Kniferide wrote: Sun Jun 05, 2022 12:10 am
I live in PDX. It feels like a small town that is big enough to be a filthy mess, and for people to throw their hands up about it.
Yes. And from what I've seen, west-coasters are litterbugs to begin with. People here seem incapable to holding onto trash until they reach a suitable receptacle. As much as homeless tweakers hording piles of shit contributes to the mess, I just as often see assholes just throwing shit out their car windows, or abandoning shit roadside because: A) This city charges exorbitant fees to throw out large items - that have to be brought to a receiving site, rather than other sensible cities that have large-item pickup days 2-3 times a year; and B) Hippie-dippies here would rather leave their shit sitting out by the sidewalk in the rain as "free stuff" rather then live with the guilt of actually throwing something away.
Its a relatively inexpensive city that the locals think is out of control expensive, which leads me to the people. People who have lived in Portland OR, since before Portlandia are convinced that the show is why people have moved here. That is fucking ridiculous. No one has ever moved to a city just because a TV show had one and a half funny seasons.
I would go a step further and differentiate between the folks who've been here generations and often like to brag about their Oregon Trail roots, and the slackers that moved out here in droves in the 90s because it was cheap like Milwaukee/Cleveland/(insert name of mid-sized rust-belt city here), and they could find a place to rent cheap, and a shitty job with little responsibility, and play in their little hobby bands, and drink $1.50 boilermakers every night at dive bars for 20 years, and never get their shit together, or save money, or get a career going, or committed relationship, or buy a house, or any of the shit the friends that ended up staying behind in aforementioned rust-belt city ended up doing with their lives - setting and achieving things like goals.
They're the ones that are really upset, since they seemed to be living in a fantasy land where they would never age and their health would start to be problematic, rents would never go above $600/mo, they'd never have to compete against 20-something cool people for the same shitty service jobs they were doing 20+ years ago, and the dive bars with $1.50 boilermakers would never close or charge more.
The exact same people who in the early 2000s were inviting those more responsible friends from back east to come visit with "Isn't this awesome? When are you gonna move out here? It'd be so much fun to have you around? What do you mean you'd need to figure out your career and job? and a house? and family? Just pack up and move!"
So eventually the more responsible friends DID find a way to make it work, even if it did take a few years or more to get the plan in place. And they did move out, and bring their career positions with them, and the equity from their home in Chicago, or DC, or Boston, or Minneapolis, and the work ethic of having had careers in those places, and the spending power to pay for $6 beers and $30 a seat dinners.
And now the slacker folks are upset at how their beloved refuge from responsibility and planning has changed. The Oregon Trail folks don't give as much care. Now they have growing businesses and a better employee pool, and they can charge more rent, and maybe kick out the 45+ year-old alcoholic tenant that can barely pay rent and lives in near chaos and get some better tenants than the losers they had to rent to in the 90s.
Oregonians are generally annoying people with strong xenophobic tendencies, that feel threatened by people from other places.
I could never tell if the whole "buy local" thing was an extension of this. Building up a professional reputation has taken longer and been more about slowly building recognition and trust in the same individuals than I ever saw working in Chicago and other major cities out east.
There is a wholesale fear of CHANGE here. People try to put all kinds of lipstick on their fear-of-change pig: equity, history/historic preservation, sustainability, etc...but the reality is nobody wants to deal with their surroundings being different than their idealization from childhood and young adult years.
The food is good if you don't want Indian or Chinese. PDX has both the worst Indian and Chinese food I have ever eaten.
I've seen that too. Good 'honest' food can be hard to come by too. Chicago was full of good 'honest' food without pretense and with full authenticity. The good food here is upscaled to death: "local", "farm-to-table", "new American", fusion-ed and "re imagined" by mostly white people. Through the pandemic I've found that aside from not being able to deep fry things, I make better food, in more variety and authenticity, than most of the stuff I'd get around here. Two things I must go out for still: fried chicken, and real-deal tonkatsu broth.
I've had okay Indian food out in Hillsboro. The best Chinese food has been at Danwei Canting (run by white people, see previous), or again, out in Beaverton/Tigard. Good asian ingredients abound, though. With a little help from Fuchsia Dunlop and others, I'm making great Chinese at home.
There is no sewer drainage built into the infrastructure and the city charges home owners thousands of dollars a year for "run off" . Still cant figure that out. There is no sales tax, and all of that shortfall is passed off to home owners. Portland Or. is fine I guess.
It's okay, it just needs a few major changes: They main one being a need to get rid of this shitbag 5-member Commission form of city government. "Activist" electees should not be in charge of whole city departments with 1,000+ employees each and multi-million dollar budgets when they can barely manage a small bookstore or $16k in defaulted credit card debt. I'd love to have an alderperson who was answerable to a specific part of the community, including those who can represent everyone east of 82nd and north and west of Alberta and Interstate. The City Club has a pretty good plan for amending the city charter for a representational districted city council form of government. Getting a strong Richard M Daley type in charge rather than the milquetoast twit we currently have might not hurt either.