Welcome back Sekkle, it's so great to see your work here again. You capture details of Portland like no one else, it's amazing. My favorite in this set is the grafitti (Oh the GRAFFITI one, of course! haha) ..with the pink blossom trees on either side. Gorgeous.
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Those photos break my heart! Had long visits to Portland in 1995, 97, 99, and 01... and it was so beautiful then. What's happened to it? Does anyone there care anymore?
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I'll attempt to answer this because in a nutshell, the whole city is sad/mad over the state of things right now.
I volunteer almost every weekend doing litter pickups, and every one of these events is full, which never used to be the case prior to 2020. Calls to the city over trash dumping are up 300% in the last year. It used to take 3-4 days for a response. Now it takes 45 days. CDC said not to clear homeless camps for fear of spreading Covid, and boy did Portland follow suit, and the resulting trash that built up was pretty much left in place as well. ODOT (the state highway dept) has been busy cleaning up from a winter ice storm, still, and Covid budget cuts have led to freeway graffiti everywhere not being addressed. Foot traffic downtown, like I assume in most major cities, is down 80% -- office workers and tourists and conventions and games and restaurants and theaters and bars and festivals etc...poof, gone! OH yeah don't forget the protests -- absolutely great, until a group of about 100 anarchist types decide this is the perfect opportunity to spend month after month after month vandalizing, in many cases, the very minority small business owners/non profits they claim to be up in arms for.
That being said -- as a lifelong resident who feels sick to my stomach over Portland 2021, I have great optimism for the future. We just passed $250 million/year funding to address homelessness on every level, from housing to mental health. They're even paying homeless $20/hr to clean up the city. Portland banned single family zoning which means you can actually build a fourplex here and there in the suburbs etc, increasing housing options. And at last the city is tackling the garbage and graffiti issue with added funding this year, after basically taking a year off. A recent Saturday downtown, my expectations low, i was happy to see tons of people out and full restaurants with lines out the door. So Portland has bottomed out and it sucks right now, but IMHO the urgency of this past year has lit a fire under our collective ass.
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The last year has been difficult, but in many cases I was trying to photograph darker/more depressing scenes intentionally. Not to make the city look bad or to say "everything sucks here", but just because that's what I wanted to photograph. I threw in a couple skyline and Mt. Hood pics to try to balance things out, though. Didn't work I guess!
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