Gunfire, homeless and addicts -- that was my experience earlier this month staying two nights at a historic luxury hotel on Broadway in Downtown Portland. The hotel is beautiful, we found wonderful food and things to do in other parts of the city, but I cannot recommend booking accommodations Downtown, in the epicenter of the city's urban woes.
We arrived to find a person urinating in front of the hotel entrance. We had to navigate past addicts staggering in front of the next-door cannabis shop and homeless persons passed out and blocking the sidewalks on the blocks adjacent to the hotel. We exited the parking garage across the street and a disturbed woman spun around to face us brandishing a knife. We set out for a food truck pod three blocks away, had to detour to avoid an intimidating gang of addicts, and found that the food carts had closed early, the site instead teeming with police officers. We reluctantly ate dinner in the hotel lobby restaurant because we feared for our safety venturing out after dusk. That night we were awakened by a burst of gunfire outside our hotel.
I hadn't been to Portland in twenty years. On my last visit it impressed me more than any city I had recently seen with a palpable vibrancy in its effervescent street life -- bustling with entrepreneurship, progress, optimism and joy. On this visit we saw shuttered storefronts and high street front vacancy, a sea of troubled and dangerous people, and a grim apocalyptic pallor hanging over the city. It was frightening and depressing.
That's the reality. I worked for decades in large East Coast cities and never felt this unsafe; and I currently life near a mid-sized Midwestern city with Democratic government but it has not adopted the extreme progressive moves that have sent Portland into a tailspin. Recent pieces in the New York Times document the lack of political will in Portland to confront the homeless, meth, fentanyl, and crime problems now out of control owing to ill-conceived public policy.
I feel for the hospitality and other business professionals struggling to do business in this environment. A manager for the hotel where we stayed contacted me with a valiant effort to assure me that my impressions were completely false and that the hotel and city are completely safe. I would not have booked a Downtown stay had I been forewarned of the real life status of the immediate environs of this hotel.
I don't live there, and I don't have to visit again. But if you do live there, and you support the public policies that have created this tragedy, then I question your business model. It will only get worse and at the end of the day you are the ones accountable.
