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?

    • Coolkidbozzy [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      13·
      2 months 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
      13·
      2 months 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·
        2 months ago

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