Influential figures are calling for a renewed federal presence in the city, whose long history of energetic protest once it earned the nickname ‘Little Beirut.’Leah Nash/The Globe and Mail
Ben Edtl still can’t quite shake a feeling of sadness when he stands at the corner of Burnside and Trinity in Portland’s historic Alphabet District.
On one side, plywood covers the windows of what was a Chipotle restaurant, now shuttered. On the other, a large window opens onto the tables and chairs of a café Mr. Edtl once ran, until “we left it and abandoned it,” he said.
He ran several coffee shops and a roastery in Portland, a business that did not survive the turmoil of 2020 and 2021, when many months of protest – sometimes peaceful, sometimes destructively violent – raged through the Oregon city gripped by COVID lockdowns.
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Recovery has been slow. Nearly a half-decade later, a city survey found only one in five residents feels safe downtown at night. Transit ridership remains down by a third. Portland leads the United States in commercial vacancies.
Into the urban voids have come a swell of homelessness and the detritus of fentanyl addiction, a tableau of human suffering as the city sets records for numbers of people dying on the streets.
Last year, voters replaced Portland’s mayor with a new leader who entered office determined to end homelessness on streets in the city, while the state abandoned its decriminalization of narcotics.Leah Nash/The Globe and Mail
And protests have once again broken out, with clusters of people nearing 100 days of loud demonstration outside a local Immigration and Customs Enforcement building.
In Portland, says Mr. Edtl, a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump, “the energy is dark.”
To make change, “you can do it politically, or you can get kinetic,” he adds. “And when Trump brings the National Guard in, it’s kinetic.”
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Mr. Trump has suggested he intends to move in that direction. “It’s like living in hell,” he said of Portland earlier this month, promising: “We’ll be able to stop that very easily.”
The U.S. President has already deployed federal troops to Los Angeles, Washington and Chicago.
But even Mr. Edtl is skeptical that doing the same will help Portland. Instead, he fears it may accomplish the opposite, at a time when, he says, “things are changing in Oregon.”
Mike Schmidt was the local county district attorney whom Mr. Trump attacked as a ‘radical left’ figure in 2020. He is now the general counsel of the Urban League of Portland, one of Oregon’s largest and oldest civil rights organizations.Leah Nash/The Globe and Mail
Mr. Trump has for years found Portland an irresistible foil, a place that has exemplified leftist politics where he can stage his law-and-order approach.
In the violence of 2020, Portland was singled out “as some sort of archetype of a failed progressive city,” says Mike Schmidt, the local county district attorney in 2020 whom Mr. Trump attacked as a “radical left” figure. That June, Mr. Trump dispatched federal forces to the city.
“We were the pilot of this strategy,” Mr. Schmidt says. “We’ve been here before. We’re doing it all over again.”
But it’s a very different time. Last year, voters booted Mr. Schmidt from office, voting in a more centrist district attorney. They replaced Portland’s mayor with a new leader who entered office determined to end homelessness on streets in the city. The state, meanwhile, abandoned its decriminalization of narcotics, a policy that had made it a progressive pioneer.
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“Our policies in Portland have been somewhat misguided,” says David Dickson, a former community college leader who is now working to find solutions to homelessness.
“What we were calling compassion has been really more permissiveness,” he says. A life-long Democrat, he would welcome greater federal help for the city – so long as it doesn’t come in military uniform.
“Would there be any benefit to that? No,” he says.
Indeed, memories remain fresh of the tear gas-soaked months of protest in 2020 that left stretches of downtown boarded up. “We can’t have that again,” says LaJune Thorson, president of the Downtown Neighborhood Association. “If it got as bad as it did before, it would be hard to survive.”
Todd Zarnitz leads the neighbourhood association in the city’s northwest district, where two shelters housing more than 200 people are in the works. He says that neighbors are fed up and an overnight shelter is not the solution. ‘What is the level of acceptable behaviour in a city?’Leah Nash/The Globe and Mail
But influential figures are calling for a renewed federal presence in the city, whose long history of energetic protest once it earned the nickname “Little Beirut.”
Late last month, U.S. Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who is from Oregon, told Mr. Trump: “I hope you will come to Portland, Oregon, and crack down.”
That idea is “very dangerous,” says Todd Zarnitz, who leads the neighbourhood association in the city’s northwest district.
He has few compliments for the left-leaning policies and philosophies that have held sway in a city that, he argues, has learned too few lessons from recent upheaval. “The problem is so deep and wide,” he says. Parallel arcs of homelessness and violent protest have left Portland “a complete mess.”
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But, he warns, any action by Mr. Trump will amount to “trying to prove a point that we’re a bunch of crazy, loonie, violent, leftist liberals that are unhinged and will gladly smash up the whole town,” he said.
“And that’s right. That’s what will happen.”
It’s not even clear what could be accomplished by a hard-line response, argues Mr. Schmidt, who is now general counsel for the Urban League of Portland. Portland has neither enough public defenders nor enough jail space to accommodate a wave of arrests.
Besides, he said, violent crime is – like elsewhere in the country – already in decline.
A city survey found Portland leads the United States in commercial vacancies.Leah Nash/The Globe and Mail
Bringing in an outside force could also dim what has been, for some, a growing optimism that Portland has begun to turn the corner on a rough decade.
Last week, Mayor Keith Wilson sent residents an e-mail warning about the possibility of “mass arrests by masked agents,” and soliciting civic volunteerism to “prove the administration’s heavy-handed tactics are not needed in our city.”
Within days, the mayor’s office had received more than 150 responses, including from Megan Boutwell, a local executive who figured her experience could be helpful to people in need of employment coaching.
Ms. Boutwell has felt a swell of optimism for Portland, motivated in part by Mr. Wilson’s determination to end homelessness, but also by changes she has seen, like Monday night tango dancing at a local park this summer.
A federal troop deployment, she worries, “would be a huge step backwards.”
“It takes people loving the place they live to make it better,” she says. “And that’s what I want to be a part of.”
Nearly a half-decade after COVID-era protests, a city survey found only one in five residents feels safe downtown at night.Leah Nash/The Globe and Mail