The CHNN eastern desk reported recently that Harlan Harrington, the network’s go-to international correspondent and expert on Mediterranean scandals of all sorts, was skiing in Switzerland, accompanied by Lois Farnsworth, a former Miss North Dakota, and largely unavailable.

Until this week.

Harlan said he’s been overwhelmed, not to mention overdone, by the tempest in Italian politics, and has not been able to mount a massive,  Guernica-size report on Berlusconi’s titanic struggle to hold onto power.  Occasional thousand word pieces fail to do this story justice, Harlan said, and since the CHNN flying boat is in winter storage in Bismarck, he’s also had some difficulty just hopping down to Milan, as he is wont to do, to examine court briefs against the PM.

Still, Harlan does have a snippet of news, small beer though it may be to those ravenous readers of all things bunga bunga in Rome.

The prime minister, according to Harlan, met this week with a select group of Vatican leaders, ostensibly to celebrate the 82nd anniversary of the signing of the Lateran Pact of 1929.  The Roman Catholic church struck a deal at that time with then Italian leader Benito Mussolini, providing for official state recognition of Vatican City and it’s core structures.  The church built a village and people came, long before the idea occurred to Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The meeting between the clerics and the prime minister was described by observers as “correct,” as the church, itself embroiled in a worldwide institutional sexual abuse scandal, appeared to be sensitive to the need to reach out to the prime minister, somehow or other, without appearing to ignore or condone the colorful contours of the premier’s personal life.

Back to the small beer.

Italian reporters helped Harlan out a bit with some details of the meeting, pointing out that church leaders still see Berlusconi as an ally on right to life issues, and as a possible source of money – direct, or, if need be, indirect.

A bill now before the Italian parliament,  and favored by the church, would include a one euro ($1.36) tax hike on commercial movie tickets.  Church-owned “family friendly” theaters would be exempt.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uGkuyc2OmY

As picayune as such a negotiating point might appear to the uninformed, non-Italian political observer, Harlan emphasized the Machiavellian quality to the church-state dance now underway between Vatican leaders and Berlusconi.

Observers said Berlusconi, sitting in a large, blood-red upholstered, gold-leaf wing chair, appeared to wince slightly as the ticket issue was raised in whispered tones by a cleric assigned to the task.  The Leader then nodded as if in assent, conveying a confessional demeanor.

Harlan ended his report to the CHNN eastern desk with this quote from an Italian legislator:  “The church has an enormous influence on politics still,” says Italo Bocchino, a lawmaker who defected from Mr. Berlusconi’s party  last year (the political party, not the one at his Sicilian retreat with Vladimir Putin).  “If the church had said Berlusconi was incompatible with governing, he would have fallen.  But they didn’t.”

Catholic reporter Andrea Gagliarducci observed:  “It is diplomacy.  You take everything you can.  You make agreements even with people you don’t trust.”

Harlan told the eastern desk  he’s thinking of bringing that message personally – along with a large shipment of The Prince in paperback – to activists and leaders in Madison, Wisconsin, and maybe Ohio, as soon as he packs his skis and can get himself and Lois on a plane back to Bismarck.

They know there are known unknowns that I don’t know about; and I know I don’t know about them.  Nolo contendre.

Anyway, when one does at least realize that nothing – not credit card wars, not torture, not tax policy, not social welfare policy, not massive fraud in the financial and mortgage markets, not massive (and up to now, largely unreported) deficits in state treasuries, not historic rot in the nation’s public infrastructure (no high speed rail in the US!), not a high school dropout rate at 30 or 40 percent (possibly higher), not a jobless rate at 10 percent (probably more than double that in real terms, and climbing) - nothing, not even a mild rebuke from one of their golden boys, David Brooks, will dissuade those representing the right from their catastrophically appointed rounds  – well what can a poor boy do?

Yet, there is perversity in this I think, real perversity in a moral sense, if one cares to look rather casually at the “tip of the spear,” where it seems the same ideology has appeared “in the heat of battle.”

DON’T HAVE TIME FOR TOO MANY QUESTIONS!!!

Here is a tiny snippet which might show, in moral terms, what such hubris means to people we don’t even know.  Out there.  Over the horizon.  Out of sight and out of mind, well beyond the picket fences guarding our little castles in the shining city on a hill.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2010/12/03/wikileaks-u-s-ignored-british-concerns-over-secret-spy-flights-115875-22757887/

Oh never mind, children.  Nothing can be done, nothing can be corrected, no lives can be saved – anywhere in the world – until American tax policy is settled, to the satisfaction of the anointed ones in our midst.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/ns/msnbc_tv-countdown_with_keith_olbermann#40500189

Koppel targeted Fox News and MSNBC, comparing them to bling-addled boxers in the big media ring, glaring at each other from their respective neutral corners, and then raining rhetorical spitballs, as they move, night after night, to the center of the big canvas:  American cable television.

Typically, there’s been a lot of reaction.

Sssssnnnnnnorrrrrrrre !!!

Koppel furrowed mightily about the underlying threat to the Republic if trends (in place and quite profitable for a helluva long time, thanks) continued, led by O’Reilly/Olbermann, Beck/Maher, Limbaugh/Stewart food fights.

BUT !!!!

It may be The Big Media Story is way ahead of Ted and all these other clowns, at least in terms of the dire state of cable itself.

From the Financial Times, 11/18/10:

“The number of people subscribing to US cable television services has suffered its biggest decline in 30 years as younger, tech-savvy viewers lead an exodus to web-based operations, such as Hulu and Netflix.” *

• Total number of subscribers to cable and satellite in the third quarter:  down by 119,000
• Compared to gain of 346,000 in the third quarter of 2009
• Net falloff in subscribers in the third quarter of 2010:  741,000

“The figures suggest that ‘cord-cutting’ – one of the pay-TV industry’s biggest fears – is becoming a reality as viewers drift to web-based platforms.”

• Online subscription services now priced at $7.99 per month (Hulu and Netlfix)
• Hulu’s revenue up over $130 million this year compared to last (Hulu owned jointly by News Corp., Disney, and NBC Universal)

“Research from The Diffusion Group, a technology research company, found that more than a third of iPad users were likely to cancel their pay-TV subscriptions in the next six months.”

* Source:  SNL Kagan

“We have known for some time that the cement used to secure the production casing and isolate the hydrocarbon zone at the bottom of the Macondo well must have failed in some manner.  That cement should have prevented hydrocarbons from entering the well.”

- snip -

“We asked Halliburton to supply us samples of materials like those actually used at the Macondo well … Halliburton agreed that the Chevron lab (in Houston) was highly qualified for this work.”

- snip -

“Chevron agreed as a public service to test the cement slurry on behalf of the commission.”

- snip -

“Chevron’s report states, among other things, that its lab personnel were unable to generate stable foam cement … using the materials provided by Halliburton … This may have contributed to the blowout.”

- snip -

“The documents provided to us by Halliburton show, among other things, that its personnel conducted at least four foam stability tests relevant to the Macondo cement slurry.”

(Note:  the report indicates Halliburton did not provide BP with results from all four tests prior to the blowout.)

- snip -

“Taken together, these (the Halliburton) documents lead us to believe that:

(1)    Only one of the four tests discussed above that Halliburton ran on the various slurry designs for the final cement job at the Macondo well indicated that the slurry design would be stable;

(2)    Halliburton may not have had – and BP did not have -  the results of that test before the evening of April 19, meaning that the cement job may have been pumped without any lab results indicating that the foam slurry would be stable;

(3)    Halliburton and BP both had results in March showing that a very similar foam slurry design to the one actually pumped at the Macondo well would be unstable, but neither acted upon that data; and

(4)    Halliburton (and perhaps BP) should have considered redesigning the foam slurry before pumping it at the Macondo well.”

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/science/spilldoc.PDF

It was Republican Governor Tom McCall who shepherded our landmark land use laws, coastal protection, and Bottle Bill through the legislature, and rebounded from retirement years later against right-wing “property rights” activists to preserve that legacy, during his final bout with testicular cancer which had rendered him, in his own words, “one-ball McCall.”  Republican senator Mark Hatfield was a lonely and eloquent voice against not just Vietnam but also Desert Storm, and for all his flaws, which included being a closeted gay man unwilling to stand up for gay rights, he not only represented Oregon values when it counted the most, but also brought home the bacon like there was no tomorrow.  Even ol’ Bob Packwood, that scamp, whom I had the pleasure of meeting once as he shamelessly flirted with the girls in my history class, had an equally complicated record that I rarely supported, but his staunch support for women’s rights, including the right to legal abortion, would put many of our current Democratic senators to shame.

What has happened to our country since those days, had someone tried to predict it to me at the time, I would have dismissed as insane nonsense, but not anymore.  The first cracks appeared with the election of Reagan, which happened to just precede my eligibility for the draft, and lo and behold, the hated Selective Service was brought back, and registration therewith had even been made mandatory for those of us who might be available for what little college aid was left in The Great Communicator’s wake.  The first shoots of the aggressive militarism that finally bloomed into one of those stinky flowers they grow in Asia when George W. Bush came into office were clearly, an unapologetically, planted at that moment.  Then came the War on Drugs and the ruinous tax cuts and military buildup.  Then came, perhaps worst of all, the relentlessly marketed idea that Government Can’t Do Anything, which has now seeped into our pores like the toxic gunk with which we continue to be assaulted.

Now, this ought to have been a pretty tough sell for the kids of my generation.  We had, after all, just put a man on the moon, among other things, that looked pretty good to most observers.  And locally, I personally saw many great public endeavors reach fruition, like the Fremont Bridge in the picture, which mesmerized me as it rose from the ground with its fantastically high and numerous concrete monoliths, but to top it all off, they floated the middle piece down the river and lifted it into place, and the danged thing fit perfectly.  Mission Accomplished.  No Michael Browns were evidently involved.

It’s sad, really, that as we live in and begin to assess the supposedly progressive presidency of Barack Obama, we see that government has lost, almost completely, its ability to do great things, and thus its inability to inspire.  In our militarized austerity of the last few decades, we do see nothing but the waste, incompetence, and self-dealing Republicans love to crow about even as they engage in it most lavishly themselves, and are paradoxically taught that this is just the way things are.  And for people who don’t remember the  quite recent past, of whom there are way too many (mostly in the media…), there has been little evidence to the contrary.  What few bridges we’ve built, even as we’ve burned so many, either lead to nowhere or are in Baghdad; I hope the ones we built in a more rational era last a while.  We could, back then, do a lot of things we just can’t anymore.

It makes no difference what anyone says about flying these days because you just have to suck up all the airport rules, or don’t fly.

Tell me about it.

Having flown last week-end, just before the little terrorist wannabe tried to detonate something between his legs on a flight into Detroit on Christmas Day, I just don’t think I want to do it much anymore – unless I have to.

I flew to Cleveland from LGA/NY on Friday the 18th for a niece’s wedding and came back (under a two hour snow delay) on Sunday night.

All in all, from start to finish, I felt more like a suspect than a passenger.

Still a tech dimwit (these attacks can come at any time) and not having flown for quite a while, I was knocked back momentarily, not just by fumbling around to enter my confirmation code into the computer (Oh, y’know, just another computer protocol I never did before!  Never mind.), but by having to put up with a half-strip and shoe removal to get through security.

Was it annoying?  You tell me.

I had (I thought) removed all metal and potentially dangerous fluids from my person and my small stow bag before I left home (including my new, key ring-size Swiss Army knife), estimating on a common sense level what the TSA hound dogs might take away (No, I didn’t go online and read the entire, bloody list of forbidden items).  Anything potentially threatening, no matter how innocent in appearance, was left on my desk.

Anyway, after getting my coveted boarding pass and entering the instant hullabaloo of partially disrobing and putting clothing and the rest into plastic tubs and walking through the body metal detector, I then moved to the table to get my stuff and put my clothes back on, except there were some things TSA felt they needed to seize anyway.

One guy, standing near the X-ray over the conveyor and poking through my wool jacket, waved a three-inch nail file at me and said, “Uh-uh, can’t have that!”  And while I was putting on my shoes, a TSA gal peered at a plastic bottle of hair cream in my bath kit and said,  “Oh, we’ll have to take that too.”

“What?  It’s hair cream!  In a squeeze bottle!”

“It’s eight ounces.  Too much.”

Down the rabbit hole it all went, as I imagined myself commandeering a flight to, of all places, Cleveland, Ohio – armed with a squirt bottle of hair cream and a three-inch nail file.  In the annals of American aviation, stranger things have happened.

Unfortunately, while all this was going on, I noticed that I couldn’t find my house key, which I had put on one – ONE – small key ring.  No car keys.  No keys to my five thousand padlocks.  No keys to my various safe deposit boxes, scattered in ten major international cities.  No keys to my several secret boudoirs and romantic hideaways.  No keys to the various steamer trunks which, back in the day, accompanied me and my entourage during my many first-class voyages on the Queen Mary – to Africa, the Continent, and the Riviera.

Just one key on one small ring, along with underwear and a change of clothes for two days.

By this time I was upset, starting to feel like a suspect; but I had to ask:  “Where is my key?”

All the TSA people looked at me as if I had three ears, and I very quickly got a response which seemed to imply that I had lost my keys.

I asked:  “Where is my key?  It went through X-ray and now I can’t find it.  Can you help?”

They kept looking at me strangely while searching other people.

“I can’t find my key!  It went through the conveyor, but I don’t have it.  Can you look, please?”

So they tried, while a supervisor asked me where I put it, and did I put it in my shoes?

“I don’t remember.  I took my clothes off, put my cell phone in the tub, and my key, and everything else.  It’s my house key!”

“Did you check your shoes?”

“I have them on.  I can’t feel anything.”

Back and forth it went for a minute or so, while the TSA guy who seized my nail file looked at the X-ray screen, saying there was a key detected.  The supervisor confirmed this sighting.

Other passengers moved along; some glaring at me.  I turned to another guy who was putting his shoes back on, and I said, “You know, I took the train from Connecticut, the subway from Grand Central, and a Queens bus to get here.  That was kind of fun.  This is not fun.”  He smiled.

I took off my shoes again.  I looked in one and saw the key, and realized it must have nestled under the arch of my foot.  I took it out and waved it at the TSA supervisor.

“I found it!!!  Never mind!”  As I smiled sheepishly, the entire TSA crew rolled their eyes.

I moved out, got a cup of coffee and a muffin and took a break.

A few minutes later, I went back to the supervisor to clarify how to get to my gate, which was on another level.  He was very helpful, though still somewhat defensive.

“Understand, sir, we know what we’re doing; we’ve had this sort of shoe incident happen before.”

“Oh no doubt.  Weaponized shoes and all that.  Right.  Thanks for the help.  Happy Holidays.”

I made my flight and the one back on Sunday night.  But with it all, and with the news that further security protocols may, for instance, prevent passengers from even reading a book or a newspaper within an hour of landing, flying is not something I’ll be wanting to do too soon.

I refuse to feel like a suspect.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFW6NHbWX0E

Everything looks good.  I’m in the pink.

On the way out the door, I got a couple of memos.  One had to do with what appears to be an already operational online medical link to VA.  What a concept! – I said to myself.  The helper at the primary care desk, a vet himself, said, “Please tell the American people we’re terribly sorry for taking the initiative on this.  We mean well, y’know?”

I told him I would try to say something good about it when I had the chance.

He cried and said thanks.

Boo hoo.

VA has been computerized in a number of important ways for some time.  The system was seriously upgraded during the Clinton era, which means that patients have had the benefit of doctor consults with their complete history a click away, in a clinic, in an operating suite, or at bedside for a good fifteen years or more.  And during this time it’s been easy as pie for a veteran to request a download to a CD of a complete medical file if he or she wants to move, say, from Boston to LA, or from Detroit to Dallas.

Can you say:  “Portability”?

So this online link is available now through VA; and soon, civilians may have the same cost-saving hi-tech fix, assuming the administration’s plans come to fruition.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/30/government-pushes-to-crea_n_340157.html

But of course, the dead-enders on health reform will cry, darkly, about that dastardly, really awful government takeover of health care.  Never mind that, according to the link above, it seems tech companies stand to make a bundle on government contracts which will allow them to expand the use of computers across the nation – like a cyber chicken in every pot, right in your home!

But dammit there must be some way to delete this whole idea from that humongus, 2,000 page health bill.  There’s gotta be a way!

This is  just terrible.  Right Nail in the Head?

There have been 43 major ruptures since Sept. 1, twice the number of that period the year before, and the DWP has gone so far as to consult the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to determine whether unusual ground movement (rather than increased pressure due to strict water rationing) might be the cause.  The answer, so far, from the JPL was frustratingly inconclusive as well as couched in the usual scientific hedging; evidently there has been “some deviation from the normal range” of ground movement in recent months, but the monitoring devices have only been in place for a few years, so such data cannot be properly assessed.

All this contributes to the precariousness and artificiality that make LA such a spooky place; everyone knows that without the Herculean feats of Mulholland and the DWP that date back over 100 years, the whole basin would still be desert, and the myriad disasters that continue to afflict this fragile and hubristic creation always threaten the desert’s return.  Sadly, the dreams of big money that built something so improbable and engineering-dependent as LA have faded into memory along with the public spirit and hope for the future that built them, and have now become, for LA’s 10 million residents, the subject of nightmares.  And any Angeleno that confronts routine street flooding from collapsing infrastructure can hardly help thinking, in dread, of what happened to New Orleans before them.

All across America, we continue to expect the systems we once built in a more civic era will continue to work, even as we know that they’re old and drastically underfunded, and must be repeatedly stuck together with duct tape and chewing gum just to get us through the next season, let alone the errant seismic event.  Civic improvements like water and flood control, though often pushed through by the local plutocrats of the era who did very well for themselves while incidentally doing a lot of good for others, are no longer affordable, even to simply maintain, in an era where the new plutocrats have become globalized, quick-buck non-citizens who prefer to briefly coast on the achievements of days gone by, and have no problem dropping their cities the way they drop their trophy wives when they show any sign of age.  Just move to the Caymans and be done with it.

I, and a lot of beleageured Angelenos wonder, what the water’s like there?

Of course, the largest mistake that can only be papered over with massive doses of Guilt Money is Afghanistan.  Shocked into a futile “war” by an act of terrorism rooted elsewhere, here it is eight years later, and the American people are rightly asking the nincompoops whose stupid idea this was, “Well?”  ”Well, what?” they say.  The answer is inevitably that the reason Afghanistan looks like a waste and a defeat is that we simply haven’t spent enough on it yet; this curious logic is based on the new axiom that it isn’t what you got that counts, but what you paid.  Accomplishing nothing except temporarily making Americans think war was was not only fun but easy was the point…  A great pep rally for the big game to come, not some boring, endless quagmire that drags on and on for no apparent purpose.  And now the bait and switch is being dragged out again, with a nagging whiff of desperation that escapes no one.

Then came the big game, Iraq.  This time, we wouldn’t just win, we’d kick their ass and take their gas!  The dang thing would not only pay for itself, but be a lot more exciting to those watching at home because, as Rumsfeld noticed, their were many more picturesque targets there.   They’d show those video game makers how it was done, whether or not the extras posing for this spectacle might have preferred a different approach.  Nearly six years later the balance of the region has tipped further against us, oil prices have risen and remain high, nearly 5000 Americans have been killed, and a trillion or so has gone down the toilet.  Never mind about that.  We’re told, lamely, that as disheartening and frustrating as it all is, it would have been much worse without the surge, and thus we need to… wait for it:  Spend More Money.  Nothing covers up a genocidal blunder like bricks and bricks of greenbacks.

This mentality has trickled down to the local level as well….  Just because some busy beaver at the Army Corps of Engineers once got the neat idea that Lewiston, Idaho ought to be a seaport, we’re now saddled with four dams on the lower Snake River that have fully converted the Columbia River and one of its largest tributaries into a slackwater barge canal that can literally be raised and lowered like a bathtub, and not incidentally, several iconic species of salmon and other anadromous fish are rapidly going extinct, rail traffic in the corridor has collapsed, and with it maintenance and improvements, and factory farms growing export crops have blossomed on the free federal water.  Kind of a mess, right?  So big, even, that the only answer is more money?  You’re catching on.  A billion dollars and more have been spent on such innovative ideas as trucking the fish back and forth on the freeway (I swear I am not making this up…), predator control (PETA loves it when you blame the seals…), fine tuning the level of the bathtub here and there, and just as with the wars, avoiding the elephant in the room, which is that wasteful, delusional, and predictably disastrous “mistakes were made” that have led us to this pass, and reversal of said mistake, in this case dam removal, can’t be considered because it would force us to admit such a heresy.  The only mistakes made are the ones admitted to, you know.  Now we are being told, by the usually rational Rep. Peter DeFazio that the dams are, get this, crucial providers of “green power” that can help fight Climate Change, evidently by getting a few extinctions out of the way early.

Sometimes it works out differently, though.  For several years, we’ve been listening to politicians talk about what has of late been named the “Columbia Crossing,” an envisioned replacement for the I-5 bridges between Portland and Vancouver, the only drawbridges in the Interstate system, whose homely green trusswork spans carry a mere six lanes of traffic.  Federal dollars provided the catnip for local politicians to quickly begin rolling around on the carpet crazily, and pretty soon the thing had blossomed into a 12-lane behemoth carrying light rail, bike lanes, and some fetching concrete plinths at a bargain price tag of at least $4 billion.  Trouble is, that’s a heck of a lot of money, requiring high tolls, both to Portlanders who wouldn’t be caught dead in “Vantucky,” and Vancouverites who only visit Portland to avoid the sales tax in Washington.  Of course, it was the Vancouverites who wanted all those lanes, and Portland that wanted the light rail it had generously extended almost to the bridgehead, only to be repeatedly spurned by Clark County voters, who reliably voted down light rail whenever it came up.

Now, a right winger is opposing Vancouver Mayor Royce Pollard in the next election on the issue of the bridge and its proposed tolls, and as a result, the bridge will be drastically scaled back, Portland Mayor Sam Adams has belatedly said we’ll have to cut lanes, and we’ve averted a $4 billion, obsolete disaster, basically because one city wants everything for free and the other simply doesn’t give a damn.  Think of the money we’ll save later, when this thing starts making its predictable mess.

Thanks (for once), Vancouver.  Maybe if somebody had proposed tolls to pay for the wars…..

Instant Downtown: Atwater Place at left

Atwater Place, a condominium project in the South Waterfront district near downtown Portland, will tomorrow be auctioning off 40 of the 150 or so units it has failed to sell, at prices starting at a bit less than half of what the 60-odd original buyers paid just two years ago.  It’s another victim not just of the recession, but rather of the boom preceding it, wherein otherwise reasonable developers, city officials, and the state’s largest employer, OHSU, all succumbed to the extraordinary popular delusion that a fallow industrial district a mile south of downtown could, with the right improvements and transit connections, overcome its bad location, access issues, and complete lack of urban amenities to become The Next Big Thing.  Well, it’s big, anyway.

South Waterfront from the aerial tram

It all looked so good on paper back in the day.  OHSU was growing by leaps and bounds, and continually threatening to expand in suburbia, since its Marquam Hill site was full to bursting.  The city had had enormous success in redeveloping former rail yards and industrial blight north of downtown into the glittering Pearl District, merely by adding two parks and a streetcar through the magic of tax-increment financing, and letting developers do the rest.  Condos were selling at ever-escalating prices, faster than they could be built.  Biotechnology was touted as the growth sector, and OHSU planned to take a leading role, establishing a biotechnology campus in South Waterfront that would provide upscale employment to go with the upscale condos.

Kind of a lot of space out here...

A yawning gap in the Willamette River Greenway that lay between Riverplace to the north and John’s Landing to the south was aching to be filled with a glitzy, eco-friendly “neighborhood” in a forbidding no-man’s land where they used to scrap ships.  What could go wrong?  Plenty.

First of all, the streeetcar would have to be extended a mile, from CHNN Headquarters on Park Avenue to the site.  No problem.  Second, and somewhat more problematically, some way had to be devised for all those doctors and scientists to get from OHSU to the waterfront, where nearly 1000 feet of elevation, a freeway, and a dizzying array of boulevards and bridge ramps made the trip take up to 20 minutes by car.

The tram is snazzy, and a mere $4 for a round trip.

How about a $50 million aerial tram?  Go for it.  It all happened so fast.  No sooner was the tram completed than OHSU started cutting back.  Turns out you don’t create a “Biotechnology Center” out of thin air, and OHSU stopped building after one facility was complete.  Condos, one thirty stories high, popped up like mushrooms after a rain, and here, in the middle of nowhere, a high-rise district appeared as if by magic, and sold like hotcakes with similarly magical money.  The boom was on, and then it was off, just like that.

If you lived here, you'd be broke now....

Riding the streetcar down there today, I was struck by the raw distance that separates South Waterfront from anything resembling urbanity.  One must nervously pass under a roaring tangle of the Marquam Bridge’s overhead freeway ramps, then past an enormous Superfund site, once described to me by a soil scientist as “a mess,” under  yet another bridge, and past a barge factory to get to the island of sparkling green Nirvana we Portlanders have come to expect of our downtown neighborhoods, only to be greeted by a spookily uninhabited fake urban paradise, devoid of any life except increasingly desperate real estate offices.

Atwater Place itself looks pleasant enough for the mandatory glass box of the era; it’s lushly landscaped and has a nifty fountain court.  But to those 60 buyers who paid upwards of $700,000 for units now being offered at $350,000, I must ask, have y’all every heard of the first three rules of real estate? Location, location, and location, and this joint ain’t got it.  You can’t create “urban living” where none existed before, and had the boom gone on for the twenty years it might take to connect your district to downtown, the constant construction entailed would still make your life a living hell in the process.  Back when the boom was still on, newly minted South Waterfront “residents” proudly called themselves urban “pioneeers.”   Yeah.  Like the Donner party.  Real urban pioneers that have revitalized old industrial districts like the Pearl across the country endured homeless, hookers, and drug dealers to live in areas close to downtown that had both historic character and people, whether desirable ones or not, and have been remarkably successful at it.

The pioneers of South Waterfront weren’t so adventurous…  they wanted “urban” living untainted by urban realities, and chose a Disney version of city living, where the only (imagined) inhabitants would be just like themselves, a gamble which clearly has come up snake eyes.  But what are they worried about?  The low prices will bring in the riff-raff.  Who’d a thunk?