Good morning, Portland. Here are some links.
First up is this week's feature, by Joe Streckert, about Portland's alternative history. Here's an example:
1845: Welcome to Boston, Oregon!
In 1845, city founders Francis Pettygrove and Asa Lovejoy couldn’t decide what to call this place. Pettygrove wanted Portland. Lovejoy wanted Boston. To decide, they flipped a coin. Portland won.BUT WHAT IF... it had gone the other way? What if Lovejoy had been able to name us after America’s home of tea parties and tricorn hats? This town would forever be known as “Boston, Jr.,” “West Boston,” “Boston the Younger,” or “Boston, Second of Its Name.” We would never crawl out from the influence of our East Coast namesake and comparisons between the two towns would continually give Boston, Oregon, an inferiority complex, as well as fueling an insufferable number of click-baity lists about how to tell the two towns apart. (As it stands now, barely anyone’s even heard of Portland, Maine. Phew! Close one.)
Portland has a brand new houseless community, but the city is planning a crackdown, Thacher Schmid reports.
Portland's bet on forcing developers to build affordable housing is getting lackluster results, Dirk VanderHart reports. Check out what Mayor Ted Wheeler wants to do.
Terrible news for Portland: The Oregonian laid off 11 people yesterday. Fuck that.
"A 35-year-old man suspected of killing and dismembering a woman found in the trunk of a car in Aloha last week was booked into jail Wednesday," wrote one of the handful of Oregonian reporters who didn't get laid off yesterday. "Jeremiah Johnston is being held without bail in the Washington County Jail on accusations of murder and first-degree abuse of a corpse."
Racists in Oregon: "A member of Oregon State University's student government now faces felony charges for allegedly plastering racist bumper stickers on cars outside a Corvallis food co-op last year. Court records show Andrew Oswalt was indicted Tuesday in Benton County on four criminal counts, including two counts of intimidation, a hate crime under Oregon statute. The 27-year-old was arrested and jailed the same day in lieu of $157,000 bail, records show."
Someone died in a shooting in the Pearl District last night.
Here's a Portland Tribune article about public bathrooms produced in Portland that are "solving a vexing problem around the world."
Why.
President Trump falsely claims ratings for his State of the Union speech were the highest ever.
— CNN (@CNN) February 1, 2018
Several State of the Union addresses in the past were higher-rated, including President Obama's first address in 2010, which had 48 million viewers. https://t.co/O7SXRX5Cdd pic.twitter.com/EtnQQdLWKC
Yuck.
Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald, the director of the CDC, resigned on Wednesday because of her troubling financial investments in tobacco and health care companies https://t.co/krVMs6pKAE
— The New York Times (@nytimes) February 1, 2018