Maybe a bit hyperbolic - it wasn't *every* saturday night, or even most until the George Floyd thing.
Portland does see regular rioting - anytime there's a police shooting they wanna fight with cops afterward. It really started with Occupy Wall Street and got progressively worse (the only true big about political 'progressives'!)
I can tell you with no uncertainty that while Portland is a shithole of a city, it *wasn't* that bad with riots until May of 2020 - the craziness was typically very occasional. I think with everything under lock down even the pot smoking hippies were getting stir crazy and their pressure valves blew - and when they saw the political "leaders" had no spine, they seized the opportunity to feel powerful.
Prior to May of 2020 - for the last few years Portland was more known, at least regionally, for the droves of homeless living on the sidewalks and in any bare spot of land - public or private - they could fit a tent on. Every year Oregon has a relay race known as the "Hood to Coast" - it starts on Mount Hood, runs down into the Portland area (usually along US Hwy 26 thru down town to US Hwy 30) then continues west along the Columbia River toward US Hwy 101 to Astoria and Seaside. A few years ago the geniuses who organized it decided to run the race thru along a trail called the Springwater Corridor.
The Springwater Corridor, they thought might have a few hundred homeless folk living along the trail - so they sent the police in to clear it out, because they didn't want international visitors (people come from all over the world for this stupid race) to see the real Portland. The cops weren't ready for what they found, neither was the city. They displaced not hundreds, but thousands - probably over 10,000 homeless people in their sweep of the park.
Those people being displaced from their out-of-sight, out-of-mind 'home' on the trail dispersed and soon you couldn't go downtown without seeing dozens of homeless people building tent-cities on the sidewalks. They took over. You couldn't go into many residential neighborhoods without seeing the same, especially those near major roads or highways.
Not long after the police did their sweep I was servicing a customer's vehicle in what could be considered a 'nicer' middle class neighborhood in Northeast Portland adjacent to Interstate 84. The neighborhood had one of those tall concrete sound barriers between the hwy and the homes. There was a narrow grass strip that belonged to the state, managed by DOT along the wall. On that strip and spilling into the road were dozens of ratty tents and the ground was littered with needles, used rubbers (at least some protection was being used, probably by Johns), garbage etc - right across the street from a park and a nicer apartment complex. The residents there I talked to were pissed at the city, pissed at the cops, and pissed that nothing was being done to address the issue.
And you can't say "you didn't hear about the rioting because the news wouldn't talk about it" - I had friends in law enforcement in the area too, and our own dispatchers and fleet of contractors and drivers would've put the word out to avoid the areas due to such goings-on.
You can't hide a riot if its a real riot, and fires like that would've likewise been shared - people would've been making videos of the incidents viral, and people who live / work in the area would talk. We knew when there were riots, when there were violent protests, when the idiots would try shutting down the freeways. Keep Portland Weird, right?
