News For Reasonable People

Portland's downtown is in freefall — and the desperation is now priced into broker commissions. Building owners are dangling up to $15 per square foot in incentives, compared to the normal $1–3, just to land any tenant willing to sign. The PAE Living Building is offering payouts of roughly $40,000 per deal. Others are throwing in Hawaii trips, Napa wine tours, and golf outings. Brokers are being bribed. The tenants stil...

Seattle's full city council is heading to a vote on a $300,000 allocation from the Jumpstart Payroll Tax — the so-called Amazon tax — earmarked for LGBTQIA+ organizations. The pitch: a surge of "trans refugees" fleeing conservative states like Texas has overwhelmed local nonprofits, and the NGOs say they're out of money. Mayor Katie Wilson has gone a step further, floating a state-of-emergency declaration to accompany t...

Seattle's full city council is heading to a vote on a $300,000 allocation from the Jumpstart Payroll Tax — the so-called Amazon tax — earmarked for LGBTQIA+ organizations. The pitch: a surge of "trans refugees" fleeing conservative states like Texas has overwhelmed local nonprofits, and the NGOs say they're out of money. Mayor Katie Wilson has gone a step further, floating a state-of-emergency declaration to accompany t...

Seattle's full city council is heading to a vote on a $300,000 allocation from the Jumpstart Payroll Tax — the so-called Amazon tax — earmarked for LGBTQIA+ organizations. The pitch: a surge of "trans refugees" fleeing conservative states like Texas has overwhelmed local nonprofits, and the NGOs say they're out of money. Mayor Katie Wilson has gone a step further, floating a state-of-emergency declaration to accompany t...

Daimler — maker of the Freightliner truck — is pulling its manufacturing plant out of Portland, Oregon and relocating to North and South Carolina, taking 375 union jobs with it. It's the kind of headline that barely registers surprise anymore: another major employer quietly exits a city that keeps making itself uncompetitive.

Portland Mayor Keith Wilson now presides over a business climate that is steadily hollowing out ...

Oregon came dangerously close to outlawing hunting, fishing, trapping, rodeo, and livestock operations statewide. Initiative Petition 28 failed to gather enough signatures — but the fact it got as far as it did exposed how far left the state's political class has drifted from the rural communities that built it.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Christine Drazen is done playing defense. She's proposing a constitutional amendm...

Portland's relationship with the Trailblazers has hit a breaking point. New owner Tom Dundon asked the city for nearly $600 million to renovate Moda Center and got a cold shoulder from a city council that would rather fund protest causes than keep an NBA franchise. Sean breaks down why this isn't just a sports story — it's the clearest preview yet of Portland's terminal business climate.

Mayor Keith Wilson and the Portland Cit...

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Fry is coming for your wallet. With a looming budget shortfall, the mayor announced the triple whammy: budget cuts, city layoffs, and a projected 11–13% property tax increase — all landing on homeowners who are already carrying the full weight of a city in fiscal free fall.

The math isn't complicated. Downtown Minneapolis lost an estimated $3 billion in commercial tax base as office towers sold fo...

Jay Inslee posted from Lopez Island to blame climate change for Spokane County's devastating wildfires — the kind of political opportunism that's become his brand. The internet is forever, and so is the police report: a suspect is now sitting in jail, charged in connection with the Old Trails Fire. Climate change. Or an arsonist with waterproof matches. You decide, Jay.

The suspect, Farinichi, comes with a violent criminal his...

Gavin Newsom just locked in another minimum wage hike — California workers will see $17.40 an hour by 2027. If that sounds like progress, try pricing a one-bedroom in Los Angeles or filling up a tank anywhere along the 101. West Coast, best coast — until you run the math on what that hourly rate actually buys.

The federal minimum wage hasn't moved since 2009, parked at around seven bucks an hour. California's number look...

Seattle erupted this week as Mayor Katie Wilson quietly pushed out Police Chief Sean Barnes — then left the city council to learn about it five hours later. That communication gap triggered a rare public rebuke: council members Kettle, Saka, and Rivera went on record blasting Wilson's handling of the abrupt departure, calling out the secrecy surrounding a move of this magnitude.

Barnes walked away with a reported $700K severan...

Gavin Newsom spent months accusing the Trump administration of killing California's high-speed rail project by yanking $4 billion in federal funding. What he left out: records now show California never fulfilled its own obligation to purchase the trains it promised. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy pulled the plug after 16 years and $15 billion spent with zero track laid on the full corridor.

California even sued the Trump admini...

Mayor Brandon Johnson is hemorrhaging his finance team at exactly the wrong moment. In the span of a week, Chicago's mayor lost two of his top three financial advisors — and his response was a press conference where he told residents that his presence is the constant, the continuity, the stability the city needs.

That's the plan heading into a $1 billion budget shortfall. Johnson's city just absorbed a credit rating downgrade ...

Bill Ackman isn't mincing words: New York City's housing affordability crisis isn't caused by capitalism — it's caused by city hall. In a wide-ranging interview, the Pershing Square founder named Zohran Mamdani's rent freeze agenda and the policy environment enabled by Governor Kathy Hochul as the structural drivers behind New York's housing collapse. Rent stabilization boards have already frozen over a million units, pulling...

Portland's city council just made it harder to identify criminals — on purpose. Eight councilors voted to prohibit police from removing masks during encounters, handing anonymity to anyone who wants to hide their face from law enforcement. No dissent. No debate worth noting. Just a supermajority committed to making Portland's streets more dangerous in the name of protest rights.

This is the same city that spent years watching ...

Seattle's most expensive home listing just took a $30 million haircut — from $75 million down to $45 million — and it has nothing to do with a soft market. It's because Washington's ultra-wealthy are voting with their feet, and Mayor Katie Wilson is the one holding the door open.

Democrats in Olympia swore their new 9.9% income tax wouldn't chase anyone out of state. The Denny Blaine waterfront estate says otherwise. A 4...

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson is burning through staff at a pace that would end most careers — her latest casualty is the mayor's own spokesman, the newest name on a growing list of top aides to exit an administration that can't seem to hold itself together.

The analogy is blunt: if you hand the CEO role to someone who has never run anything — no real job, no executive track record, no understanding of what a city of this s...

Amazon just confirmed another round of layoffs — this time eliminating jobs inside its own artificial general intelligence division. That's the same AI the company has been pointing to as the justification for cutting 30,000 positions over the past year. The contradiction is breathtaking: we're firing people because of AI, and now we're firing the people building the AI.

The corporate language around these cuts is the usual mu...

Nevada just enacted Assembly Bill 96, requiring businesses to implement extreme heat mitigation plans — and one lawmaker isn't stopping there. She wants a brand-new statewide heat office. For Nevada. The desert state that has been a desert since before the United States existed.

Sean walks through why this is exactly the kind of overreach Sam Kinison would have demolished in a bit. The logic is identical to world hunger: the s...