Scenes From a City Hall
A recent poll of voters in Portland’s Multnomah County showed high support for a daytime city camping ban Mayor Ted Wheeler has introduced in an attempt to reclaim downtown this summer. The Oregonian:
Nearly three-fourths also back a proposal by Mayor Ted Wheeler to enforce a citywide daytime camping ban, which is scheduled to receive a public hearing at the City Council on Wednesday.
The poll was conducted by a Republican-friendly firm for “People for Portland”, an advocacy group set up by wealthy Oregon liberals to counter progressive excesses following as a consquence of the BLM riots of 2020.
Longtime Oregon political consultants Dan Lavey and Kevin Looper launched People for Portland in 2021. The group has since raised and spent more than $1 million, primarily from a clutch of wealthy — and mostly anonymous — donors…Columbia Sportswear CEO Tim Boyle and Harsch Investment Real Estate CEO Jordan Schnitzer previously acknowledged to The Oregonian/OregonLive that they’ve given money to the group.
Homeless advocates in Portland oppose anything but the present status quo: pursuing the ever-receding goal of “affordable housing” while they continue to apply the harm reduction model as applied to substance abuse (assisting addicts in “safe” drug use in opposition to criminalization or coercion) to homelessness broadly, and to continue being paid to do it without interference.
They also don’t want competition. Wheeler’s ban comes as the city moves forward with his plan to corral the homeless in mass campsites run by a controversial non-profit out of the Bay Area called Urban Alchemy; the outsider outfit signed a 50 million-dollar deal to operate them after no locals would offer a meaningful bid.
Urban Alchemy uses ex-cons (with some predictable results) to manage similar camps around San Francisco and broke out of obscurity when it used its contacts in city government to land a series of fat, no-bid contracts as the city and state started pouring money into homelessness in 2019. The ban on daytime street camping is intended to compel the homeless into Wheeler’s designated camping sites, the first of which is not yet up and running and will accommodate either 300 people or plots, it’s not clear.
Yesterday a public hearing was held on the camping ban, a six hour-plus marathon, dominated by opponents. At one point it was interrupted by a current cliche–a high outrage low information white woman chanting–with a twist: she accused the council of being “pedos”.
In May of 2017 Jeremy Christian stabbed two men to death on a commuter train in Portland. The case became notorious due to the mentally ill Christian’s “white supremacist” beliefs–presumed because he was verbally abusing a Muslim before his victims intervened (not unlike the Daniel Penny case). After the case went public a woman appeared to say she had encountered Christian on the train a day earlier, threatening her with racial slurs and giving her permanent eye damage after striking her with a “half filled Gatorade bottle”. Her story was never corroborated and video shows her macing Christian first after a verbal confrontation.
Nonetheless she was brought in as a prosecution witness (the defense declined to cite her criminal record) and then to give a “victim impact statement” alongside the grieving families of the murder victims, which she used to orate on “white supremacy” and the need to “dismantle this corrupt system”. Having shamelessly inserted herself into the high-profile case the fiery, inarticulate Hester became a minor star in the local BLM grift scene.
This is her testimony before the city council yesterday:
Demetria became a fixture at antifa rallies during the BLM riots. Here she is participating in a “counterdemonstration” against a right-wing rally in February 2020. A small contingent of rally-goers trying to leave downtown are in the parking garage and Hester’s group is manning the exits to harass them as they leave. Hester demands random citizens leaving the garage say “black lives matter” before they can pass (the white woman shadowing her is following antifa practice of whites conspicuously acting as bodyguards for Black! speakers at BLM rallies, as if they might be set upon at any moment by frothing-at-the-mouth white supremacists, in the middle of a BLM rally).
At five and a half hours in an Indian prayer song was offered. It did not appear to drive out the bad medicine:
A homeless man declaring himself “sovereign” was popular with the crowd:
Black! liberal councilman Mingus Mapps was called a “race traitor”.
It wouldn’t be Portland if this guy didn’t show up:
The “queer affinity village” he speaks of above is one of the city’s “Safe Rest Villages” dedicated to “queer” homeless (allowable discrimination, apparently). The SRVs are fenced-in camps of small shacks housing about thirty people. The city plans more of these, along with Ted’s designated campsite Wheelervilles of hundreds.
Some were salty.
Some were sour.
There was plenty of both.
A few came out to support the ban. A newcomer tells of his travails.
A longtime resident says police were unable or unwilling to arrest a violent homeless man in his neighborhood–“the Rock Man” went from shouting at women on the street to hitting one in the head with a rock–because it was “a homeless issue”.
The lone remaining radical on the council offered an amendment withholding funds that was voted down four to one, and the ban is expected to be voted into law.
untethered 