Conspiracies Я Us

I think there is a conspiracy operating in downtown Portland that is trying to destroy real estate values. Walking around a small area near Nordstrom I noticed numerous storefronts that are either empty or for lease. The city government seems bent on destroying the automobile. Mass transit and conversion of parking spaces to anything but parking seems to be the order of the day. The result of this, along with their increasing taxes, is that running a small business in Portland is becoming a losing proposition, hence the numerous empty storefronts. They are empty because nobody’s renting them because they don’t believe they could operate their business successfully in such a hostile atmosphere. Businesses operating on the upper floors are kind of immune to all this. Virtually none of them depend on walk-in traffic. But office space is a commodity. The only time you can charge a premium is if there is a view or office space market is tight.


Meanwhile rent for ground floor places is plummeting, which has to be driving the value of the property down. Eventually some real estate investors are going to get tired of the bullshit and sell off their holdings. At that point the conspirators will swoop in and snatch it all up at bargain prices.

Once they have consolidated their hold on downtown they will replace the City Council with one that has the proper attitude and all these bullshit regulations and restrictions will be blown away, people will start driving cars again, storefront businesses boom and the conspirators will reap their criminal rewards.


I’m pretty sure this theory is nonsensical and could easily be destroyed by any kind of elementary analysis but the fact remains that I am troubled by the numerous empty storefronts. Maybe we don’t need so many retail establishments anymore. So what do you do with them? What could these places be used for that would generate kind of rent that a retail store would? Maybe it doesn’t make any difference since nobody seems to be opening any new retail stores.
You might be able convert them to parking, but many buildings are not going to be suitable for that. Or maybe they will become squats for the homeless. There are certainly enough of them. I saw maybe a dozen while I was out walking, so I'm estimating that somewhere between one out of a thousand and one out of a hundred people are homeless.

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I originally wrote this using pen and paper while I was waiting for my wife. She got herself a new iPhone 8+ today because her old iPhone 6 was getting flakey, so I thought I would try using the 'talk-to-text' feature instead of typing it in by hand. She set up her phone to compose an email, pressed the go button and I read what I had written. It took three emails to get it all, but I don't know whether that was due to the operator or the phone. That got the bulk of it entered, but then I had to go through and replace the incorrect words and insert the necessary punctuation. It was kind of a fun experiment, but not very efficient.

The actual conversion of voice to text is done on a server somewhere in the cloud, so theoretically you should be able to do this from any computer with a microphone and an Internet connection.