Thread by @NancyRomm

1/ Let's do this.

The news out of Portland 2023 is grim. The murder rate quadrupled in five years. Drug overdoses doubled between 2019 and 2022, with the state ranking second in the nation for opioid addiction and last in drug treatment.

2/ Robberies were up 50% in 2022 alone, and after having guns pulled on its baristas multiple times, a downtown coffee roastery closed in April, telling the public, “We cannot continue operation here as we cannot ensure the safety of our team and customers."

3/ I'd driven past the shop six months earlier and seen a couple at an outdoor table trying to politely cohabit with a ranting woman two tables over, a woman who had what might have been her worldly possessions spilling from garbage bags around her feet.

4/ There are more than 700 homeless encampments in Portland these days, and what I recently took to be civic landscaping, large boulders placed under freeway overpasses and along curbs, turned out to be bulwarks against people setting up tents.

5/ As a friend said, "Now they just poop on your lawn instead."

Nothing comes out of the blue, and even before George Floyd was killed, Portland had looked at its own and the nation's identitarian failings and decided the bill had come due. Recognizable targets were easiest.

6/ The city vilified the police, defunded the police, was okay with Portland's underemployed young men carving KILL ALL PIGS into the city's steel bridges. The idea was that this would set Portland on a right and better footing. It did not work this way.

7/ With fewer cops than when the city had been half its size, citizens became anxious. "They should have been there," the antifa kid told me in August 2020, after a supposed-BLM supporter pulled a motorist from his truck and kicked him in the head.

8/ When I suggested the cops were too busy chasing antifa around every night, the kid grew quiet. "They should have been there," he said.

He sensed something was dangerously out of whack, if not the fix.

9/ But what of city hall, and a bulk of citizens, and a gullible or perhaps mendacious press? Why were they intent on letting Portland burn?

10/ Did they see a future in framing disorder and destruction as necessary steps in building the new American city, a place that would work hard, visibly hard, to shuck off the sins of the past?

11/ Portland's star had risen high in the new century and people meant to push it higher, to prove they cared, caring that included policies that decimalized drugs, street camping, petty theft and, as the string would play out, every form of violence, including attempted murder.

12/ Portland’s misfirings were not unique. Chicago and Philadelphia, San Francisco and New York enacted similar policies with similarly bad results. But those cities had large and differentiated populations; no one group could snatch power and bring the whole thing down.

13/ Portland, with 635,000 residents, proved swayable and overenthusiastic, and when the opportunity presented itself, with the Big Bang of dysfunction that was summer 2020, Portland went supernova.

14/ The city had not been No. 1 in anything since the Trail Blazers won the NBA championship in 1977, and here it was on TV every night.

15/ There was excitement in this, there was identity, and with not much squinting, activists and those who supported them saw valor in trashing the courthouse; in erecting a guillotine on the roof of the police union; in breaking windows for more than 200 nights in a row.

16/ "Peace through violence," the activists said, more than once, a maxim that struck me as not much different than handing someone a turd and calling it a sausage.

If most of the Rose City is as pretty as it ever was, it is nevertheless foundering.

17/ Upwards of 20,000 people have left since 2021, and more than 25% of downtown real estate remains vacant. I cannot overstate how drastic a change this is, and how fast.

18/ As recently as three years ago, Portland was set to emerge as America's next great city, heralded, and properly so, as quirky and beautiful and authentically itself.

19/ That future was sacrificed on the altar of good intentions, and instead of rising higher, Portland finds itself digging out from recrimination and ash.

You may have questions, for instance, why did citizens not react in real time to the death spiral?

20/ Did they not perceive it? Were they too captivated by the idea of their own compassion? And what of a media that chose to elevate activists and fetishize violence? Whom did they think it helped to paint a rosy picture where things were critically falling apart?

21/ And was anyone charting Portland's rise and fall, including the deadly downstream effects that would prove nearly impossible for the city to reverse?

Yes.