I’m feeling a bit stifled in my city and want to move. My priorities are $1500-2000/mo rent and a path to an affordable house (see: picture), a unionised city workforce, good greenspace with an extensive parks system, good biking infrastructure, a good public university, and a good political scene. That leaves Portland, Minneapolis, Chicago, and maybe an East Coast city I haven’t researched yet. Of those, Portland is at the top of my list because I’m getting an ocean for Great Lakes prices.

What’s bad about the city that makes people move away? Is there a better option in Oregon, especially one that would let me commute into Portland without whatever problems it has?

  • lilypad [pup/pup's, it/its]@hexbear.netEnglish
    16·
    9 days ago

    You’ve gotten a ton of comments and info, but here’s one more.

    What’s bad about the city that makes people move away?

    One of my online friends lives in Portland, and I asked them “hey rant about pdx for moment, tell me why you hate it”. This is gonna be filled with their personal opinions so I can’t say how accurate it is. They’re… Pretty jaded, to my eyes, and very opinionated. Sometimes their opinions are on point, but sometimes they’re heavily generalized from their direct experiences. So take all this with a grain (or several grains) of salt.

    Here's some things they said about why the city is bad, arranged in a bullet list from their long paragraph of run on sentences.

    I put my notes/questions in parens, I dont feel like asking them about stuff rn. And tried to edit it with brackets to make it make more sense.

    • Portland sucks, its just really close to tons of cool stuff (I’m assuming they’re referring to the mountain nearby, the coast, the high desert in eastern Oregon, etc., cause they’re pretty outdoorsy)
    • Portland isn’t a city, its an association of neighborhoods masquerading as a city
    • Portland is super fucking white, whiter than anywhere [they’ve] lived. It comes from a history where black people were not allowed to live [there], and there’s still tons of casual liberal racism and gentrification and driving out poor people and people of color
    • Oregon in general has a fascism problem
    • tons of people [there] who are like “I’m a white liberal queer so I know what oppression is and can’t oppress others”, with some people being chillers and accepting they can oppress others, and even fewer actually doing the work to unlearn and address it
    • drivers [there] fucking suck. There’s the Portland drivers, who stop at an intersection to let another car go when they have the right of way, and dont know how to zipper, and can’t make a decisive move to save their life, and endanger tons of people. Then there’s the out of towners who learned how to drive somewhere that people actually drive normally and are competent. Then there’s the calidrivers who cut you off run stop signs break suddenly tailgate and fucking suck and endanger people. Also no one knows how to drive on slick roads after rain, and if [they] get ice then good fucking luck and drive super defensively, people [there] treat ice like it doesn’t exist and speed 10+mph over the limit with summer tires, or slow to a 5mph crawl regardless of whether there’s even ice on the road
    • there’s no gayborhood, just dispersed [f-slur used here in a reclamatory sense]
    • big homelessness problem and the city refuses to deal with it. Right now there’s a program to “relocate people to their families outside portland” instead of actually give people care and social services to get them off the street
    • PPB sucks. They’re incompetent until it’s time to beat on helpless people
    • lefties [there] are either liberals with a coat of paint, anarchists who want to burn everything and dont care about building, or batshit wackos trying to start a sex cult
    • there’s tons of old hippies (they listed this here so I’m assuming that’s a negative?)
    • the job market is shit right now
    • its in the valley of sickness. There’s mold everywhere
    • trimet (their public transit in Portland) sucks. The fact that its some of the best in the nation is a disgrace
    • the city builds bike infrastructure that makes [them] feel unsafe when biking, and neglects bike boulevards (idk what a bike boulevard is, but I’m assuming its a dedicated bike path separate from the road (Portland locals care to chime in?))
    • I fucking hate the [cishets] [there]. They think they’re queer cause they dress like [queers] and then speak like they know [queer] problems, all while perpetuating casual liberal homophobia and transphobia
    • the city shuts down after 9pm. Its gotten better about it over the years, but its still not great
    • good luck affording your $900/mo room plus utilities while making $20/hr and can’t get more than 15-20 hours/week. At least [they] qualify for fucking OHP (looked it up, its the states health plan? Looks decent at a glance)
    • you’ll need heating in the winter and ac in the summer. Hello giant utilities bill
    • everything is fucking expensive
    • the cities gonna be broke in 5 years (no idea why, they didn’t elaborate)

    Again, take this with salt. I’m sure some criticisms are on point, but dont know enough to differentiate between those ones and the more, uh, personal opinions.

    edit one more thing they said that I realized is maybe worth including, even if its a possibly jaded/hyperbolic view

    Dont stop on [interstate 5] north of Vancouver at night if your black or visibly trans, and be careful in hood river if your not white, people get disappeared.

    • Coolkidbozzy [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      13·
      9 days ago

      Dont stop on [interstate 5] north of Vancouver at night if your black or visibly trans

      I’m pretty fucking white but anecdotally that area is a land of contradictions. I stopped at a gas station there once and people tried giving me cash because I looked homeless (they weren’t wrong). But I also know right-wingers move there when they’re too racist to live in portland

    • regul [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      12·
      9 days ago

      As Femboy_Stalin said, most of these apply to any city in the US, so it sounds like your friend is maybe just jaded about life in the States (fair).

      For actual Portland-specific points:

      • Portland is very white, that’s true. There are pockets of diversity, but yeah.
      • Old hippies are a negative, if you’ve ever dealt with old hippies before. Hippy politics were never incredibly radical, and have remained so. They’re libs who sometimes pretend they’re not, I guess.
      • The neglected bike boulevard thing probably means that the city has very little in the way of grade-separated bike paths. Mostly the bike network is low-traffic shared streets a block or two off of main thoroughfares, but they always intersect eventually with the thoroughfares and introduce conflict points with cars.

      But yeah everything else is true everywhere in the US, I think.

      • stink@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
        2·
        8 days ago

        Most of the cool hippies died at a young age, what we have left are the libertarians who like weed