Just Another Photo Of Downtown PDX, Part 2

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In the last episode, I published an angle on downtown PDX taken from a certain vantage point in the Lloyd District near the Metro HQ. It appeals because of the way the buildings cluster upon one another and the way they huddle against the West Hills (this an aspect I've always enjoyed about downtown, that the tallest buildings in the State of Oregon are still dwarfed by the hills just west of that. You can't ask for better backgrounds, really).

Portland, though, tells many stories these days, and instead of the idyll that draws so many new moderns here, some of those stories, that you really can't ignore, tell of stresses that some promotionalists would rather leave off.

All you have to do is zoom out a bit.

Sure, it's a trite expression I make here, and not exactly original. But it is the reality. And it's in places where success is supposed to be the order of the day where it speaks particularly of the lack of justice that are the weft of the fabric of our modern times.

Latterly the homeless camp has become an ubiquitous and longer-lived part of the Portland urban experience. This one, at NE Lloyd Blvd and Grand Ave, has existed for a number of months, perhaps closing in on a year. Undoubtedly the pandemic has allowed for a lower frequency of the periodic law-enforcement sweeps that would keep these in motion. 

One wonders what those whose fortune hasn't routed them into one of these places thinks as they go past them. The tension between this and the mumbledy-million-dollar retail and condo towers dominating less than a half-mile away is palpable enough that you can almost reach out into the air and pluck it like an over-taut string. 

There are good people in this town who are working without enough tools and support to fix this. There are indifferent people in this town who are thankful that this isn't them. There's the money, who goes where it will and will probably miss these people altogether. 

And that's Portland, 2021; a story if you frame it just right ... and another one if you change the frame just a little. I have no solutions myself nor do I have suggestions, so, I guess I offer all this banal stream-of-consciousness to say there's a story here each one of us should tune in to, and not forget about.

It's about them, I guess. Those people in the photo that call those tents home. In a city brimming with opportunity, they have none. That's not the Portland I was hoping to see, at this time in my life.