PDX Links for June
Mosquitoes, bike bros, and stripper unions (plus the Lloyd Center is back?)
July 4th weekend plus a big news month means I’m way late on June. Apologies! Still, this is some evergreen shit so I hope you enjoy it.
1: The city has decided against using ShotSpotter (or similar) for gunshot detection. Unabashed good news and a credit to the criminal justice reform advocates who mobilized against ShotSpotter. From all the research I’ve done, gunshot detection is an ineffective waste of money at best and that’s before one takes into consideration civil liberties. Moreover, having attended a FITCOG meeting myself, I am not confident that that group was equipped with the expertise to adequately analyze a pilot program’s effectiveness.1
2: It’s not your imagination. The mosquitoes are way worse this year.
3: Portland has the highest taxes in the country for folks who make over $250,000 [Paywalled]. This is fine, in my opinion. We’re a liberal city with many folks who want progressive taxes. The trouble is on the other side of things. What are we getting thanks to that tax burden? Are our services better? Since the answer is clearly “no”, our city government needs to do some real soul-searching.
Most complex problems are multi-causal and our local tax situation (Portland+County+Metro+State) is no different. I tend to think one huge issue is that we suffer from “kitchen sink” or “everything bagel” liberalism, where we are trying to solve every intersectional problem with every dollar and, in doing so, manage to solve none of them. Couple that with an ineffective form of city government (now hopefully fixed), a bizarre tax and tax dollar allocation regime, and several bureaus with…less than stellar track records (see: any of our audits, ever) and we get to be in the situation we’re in now.
If I’m being optimistic: as pandemic aftershocks subside and once Multnomah County actually gets Preschool-for-All successfully scaled, the tax burden on high income earners won’t feel quite so ludicrous. But even then, there’s still a ton of room for improvement.
4: Apparently the Lloyd Center is cool again? I’d heard rumblings of this last year but haven’t been through to experience it out myself. Worth checking out now; you never know when the other shoe will drop.
5: A primer from Vox on 9th circuit decision in Martin v. Boise. You can’t have a complete understanding of homelessness in Portland without knowing this decision.
6: Red Line from Gateway to PDX shut down until October. Bummer!
7: If you have an Oregon ID your data may have been hacked. Double bummer!
8: Magic Tavern dancers looking to unionize. I haven’t been so I can’t speak to the quality of the entertainment but all else being equal I want safe working conditions and fair pay for strippers.
9: Ambulance response times are horrid. It’s gotten so bad that people on hold with 9-1-1 are driving victims to hospital before the call gets picked up. Seems as though the city auditor is looking into it now too.
10: A Slate interview with Congressman Blumenhauer, being a bike nerd. My plan is to buy an e-bike in the next 6 months myself though I’ll never get a bridge named after me like he did.
11: An Oregon radio station is going to start using an AI DJ sometimes. I have no commentary on this (yet) but expect more of this in the future.
12: Another month, another article of Portland Street Response’s uncertain future. As for me, I’m still rooting for PSR to work.
They seem like good people whose hearts are in the right place but they are not folks with deep statistics backgrounds.