[stillwithit]

WFH means biz isn’t coming back there any time soon even with the homeless gone.

It’s why homeless are downtown now rather on the fringe; fringe used to be emptier more frequently as downtown filled. Now folks are home on the fringe all the time.

I was just downtown for lunch on weekday and it was a ghost town. I worked for PSU for years, am aware of what it should look like and it’s just dead. That’s been the case since 2020.

If you want services, good luck. Feds extracted that money and feed it to cloud app companies to keep you all happy and you still aren’t.

Let’s keep giving Elon forever to fail to reach Mars and complain government experiments are failures right away.

Americans have a credibility problem. Work less and less but expect more and more because we have a lot of hallucinated wealth. Where do the real workers come from if everyone is doing office work? Now that other nations have matured after WW2 rebuild, how do we justify taking more for less output?

1945-2000s was a statistical anomaly. America needs to sober up.

[twelve40]

I don't buy this "WFH makes downtowns drug-ridden war zones" dichotomy. I've been to downtown Portland before Covid, and it was pretty repulsive, just like SF. Sure, it has deteriorated in both places since, but that was not pre-determined. WFH != war zone in downtown.

[stillwithit]

Your paraphrase is a strawman (melodramatic one at that). Nice job ripping it asunder to show us all how serious you are

[panick21_]

These problems are so American. Downtown in European cities (that I know) are as vibrant as ever. Europe has done just as many social programs as Portland or probably more. Why do people no live in these areas?

It seems to me this problem is much larger then drug law enforcement.

PS: US Government haven't given Musk a single $ to go to Mars, what are you even talking about.

[volkl48]

As someone on the US East Coast - Boston and NYC are doing pretty fine. This is very much a specific cities problem, not an all cities problem.

[polski-g]

Europe has much higher police officers per capita than the US.

Portland specifically has less police officers per capita than Haiti.

[carlosjobim]

What about Paris? I think you can find as many European as American examples, but instead of junkies it is gangs making the cities unsafe.

But from what I know the police in Paris sometimes clear away the tent cities from the streets.

[GoblinSlayer]

Bucks are free, just print them. Wait, no, money are digital now, press a button and make money numbers.