Clown and Out in Portland

Portland’s Behavioral Health Resource Center is a”low barrier” service center for the homeless “geared toward people experiencing severe and ongoing mental health and/or substance use disorders”, staffed by “peer mentors” possessing “lived experience” with drugs and mental illness. Not a shelter but a “walk in” clinic with minimal rules, there are no drugs or guns allowed, “self defense tools” must be checked in a locker. Not everyone was happy when it opened last December in Portland’s struggling downtown retail core, a few blocks from Portland’s almost completed Ritz Carlton, which will feature the city’s most expensive condominiums and hotel rooms and the city’s first five star restaurant.

Ritz Carlton, RealtyPortland.com

The multi-use tower is on schedule to open in summer 2023. It broke ground in the optimistic days of 2019. Needless to say the odds developer Walt Bowen assumed when placing his 600 million dollar bet on downtown Portland have diminished significantly since then.

This is the year the Portland real estate developer is to deliver his Ritz-Carlton building, a massive $600 million gamble that some have come to view as a high-stakes referendum on downtown Portland itself.

Bowen and his team have managed to keep construction on track — city building officials say they expect the tower at 900 S.W. Washington St. will be ready to partially open as soon as May — and his lenders on the team. That’s no small achievement given the historic events out of his control that have sapped the vitality of downtown Portland since construction began in 2019.

Now comes the really hard part – selling the building’s 138 condos at price tags never before seen in Portland, attracting guests to stay in the city’s first five-star hotel, and finding tenants for the building’s five stories of office space…

Stephen Fitzmaurice, a Portland Realtor and condo specialist, predicts Bowen could pull it off precisely because of the uber-exclusive target market.

“The upper half of the top 1% have more money than they ever have,” Fitzmaurice said. “I actually wouldn’t be surprised if the condos sell out because they are targeting that niche.”

Fitzmaurice is cynically counting on the killing the wealthy few made as a result of Covid lockdowns–the “one percent” increased their wealth by an estimated 6.5 trillion dollars in 2021–to counter the current economic collapse resulting from the same lockdowns and another elite-funded disaster, the BLM riots of 2020. The raft of legislation that rode the BLM terror campaign into law included Measure 110’s legalization of drugs. The streets around the project gradually declined as the building rose, as if the massive tower was draining the surrounding landscape of life to grow up out of it, gleaming and indifferent.

But it remains to be seen if the filthy rich will accept our increasingly filthy streets. Mayor Ted Wheeler has been trying to reclaim downtown for months by declaring his intention to re-institute the long-lapsed ban on street camping and transferring the homeless into large tent camps in outlying neighborhoods. The enforcement part appears to be waiting on the first of Ted’s new Wheelervilles to open–this summer, in time for the Ritz’ grand opening. The city is following a 9th Circuit Court ruling as precedent, Martin v Boise, requiring a municipality to have an available shelter bed to offer anyone as an alternative to arrest or citation.

The city just signed a 50 million dollar contract with a Bay Area non-profit called Urban Alchemy, staffed by ex-cons (some predictable results) to manage the city’s new mega-camps. Using contacts in San Francisco government Urban Alchemy seemingly came out of nowhere in 2019 to tap into the largesse California and San Francisco were suddenly dumping on their growing homelessness problem, winning a series of no-bid contracts. UA had no serious competition for the Portland contract. Covid mandates didn’t only enrich the wealthiest, they seem to have been a boon for Urban Alchemy as well.

The nonprofit plunged in to help address homelessness and the filth of the Tenderloin streets during COVID-19. And it is employing felons, some convicted of murder, who might get no other chance to rejoin society. Its alchemy is hiring the unemployable to do the work few want to do. Los Angeles and other cities are hiring Urban Alchemy based on its performance in the Tenderloin, and the National Science Foundation praised its impact on neighborhoods after a study.

On the other hand, close relationships with City Hall have raised questions about no-bid contracts that are part of the $41 million San Francisco taxpayers will send to Urban Alchemy. Yet because the nonprofit was granted reporting extensions by the Internal Revenue Service, much of the bookkeeping of its boom has not been visible. Its CEO, Lena Miller, declined to disclose her salary, while her relationships with City Hall power brokers has played a key part in the nonprofit’s growth…

The shooting of an Urban Alchemy worker in February raised questions about the nonprofit’s approach of building relationships in dangerous neighborhoods without security training or support.

Yet despite the challenges, Urban Alchemy has experienced the kind of growth that could make a budding Silicon Valley startup jealous. It has grown to 1,000 workers in just three years, and is branching out elsewhere while it deepens its responsibilities in San Francisco. Its budget increased by more than 500% over the last two years, it says. And while its prominence has risen at breakneck speed, that growth has made financial disclosures and training employees for future roles a challenge.

Meanwhile downtown Portland has only grown worse in recent months. Which brings me back to the Behavioral Health Resource Center (BHRC). Willamette Week:

Every morning, a line stretches for a block before the center opens at 8 am, down-and-out Portlanders awaiting entrance to a squat building located among the Dossier, the Hyatt and, soon, the 35-story Ritz-Carlton, by far the most expensive hotel Portland has ever seen.

And those business owners are asking the county to do more to keep the neighborhood around the center free from some of what its clients bring with them, including threats of violence and drug use. They’ve requested security patrols, police drug stings, and a fundamental alteration of the center’s operating model.

The tensions underlie a more complicated question: How do officials serve homeless Portlanders in the heart of downtown without deterring the customers businesses desperately need?

Business reps painted a bleak picture.

“Staff members have been held at gunpoint, clients that we’ve relied on for years have turned away from downtown,” Matthew Skelton, manager of Hotel Lucia, a block east on Southwest Broadway, told the board Feb. 16. “Clients have been robbed.”

The Mayor’s office in Portland isn’t vested with a lot of power–he’s essentially a privileged council member–and Wheeler’s efforts to clean up downtown are often checked by his own city and county government, which administers most of the programs.

The county says it won’t change the center’s walk-in model because it’s meant for Portlanders for whom even a phone call to schedule an appointment can pose an impossible barrier…

The county hired Mental Health & Addiction Association of Oregon to run the center. It’s staffed by more than two dozen peer specialists who themselves once struggled with addiction or homelessness.

In Portland everything done on behalf of the homeless, mentally ill or drug addicted follows the “harm reduction” and “trauma”-informed model, the latter being the reason for all the reformed drug users administering to unreformed drug users (what could go wrong?).

By March a long abandoned retail mall near the BHRC became an open air drug market; day and night the sidewalks around the building were dominated by fentanyl users getting high, passing out, overdosing.

April 7
March 17, across from Washington Center

On April 1 the city recorded eleven overdoses, three of them fatalities, in and around the Washington Center drug market. The next day Willamette Week reported the BHRC had abruptly closed, with only a notice posted to the center’s website late on a Friday. BHRC cited “building improvements and staff training”.

When the BHRC re-opened on April 17, no doubt to the chagrin of its neighbors who’d hoped to see the last of it, we learned the reason for the closing.

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) – Multnomah County’s Behavioral Health Resource Center in downtown Portland reopened on Monday after a two-week closure to train staff — as well as investigate allegations of “inappropriate relationships” and on-site drug use from contracted employees, the county announced.

The internal investigations looked into allegations of inappropriate behavior at the center among security staff and other contract employees, the county said. Officials clarified that the investigations did not involve county employees or clients…

Based on the allegations of “inappropriate relations” and on-site drug use, the county directed DPI Security to replace all of its center staff. However, DPI Security claimed it did not have enough staff for the replacement, so the county switched to Northwest Enforcement Inc., which will provide security moving forward, officials said…

The center is a peer-led model employed by others with lived experience to help those experiencing chronic homelessness, mental illness and substance abuse. Peer Support Specialists use trauma-informed practices and have certification requirements, the county said.

Washington Center, downtown Portland, Menache Properties promotional material
Washington Center, April 2021 pdxccura
Washington Center today, untethered

On April 12 police cleared out Washington Center and it was boarded up, again.

Washington Center April 14, untethered

And the beat goes on.

update April 27

Willamette Week reporter Sophie Peel with more on the alleged shenanigans going on at the Behavioral Resource Center:

Emails obtained by WW from the two weeks leading up the center’s abrupt closure show that a tangle of allegations from multiple employees and managers—and an especially extensive set of allegations by a departing worker relayed in a March 29 evening phone call—prompted the county to temporarily shut the center’s doors the next day.

The staffer’s “report suggests that the work environment may be unsafe and toxic, particularly on the 3rd floor,” wrote one county manager hours before the center’s closure.

Indeed, the dynamics alleged in county correspondence include employees of the three contractors trading drugs, sleeping with each other, and blackmailing each other by threatening to reveal each other’s behavior.

The Center’s trauma informed care seems to come with a lot of drama-induced cares. Trauma-informed care and constant companion harm reduction are basically the precepts everyone is a victim of trauma (so don’t re-traumatize by asking anything of them) and just give them the clean needles, respectively.

According to Appleton’s notes, the disgruntled employee alleged sexual triangles between contractors, the use of “powder” at the center, and trysts taking place between staffers on the third floor. “The county doesn’t know what is going on in the facility, and if they knew, then MHAAO would not be the provider,” Appleton wrote based on what the employee had said to her over the phone.

The county abruptly shuttered the center the next day. It remained closed until April 17…

The records provided by the county also show just how intense the needs are of those who frequent the BHRC. Incident reports spanning just two weeks describe a man who slept overnight at the center in an electrical closet; a man hitting a sleeping woman with a chair; clients getting in fights or near-fights; and a participant who was asked to leave the center throwing an e-scooter and batteries at its windows.

The incident reports also tell of a client who would be dead had it not been for staff using six doses of Narcan to revive him, and tell of staff calling an ambulance to pick up a man who said he was feeling deeply suicidal.

In one two-week period in the latter half of March, center staff wrote reports for 45 incidents.

Portland Justice

The Short, Unhappy Life of Hunter Means

Hunter Means was Portland’s youngest homicide victim in the bloody, record-setting year of 2021. He spent the last two of his three months in the hospital, and died there in June.

By August 17 of 2020 Portland police had lost the blocks directly around their central precinct and the federal courthouse to antifa rioters and their criminal allies; the worst place to find trouble was in the vicinity of the police station. On that evening a group styling themselves antifa security beat a harmless man into a coma in the no-go zone.

Youtuber Drew Hernandez was on scene and recorded the chaos of stupidity and violence leading up to that assault. Graphic content:

August 17, Drew Hernandez

Marquise Love, wearing a stab vest labelled “security” from a job he had held for a couple months before, capped off the night by getting up a running start and kicking the head of Adam Haner, sitting beaten and dazed in the street, placekicker style. With Haner in a coma Love was briefly on the lam, and on social media, lamenting he might soon go to jail for “fighting a racist”, following the ruse antifa had up within minutes of the attack on their social media.

Haner came out of his coma and Love, who has a lengthy rap sheet including domestic violence, was eventually sentenced to 20 months in prison after “negotiations” with restorative justice practitioner Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt, for one count of third degree assault and one count of felony riot (a charge the DA had previously announced he would decline to prosecute in the case of “racial justice protesters”).

The resolution of this case resulted after months of pretrial negotiations and a judicial settlement conference.

The victim, law enforcement, the court and the state are in agreement that the resolution of this case is appropriate.

By pleading guilty to one count of assault in the third degree and one count of felony riot, Love admitted that while being aided by another person, he caused physical injury to the victim and that he and others engaged in tumultuous and violent conduct and created a grave risk of causing public alarm.

Throughout the case, the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office communicated with, listened to and involved the victim in the pretrial negotiations and subsequent resolution.

Although the victim did not attend today’s court hearing, in an interview with media on August 19, 2020, he said he is not seeking vengeance against Marquise Love and that he hoped Love would learn from what happened.

I was at the intersection of 4th and Taylor an hour and a half before Haner was beaten, and recorded some very young black would-be thugs, boys and girls, jumping a white antifa boy who was defending a homeless man they had been harassing. The gang of kids appeared on the scene late in the summer, beating and robbing the weak and sometimes fighting among themselves. They had some relationship to the antifa security gang and would be on hand for the attack on Haner and his girlfriend.

August 17, untethered

Five days later on August 22 Proud Boys and antifa counter-demonstrators faced off violently on streets abandoned by police–Mayor Ted Wheeler had announced ahead of time police would not intervene in the anticipated brawl. Among the many things I recorded was a man threatening to return with his “Glock” to deal with a handful of Proud Boy antagonists:

His name is Dakota, and I recognized him as a regular presence during the riots, when he made the news two days after the rally after being arrested for assaulting an employee leaving the federal district court (antifa by that time had turned their attention from the police station to the courthouse next door, refocusing and reinvigorating their siege as a campaign against Trump’s feds). Again he was threatening to return with a gun.

A Portland man has been charged for forcibly assaulting and intimidating a federal worker near the Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse, U.S. Attorney Billy J. Williams announced.

On August 24, Dakota Kurtis Means allegedly began following an employee around 5:30 a.m. while yelling obscenities. Court documents say he was carrying a black paintball rifle and told the employee “it’s a paintball gun now, but it’s going to be an AR later.” U.S. Marshals Service deputies arrested the 20-year-old a short time later.

Means was charged with forcibly assaulting, impeding, and intimidating a federal employee while engaged in or on account of the performance of their official duties — a Class A misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in federal prison.

He pleaded not guilty at his first court appearance on the same day as his arrest. A one-day jury trial is scheduled to begin on October 27.

His unfortunate face is unmistakable.

dakota-means-mug
KOIN News

On that same August 22 Portland police released photos of the antifa security gang asking for help in identifying Haner’s assailants. There again was that sullen visage, throughout the lead-up to Haner’s beating.

Here in a still from the Drew Hernandez video he threatens a good samaritan with a gun he claims to have concealed in his backpack; the samaritan is defending a man who identifies as a woman the group had been beating up (and who Dakota threatened with a gun in the same fashion, making for four such threats in our brief glance over his week of August 17 through August 22).

The video documents the sequence of events leading up to the attack on Adam Haner (in a blue t-shirt in the background above), beginning with the antifa security gang escorting a man they found suspicious out of the protest area. As they’re beating him in the intersection of Fourth and Taylor the trans woman draws their attention. Eventually they rob him and, after he’s been beaten up by the girls in the group, they turn on Haner, who had been hanging about and repeatedly, foolishly, trying to peacefully intervene.

Hernandez’ video is age restricted so the timestamps below aren’t hyperlinks.

At 8:52 Dakota enters the scene and briefly threatens the trans woman, who’s been robbed and roughed up, claiming to be holding a gun in his backpack.

9:43: A police paddy wagon cruises past the chaotic scene slowly with its code lights on but doesn’t stop; some of the gang follow behind, taunting.

11:17: After the girls in the group have beaten up the trans woman who’s now defenseless on the ground, a passerby intervenes. A black man in a plain white dress shirt, cradling a knife discretely in one hand, stands between the men and the downed trans woman. He’s set upon by the gang, shouting various iterations of “fuck these white people”, but they don’t attack.

11:27: Dakota enters the scene again, and eventually threatens the hero in the same fashion he threatened the trans woman, making a show of taking off his backpack and suggesting he had a gun in his hand hidden there. The hero looks terrified but bravely stands his ground, asking what’s in the backpack. You’ll find out Dakota threatens.

17:23: Marquise Love,in a fit of rage, is restrained by his fellows; one of them is a masked bald white man. Masked white antifa hang about on the fringes of the scene discretely; it seems they only intervene if they think the gang is going to go too far and bring trouble on themselves. One of them may have been Michael Reinoehl, another member of the antifa security gang, who would go on to murder Proud Boy Aaron Danielson, a little over a week later on September 1. Previously he was cited (but not apparently arrested) for possessing a loaded gun at a protest on July 5. The district attorney declined to prosecute.

Police had seized a gun from Reinoehl during an early morning protest downtown on July 5, but it was of a different caliber than the one used to shoot Danielson, according to the affidavit. Reinoehl was given a citation then, accused of possessing a loaded gun in a public place, resisting arrest and interfering with police on Southwest Main Street. Police took a Walther 9mm semi-automatic handgun from Reinoehl. The citation was dropped by the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office on July 30, and Reinoehl spent no time behind bars. The office earlier this week said it was still reviewing the case.

20:15 Adam Haner, who can be seen throughout the video in a blue t-shirt trying to talk down the gang as they harassed the trans woman, has come under attack and is locked in his truck. The girls in the gang are trying to stop him.

20:21 The men of the gang surround the truck, trying to open door. The girls start beating Haner’s girlfriend, who has been abandoned outside the truck. Some are already shouting about the “racist”; others plea on his behalf; “he didn’t do nothing” someone yells.

21:19 Haner is trapped on the curb in his truck, he can’t pull away without hitting someone, his girlfriend has taken a pretty good beating in the middle of the street at the hands of the girls; a big man is at the driver’s side window banging on it.

21:33 Haner inches away from the curb and accelerates down Taylor. Two of the girls inexplicably pushing on the side of the truck bed fall away from the truck. Now the crowd is screaming, outraged.

23:20 Haner crashes a couple of blocks away near a high-end hotel; the gang jeers in celebration as they close in on him.

24:41 Haner is out of the truck pleading with a masked white antifa who is carrying a club and has Haner cornered, holding him for the gang; he threatens him with the club in one hand, filming him with the other: “don’t come near me bro I’ll fuck you up”.

25:03 The masked white antifa, holding Haner hostage, waiting for the gang, tries to clear the area of witnesses: “hey, there are too many people around here”. Soon Haner is pleading his case before a line of protesters blocking his escape. The gang arrives finally; “bro you’re not leaving bro”.

26:30 Haner’s beating starts as he’s pushed to the ground

26:49 Haner tries to get up, is forced back down by the white antifa.

27:05 Haner is on the ground, where’s he’s surrounded, holding his phone; an older white man appears and tries to extricate him; he’s shouted down; someone says they’re holding him “til the cops come nigga”. At some point Haner is allowed to take a call from his worried girlfriend.

28:58 Love, who’s been leading the beating and flies into a blind rage at Haner’s whimpering pleas, gets a running start from the other side of the street and blindsides Haner, knocking him unconscious with a kick; somewhere a white anifa exults, “drop that fuckin’ racist bro! You fuckin’ loser!”

29:27 Haner’s girlfriend is on the scene and in a panic after seeing his condition. The white antifa who held Haner for the gang pulls her aside trying to calm her: “he wrecked his car…was trying to run people over…”; he abandons her to stop the gang from looting the truck. They are waiting for the police they say. A few people are attending to Haner on the ground, no one knows what to do; a woman shouts “call 911”. Haner is bleeding from the back of his head; someone pours water on his face. As the scene ends expression of concern are shouted down; he’s a racist they say; “black lives matter” “I’m black motherfucker and I”m in this”; a black man in an undershirt is challenging anyone who disagrees to fight him.

Sometime after seeing his picture in the paper I saw Dakota one day, looking stoned stumbling down Harrison Street toward the waterfront.

For threatening the federal employee August 24 Dakota was released and scheduled for trial in October.

Means made his initial appearance in federal court on August 24, 2020 before a U.S. Magistrate Judge. He pleaded not guilty and was ordered released to a residential re-entry center pending a one-day jury trial scheduled to begin on October 27, 2020.

In January he was released on probation after 60 days time served.

Means told U.S. District Judge Michael W. Mosman that what he did was a “stupid mistake.”

“I regret my decision that day,” Means said. “I take full responsibility for what I have done. … I know it’s not going to happen again.”

(…)

Means appeared via video for the sentencing hearing, hours after completing an overnight shift at a 7-Eleven, where he now works full time, his lawyer said…

He lives with his wife and has a second child expected in March. He’s also getting a mental health assessment and treatment “he should have had a while ago,” Ahlemeyer said.

Intimidation of a federal employee carries a maximum sentence of one year. Dakota Means was one of many “protesting police violence” to receive light sentences for assaulting feds. So he was at home on probation in April of 2021 when he would beat his infant son Hunter for the last time.

PORTLAND, Ore. — A Portland man convicted of assaulting a federal officer is now facing charges in connection with his infant child’s death.

Court documents say 22-year-old Dakota Means is charged with two counts of second-degree murder.

According to a memorandum opposing bail filed by prosecutors, the child was admitted to Randall Children’s Hospital with a serious brain injury in April of 2021.

The child later died from his injuries in June, and the medical examiner found the cause of death was blunt force trauma.

Hunter was six weeks old when admitted to the hospital; it appears Dakota had already been beating him regularly.

Court documents say a doctor also found the child had been previously abused with evidence of rib fractures.

Prosecutors allege Dakota was the only one in the room with his child when the injuries occurred. They say the child’s mother had also told him he needed to be more gentle with the children.

Means was originally charged with assault and child mistreatment before being charged with second-degree murder. He pled not guilty to the charges in 2021.

Prosecutors say he is also on probation for a 2021 federal conviction for assaulting an officer.

The boy suffered brain bleeds, a fractured skull and broken ribs. His father was home with him at the time the injuries occurred, according to investigators.

He died in the hospital June 23, a little over a month after he was removed from life support. Hunter was three months old when he died, his mother Gabriella Means said.

(…)

His lawyer said that Means early this year was living with his wife and was expecting a second child in March. Means also was set to get a mental health assessment and treatment, the lawyer said then.

Means wasn’t the only one threatening people with a gun at the August 22 fight between antifa and Proud Boys. Antifa-friendly journalist Sergio Olmos of Oregon Public Broadcasting stalked Proud Boy associate Alan Swinney throughout the day and eventually nabbed his money shot, a photograph of Swinney, covered in paint, pointing a revolver at aggressive antifa. The tall, scary-looking Texan was a regular, prominent presence in the series of occasionally violent antifa-patriot standoffs that began with the Trump era. Antifa despised him of course and had been out to get him for years.

August 22, Oregonlive.com

For this and and for paint-balling and bear-macing two counter-demonstrators at a previous confrontation on August 15 when his small group of demonstrators was trying to escape downtown, Swinney was arrested in September of 2020, for 12 charges: unlawful use of a weapon, pointing a firearm at another person and unlawful use of mace. Swinney turned himself in thinking it was a minor matter and found himself held on 534,000 dollars bond. A Multnomah County judge refused his lawye’rs motion to reduce it and he hasn’t seen the light of day since. He was eventually sentenced to ten years in prison.

August 15, Untethered
August 15, untethered

DA Mike Schmidt’s prosecutors took advantage of Oregon’s mandatory minimum law, which the district attorney had lobbied against in the name of racial justice the previous March, combining charges from two separate days (both involving antifa chasing Proud Boy demonstrators out of town), each carrying mandatory five-year sentences, to be served consecutively. Antifa got over their putative hatred of law enforcement and the District Attorney got over his principled opposition to excessive sentences as the two worked together, hand in glove.

Schmidt charged Dakota Means with one count of manslaughter in the first degree and one count of criminal mistreatment in the first degree (apparently ignoring physical and witness evidence of previous beatings) for killing Hunter. He was sentenced to just over twelve years on April 7. Schmidt could have charged him with murder in the second degree, yielding a minimum sentence of 300 months, or 25 years, but it seems his opposition to long sentences is only suspended in the case of political opposition, not infanticide. The 22 year-old father of one surviving child will not yet be thirty five years old if he serves and survives his full sentence.

Rotting Apple

The Apple store in downtown Portland was built in 2014, designed by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson to fit Apple’s open-air, accessible aesthetic. From the architects:

This single-room, pavilion-like store was designed for one of the world’s leading technology companies and located along a prominent Portland retail corridor. Replacing a preexisting department store, the new building is a reinterpretation of the favorite architectural themes developed over the past 14 years for the technology company’s extensive retail program.

A broad, glass-enclosed room makes this retail environment feel like a seamless extension of the surrounding urban environment. Spanning a city block with 240 lineal feet of 20-foot high storefront glazing, the building’s facade dematerializes the boundary between interior and exterior. The store is actively engaged in the activity of the thoroughfare, with its entry setback adding another stop along the “Portland Open Space Sequence” connecting Lawrence Halprin’s 1970 Forecourt Fountain and the Pioneer Courthouse Square with other downtown parks…

Delicate stainless steel columns set at the interior side of the glass storefront support the roof as it cantilevers out over the surrounding plaza. This minimal support allows for unobstructed views to the surrounding urban landscape, further blurring the line between interior and exterior. The canopy creates a place for pedestrians to gather and diffuses direct sunlight, both inside and out.

Above the occupied retail space grows a green roof system that not only acts as a fourth facade to the surrounding towers, but also contributes to the overall health of the building and well being of the city of Portland.

The store was targeted by antifa in the early morning hours of May 30, the first day of 2020’s summer of BLM rioting in Portland.

Dennis Dale Untethered Livestreams

After a few days the store boarded up, and instantly became a memorial to the growing canon of BLM heroes.

Dennis Dale Untethered Livestreams
9to5mac.com

The store closed in June as the rioting continued. That December, as Apple carefully prepared to reopen the store, the company had a dilemma. Taking down the boards meant dismantling the BLM shrine it had become, and could prompt new antifa hostility just as Apple was trying to reclaim the store. So a solution was found.

Apple began covering up the George Floyd mural on its downtown Portland store Wednesday, the first step in the company’s plan to preserve and ultimately donate the historic artwork.

“We’re going to be putting up a protective layer of plywood over the existing artwork to preserve them for future donation,” Apple said in a statement to The Oregonian/OregonLive on Tuesday. The company said it expected to announce long-term plans for the mural early next year.

The artwork was donated to local BLM grifter Teresa Raiford’s Don’t Shoot PDX. Here’s a group photo in front of the shrine/store. I have no idea what the beauty queen is about, but I noticed at the time on the group’s website a banner blocked her out of the picture. Maybe Teresa, in tracksuit here, didn’t like the showboating:

The store reopened in May of 2021. But simply returning it to its original state was not feasible. When the federal courthouse nearby took down its barriers two months before the building was attacked within hours and set on fire that night. It remains barricaded, like the police precinct next door.

So the company encased the store in a massive steel fence anchored by concrete blocks, where customers filed through a security checkpoint. It resembled nothing so much as the entrance to a prison.

oregonbusiness.com

Now the steel is coming down. But leaving the store exposed is still not recommended. So Apple is removing the dystopian eyesore that is the steel barrier, and replacing it with a less conspicuous plexiglass eyesore.

The Oregonian reported last May that Apple had proposed installing a lattice-work of clear polycarbonate panels around the store’s windows to replace the security wall. Based on the appearance of the store on Friday and the proposed renderings, it seems that Apple went through with the upgrade — suggesting they’re still hedging their bets somewhat.

Nowhere is the conflict between “social justice” and older, putative progressive values such as “livable cities”, as expressed by Apple’s architecture, more evident. No one here seems to notice.

Apple, March 2023, KGW TV Portland

Nearing three years after our Summer of Soros ushered in the “racial reckoning” the store stands as a metaphor for America and its adaptation to our new order.

Update: Apple launched a $100 million Racial Justice and Equity Initiative in January 2021. Apple CEO Tim Cook has not given a dollar figure for the company’s direct contributions to BLM-related organizations.

Just Flew It

A month ago Nike took Chris Rock’s advice and fled Martin Luther King Boulevard. People are looting the store with impunity–no need any longer to wait for rioting and a subsequent, temporary collapse of order. Since BLM’s triumphant summer of 2020 the ensuing raft of legislation against criminal prosecutions generally because they fall too hard on Blacks! and the reign of woke Multnomah County District Attorney MIke Schmidt have rendered rioting obsolete, from the looters’ point of view; order is low-key suspended, indefinitely.

Nike has temporarily closed a retail location in Portland, Oregon, with one of the richest histories in its store footprint because of ongoing theft. 

“People were just going in there with bags already opened and picking up stuff and walking out the door past unarmed security,” Ron Herndon, a Portland civil rights and education activist, told Insider, about the closure of the Nike store on the city’s MLK Boulevard. 

Herndon worked with Nike to open the store in 1984. 

Well, at least they had the right footwear for running away. When you need to flee, choose Nike.

The “community store” was opened after a campaign led by the above mentioned Herndon to bring businesses into Black! neighborhoods. In 2004 the company celebrated 20 years of operation:

“Nike has been a key economic driver for this community, and they are to be congratulated not only for doing business here for the last 20 years, but for being one of the first area businesses to stand up and declare Northeast Portland as a viable community to do business in,” said Ron Herndon, who led the Black United Front in the 1980s and served as a catalyst for encouraging businesses, including the Nike Factory Store, to locate in the community. “Northeast Portland has seen incredible change in the last two decades that simply could not have happened at the speed it did if it were not for the significant commitments made by Nike and others in the business community–both in terms of achieving economic reward and providing community investment.”

When the Nike Portland Factory Store opened in 1984, it pledged to donate a portion of the store’s profits to community-based non-profit organizations…

Nike is still trying to get uniformed police as a condition of reopening the MLK store and for its downtown location near the still-fortified Apple store, where the aesthetic and banners no longer celebrate powerful and fleet athletes in motion, but Black! women and sexual ambiguity. No more stout or svelte mannequins; they’ve all put on weight, let themselves go, and that’s the point; now it’s rotund female figures in yoga poses.

Nike has donated massively to BLM and related causes, and here in Portland the disintegration of downtown is directly related to the BLM riots and subsequent legislation of 2020. But Nike’s money is nothing compared to the cultural effect it leverages with such as their Kaepernick ad campaign–a political campaign under the guise of private enterprise.

So if Nike, once a remarkable Northwest success story, is to die on this hill of shit they’ve created, let us call it the Curse of Colin.

If You Lived Here You Would Be Homeless Now

Depression-era Hooverville, Seattle

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler recently announced he’s found a site for the first of six planned large-scale camps for the homeless.

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) – Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, alongside other city leaders, announced the first possible location of a temporary alternative shelter site during a Thursday press conference, as part of his plan to build six mass homeless camps across the city.

Wheeler says his five-resolution plan is now in the implementation phase, noting his goal is to phase out unsanctioned camping.

“I know people are tired of hearing us talk about addressing this issue, they expect action and today is about direct action we are taking to move this project forward,” Wheeler said.

Wheeler announced the first site will likely be at 1490 Southeast Gideon Street in Portland’s central eastside. He said the city does not have a signed lease on the property at this time but does have an agreement in principle. Wheeler said he is confident the city will secure the lease soon and plans to have the site running by summer.

“Initially, this site will have up to 100 tenants, they can hold up to 150 individuals. This location will help provide safe designated camping locations for homeless Portlanders who then can access basic services like food, restrooms, showers, laundry, electricity and storage facilities,” Wheeler said.

His plan originally envisioned sites for up to 500 campers and was lowered to 250 after pushback from various quarters. This first attempt will attempt to support 100 people with basic services.

The city has picked a San Francisco outfit called Urban Alchemy to run the first Wheelerville. Urban Alchemy, a “workforce development agency”, employs ex-cons to manage homeless shelters.

Urban Alchemy was created in 2018 and expanded quickly from humble origins to capture some of the 1.2 billion dollars San Francisco allotted for homelessness in 2021, through controversial no-bid contracts. Urban Alchemy was the contractor at the center of a scandal involving their management of the Ansonia Hotel as a homeless shelter. The Center for Health Journalism:

The city has more money than ever to combat its homelessness crisis — a $1.2 billion two-year budget bolstered by federal and state funds — yet there’s skepticism about that money being put to good use…

[A] corruption scandal continues to take down City Hall officials like a slow-moving cascade of dominoes, all tied to donations from and relationships with city contractors. Neither the homelessness department nor their contractors have been involved or implicated, but as The Frisc has reported, the six-year-old department has been taken to task for lack of oversight, shoddy contract management, and personnel turnover. It is the only major city department that doesn’t have a formal oversight commission.

At a February hearing about the Ansonia and the $18.7 million contract, Sup. Ahsha Safaí asked Emily Cohen, a top city homelessness official, this question: “If things aren’t going well or are mismanaged, how does the department handle this?”

On one level, the supervisor was voicing concerns that others, from his board colleagues to nearby residents and businesses, were also asking: Is the nonprofit getting this contract — a no-bid contract, no less — ready for this high-profile job?

If no-bid contracts are an indicator, the homeless advocacy industry is being consolidated by a few players:

At the same time, he was addressing recent history. Since 2019, SF’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH) has leaned heavily on no-bid contracts to create housing and services, part of a strategy to treat homelessness as an emergency. In this era, no-bid contracts awarded by HSH have jumped, as a percentage of total contracts, from 1 percent to more than 40 percent.

Urban Alchemy, the SF nonprofit at the heart of Safaí’s query, is among the organizations benefiting the most from this new era. The group hires people who have experienced homelessness, substance abuse, or incarceration. Its first job in the city, handed off from a parent organization, was in 2018 managing and cleaning portable toilets.

On its website, the group uses a saltier description of its approach: ‘No fuckery.’ It has even applied to trademark it. 

But it seems there has been a bit of fuckery. In February one of the cons working at a shelter in San Francisco shot someone on his break before returning to work.

An Urban Alchemy worker allegedly shot a person while on a break during a shift outside a San Francisco homeless shelter run by the nonprofit in November. 

Joseph Perry was arrested and has been in custody since December. He was charged with attempted murder, great bodily injury, assault with a semiautomatic firearm, discharge of a firearm at an occupied motor vehicle, and possession of a firearm by a felon, among other felonies, in January…

Perry was working a shift at the shelter and was on an unpaid 15-minute break when the incident occurred nearby. He returned for the resumption of his shift, but not for work the next day, the organization said.

Urban Alchemy’s “practitioners” have caught some fire as well:

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — The latest victim of crime in San Francisco is a city ambassador from the nonprofit Urban Alchemy.

He is recovering after being shot in the shoulder in broad daylight, in the same alley where a 16-year-old girl was found dead last week of an apparent drug overdose.

“It’s terrible. I was over there on the plaza and I hear maybe three to four shots. Other people said it’s a shooting. It’s not good, but in San Francisco it happens almost every day here. People having guns and shooting over here,” said Vladimir Ivanov, a Tenderloin resident…

The Urban Alchemy ambassadors were not allowed to speak on camera, but could be seen walking down the site in a small group.

Another Wheeler initiative for a car park for the homeless is proposed for an old RV dealership on a major thoroughfare on the east side. Residents are predictably wary.

Oregon today passed a $200 million Affordable Housing and Emergency Homelessness Response Package, so more is on the way. As are more homeless. Here a newcomer says Montana put him on a bus to Portland:

PDX POV 4.17.23

The warming sunlight falls with equal indifference on the evergreens and stray placid people walking or biking along Terwilliger into downtown, just as it does on the squalid scenes there. About ten people were picketing in front of City Hall with BLM signs. Maybe it was the weather, but I thought I’d give them a honk on the horn. They cheered.

The intersection of Fourth and Washington (not yet renamed) is one of our worst. A massive, ugly building that used to function as a small indoor mall has been abandoned and fenced off there since before downtown’s demise. The fence is down in several places, and scattered homeless are in various states of recline on the steps inside. The homeless presence here, centered in front of another abandoned building next to a perpetually besieged convenience store, has been continual for years, but today there are more of them. I parked and walked to the store, to get a closer look, and this happened:

I bought a drink from the weary man of indeterminate ethnicity behind the counter and headed back out. Coming upon the intersection from the other direction and filming surreptitiously I was “made” by a tall skinny negro in a feral afro. “You recording nigga?” I heard from over my shoulder. I pretended not to hear and kept walking to my bike. Casting a glance back I could see him watching me. Imagining myself bolting down Fourth with the whole band chasing me like zombies, I got the key into the ignition while I put on helmet and gloves.

I cast another glance back and he’s got his phone out, coming across Washington toward me.

“Get his license.” A female voice, thick-tongued and garbled by drug use, called out. I pulled away.

I spent less than a half an hour downtown. The numbers of homeless there have increased after having eased up somewhat recently. But the condition of those on the street is noticeably worse. There are levels to homelessness, from the truly helpless to the functioning vagabond, and everyone on the street looked to be of the helpless or homeless criminal class–like my filming friend. The latter supplies the drugs to the former, I’d wager.

Southwest Portland remains relatively normal compared to downtown. Relatively:

Ted, Rested and Ready

Ted Wheeler’s mad as hell and he’s not going to take this any more. The Daily Mail:

Portland‘s mayor turned on a left-wing activist who hijacked a council meeting to air her own views, telling her in exasperation: ‘Nobody really cares what you think.’

Ted Wheeler, a 60-year-old Democrat who took over the famously liberal city in 2017, was chairing a council meeting on March 1 when Keeley Higgins took the floor – and the two engaged in a terse verbal back-and-forth. 

Higgins started her ill-timed rant by saying: ‘Ted, I believe the last time I saw you in this kind of setting was when I gave testimony demanding that you end the use of poisonous gas on humans in this city.’

It’s been a long hard road for the heir of a lumber fortune and former state treasurer. He appears to be a progressive technocrat who thought it would be fun to run one of the most progressive cities in the nation in a time of increasing tax revenue. He took office in 2016. By early 2018, after having been introduced to the regular commandeering of city hall by protesters and other features of Portland politics, he was caught in public saying he “couldn’t wait” for his term to end.

August 18,2018, The Oregonian

Nonetheless he weathered Covid and the riots to become the first Portland mayor to win reelection since 2000, when a spoiler in the race allowed him to beat radical Sara Iannaronne, who had promised to turn the police bureau over to police abolitionist leader Jo Ann Hardesty.

Iannarone supporters launched a recall effort against Wheeler in 2021 that failed to muster the necessary signatures, identifying him with the hated police and their “excessive” response to rioters. Later they sought an extension in court, citing Covid.

The Hail Mary maneuver came hours after the campaign disclosed Monday that it had collected only 40% of the signatures it needs by Wednesday to place a recall of Wheeler on the ballot.

Late last month, an elections official in the Portland City Auditor’s Office, Louise Hansen, denied a request by the recall campaign for a 90-day deadline extension. The campaign’s lawsuit names Hansen and City Auditor Mary Hull Caballero as defendants.

Not all recall attempts or other signature-gathering drives have struggled to gain traction during the COVID-19 pandemic. Oregon City residents upset with their city’s mayor easily gathered more signatures than needed last summer to put a recall on the fall ballot, and voters ousted former Mayor Dan Holladay from office.

Wheeler’s capitulation in 2020 to rioters under the BLM banner, his abandonment of the police, even his ritual humiliation and tear-gassing did nothing to endear him to the radical left and this surrender looks like alliance to average Portlanders. Wheeler, as a progressive liberal, is adjacent to the radical left, and, with the special disdain the radical left has always held for liberals, there be dragons. Big, ugly rainbow-attired, gender-fluid dragons.

The recall effort only collected about 20, 000 votes despite Wheeler’s broad unpopularity; it’s hard to imagine an effort coming from the other side, one seeking to recall him for losing the city to antifa and Jo Ann Hardesty, doing worse.

Now the man who said he couldn’t wait for his time to end says his time has come.

Seven years ago, Ted Wheeler ran to become mayor of Portland and led with one audacious pledge: He would eliminate unsheltered homelessness in Oregon’s largest city by the end of 2018.

He utterly failed to deliver, however, and today an estimated 3,000 individuals reside in hundreds of encampments all around the city.

The pandemic not only magnified the misery of those living on the streets but also hollowed out the city’s once-vibrant downtown. Last year, Portland experienced record homicides, a slaughter more than twice the per-capita level as Seattle.

Yet Wheeler remains bullish, not only on Portland’s prospects but also on his own leadership capabilities.

“I actually believe that I was made for this moment,” he told The Oregonian/OregonLive.

We’ve only just begun…

New Funky Pox Drops

A new gay disease has arrived via a “drug-resistant strain” of a bacteria that is spread through the ingestion of fecal matter, and newsreader gals are giggling when explaining rimming and other current gay-to-straight fads to le bourgeois. The white lady is courting trouble here calling the practice “very gross.” Yo, Karen, love is love.

“It’s really going to be about control of behavior, oral, kind of fecal spread…among gay and bisexual men…” Well, good luck with that sister..

The “Shigella” virus, discovered in Japan in 1899, calls to mind the Monkey Pox virus that a tourist brought back to the UK from Nigeria in May of 2022 setting up a June “Pride Month” of gay super spreader (unfortunate phrase here) events. Despite having condemed public gatherings in the service of Covid hysteria, not a peep could be heard in the national media suggesting gay men maybe take it easy just this one summer.

Needless to say there’s even less of a hint that gay men should responsibly consider the broader straight world and what their exotic practices might unleash upon it. But we are living in the post-AIDS world and that doesn’t mean–as it once did to quietly hopeful boomer liberals–that we became more conservative about sexual relations, but rather that we must approve of any and all homosexual behavior, epidemiological and moral consequences be damned, lest gays be compelled to keep it in their pants once in a while.

Dishonest AIDS propaganda beginning in the eighties telling people “everyone” was at risk preempted any discussion of responsibility, as intended. Though we’ve long known it’s virtually impossible to get AIDS from heterosexual practice, the residual impression remains among the ill-informed mass that one heterosexual coupling with an infected partner is a death sentence.

Michael Fumento wrote in 1987:

The reason AIDS is not “exploding” is that, contrary to public belief, it is a disease that is extraordinarily difficult to transmit or contract, even by the standards of other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Whereas mere juxtaposition of genitalia is enough to transmit syphilis, gonorrhea, herpes simplex II, and chlamydia, all of which require only direct contact with the mucous membrane, HIV (like hepatitis B) is bloodborne, the most inefficient mode of transmission an STD can enjoy. A sore, even an undetectably small one such as often accompanies herpes, might offer a passageway for these viruses, but some sort of passageway is needed and in the case of most Americans such passageways do not exist…

The reason anal as opposed to vaginal sex is so dangerous has to do with the difference in tissue construction between the male urethra and rectum and the female vagina. While the vagina is constructed of tough platelike cells that resist rupture and infectious agents, and are designed to withstand the motions of intercourse and childbirth, the urethra and rectum are constructed primarily of columnar cells which tear or rupture easily. This allows semen to enter the more readily accessible blood vessels of the rectum or, conversely but much more rarely, allows blood from a ruptured rectum to seep into the urethra of the active partner. (The April 1987 AJPH study found that men who reported rectal bleeding were far more likely to become HIV-positive than those who did not.)

Heterosexual transmission of AIDS turned out to be a deliberate lie, necessitated by the need to obscure the inherently unhealthy nature of anal sex and gay promiscuity.

Discussing the sexual transmission of AIDS without mentioning homosexual behavior in general and anal sex in particular is like discussing syphilis without mentioning intercourse. But this is precisely what the media and other responsible authorities do. Most articles and wire-service stories on AIDS do not so much as mention the words anal sex, much less indicate that it is the overwhelming risk factor. Similarly, one AIDS book designed for use by elementary-school students refers to heterosexual sex while making no reference to homosexuality, and one sex-education text formerly distributed in Seattle took the final step by stating that “AIDS is not a sexually transmitted disease.”

The untold story of AIDS is how it acts as the gay holocaust. What was the worst public relations problem in history was turned into a triumph, replete with religious mythology and quasi-Christian suffering, placing gays at their present spot atop the hierarchy of grievance which lords over us.

Should we be surprised? They had all the talent for just this sort of thing. AIDS was when all that gay genius that had been making cinema for straights started telling its own story. And it’s killing us.

Robert Kennedy Jr’s book The Real Anthony Fauci contains a remarkable chapter alleging the AIDS virus as we understand it is a hoax. There’s not time (or expertise) here to go into that, but Kennedy’s account of Anthony Fauci losing his battle with gay activists and adopting their propaganda-centric approach, scaring the straights into thinking they were at equal risk–to keep the blame off the gays and to keep the money for treatment coming in–is notable here.

Randy Shilts, who has rationalized the spread of the heterosexual-AIDS myth, is also frank to concede the irresponsibility of this approach: “ In two or three years heterosexuals are going to wake up and see that they’re not getting the disease. Then what?” Then what, indeed?

He need not have worried. We learned a lot of things from AIDS. One is that there is no accountability, for some people. Here’s Shilts quoting Fauci spreading the misconception that casual contact could transmit the blood-borne AIDS virus:

“The finding of AIDS in infants and children who are household contacts of patients with AIDS or persons with risks for AIDS has enormous implications with regard to ultimate transmissibility of this syndrome,” Fauci says. “If routine close contact can spread the disease, AIDS takes on an entirely new dimension,” he adds.”

Shilts eventually became a hero for his book And the Band Played On (and then dying of AIDS) but he was reviled by activists during his life for advocating for things like shutting down San Francisco’s gay bathhouses and for speaking honestly about the nature of gay promiscuity.

Another remarkable feature of the AIDS (cultural) debacle is that straights were exposed to the hyper-sexuality of gay culture, just as it introduced a harrowing disease we all (supposedly) had to fear, and the eventual effect was not condemnation but normalization of that culture.

The trouble was that, by definition, you had a gay male subculture in which there was nothing to moderate the utterly male values that were being adulated more religiously than any macho heterosexual could imagine…Promiscuity was rampant because in an all-male subculture there was nobody to say ‘no’ – no moderating role like that a woman plays in the heterosexual milieu. Some heterosexual males privately confided that they were enthralled with the idea of the immediate, available, even anonymous, sex a bathhouse offered, if they could only find women who would agree. Gay men, of course, agreed, quite frequently.

Fauci gave in to the gays’ demands to keep the bathhouses open and the orgy going, in the same way he gave in to demands to push masks and other Covid measures he knew to be ineffective or worse. If you want to know who rules over you, take a look at–no, don’t look. It’s very gross.