Today’s headline may be viewed as shocking and depressing unless you’ve been paying the slightest bit of attention to the news out of Portland, Oregon over the past few years. Based on IRS records, the city lost one billion dollars in municipal revenue between 2020 and 2021, and things didn’t look much better last year either. The underlying reason for this dip in revenue is obvious. Starting with the BLM riots of 2020 and the subsequent wave of homelessness, drug addiction, and crime in the years following, many of those with the ability to do so packed up and moved out. And they took their tax payments with them. More than 14,000 former residents fled the city, and that’s a significant chunk for a town with a population of a little over 600,000. (Washington Examiner)

Portland, Oregon, lost $1 billion between 2020 and 2021 as residents fled rampant homelessness and crime, taking their tax dollars with them.

According to an analysis of Internal Revenue Service data by Oregon Live, Multnomah County, where Portland is located, hemorrhaged 14,257 persons filing taxes, resulting in a record loss of $1 billion in revenue.

Those who moved were also relatively wealthy, with the former residents holding incomes 14% higher than persons who had moved out of the area the year before. Over the course of the year, the average income of county residents who stayed declined slightly.

As noted above, this analysis isn’t simply based on the raw number of people who moved out. A significant percentage of them were people with higher-than-average incomes. You don’t need a degree in economics to understand that those are the same people who pay a larger share of the taxes, despite what progressive Democrats are always trying to tell you. (Portland recently made the list of America’s Fastest-Shrinking Cities.)

Some of the departing residents were replaced, of course. But too many of the replacements wound up being homeless people and drug addicts who still litter the streets and drive up crime rates. (Prompting even more people to leave.) Homeless drug addicts don’t tend to pay much in the way of taxes, nor do they contribute significantly to the local economy. If anything, they put even more strain on Portland’s budget as the city struggles to provide them with their basic needs.

As conditions in the city deteriorated, crime of all types predictably rose. The usual robberies and carjackings have made the streets less safe. And on top of all that, the city appears to have a serial killer on its hands, though that’s probably unrelated.

You can’t blame all of this on the pandemic, as some local leaders have tried to do. The shutdown certainly didn’t help, but the city was already in decline by that point and it obviously hasn’t bounced back. You’ll recall that Ted Wheeler was elected Mayor in 2016 and immediately began implementing progressive “justice reform” changes as we’ve seen in other blue cities. Conditions began going downhill almost immediately. And Wheeler was somehow reelected in 2020. An effort to recall him failed in 2021.

Wheeler briefly toyed with the idea of criminalizing illegal drug injections in public (coming as a shock to everyone who had assumed it was already illegal). He also suggested a ban on public camping and campfires inside the city. But he abandoned both of those plans last month following an outcry from the liberal base of his party.

All of this recently led John Sexton to ask what should be an obvious question at this point. Can Portland be saved? In that article, John points out that these deteriorating conditions can’t be addressed by simply throwing more money, free tents, and disposable syringes at the homeless because those actions do not address the actual, underlying problem. You can’t expect an orderly and safe society to simply reemerge on its own. You have to make it happen and that includes holding people accountable for their public actions even if you feel sympathy for them. And if Ted Wheeler can’t do that, he has no one to blame but himself.