Liberals have long held up Portland and Seattle as two of America’s great urban progressive success stories. These cities have been heralded as a version of an American Scandinavia: filled with highly-educated, culturally refined, rich, nature-focused residents. For years these were top destination cities.
No More.
After decades of rapidly gaining population, these cities are being depopulated quickly. The riots and lawlessness in the summer of 2020 that never seemed to end, certainly accelerated the exodus.
“Portland has switched from attracting new arrivals to repelling its current citizens,” concedes the left-wing alternative paper Willamette Week, with the news the city has lost people three years in a row. “In Portland, many liberals are dodging stray bullets, losing catalytic converters to thieves and sidestepping tents. Then they open their tax bills.”
Even Rep Earl Blumenauer, Portland’s congressman, says “Portland is broken”.
The schools certainly are. Portland, Oregon public schools issued an absurd curriculum guide last year that taught kids the idea of gender as mainly binary was brought to the U.S. by white colonizers.
Ditto for Seattle, which the Seattle Times warns is suffering from its first decline in working residents but attracting homeless people and criminals, while crime is soaring.
Meanwhile, just a 20-minute drive from Seattle is Bellevue, a booming city of 154,000 people. Seattle-based Amazon is shifting its workforce and plans to have 25,000 employees in Bellevue, Microsoft has 9,000 people on its Bellevue payroll and Facebook and TikTok are expanding their local footprint. Kemper Freeman, who developed Bellevue’s massive retail shopping centers, says business has never been better.
https://www.geekwire.com/2021/