"Equity"? Or the next development scam?
Busy times in real life have prevented me from pointing out this story, in the Weed, from three weeks ago. It tells how one of the bigger grants awarded out of the City of Portland's "clean energy" slush fund – $4.7 million worth – is going toward a building that hasn't even been properly planned yet.
It's supposedly going to be an office building on the corner of North Williams and Russell, in the crime-plagued zone over by Emanuel Hospital. It's being pitched as part of the seemingly endless reparations to be made for razing a Black neighborhood over there 50 years ago for the almighty "urban renewal." But it's a real estate deal, and it seems to have precious little to do with "clean energy," other than the fact that it's going to use some.
Voters directed PCEF to use tax dollars to curb emissions and maximize the economic benefits of green energy in low-income communities of color, where climate change takes its biggest toll. With Williams & Russell, PCEF may be using the money instead to back a speculative commercial real estate development in a city that’s already rife with vacant offices....
So far, Williams & Russell has just a conceptual design for the four-story office tower, a five-story apartment building, and 23 townhomes, all at affordable rents and prices.
“Our vision for the site is to create a place of opportunity for the Black community,” Williams & Russell said in its proposal. “This opportunity can come in various forms—through business enterprise, career development, art and expression, or by being able to call this place home.”
As eye-opening as the Weed story is, one detail was left out: Earlier this summer, Oregon's two U.S. senators (the one actually from Oregon and the one from New York City) were bragging about $850,000 in federal pork that they've steered toward this project.
Oh what the heck, even if it never gets built, it's only taxpayer money. And it's for "equity." Almost as good as "for the children."
This is the Portland guilty white liberal version of the “Field of Dreams.” If you build it, they will come.....come back.
ReplyDeleteI swear, I must have read hundreds of stories and opinion pieces over the years here in town rehashing the same two or three same examples of how the blacks of Portland were wronged. Yeah we get it. Retelling the same old yarn once again doesn’t make you brilliant. It is just lazy journalism.
So all the white folks coming into North and NE Portland and snapping up all the affordable (at the time) houses had nothing to do with pushing the Black community out to the numbers? And anybody who thinks the planet is warming only because of the human output of CO2 is allowing this crap to happen. Do some research and find out this is just another globalist scam. The ice in the Arctic Sea is not melting away, but increasing. And the warming started in the 1800s, after a "little ice age" period. Greenland used to be inhabited by Vikings because it was much warmer.
ReplyDeleteNice segue.
ReplyDeleteKeep fiddling Nero while the world burns. It's been too late to do anything probably for over 50 years so you're entitled to your opinion but Mother Earth really doesn't give a shit, it matters not what or who occupies our planet and eventually no matter what we do it will be cold, dry vacant orb like the moon.
ReplyDeleteWhat matters in science is facts. You have provided none, but emotional arm waving.
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