Love the irony of the Ron Wyden for U.S. Sentate ad on Bojack...He could probably buy up all the ad margins on every blog in Oregon with his war chest. Or his Amex Black card.

whoops! U.S. Senate (my typo, not his)

Not enough minority owned business on that stretch to keep CoP happy. Now with a few PDC loans and anti-CHina messaging, you could sell the City COuncil on this.

Ruh oh! Don't give them any ideas or they will do it and brag about what a vibrant shopping area it is.

I don't know, Potemkin Retail seems like a better and cheaper idea then many of our Urban Renewal subsidies. Plus it would put our unemployed 'creative class' to work painting the murals. Win.

This has merit for PDC. With all the people leaving they'll need murals to pretend it exists and people are working. Well, their present digs was formally the PDC funded, failed Creative Class Building; it makes sense to hire the creative class muralists to make faux.

Looks exactly like Portland's idea of business/economic development....empty window dressing.

Pathetic.

Careful...PDC will put up fake store front improvement districts and charge the rest of us big bucks for to it.
So easy, and no pesky real business people to deal with.
And think of the extra money they will have to add on more urban renewal areas.

They could replace ALL business with these things. No more Portland Business Alliance to nag the city about their stupid ideas....

This is already being done. Maybe not as extreme as the "delicatessen?" but look a little closer at the windows downtown around the mall area.

It is as if every person within 50 miles that ever thought about putting paint brush to canvas has some art on display. Look beyond the art and you can see several thousand square feet of empty retail space.

Maybe you can convince the city to use this modus operandia for laying down new streetcar tracks.

Funny that you bring this up, because I'm already seeing this happening with shopping malls. Of course, it wouldn't hurt if the malls actually had customers inside who could see those spaces, but you can't have everything.

Y'know, with this idea, the sky's the limit. Making fake storefronts is just one possibility. How about making fake condo fronts full of happy people? Fake bike paths that show what they could be like if Portland riders could be a tiny bit civil or attentive? Best of all, you could put up cardboard figures for all of Portland's government, and you wouldn't have to change a thing.

And you could put cardboard people on WES and MAX too!