By Jeff Church, PDX Real
I don’t find myself driving around Portland much anymore, especially to downtown Portland and its immediate environs of the Central Eastside District or the Pearl and Alphabet Districts and beyond. Last week, I ran some errands for work and found myself in both the Central Eastside and the Upper Northwest Portland area. Between these points on the map, I drove through downtown and Chinatown. What I saw wasn’t much different from what I saw back in 2021. Both locations I visited were surrounded by homeless tents and camps. Driving through downtown and into Chinatown, I saw individuals passed out on sidewalks. I saw garbage and graffiti. I saw what amounted to considerable human suffering and urban decay.
Angela’s common sense commentary on the homeless failures in Multnomah County:
Starting in early 2016, there have been multiple declarations in Oregon, in Multnomah County, and in Portland of homeless states of emergency, and by what I’ve experienced, these declarations have done absolutely nothing to quell the emergency.
As a matter of fact, the state of homelessness has gotten considerably worse in the nine years since. Some people claim that things have improved since the Covid freak out. Perhaps they have, but the improvement is barely perceptible anecdotally.
In the last few weeks, there has been multiple startling statements from “the experts.” First, came the announcement that the City of Portland had a budget shortfall of around $100 million. Then came the announcement from a Portland economist who called Portland’s economic forecast a “doom loop.” In the middle of last week, a study showed that foot traffic in downtown Portland was still 36% lower than it was in 2019, which wasn’t one of the best years for downtown by a long shot. And finally, on Friday of last week, our joke of a Multnomah County Chair, Jessica Vega-Pederson (JVP) announced that the county had a homeless budget shortfall of $104 million.
In hindsight there were warnings. You may recall JVP shared last years $3.9 billion budget with county commissioners only 24 hours before the vote. Julia Brim Edwards and Sharon Meieran spoke out saying it wasn’t enough time to consider the budget. The budget passed 3-2, with questionable priorities and cuts to public safety. Here is a flashback from our Instagram.
City administrator, Michael Jordan, informed us that the budget shortfall in the city was largely due to vacancies in downtown buildings, which is where Portland gets a considerable percentage of its tax income to pay for all of its various pet projects, which is leading to hundreds of millions in lost city revenue.
This is not so much of a doom loop. It’s an unmitigated downward spiral.
Here’s how it goes: Local governments tax the middle and upper middle class at a high rate so they can get sufficient tax funds to pay for homelessness – a problem they created with poor policy decisions. This tax money is given to the government, and in turn, they mostly parcel out these funds to non-profits and NGO’s. These organizations, who are in on the take, waste the hundreds of millions of dollars given to them, both by paying high-level staff huge salaries, and on DEI-tinged efforts that not only don’t mitigate the issue, they make it worse – here’s looking at you Harm Reduction and Housing First.
When the tax funds don’t solve the problem, the government looks to continually increase the tax burdens of high earners and small businesses. Small businesses, which are under attack both from high taxes and rapidly declining public safety (usually in the form of vandalism and theft, and high insurance premiums or even loss of coverage), begin to shutter their doors because they can’t sustain their negative bottom lines due to falling sales and ever-increasing costs. This leads to layoffs, which directly affects and guts the middle class. Those middle-class wage earners, who used to be able to thrive in the city a decade ago, increasingly find themselves underwater due to their own tax burdens and their exhaustion of seeing a city they formerly loved begin to fail under decay. The 80% of businesses which have experienced first hand these public safety problems are wilting under the pressure of seemingly unending the rising costs to survive in Portland. Add to this a public school system that isn’t pumping out excellence, and hence, the mass migration begins. This is where we are now.
Vega-Pederson’s reasoning for the county shortfall was due to unexpectedly low returns on its SHS tax fund. The Metro Supportive Housing Services tax is a 1% tax on “high earners.” In Multnomah County, a high earner is someone who makes $125k/year, or a married couple that makes $200K/year, which is pretty much anyone in Portland who wants to live in a decent house in a neighborhood that isn’t overrun by drug addicted street zombies. Median income in Portland from 2023 is $88,792 a year. These individuals aren’t seeing the payoff, and logically, they are fleeing to some place more safe, less expensive, and considerably more aesthetically pleasing, such as Clackamas County.
Back in October we posted this gem.
When Vega-Pederson announced the shocking shortfall, nearly every elected official in the region responded in some degree between surprise and shock. The biggest critics of this announcement were Metro Council President Lynn Peterson and former county commissioner Sharon Meieran. Peterson said, “To me personally, it wasn’t just disappointing, it was actually jarring. Chair Vega-Pederson’s actions on Friday highlight the trust issues the electorate has with the government in general. We can’t keep telling the voters of the region we can do big things and then let them down.”
Meieran was much more brutal and to the point. In a long and detailed post on X, Meieran stated that the massive budget shortfall was anything but unexpected as JVP claimed and could have been avoided with adequate planning. Meieran also was critical of JVP’s claims about what the SHS tax was bringing in, saying it was $100 million above what had been promised ($250 million). Meieran also took umbrage with the newly appointed “Homeless Czar,” Jillian Schoene, stating that Schoene “doesn’t understand homelessness, county history, or the people the county serves.” Meieran finished by saying what I stated above,
“We’re a decade into this housing (and homelessness) crisis and nothing meaningful has been accomplished.” – Sharon Meieran, physician & former county commissioner
Other elected officials, from Governor Tina Kotek, to Clackamas County Commissioner Ben West, to Mayor Keith Wilson, even to fellow Multnomah County commissioner Julia Brim-Edwards, indicated their dismay at the shortfall and the lack of transparency from Vega-Pederson, and they laid the responsibility of this failure solely at Vega-Pederson’s feet. In her letter to the press, Vega-Pederson asked Metro for $30 million and the state for $55 million to bridge the gap in the shortfall, but neither Peterson nor Kotek indicated that this was even possible. Kotek stated, “I don’t think it’s appropriate to come out of the gate and ask for an amount of money without previous conversations.”
In other words, JVP has no clue what she is doing.
JVP issued a dire warning about not receiving the additional funding, calling it “catastrophic,” and stating it would force the closures of shelters and substantially decrease rent assistance to those of the verge of losing their housing. Mayor Keith Wilson said the news “put him back on his heels” and that “we do not believe this is how partnership and collaboration should be forged.” Solving homelessness is Wilson’s primary policy issue, and he won the mayoral election by fully committing the city to solving the problem, stating he would solve the crisis by providing 3000 nighttime shelter beds by the end of the year. Obviously, Vega-Pederson threatening to close shelters is going to make the mayor’s goal much more difficult to realize.
The vast majority of Portlanders have questioned JVP’s leadership nearly from the time that she took office a little over two years ago. She has bumbled and fumbled nearly every policy program she has pledged to the public.
Remember when she declared a Fentanyl Emergency for 90 days to see what happened next? Nothing.
As of October of 2024, she had a paltry 11% approval rating, which according to the Oregonian was “the lowest approval rating posted by any local elected official in recent memory.” This new development has laid waste to what little support the community has for Vega-Pederson’s leadership. There is no possible way forward for her to remain as the Multnomah County chair.
Many have brought up the possibility of a recall. A recall is a 90 day process of gathering 15% of the signatures of ballots cast in the last Gubernatorial race in Multnomah County. Oregon’s recall laws and compliance are quite involved and substantially less effective than, say, California’s, which has produced several significant recalls in recent years. Because of state laws, no Oregon recall of consequence has been successful. Even if a recall was against Vega-Pederson, it wouldn’t trigger an immediate new election where she would undoubtedly face a fierce battle against Sharon Meieran (who lost to JVP in 2022, but has gained considerable standing within the community, while JVP’s popularity has nose-dived.)
Absurdly, if JVP was successfully recalled, her chief of staff would be her interim successor and an immediate special election would not be held.
We must not allow JVP to do any more damage to Multnomah County.
It is now time for Portland’s citizenry, both voters and elected alike, to demand Vega-Pederson’s resignation. We can no longer afford to allow someone this incompetent to run Oregon’s largest county, especially at a time that is so crucial to our future.
We will be testifying tomorrow morning at the Multnomah County board meeting at 9:30am with other citizens. Care to join us to ask for her resignation?
Board Meeting Each and Every Thursday starting at 9:30am
Multnomah Building
501 Southeast Hawthorne Blvd., Boardroom 100
Portland, Oregon
This post originally appeared at the PDX Real substack. Click through to watch video clips and join the discussion