Downtown Portland businesses: "The city has let us down"

Business operators in downtown Portland are tired of the riots, the graffiti, and the tent camps. They have formed something called the Rose City Downtown Collective, which will work on these problems and spur the local politicians on to get off their duffs and do something about them.

Here's a story about the formation of the new organization. There's a polite open letter, but also some less sunny comments from a couple of the real estate types that used to own the City Council.

“You already had businesses who were on their last legs because of COVID, then all they had to their names was their inventory. Then that was taken from them,” [Moyer heiress Vanessa] Sturgeon said. “The expense of replacing their windows is just the final blow for these small businesses.”

The collective is a wide variety of businesses and individuals ranging from hair stylists to restauranteurs to folks at business firms to candy shops — all calling on City Hall to do more.

“We need these small businesses to have safety for their clientele,” Sturgeon said. “We need the garbage picked up downtown, we need the homeless to have a compassionate resolution to the lifestyle that they’re now living, which is quite inhumane in tents on the streets.”

It's going to be up to the new City Council members – Carmen Rubio, Mingus Mapps, and Dan Ryan – to get the downtown moving back in the right direction. It would take guts. There would be all sorts of whining on the left. But as Chloe Eudaly and Sarah Iannarone found out, the left can take you only so far.

Meanwhile, look on the bright side. The Pioneer Courthouse Square holiday tree has made it through five nights without being destroyed.