About Portland

An anonymous comment on a blog post here is so right on that I'm copying it below for greater exposure. This is exactly what happened in Portland.

I used to love Portland. When I moved here it was paradise, as everyone says. Today, not so much.

The unemployment rate is outrageous. When i moved here, Portland was a plucky little town with jobs and dirt cheap housing. Then the housing bubble, all the hip kids keep moving here right after college, the city put money into expensive condos, everyone refurbished their homes -- all this means, there are too many starving, adorable twenty-to-thirty year olds looking for jobs, and rent/houses have skyrocketed in prices which in turn makes the youth looking for work need two or three jobs, thereby exacerbating the problem.

Because of how fast Portland 'bloomed' with talented people and at the same time experienced housing inflation, there is a large block of nouveau riche -- people lived here before the boom and rode the wave over the crest/crash, or people who dropped in at the right time and landed the good job/smart investment opportunities. So the rich people are hunky dory and not much is going to hurt them unless our whole economic system collapses. And the rich see no reason why the poor should be poor.