this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2025
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Fuck landlords
Yes, but also young people aren't hanging out at bars anymore. It's a combination of many factors, some good and some sad. LGBTQ+ patrons have more safe options, which is good.
Fuck landlords, but also businesses adapt to a changing market or they die.
Sure but the rent is the base value of "your business must be this successful to survive. We allow landlords to autonomously decide for our community what that value should be, with no value add besides a piece of paper backed by our supposedly democratic government(s).
(Property management is a fine job that is rarely actually done by landlords themselves, people managing the maintenance and occupancy of properties can and usually do make a wage like the rest of us workers).
It makes the city more interesting when "crappy" businesses can get by. It makes it easy for people to jump in to the market economy and offer something innovative, instead of just closing everything down and opening chipotle locations, or landlords letting occupants leave so they can make money on speculation which offers no value to our community.
I don't think anything you said is wrong, but the owners didn't cite the landlord as being the problem. They plan to open a new more family friendly space in the same city but in a different neighborhood. To me, that says that rent isn't the problem, but the market demand has shifted. Bars don't make as much money as they used to, and LGBTQ+ families exist. Even the name, Scandals, is a relic from an era when "nontraditional fraternization" was considered "scandalous."
Of course, we also have Nazis and rapists and criminals openly corrupting the government and destroying the global future, so "progress" is relative.
I'll take the "mutual agree" on all that. In the back of my mind I was thinking how "the location is really the core problem here".
I do think that what I said is relevant to other commercial vacancies around town, so I had to soapbox a bit to blow off some steam.
you have to update with the times and a lot of bars like this are firmly stuck in a by gone era; this is the bar that made me realize this when i visited a couple years ago and was surprised to learn that it seemed par for the course for portland.
i'm not sure yet if it's a blessing or a curse to have lived in enough places that i now posses the experience to detect whether a gayborhood is built for the long term based on its communal spaces.