The follies begin
Yesterday we found Mingus-a-um Mapps, candidate for mayor, bragging about how many parking tickets his "transportation" bureau minions are giving out lately.
I'm excited our efforts to ramp up parking enforcement are finally coming to fruition. It’s past time to ensure safer streets for everyone. Over the past year and a half, my team has been overseeing this work, restarting the tag warrant program, securing new funding for increased…
— Mingus Mapps (@CommMapps) June 27, 2024
In any sane place, this would be political suicide. But it's Portlandia we're talking about. The city that's going to rise from the ashes by further torturing anyone misguided enough to own a car. The people who steal the cars are treated better in some ways. And those who drive like maniacs face literally no consequences, haven't for years. But parking tickets, highest priority.
Meanwhile, the governor, T. Kohoutek, endorsed one of Mapps's opponents, Carmen "Chainsaw" Rubio. And get this: It's because of Rubio's "track record" of "getting results."
Really? Rubio joined the City Council on December 28, 2020 and has been in the majority on every significant vote I can remember since then. What "results" has she "gotten" that are so wonderful, except maybe for her construction buddies? Is Portland a better place now than it was on December 27, 2020?
But I'm not surprised at the endorsement. The voters in the biggest city in a state that wants to be led by a strange bird like Kohoutek are probably fine with an empty suit as their mayor. Sophie, Flower Child of the Weed, seems beside herself with glee.
If you're waiting for the Portland comeback, you might want to find a comfortable place to sit.
Parking isn’t much of an issue at Bridgeport Village or Washington Square
ReplyDelete...or Cedar Hills Crossing or downtown Beaverton. No meters in downtown Beaverton either...
DeleteI feel like that girl Oprah brought as an offering to Weinstein. There will be no help from the crowd because they are either oblivious or condoning. (We've all seen the picture.)
ReplyDeleteI get emails from PBOT - most about street festivals. Now besides organizing events, PBOT wants to be in the parking enforcement business. It's like they decided they don't want to pave streets any longer. Maintenance is so boring.
They do want to erect eight inch concrete slabs blocking arterial lanes so it is faster to take shortcuts through residential neighborhoods.
I guarantee no one is happy with PBOT except a few. Yet all we have are idiots and sycophants willing to run for office.
Do you still have to pay the ticket if you come back to your car and your window has been smashed in?
ReplyDeleteWill the license-less cars providing haven for drug use and theft be getting tickets? Will the millions in homeless-services money then pay the fines?
ReplyDeleteDriving around Portland nearly every day, even through the COVID era, I still see cars without Licenses & Tags.
ReplyDeleteMany are likely stolen.
1. If the relatively small number of People who Steal cars and go through the revolving door of Criminal Justice are finally incarcerated for useful durations, this would solve much of the problem.
2. Unfortunately, Parking Enforcement is a mixed bag, as some of the burden of expired Tags (along with crazy speeding, some of which are stolen cars) should also be carried by the PPB Traffic Division, which seems to have been absent until recently.
https://www.portland.gov/police/divisions/traffic-division
However, with the PPB I am not a fan of increasing Photo Vans & Lights and torturing mostly law abiding Drivers trying to commute to and from work.
Meanwhile, by allowing Stolen cars to proliferate, this is a regressive attack against the Working Class, as the Working class cannot afford the newer cars that are less likely to be stolen. So the Bureaucrat Planners want the Working Classes to be forced into Mass Transit (with it's delays, onboard drug users, physical assault risks, I am a witness) for a delayed journey, multi-transfer (each transfer delays approx. 15 minutes) travel from their distant cross County and relatively affordable housing, to the location of their lower wage jobs. This is also why I am against Tolls. Despite all the 'Progressive' rhetoric, Tolls are actually regressive against the less fortunate, the Working Class. That is not democracy.
Many businesses still can't find Workers and so this Working Class drive commute problem, along with rising Portland Business Fees and Taxes, doesn't help anyone accept temporary revenue increases for selfish government bureaus seeking revenues at everyone else's expense.
So, Businesses then move out and make Inner Portland into a dystopian encampment of decline.
As a result, local governments now losing revenue, go into a viscous cycle of attempting to jumpstart with the usual nonviable government and non-profit grants, then over to desperately woo sweetheart delayed taxation and fee deals to REIT Developers, adding even more construction sites full of high-end dark canyons of rectilinear 'Silo Bunkers'.
All while consulting with their local University Urban Planning and City Planning Departments, who are, already biased by both idealistic, impractical, arrogant, unproven & academic dogma, along with selfish plans to keep their jobs, also at everyone else's expense.
The Planners are therefore an integral part of a bourgeoisie Gentrification process, as they are usually absent later to fix their own now proven planning mistakes, while long term constituents suffer and exit.
This cycle will eventually end in the future with conversion to Stalinist Soviet Era mass housing and tenements in the United States of America. There will be no middle class. The disturbing writings of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Philip K. Dick are already receding in the rear view mirror!
Arrrgh! Go peddle your DSA clap trap elsewhere.
DeleteI guess you were absent the day the teacher talked about proper capitalization in school. German-style capitalization of all nouns is not proper (or correct) English syntax.
I'll believe it when I see it. Visible from my porch there are four vehicles stored on the right-of-way with long-expired tags. Calling them in has been an exercise in futility for many, many years now. It would be great if that changed, but I don't expect it will.
ReplyDelete1. If DSA= Democratic Socialists of America, that is not my politics and was not my intention. Though I was once a Socialist while attending Portland State University back when I was politically naive.
ReplyDeleteRather, for the most part, now more than ever, planning by a bureaucratic Central Committee hasn't worked anywhere without repression, failure and eventual financial bankruptcy. A free government should listen to and be responsive to it's electorate constituents, which includes the welfare of all of the citizens under it's charge. The bureaucratic arrogance, that we see all around us locally, too often ignores these aspects and will ultimately end in failure every time.
2. I deliberately didn't care about noun capitalization and actually consider it a compliment that the method was attacked rather than any intellectual attempt to engage the message.
3. Regarding the message:
After years of riding my bicycle to and from work during many dark winters alongside the urban towers around Portland... I was not seeing enough tower unit residential lights 'on', to believe these buildings are financially viable, if not resource wasteful.
We also live in an era when tax laws are so convoluted that minimizing tax losses often involves wasting resources, including commercial real estate and housing. Where whole buildings can remain vacant for years as a tax loop hole, when there are also local shortages of the same.
So the following, is one area where I think Portland, Oregon is headed. This is the direction that our Urban Planning Schools, as well as local City and County Urban Planners help steer local Real Estate investment. They spend a disproportionate amount of time on increasing housing density and very little time on planning for businesses that help create jobs nearby. The high density towers are designed to multiply government revenues and drive up property taxes.
The un-elected bureaucrats who plan these bubbles have no skin in the game, while they exist primarily to raise tax revenues, protect and increase government jobs, even to increase budget deficit levels......
Meanwhile, across the border in Canada, both in Toronto and Vancouver BC, they are already headed toward real estate price 'correction':
Why are so many big-city condos sitting empty? | About That
CBC News
CBC/Radio-Canada is a Canadian public broadcast service. Wikipedia
10 days ago
In the midst of a housing supply crisis, thousands of condos in Canada's largest cities are sitting empty. Most, experts say, are less than 500 square feet. Andrew Chang explains why there's been an explosion of these so-called 'shoebox' condos, and why they're suddenly struggling to sell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGfFBP7U7pQ
Our only saving grace for a viable High Rise condo market, will be migration over from the state next door having the largest population. If not, then these fancy units are on the path to ultimately turn into tenements, of which they were not designed, leading to dystopia.