Gooder and harder, but too bad for the natives
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No, the owner of these bags has not left to take advantage of the Portland Opportunity program offering $15 hour and (literally) a free lunch; he’s outside my window, panhandling, with a sign saying “need work”
Portland, Maine to raise property taxes to pay for free housing for 'asylum-seekers'
PORTLAND (WGME) — Portland property taxes will soon be going up by 4.8 percent.
Last year, families with a $400,000 home paid about $5,200 in property taxes.
With this new increase, it'll be around $5,550 for that same home.
Portland's finance director says without federal help, it will cost the city $9 million to house hundreds of asylum seekers and people experiencing homelessness.
A figure that neatly comes out to the need for a 4.8% tax increase.
Portland’s problem is that it has been taken over by rich wokes from points south, and students, and restaurant workers, and musicians. All but the wokes rent, usually 3-5 to a household, and pay no property directly, and all three categories vote. The result is a $22 hour minimum wage, draconian rent controls that bar landlords from recovering the cost of maintenance and improvements and, naturally, property tax increases, and ever-more-generous benefits for the homeless, which draws them in like flies from the rest of the state, plus Boston, NYC, and other cities from Philadelphia to Miami.
To be fair to the city’s growing population of African illegals, they rarely show up on street corners begging: that distinction mostly belongs to drug-addled, all-American white folks. But resources can be stretched only so far, and there simply aren’t enough progressives earning $175,000 a year to pay for the largess extended to the non-working classes. So for now, the original blue collar home owners are being whacked; they’re being driven out, however, so the cornucopia may be emptying.
But not quite yet: Portland is still booming, with more than a thousand new condominiums on the drawing boards or under construction. Come back in ten years, and see whether the progressives have returned the city to its 2000 level of a 65% commercial vacancy rate downtown, and a crumbling, but now rent-controlled housing base.
