these attitudes through personal engagement is the tip of the iceberg.
We need mass communication channels that show the connectedness, and they should engage the people in an authentic way.
Only the will we be able to elect people to the governing bodies that create laws to help the people as a whole.
Not to sound too brash, but a good chunk of that Occupy repression expense/outlay goes to the law enforcement whores who are supplying their suppressive expertise to the Janus party and its corporate whoremasters. Fascism succeeds because so many self-serving minions of Gog support him/her for their own self-interest.
"The mayor and city commissioners constantly repeated that argument as justification for the eviction, citing life-threatening drug overdoses and assaults at the encampments."
When you embrace the truth of the far left, that there are no mysteries, but in fact all the dots connect, then you are able to see clearly that the Portland mayor's arguments are wholly defunct. Drug abuse is practically non-existent in the society the far left is building, the localist society. Drug abuse exists only in the elites' consumption society, where elites dangle opiate baits relentlessly above the people's heads. Same rackets motivate the assaults. Only in the elites' society of slavery/injustice. Who thought the elites' rackets were without liabilities? Who thought the far left was not terra firma?
Great post.
Yes, the far left is terra firma. But people have been trained to fear it, and so they live in a constant state of anxiety, confusion and cognitive dissonance.
All the cities are playing the blame game over the "cost" brought about by those Occupy raids and constant stalking by police, running up overtime pay. Past court decisions have ruled it is the responsibility of the city, and is a small price to pay for the exercising of our First Amendment rights. In doing so, they hope to cloud the issue and take the blame away from them in their over-reactions with the use of constant stalking and military-sized encampment removals. Such expensive shows of violent force aimed at peaceable assembled citizens are the real crimes. Those who made the unConstitutional decisions should pay the full price and do a bit of jail time..