Portland used to be the affordable West Coast city where artists, young people, and working-class families could actually live. Now the median home price is pushing $500K+. Is the city's soul gone, or is this just how cities evolve?
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Add your commentMy parents bought in St. Johns in 1988. My sister and I grew up there. She could not afford to rent a one-bedroom in St. Johns today. That neighborhood is THEIRS and she can't live there. Tell me that's just evolution.
I bought my house in Woodstock in 2009 for $187,000. Today Zillow says it's worth $540,000. I should be thrilled. Instead I feel vaguely guilty every time I look at my 28-year-old coworkers trying to afford rent in Gresham.
my landlord raised my rent 22% in one year citing 'market conditions.' I've lived in this apartment for 9 years. Nine years. I know which neighbor leaves their recycling bin out two days too long. I know every crack in these walls. and now I might have to leave because of 'market conditions.'
Moved here from San Francisco in 2018 and Portland felt SO affordable by comparison. I realize that says absolutely nothing useful about whether it's affordable for someone who was already living here. I'm part of the problem and I know it.
The number of musicians, painters, and small theater people I've watched leave Portland since 2015 is actually staggering. These are people who made Portland interesting enough for the tech workers to want to come here in the first place. The irony is brutal.
The city's 'identity' always gets invoked by people who already got here and bought property and don't want anything to change. Funny how that works.
Hot take: Portland's identity was always 'place white people from California and the midwest came to reinvent themselves cheaply.' The original residents didn't exactly get a vote on what that identity was.
the answer is just build more housing but every time someone proposes an apartment building in their neighborhood suddenly everyone becomes a historian about neighborhood character lol
Property taxes in Oregon are actually really low compared to most states because of Measure 5. So if you OWN here it's quite manageable. If you RENT here you get none of those protections. The system basically rewards people who already had money.
Portland was never as cheap as people remember. It was cheap compared to SF and Seattle. That's a specific comparison. Relative to local wages it was always a stretch for working families.
I keep hearing that Oregon's land use laws are supposed to prevent sprawl and protect farmland and I believe in those goals. But the side effect is that housing supply is constrained and prices go up. There's a real tradeoff here that nobody wants to honestly discuss.
we need more social housing like Vienna not more luxury apartments pretending to be affordable because they have one studio at 60% AMI
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