“If you give power to Joe Biden, all cities will look like Portland, the Democrat ”, threatened Donald Trump during his inauguration speech on August 27. The American president continues to denounce the demonstrations that have shaken for several months the largest city in Oregon, which has become the epicenter of the Black Lives Matter movement. At the end of August, the violence escalated there with the death of a pro-Trump far-right activist who came to fight with the demonstrators. Enough to fuel the presidential vindictiveness against this city which appears in the archives of the World resolutely remote from the values advocated by the tenant of the White House.
The first mention is old – it dates back to June 27, 1945 – but is of little interest: the article simply tells us that President Harry Truman made a stopover in Portland before going to sign the United Nations Charter in San Francisco. Three decades later, it is another American president who will make the newspaper want to make the trip to Portland.
The fruits of a daring policy
In 1979, Jimmy Carter appointed the mayor of the city, a certain Neil Goldschmidt, secretary of transport. At 39, this Democrat owes his promotion to his municipal politics. Nicole Bernheim therefore decides to go and check on the spot on August 20, 1979: “Portland, three hundred and eighty thousand inhabitants”, is “The largest city in Oregon, one of those Northwestern states experiencing an economic boom due to accelerated industrialization, which attracts many immigrants from the East and Midwest”. A dynamism that has its downside: “Portland grew up in anarchic fashion, with increasingly stretched out suburbs, linked by increasingly intrusive highways. Result: the center has gradually emptied of its inhabitants, its shops and its offices, while urban life takes refuge, anemic, in dreary suburbs. “
“You get around by tram or by bike, life is cheap there, and the rock scene (Gossip, The Dandy Warhols) vibrates like nowhere else. “
In short, an American city. Except that this mayor “Liberal democrat” has put in place a bold policy that “Takes place in three chapters, writes the journalist: prevent the systematic destruction of old housing and facilitate their renovation under financial conditions that allow their inhabitants to stay there; prevent the construction of new urban highways and close the main streets in the city center to automobile traffic; develop transport by bus and trolleys ”.
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