Posted on 10/29/2021 2:18:25 PM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
Portland’s “badly damaged” reputation – marked by months of destructive protests, a homeless crisis and record year of homicides – is hurting the standing of Oregon’s largest city, according to the city’s main tourism promoter.
Travel Portland, the city’s tourism promotion group partly funded by taxes, presented data to the City Council and mayor this week showing the city has declined to its “lowest level” of being a likely destination for delegates to attend conferences. Just 64% of surveyed tourists said they would visit Portland again.
“There’s an old old saying, ‘It takes a lifetime to build a reputation and you can ruin it in an instant.’ That’s true of cities, as it is people,” Portland Mayor Wheeler said in response to the Travel Portland data. “And we’re just going to have to commit to that long term process of improving the safety and the livability and the economic prosperity of the city.”
The data shows that more than half of event planners and two-thirds of attendees indicated that their “likelihood” to book or attend meetings in the city over the next two years was heavily influenced by the “visibility” of racial and social protests.
“The impact of this is that we likely won’t even get the opportunity to bid on many conventions for the next two years, which will affect our long term successes well into the future,” said Jeff Miller, the president and of Travel Portland.
City Commissioner Dan Ryan said one of his friends who recently volunteered at a convention texted him about her experience with visitors who felt unsafe in the city.
The woman told Ryan “it was really depressing to have so many people approach her, that looked angry, that we allowed ourselves to even host a big convention... like we weren’t ready for it.”
(Excerpt) Read more at apnews.com ...
Portland is a couple of hours from the coast, or much more if you’re floating down the Columbia. And Seattle is not considered “on the coast” as it is located on Puget Sound, far from the open ocean.
wow that Mayor Wheeler is a real genius!
when you’re in Kansas, it’s close enough
You can feel the “Force of The Suck”. Stand off and breath some fresh air.
I understand your perspective. It also bugs me when people from Pittsburgh or somewhere talk about Denver as being “out west”, or maybe even Kansas. Denver is not even in the same time zone as us.
It’ll take 25 years to come back from this….but the local dimwits would need to elect law & order, pro-free market candidates first.
But that’s not going to happen. Portland will forever be a third world $hit hole
Not a badly damaged reputation, but a very much earned bad reputation.
“ Portland will forever be a third world $hit hole”
There’s no longer any reason for it to exist. It’s not a big port, and logging, farm and mineral products are easily shipped by rail to ports that can handle large volumes of them. Seattle used to have some large industries, but the aircraft, aluminum, lumber, and software industries are drawing down there. Ship building is gone, as is most of the commercial fishing. What are Portland and Seattle left with? Needles and poop.
I lived in Seattle 40 years ago, and seriously thought about permanently settling there, but I’m glad I didn’t.
I was born and raised in Portland, but I’ll probably never go back, even to visit. It really was nice once, though.
A handful of properly placed problem solvers could take Portland from sh*thole to shinola protuberance in just a few years. There would have to be a few arrests, of course.
I live across the Columbia river from Portland in the Vancouver Washington area. This past summer, the homeless situation was BAD. B A D. Driving down I-5, there were homeless encampments on both side in pretty much every free space. Graffiti everywhere, etc. The most troubling thing was that A LOT of these homeless were living in cars, or old decrepit RVs. Parked on the side of the secondary roads in the industrial areas wherever there was a free space. But, I took a drive down a few days ago, and they’ve cleaned a bunch of this crap out. I didn’t see ANY cars/vans/RVs being used as living quarters, and the city has put concrete blocks (big ones that you can’t move by hand, or likely destroy without explosives) in all the spots that there had previously been RVs and vans. The tent cities have greatly decreased in size. (Some of them burned and weren’t repopulated, some of them just seemed to move along, and the city came in and cleaned up behind them).
The folks in charge are still leftists, and Antifa still has the “right” to go into downtown and bust out shop windows, and set dumpsters on fire without prosecution. But at least the homeless camps are getting taken care of.
I don’t believe it’s possible that 64% would visit there again.
At least in Beruit, they let you shoot back.
We drive thru and around Portland regularly. Lived there for several years when it was Free and Beautiful. Portland now reminds me of a 3rd world country. We have to go into the city on Monday to pick up appliances. Not looking forward to it.
The homeless likely moved to their “summer” homes.
I have to drive I-205, east Portland, regularly. The homeless camps along the freeway, especially near Powell Blvd., seem to spring up and then get torn down by the authorities. I’m assuming they move back and forth from
I-5 to I-205.
Welllll,when you live in La La land, reality always bites you in the ass
Wheeler was key to the destruction of portland an odd fact that the reporter missed.
A few hangings I would expect.
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