Portland: crime, homelessness create $1 billion hole in public coffers

The city of Portland, Ore., lost an estimated $1 billion in taxes between 2020 and 2021. This record loss figure for the city comes from Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data analyzed by Oregon Live.

The data refers not only to the city of Portland but to Multnomah County, where where Portland is located and where nearly 15,000 taxpayers left their homes for another region. Portland suffers from a serious problem of insecurity on its streets. The former capital of the Black Lives Matter and defund the police movements has had a crime rate on the rise for half a decade. Added to this is the problem of homelessness, which floods the city and which the local government has declared to be one of its greatest challenges.

According to the analysis of IRS data, the ex-residents who left Multnomah County were largely high-income families. Those who left the county between 2020 and 2021 had incomes 14% higher than those who left Multnomah and Portland between 2019 and 2020. In turn, the incomes of those taxpayers who moved to Multnomah County are increasingly lower. Portland lost 3% of its citizens between 2020 and 2022. Multnomah County had the state’s largest population drop in the same period.

According to attorney Kristin Olson, who was consulted by the Washington Examiner about this data, it is crime and insecurity that have caused this demographic exodus. Other media outlets have blamed the coronavirus pandemic, a mistake according to Olson.

"Most major cities saw a return of residents after 2020. Portland did not," Olson noted. "What sets Portland apart from other major U.S. cities is that we have a huge epidemic of homelessness and fentanyl addiction and extremely high taxes for these very issues that, paradoxically, only seem to make the very problems they are supposed to solve worse."

As Olson stressed, Portland losing its highest taxpayers is dangerous for the state's finances, which gets 86% of its state funding through individual taxes. In Oregon, those individuals with annual incomes over $125,000 have a tax rate of 24%.