News For Reasonable People

It hasn’t even opened for business yet, but the new Shake Shake in Downtown Portland has already been vandalized. Shake Shake is a popular national burger chain with roots in New York City. They are famous for their smash burgers and milkshakes. The new downtown burger restaurant, across from Powell’s Books, is Shake Shack’s second location in Oregon. The other store is in the Cedar Mills area of...

That’s the name of a Twitter feed I discovered while roaming the feeds. Its sole purpose is to show you what has happened to Portland since its implosion over the past few years. It’s impossible to convey how bizarre this is. Portland for decades was portrayed as a liberal paradise. It literally was the place that all the advocates of urban planning and “diversity is our strength” zealots pointed...

When you think about a mall, its success is often measured in the number of stores open and operating. If the mall is doing poorly, they close — and the more closed storefronts, the worse the perception of the "health" and prosperity of the mall. The mall can function as something of an analogy for thinking about downtown Portland, even if the latter is at a much larger scale. The more b...

Downtown San Francisco’s new Ikea furniture store will have round-the-clock security, the retail company announced Monday.  It comes a week after a Downtown Whole Foods store announced its abrupt closure due to staff safety concerns.  “The safety of our co-workers and customers is always the highest priority for Ikea. Ikea San Francisco, which will be part of a new meeting place from Ingka Centres...

Over the weekend, downtown Chicago turned into a chaotic scene as several hundred teenagers went on a rampage, causing mayhem and destruction throughout the city. The young delinquents, primarily African-American, targeted Millennium Park and the Bean, causing significant damage and leaving city officials scrambling to assign blame. While some authorities argue that the teenagers are simply lackin...

Los Angeles-based business owner Yvette Ingram has decided to close all five of her beauty supply stores in California and Texas due to a series of break-ins that have affected her mental and physical health as well as her livelihood. Ingram's stores, which began facing break-in problems during the 2020 lockdown, have been broken into a total of 12 times, causing thousands of dollars in losse...

Illegal cabins with million-dollar views have been appearing along the Willamette River in Oregon, causing concern among nearby residents. The cabins, some with solar panels, are built on a no man's land that has become a loophole for homeless encampments. Authorities have struggled to enforce the law in the area, as multiple entities claim they lack jurisdiction, including the city, county,...

A controversial bill in Washington state, known as Senate Bill 5599, is causing concern for some residents as it would permit medical transgender interventions on minors without parental consent. Critics argue that this legislation strips parents of their ability to guide their children through crucial life decisions and could lead to irreversible consequences. The bill enables host homes for runa...

REI, a well-established outdoor outfitter, has announced the closure of its only store in Portland, citing increased crime, theft, and break-ins as primary reasons. This comes after Walmart's recent decision to pull out of its last two stores in the city. REI's closure in Portland is especially concerning, given the city's abundance of outdoor activities and opportunities. REI, a co...

Wealthier residents, liberated from the office by remote work, are leaving the Bay Area at a higher rate than before the pandemic — a trend that could exacerbate a dreaded economic “doom loop” for the region’s slowly recovering job centers and downtown cores. In 2021, households earning more than $150,000 made up 32% of all those moving out of the nine-county Bay Area, up from 27.6% in 2019, accor...

Walmart plans to close half its stores in Chicago, a reversal of the retail giant’s high-profile commitment in 2020 to expand in the city as part of its corporate racial justice initiative in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by police. Walmart announced Tuesday that next week it will close four poor-performing stores out of the eight it operates in Chicago. Three of the locations are located in C...

Emergency responders were called to a recently shuttered Downtown Whole Foods at least once a week on average during the first six months it was open, according to data from the San Francisco Fire Department. Data obtained by The Standard shows that a Downtown Whole Foods that opened in March 2022 and abruptly closed this week was the site of several overdoses, psychiatric episodes and other emerg...

Beer Colossus Anheuser-Busch saw its value plummet more than $5 billion since the company announced its branding partnership with controversial transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Since March 31, shares of Bud Light’s parent company have fallen by nearly 4% — knocking down the company’s market capitalization from $132.38 billion to $127.13 billion on Wednesday. Anheuser-Busch stock...

San Francisco crime statistics compare favorably to other major U.S. cities on the surface, but one expert argues the city's numbers have covered up a problem for over a decade. "Crime is worse than the data shows," Charles "Cully" Stimson, Heritage Foundation senior legal fellow and former prosecutor in San Francisco, told Fox News Digital.  "People do not report the...

In the first quarter of the year, office vacancies were the highest ever recorded, according to real estate broker CBRE. The firm estimated a 29.5% vacancy rate last quarter, substantially higher than rates seen during the dot-com bust and Great Recession and a seven-fold increase from the start of 2020.  Real estate analysts are expecting vacancies to tick up further as leases—including a major g...

San Francisco is requesting assistance from the federal government due to an “unprecedented police staffing shortage” in the liberal California city. Three years ago San Francisco Mayor London Breed joined Democrats across the nation and announced a plan to defund the police. It backfired in every way imaginable and Breed eventually reversed the budget cuts but the damage was done. The city is ful...

After two decades of losses and "hundreds of millions of dollars" invested in Chicago, Walmart is shuttering four unprofitable stores in the metropolitan area, reducing its store footprint by half in the crime-ridden city.   "The simplest explanation is that collectively our Chicago stores have not been profitable since we opened the first one nearly 17 years ago – these stores lose...

The developer behind a stalled effort to build a 40-story housing high-rise in Downtown San Francisco has given the property up to its lender in a sign of growing distress in the city’s real estate market.  Developer Build Inc. has filed a deed in lieu of foreclosure for its One Oak development at 1500 Market St. on the corner of Market and Oak streets, according to city property records.  Propert...

Another downtown Portland business is calling it quits.  Coava Coffee on the corner of Southwest 12th Avenue and Jefferson Street announced Monday that its last day in that location would be Thursday. The business cited extreme violence and criminal activity that has gotten increasingly worse. Coava’s remaining two locations on Southeast Hawthorne and Southeast Grand will remain open. "All of...

San Francisco's former fire commissioner was brutally attacked this week after a "group of homeless people" slashed him with a knife and fractured his skull with a pipe in his own front yard, according to a family friend. The attack on Don Carmignani happened just outside his home in the city's Marina District, his friend and prominent Bay Area lawyer Joe Alioto Veronese reveal...

Two people were stabbed Thursday at or near stations on the LA Metro Red Line, and the attacker or attackers were still at large. The first attack occurred at the Metro Hollywood/Western Station. According to the Los Angeles Police Department, the victim was stabbed by someone who fled the scene at around 4:55 p.m. The victim's condition was not immediately available. The attack caused a brie...

One of the largest supermarkets in Downtown San Francisco—the Whole Foods Market at Eighth and Market streets—intends to shut down at the close of business Monday just a little more than a year after the store opened, company officials told The Standard. “We are closing our Trinity location only for the time being,” a Whole Foods spokesperson said in a statement. “If we feel we can ensure the safe...

Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced on Saturday that he is seeking a pardon for Daniel Perry, a U.S. Army sergeant and Uber driver convicted of murder in connection to a Black Lives Matter protest shooting in July 2020. According to the governor's Twitter post, he will grant the pardon as soon as a request from the state's Board of Pardons and Paroles reaches his desk. However, he noted...

New data show how much Oregon has been impacted by the homelessness crisis since the start of the pandemic, and how we compare with the rest of the county. According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Pacific Northwest saw some of the highest numbers of people unhoused from 2020 to 2022: nearly 18,000 in Oregon and more than 25,000 in Washington. “Those are lists where yo...

If people like Rohit Singh, who lives in Berkeley, are already planning for Sunday breakfast at Mum's Café in San Francisco's Japantown, it's likely going a big day for restaurant's closing. "I'm coming here for breakfast tomorrow morning," explains Sigh, standing in front of the restaurant Saturday evening. "When I was told about the place I said, 'Let...