Posted on 09/01/2020 6:05:25 AM PDT by MarvinStinson
Businesses were in bad shape because of the pandemic even before the riots started. In Portland the protests happen every night and riots have been declared nearly every other night in the month of August. A business group sent Mayor Ted Wheeler a letter warning him an exodus from the city had begun because of the ongoing lawlessness:
For Greg Goodman, the co-president of the Downtown Development Group, there are other numbers that tell a deeper, even more disturbing story: the number of businesses that are moving out of or locating outside the central district of Portland.
“The number is like nothing I have seen in 42 years of doing business in downtown,” Goodman said in a letter he sent to Mayor Ted Wheeler and the members of the Portland City Council…
Their departure, he said in the letter, has nothing to do with the Black Lives Matter movement “but does have most everything to do with the lawlessness you are endorsing downtown.”
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a link to the full letter available but Fox News published some of it:
Goodman said companies include Daimler Trucks North America, Airbnb, Banana Republic, Microsoft, Saucebox, and Google, which he claimed: “leased 90,000 square feet in the Macy’s building [and] has stopped construction of their improvements.”
“The list goes on and on. If you know a retail or office broker, give them a call and ask them how many clients they have are trying to leave,” he continued.
Goodman encouraged city leaders to “walk around downtown Portland in the morning,” adding that he would personally give them a tour.
“You aren’t sweeping the streets, needles are all over the place, garbage cans are broken and left open, glass from car windows that have been broken out is all over the streets, parks are strewn with litter,” he wrote. “You are willfully neglecting your duties as elected officials to keep our city safe and clean.”
Google contacted KOIN to say that its plans weren’t impacted by the riots so take that for what it’s worth. I’m not sure they tell us the truth if they were? Any response to BLM activity is a PR issue for major companies. They are going to handle this as PR, i.e. spinning this in whatever way will do the least damage.
Here’s KOIN’s video report on the rioting and the letter from the Downtown Development Group. It’s frustrating to see the black BLM protester interviewed for this story who agrees that the violence is counter-productive but who doesn’t want to tell other people how to protest. It really shouldn’t be that hard to tell people that setting fires is not the way to get your point across. But I guess that’s the point we’ve reached. Saying ‘riots are bad’ is considered controversial now.
Why do they weasel word virtue signal like this? The burning looting murderers have everything to do with the lawlessness.
Portland’s mayor and DA are Marxists and totally on board with this. Sacrificing jobs and prosperity are a part of their solution.
This business group doesn’t get it.
BLM are marxists.
This is the natural outcome of their policies.
The Black Lives Movement is about reparations which is identical to burning and looting.
Life is simple when you know the rules.
Leave all the destruction alone. A memorial to the BLM movement.
Many American cities still have many blocks that are de facto memorials to the riots of the 1960s.
IF they are going to excuse the blamtifa for burning down their businesses, then the business owners need to shut up and take their beatings.
Developers think and plan long term. 10+ years.
Those business that leave won’t ever come back.
Because..... the west coast needs it’s own detroit...
Because if they don’t, it won’t be covered or they will be attacked.
The “Yes, but...” approach is what has to happen in such despotic regimes as Portland.
when do we all determine the Mayor is clinically insane?
In our nearest large city, the rioters destroyed entire sections in the late 1960s.
Those areas still are burnt out slums—sixty years later—and five decades of media and Chamber of Commerce propaganda about “our community” have still not lured any business owners to go there.
At this point they might as well convert the area to agriculture.
OREGON PING
If you’d like to be on the Oregon ping list, please freep mail me.
They looked at the BLM Movement as positive????Idiots. Don’t come to my state morons...
The “Yes, but...” approach is what has to happen in such despotic regimes as Portland.
Amazing how few Freepers understand that.
It's like a bunch of 5 year old stomping their feet.
From your home page:
“A war against an army that has no free will due to technological tampering is in the world’s future.”
Like BLM’s social-media-hive-mind “army”?
Exactly. As behind the Iron Curtain, not getting oneself killed takes some strategic intellectual “social dancing”....
I think I was envisioning no ideology, just killing machines who destroy humans just because they exist.
BLM just wants to destroy all white people because they exist.
That’s something that puzzles me: how is it that urban real estate owners and developers are not raising absolute hell in these Democrat cities?
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