If you happen to visit Portland, you’ll feel right at home. It’s San Francisco 2.0. Or, perhaps, it’s the reverse. No matter. The two are nearly identical twins, at least when it comes to a variety of factors, both good and bad.

The West Coast weather is similar. Attractive water and impressive bridges grace both cities. And then there’s the societal decay. The depressing evidence is visible in too many grimy precincts. We had the misfortune of viewing some of it (too much of it, really) on a journey north late last month.

Portland’s fetid homeless encampments pop up with unfortunate regularity just like those in the once-proud city by the Bay. These makeshift dwellings house a compromised and vulnerable population marked by drug abuse, public toilet habits, occasional violence and unrelenting (and expensive) dysfunction.

Like the harried policymakers in San Francisco, those in Portland are consumed by the trials and tribulations (not to mention the costs) of the unhoused, not to mention their off-putting effect on the voting populace at large, including the business and tourist interests held hostage by all of this.

It’s no wonder that, like our own fading metropolis to the north, Portland has lost thousands of its residents over the last several years.

It’s a shame, really. The natural beauty in Portland and its surrounding towns and landscapes remains stunning. Not so much the city itself.

Welcome to San Francisco’s sibling in the northwest. Let’s not even mention Seattle. That’s another sad, though similar, tale.

RAIL BOONDOGGLE WILL NOT DIE: Government, at all levels, is confronting limitations on the spending of taxpayers’ dollars. What a concept.

At the same time, public transit agencies are begging for funding help due, in large part, to a dramatic decrease in ridership, largely due to work-related commute changes caused by the pandemic.

The timing is poor. That’s obvious. But some significant funds are being provided. Whether they will be enough to save transit agencies from major service reductions remains to be seen.

One particular entity, the state’s High-Speed Rail Authority, continues to prove that, no matter how obvious its deep and abiding fiscal flaws may be, cash will still flow.

The latest state budget includes the release of $4.2 billion to keep HSR construction going in the Central Valley. So the monetary life support for this manifestly mistaken operation goes on — and on.

For the many persistent critics of HSR over the past 15 years, anything that helps it to limp along and devour public dollars in the process is a cause for the gnashing of teeth and murmurs of frustration. Lawsuits against the project have come to naught.

The fast-train fiscal folly seems impervious to any and all efforts to drive a stake in it and kill it off once and for all. It’s a public-spending nightmare, a transit vampire devouring vast, endless sums, that simply refuses to die.

KRON’S ABSENCE EASILY HANDLED: Absence does not always make the heart grow fonder. That counter to a bit of accepted folk wisdom has certainly applied to the troubled condition of KRON TV-Channel 4. As the week began, customers of AT&T cable and Direct TV had been without KRON through July due to a financial dispute.

The impact appeared to be negligible. Or as that former KRON anchor/sage Gary Radnich might have put it: “Nobody cares.”

Some would-be viewers may well care, but not enough of them to make much of a difference. There are plenty of local KRON competitors out there selling the same sort of programming.

Sedentary life on the couch, such as it is, has gone on — with or without the presence of KRON on AT&T big screens.

TWO MORE MERIT WINNERS ADDED: Two more San Mateo County students of the high school Class of 2023 have received National Merit Scholarships, according to a supplementary list of winners released this week.

The local honorees are Joshua Yang of Carlmont High School in Belmont and Eli Zimmerman of San Mateo who attended Kehillah Jewish High School in Palo Alto.

For Carlmont, the latest local addition brings its National Merit total to nine, the most (by far) of any secondary school in the county this year.

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There is an ongoing fixation with San Francisco. National magazines and even international newspapers have written story after story about the potential doom spiral hitting the City by the Bay and theorizing on potential causes.

In a circle-the-wagons response, local officials and residents have countered by saying it’s still a majestic place with a free and easy spirit, great outdoor spaces, and innovative arts, dining and culture. They also suggest that the city is being unfairly targeted.

It’s not an either/or situation. San Francisco can be both beautiful and inspiring and tragic and depressing at the same time. In fact, that is the case right now. There are severe issues with open drug use and sales, homeless, violence and crime. There are also issues with retailers pulling out for any number of reasons and office work not coming back.

Homelessness is not a new issue in the city, but it has gotten worse in recent years. Open drug use is the same. Crime too. Those issues are certainly not unique to the city, or any city, but it is very bad there right now. If you deny that, you are delusional. The San Francisco Sheriff’s Office just activated its emergency service unit to address the fentanyl crisis and the mayor has enlisted the help of the National Guard and California Highway Patrol.

Add in the fact that some major retailers are pulling out of the city, along with this week’s news that two of the city’s biggest hotels plan to halt payments and give up on both properties, and there are some very real issues facing San Francisco right now.

It is easy to conflate the issues as they all seem connected, and in a sense they are. But it’s more complicated than that. It always is. San Francisco has long leaned on its beauty and reputation and that was often enough — so other issues lingered without solution. The pandemic did a number on the financial district and working from home seemed to stick. Ancillary businesses suffered. Retail is also shifting and that hasn’t helped. Then the lingering issues with homelessness and drugs festered and grew, fueled by fentanyl and its horrors.

As someone who was born in San Francisco, lived there three times, and lived near it most of my life, I know the city has changed much over the years from when my father told me I wasn’t allowed to wear white shoes there after Labor Day. There are homeless people, drug use and crime. It’s life in the city.

But it was nowhere near the levels of today, where I have seen men openly masturbate or urinate in public, people shoot up drugs and openly exhibit signs of drug-induced stupors, and stolen goods openly displayed for sale. How is it that a man can be passed out in the middle of the sidewalk with his pants around his ankles and no one will help for fear of potential violence or harm? We wouldn’t allow someone with dementia or Alzheimer’s disease to wander the streets self-medicating, so why do we, as a society, allow for those with a disease — and drug addiction is a disease — waste away on those same streets?

Every person living on the street has a family and a past and a potential future; and yet, we have somehow decided that the best course of action is to let it be. It’s wrong. This is not just a crisis for the city, but a crisis for its people who find themselves addicted and living on its streets. It is a crisis for all of us.

This is one of the reasons why the Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment Act is important and needed. By next year, the act will compel every county in California to implement its plan to get people suffering severe psychosis and addiction into treatment through a judge’s order.

Family, medical professionals and first responders can make the request for such an order. San Francisco must set this up by Oct. 1. There have been concerns about civil liberties and freedom for those living on the street and potential for abuse of power. Yet, the current situation is no longer tenable. Nor is it humane.

Under the chatter about the potential ruination of San Francisco and its potential causes and the cross-chatter about its beauty and promise are lives of thousands of people in peril who are afflicted with a terrible disease. They need help. Let’s not forget that. When the focus is on people, then other issues tend to fall in line. I suspect that will be the case here as well.

Jon Mays is the editor-in-chief of the Daily Journal. He can be reached at jon@smdailyjournal.com. Follow Jon on Twitter @jonmays.

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At an election night party in November, I asked then-Rep. Diane Papan about the seemingly widening divide in San Mateo County politics between progressives and moderates—although she clearly aligns with the latter.

Papan quickly resisted the label. She is not a moderate, she said, but a pragmatist.

The implication is clear: a progressive agenda must be tempered by the need to get things done. Some progressives would argue that this pragmatism is an excuse to back away from genuinely seeking solutions to problems like the climate crisis, housing costs and related discrimination, or police misconduct.

Progressive is just one of the terms I use a lot when writing about politics. In this lull between campaigns, it seems like a good time to ask yourself what it means and how it should or shouldn’t be used. Moderate is another term that comes up here and I’m not at all sure it can be applied with any precision. Another is the word activist and I’m pretty confident about its application.

What difference does it make?

Well, as long-winded as this corner is, I’m limited to 800 words. For the sake of economy, like many journalists, I resort to a kind of shorthand—terms that, at least in the political world I visit, have a common understanding. The risk is that these words – yes, labels – are generalizations, with all the bias and inaccuracies that can accompany them.

Especially now, in the peninsular political environment, I admit that I have some confusion about how to use terms like progressive and moderate as labels in confidence of their usefulness—to me, to the people I write about, and to those of you who do I have the honor of reading this.

The Pew Research Center describes progressives as proponents that “US institutions need a complete overhaul because of racial prejudice.”

Pew also notes—and it’s totally true here—that progressives are among the most politically active Democrats.

Many peninsular progressives are young; Many of them – not all – come from communities of color that are slowly evolving into the combined peninsular majority.

You are liberal. Many of them are supporters of the democratic socialist principles advocated by US Senator Bernie Sanders. They’re big fans of US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who responded to the extremists’ label online and offered a list of positions she considers more mainstream than what the political establishment believes: Medicare for all, the Green New Deal, ICE is a “rogue agency” that should be dismantled. “I believe in cooperative economics and cooperative democracy, also known as democratic socialism,” she wrote.

Incidentally, I’ve heard more than one candidate say he or she wants to be “SMC’s AOC.” I don’t think this is an AOC district, but there you go.

The complication of describing progressives as a distinct political entity within our local political landscape is that most elected officials in the peninsula – certainly the most prominent – can only be characterized as progressive. Then-MP Kevin Mullin, who ran for Congress last year, has been named by several progressive groups as one of the leading progressives in the legislature. He is also certainly a leading member of the political establishment.

It is noteworthy that Papan’s election night commentary was delivered at the Plumbers’ Union Hall in Burlingame, a decades-long political arena in the county. Labor was perhaps the key factor in San Mateo County’s transition from staunchly Republican to fully Democratic. Labor remains the most influential advocacy group in the county and is clearly progressive. But progressives could easily view the labor leadership as pragmatic and mainstream establishment. Labor has consistently had a strong track record of supporting winning candidates, which is undeniably the ultimate sign of pragmatism.

And that might be the crux of the matter. The real conflict between progressives and pragmatists is that more pragmatists win office—at least for now. That tension plays out in other ways: in voting on policy issues in the Democratic Central Committee, or in battles over who goes as a delegate to Democratic conventions. On these battlefields, the sides are evenly divided.

A core of leading progressive officeholders is emerging — County Supervisors David Canepa and Noelia Corzo, San Mateo Mayor Amourence Lee, and South San Francisco Councilmember James Coleman are among the most notable.

But the real tension may simply be that a younger generation is impatiently waiting for an older establishment generation to step aside.

And that is as old as politics itself.

Mark Simon is a veteran journalist whose career spanned 15 years as an executive at SamTrans and Caltrain. He can be reached at markimon@smdailyjournal.com.

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Got a problem? Raise taxes on the entire herd. That seems to be the mantra throughout San Mateo County.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a city, school district or the county itself, the answer is usually the same: Soak ’em all. Don’t differentiate. When it comes to the frayed pocket-book, employ a chain saw instead of a scalpel.

The latest issue conflicting local policymakers is climate change. Specifically, there is concern about the potential for wildfires and sea level rise.

County authorities have been discussing the possibility of seeking areawide voter approval of a parcel tax to generate money to pay for mechanisms to address the anticipated effects of a warming planet.

But there’s one obvious snag: A number of Peninsula communities and commercial enterprises are already taking matters into their own hands. They aren’t waiting for the government to act. They’ve been doing so for a while.

Look at property owners in Foster City and the Shoreview neighborhood in nearby San Mateo. They are paying for major improvements to their Bayfront levee systems now.

They were prodded to do so when it became clear that their insurance rates would skyrocket if they didn’t. Should these same property owners be taxed again to fund improvements elsewhere? Would that be fair to them?

Those are just two examples. There are more. Let’s not even broach the matter of who is responsible for properly thinning, clearing and tending our lush foliage in the western hills.

Which brings up a point. If you choose to dwell in a wildfire-prone area or a flood zone, shouldn’t you provide the dollars to secure your own property? Wouldn’t that be the prudent thing to do? Why burden everyone else?

The county and cities could, if they so choose, deny new developments in fire- or flood-threatened areas. But, for decades, they haven’t. What are we missing here?

SUZANNE TATEOSIAN HAS DIED: Family, friends, neighbors and professional colleagues have been mourning the late February passing of Suzanne Tateosian, 66, a longtime Burlingame resident who dedicated much of her life to keeping her community resilient, safe and secure.

She died unexpectedly in Nevada due to a stroke late in February. She was the former proprietor of a local firm that provided earthquake survival kits to private companies, schools, government entities, foundations and individuals.

She was a selfless and key participant in the work of the Burlingame Neighborhood Network which aims to assist residents in the event of a natural disaster, among other laudable goals.

A recent statement from the network board lamented the loss of one of its most valued members, noting, “We miss her enormously.” The Tateosian family intends to have a celebration of Suzanne’s life in the near future.

PACIFIC CITY’S LIFE WAS SHORT: We would be remiss if we didn’t recognize the 100th anniversary of a San Mateo County amusement park that saw the light of day for only a very brief but exciting period in our entertainment history.

That would be the ambitious experiment known as Pacific City. The Bayside enterprise featured a boardwalk, roller coaster, dance hall and a 1,000-yard pier constructed at Coyote Point on the Burlingame/San Mateo border by optimistic investors who envisioned their effort as a West Coast version of Coney Island in New York.

Pacific City opened in the summer of 1922; it closed one year later, a financial victim of foggy, cold weather and the stench of untreated sewage discharged by towns directly into the waters along the Bayfront.

THANK YOU GOODNESS, BINGO IS BACK: You know the fear and loathing connected with the pandemic are definitely winding down when that hoary staple of Catholic fundraising makes its grand return.

Of course, that would be bingo. Yes, that legal form of innocent quasi-gambling is back. All Souls Parish in South San Francisco (founded in 1898) is hailing the bingo rebirth after an absence of 26 long months at 5 pm April 1 in the confines of the school cafeteria.

Minimum prize will be $200. Complimentary food and beverages will be provided. For more information call (650) 583-3562.

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Mark Z Barabak Los Angeles Times

San Francisco is quite familiar with earthquakes, and what happened Tuesday — the ouster of three extreme lefties from the Board of Education — was not one of those.

Earthquakes are sudden and unexpected. The recall was neither.

The removal of board members Gabriela López, Faauuga Moliga and Alison Collins was destined the moment the city’s liberal establishment, led by Mayor London Breed, joined the effort along with several discontented millionaires, who threw in loads of cash.

What happened Tuesday was more a foreshock, a warning — as if Democrats needed any more of those — that November’s midterm elections could be very bad indeed, as parents unsettled by two years of pandemic-related upheaval vent their frustrations at the polls.

The circumstances of the recall were both unique and broadly reflective.

In a place that prides itself on social justice and forward thinking, members of the school board outdid themselves by moving to strip the names of, among others, Presidents Washington and Lincoln and Sen. Dianne Feinstein from 44 public schools.

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The intent was to remediate the country’s history of injustices: George Washington owned slaves, Abraham Lincoln oversaw the slaughter of Native Americans, and Feinstein, as mayor in 1984, replaced a Confederate flag that had been vandalized at City Hall with a new one. The result was outrage.

In another instance of misplaced priorities, board members spent hours debating whether a father who was white and gay brought sufficient diversity to a parental advisory committee. His appointment was ultimately nixed, but there was no recovering the time board members wasted.

Perhaps most antagonizing, the board moved to end merit-based admissions to Lowell High School, one of the city’s most sacred institutions, where Asian American students are the majority. (The move catalyzed the city’s Asian American community, long an important force in San Francisco politics.)

Old comments surfaced from Collins, in which she stated Asian Americans used “white supremacist” thinking to get ahead and were racist toward Black students. She apologized, then sued the school district and five fellow board members, seeking $87 million in damages, for removing her title as vice president. A judge summarily rejected the case.

All of which was too much for this famously tolerant city, as students struggled with distance learning and public schools remained closed even as others in neighboring communities reopened.

Inclusion, sensitivity and righting history’s wrongs are all well and good. But there was a strong sense that “we are not getting the basics right,” as Siva Raj, a father of two who helped launch the recall effort, put it.

He and others would have removed all seven members of the board, but only the three who were targeted were eligible for removal.

It is foolish — and one of the bad habits of political prognosticators — to overinterpret the results of any one election. To be clear, San Francisco hasn’t changed. A city that gave Joe Biden 85% support won’t be voting Republican in anyone’s lifetime.

But the results are noteworthy precisely because the recall took place in liberal San Francisco. It’s not a case of pro-Trumpers seeking to ban books, or conservatives stirring up unfounded concerns about critical race theory being introduced into grade schools. Parents have emerged as one of the most potent forces in politics today, and woe to anyone seen as standing in the way of their kids’ education.

Liesl Hickey, a veteran GOP strategist, has dubbed 2022 the year of the angry K-12 parent. “They are mad,” Hickey told the Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter, “and they want to hold someone accountable.”

That’s what bodes poorly for Biden and his fellow Democrats.

Midterms elections are almost always a referendum on the party in power, and the voters most likely to turn out are those who are angry and wish to make known their discontent.

Public schools may be back to regular business by the fall. But it’s a good bet that parents won’t be forgiving or forgetting what’s taken place over the last two plague years, and in that way San Francisco’s recall election may be the early rumblings of a much larger shakeup to come.

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On the hard way in this century, one of the few safe havens I have found was the poetry my mother recited to me, from Alfred Noyes’ “The Highwayman”, which Phil Ochs set to music, to the lyrical longings of Edna St Vincent Millay, a bohemian whose house in Greenwich Village was less than a foot and a half wide, was a perfect fit for someone who wrote of a world that stands out on both sides: “No wider than the heart is wide” – words that opened my.

But such poetry has long since disappeared from everyday language.

At the inauguration of the Restorative Presidency, we drank the words of our national youth poet award winner who came with a cup of joe. We inhaled hip hop rhythms and hopeful intentions and were reminded of the poem’s power to find something deeper within ourselves, something that we had forgotten was there.

“Before we do anything we knew,” recited Amanda Gorman, her simple rhyme calling me the Bob Dylan of a similar age when he teased, “I’m a poet and I know, hope I don’t blow.” it. “He was the first songwriter to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. May Gorman rise to similar heights as it lifts our spirits.

Half a century ago, the dean of the living poets for this literary student was the bohemian writer Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who has been largely mistaken for one of the beats ever since he took up the press of a publisher and asked the courts and the nation to grapple with the raw writing von Allen Ginsberg in “Howl”, the first lines of which tore apart the self-satisfaction of the Eisenhower years: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness and starving hysterically naked.” Ginsberg set the tone for the 1960s, and Ferlinghetti lit the paper fire.

Twenty years later, I took Ferlinghetti to my university to read, and at dinner I was determined to strive to be the gentleman and scholar he was. The copy of his “A Coney Island of the Mind” that he signed up to me became the cornerstone of my library, which is now overflowing with the inked inscriptions of so many other heroes and heterodox literary figures whose volumes serve as tombstones for their lives and their minds stand. Body gone, her words live on.

Cheek to cheek with these images of a vanished world by Ferlinghetti, who passed away last month at the miraculous age of 101, is the collection of poems I published a few years after meeting and being inspired by him. As big as Ferlinghetti’s book, my Positively Prince Street collected the works of poets whom I had persuaded to read in the bookstore next to my home on Prince Street in the old town of Alexandria.

The owner of this magical crossroads of aspiring poets was Irene Rouse, who became a second mother to me during those years. It was the dwindling days when it was possible to gain literary reputation as a poet.

Irene is now buried nearby in Virginia, and her husband Bill died of COVID-19 last year, breaking the last of that part of my heart that was broken on her departure. Now, when I take up our little anthology, I think back to the time it was published and the very first call for it to be distributed. it was, of course, Lawrence Ferlinghetti in his office at City Lights Books in San Francisco. I reminded him of our dinner and his inspiration, and not only did he take a healthy order of books, he managed to sell them too. I acted with his presence in City Lights and persuaded Gotham Book Mart in New York to do the same, and the anthology, as I announced, sold coast to coast.

Of course, rock poetry soon obscured the spoken word, and the closest we came to song as literature, the closest we got to Dylan and his few heirs like the Canadian poet who became songwriter Leonard Cohen and the “new Dylan” Bruce Springsteen, whose “Madmen Drummers Bummers and Indians in the summer,” recalled Ginsberg’s rolling thunder. Books of poetry were no longer sold to the masses like “Howl” and “Coney Island”. My poet friends felt left behind on Robert Frost’s street, which was less traveled.

My other mother Irene had written in my favorite poem “Tricky Heart” that the sustained cadence of her pulse reminded her: “I’m alive, I’m still alive.” While she is gone and so is Ferlinghetti now, along with all the jewels and rubble of my youthful ambitions, the sounds of the streets of America resound in Amanda Gorman, and again comes the heart of who we are and can be, of whom we offer the least – a young person, a black woman who dares to be hip- Hop fully into the literary mainstream. I hear it now and still echoing.

Dalton Delan can be followed on Twitter @UnspinRoom. He has won Emmy, Peabody and duPont Columbia awards for his work

a television producer.

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