Yeah lots of foot traffic. Wouldn’t be so bad if every other person wasn’t some kind of a panhandler.
Hey! You're talking to a Portlander, and I know that's not true... LOL...
I know it's fun to exaggerate and perhaps many people do know that already, that this is what you're doing to emphasize a point. But, there are many who have absolutely no clue what downtown Portland is like, and they will never see another inner-core big metropolitan city like this in the nation.
I've been to many of them (try LA, Denver, Santa Fe [not so big there, though... :-)], Miami, Oklahoma City, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, San Francisco, Seattle, Kansas City, Springfield, MO, New Orleans, Little Rock, Memphis, St. Louis, to name a few) and Portland is completely different and is definitely a "walking town" to be sure. That's what I've always called it.
You will pass 1,000 people on the streets in Portland and you'll probably never hear but one panhandler come up and talk to you... LOL...
That does remind me of a story that happened to me one time. There was a guy walking in downtown Portland and was waiting at the same light as I was, and he asked me for some money for gas, as he and his family got stranded and needed gas money. His wife and kids were in the car. The thing that made this one more unique was that he was carrying around a red gas can when he was doing this.
Okay, that was one day. The next day, this same guy happened to be by me at another street light waiting again, and he asked me the same thing. Well, I asked, "Weren't you the same guy who asked me that yesterday at another street light?!" LOL...
Well, he very quickly moved on, never saying a word to me and asked someone else for some "gas money"... :-)
Heck! One time when I was in Miami, I was driving around in the evening and stopped at a red light and someone came rushing up and started washing my front window of my car... whoa! I said to myself, "What is going on?"
And I just sat there, sorta stunned and then when he was finished, he came over and asked for a dollar... LOL...
There you go... it's the society we live in, and has nothing to do with the city you're in.
In Tulsa, by the way, you can exit off the freeway exit ramps and at the light (in the neighborhood streets) there is someone there with a sign, sitting there, asking for help. I see the same guy there all the time (and also see others in different places, all the time, too).
What you're talking about is something in our society, not something in "Portland"... LOL...
Say what you want, but when we go to downtown Portland we see wall to wall panhandlers and I don't know how anyone can deny that. I will say most of them are up front - they just ask for money without trying to play a sob story - but they are there, every bus stop, every Max stop, and all of the square. Back in the day it was winos at Third & Burn, but I guess you could say it has been “dispersed”, both in location and intoxicant of choice.