Model City: Portland’s Journey From Symbol of Chic to Shabby
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
In December, bestselling author and humorist David Sedaris wrote a New Yorker magazine essay about a recent trip to Portland, Oregon . While on a walk to a donut shop, he “lost count of the strung-out addicts I passed on my way” before eventually encountering four homeless people huddled around an empty baby carriage and smoking drugs right on the sidewalk. Moments later, a dog belonging to one of the addicts rushed out and bit him.
Following the incident, Sedaris, a former methamphetamine addict himself, was struck by the fact that most people in Portland didn’t seem concerned about the state of the city – even the medical worker who treated him appeared more concerned with the dog’s well-being than what had happened to him:
I mean, how hard should it be to get a little sympathy when an unleashed dog bites you? What if I were a baby ? I wondered. Would people side with me then ? What if I were ninety or blind or Nelson Mandela ? Why is everyone so afraid of saying that drug addicts shouldn’t let their dogs bite people ? Actually, I know why. We’re afraid we’ll be mistaken for Republicans, when, really, isn’t this something we should all be able to agree on? How did allowing dogs to bite people become a Democratic point of principle? Or is it just certain people’s dogs? If a German shepherd jumped, growling, out of one of those Tesla trucks that look like an origami project and its owner, wearing a MAGA hat, yelled, “Trumper, no!!!,” then would the people in my audience be aghast?
That one of America’s most progressive cities has become a laughingstock in one of the country’s more progressive magazines is a sign of Portland’s ongoing troubles. ..
The city also has much more sophisticated criminal problems. As Minneapolis uncovers evidence that it has lost billions of dollars in fraudulent schemes by the city’s Somali community, Jeff Eager, the former mayor of Bend, Oregon, has published a series of alarming reports revealing that Portland may have a similar large-scale problem with its welfare programs – some of it connected to more menacing kinds of organized crime.
Early last year, for example, Eager reported on his Substack, Oregon Roundup, about a man named Kevin Daniel Sanabria-Ojeda, whom authorities say is a member of the violent Venezuelan Tren de Agua criminal syndicate and who was arrested for attempted murder. According to Eager, Sanabria-Ojeda, along with an accomplice who remains at large, “kidnapped Maria Guadalupe Hernandez Velasquez outside her Seattle home, drilled into her hands with a power drill to force her to provide them her PIN for her debit card, robbed her of gold and cash, shot and wounded her and left her for dead in rural Washington.”
Somehow Velasquez survived the ordeal and police traced the two criminals to a house in a Portland suburb that police reports describe as a drug den, with “residents possibly using drugs in the back yard, large numbers of people coming and going at night, possibly entire vans full of people, and people being dazed or drugged… and on a few occasions groups of young women or girls being present at the address.”
That house was also listed as the address of Uplifting Journey LLC, an addiction recovery provider that received $2.3 million in state Medicaid funds between April of 2024 and March of 2025. Eager has further documented that owners of Uplifting Journey, Julius Maximo and Espoir Ntezeyombi, have multiple ties to three men indicted in Arizona for setting up a $60 million Medicare fraud ring that was laundering money by sending it to Rwanda. One of the leaders of the Arizona fraud even co-signed the lease on another dubious residence owned by Uplifting Journey in the Portland suburb of Gresham.
Despite all the documented evidence and the fact that Eager is the former mayor of one of Oregon’s largest cities, he’s been unable to get anyone else in the state’s media outlets to pay attention.
“I feel like I've seen the tip of the iceberg in Oregon,” Eager told RealClearInvestigations. “It's a huge scandal, and I'm the only one that's covered it so far …. The state government here couldn’t care less.”
Portland Mayor Keith Wilson, City Council President Jamie Dunphy, and Councilor Candace Avalos did not respond to requests for comment. In a written response to RCI, council member Dan Ryan said, "I hear those concerns every day, and I take them seriously. My priority is improving livability and public safety, and cultivating a vibrant economic environment in Portland.” Ryan proposed and helped achieve unanimous passage of the Storefront Support Program in October to help strengthen and stabilize the city’s small business community as part of a larger effort to provide residents with “better services for the taxes they pay. We need to rebuild trust, support our neighborhood main streets and downtown, and ensure Portland's economic recovery reaches every corner of the city.”
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