Our Golden Age, I insist, was the late 70s and 80s.
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Monday, March 02, 2009
Portland ranked most unhappy city in country
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"The struggle itself ... is enough to fill a man's heart." --Camus
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7 comments:
It's pretty obvious you don't live here. I wouldn't live anywhere else! The southern states have unbearable heat and bugs, California....well, that answers itself as they are all moving up here. The east coast..if you can find it under all the snow and ice, smog and billions of people living on top of each other. And the mountain states, if you like to pay huge shipping costs for everything.
So Portland is a jewel, in fact pretty much everywhere in Oregon and Washington.
Sounds like a case of sour grapes to me.
Sorry, I've been living here for over 30 years! I too hate the east coast, and I LOVE eastern Oregon, northern Idaho, much of the NW. And I loved Pdx in the 80s, God's city! At any rate, this is just a list, for God's sake, based on calls to crisis centers, suicides, divorces and such. They didn't ask yuppies from Calif. You apparently don't know a lot of your neighbors ha ha. The troubled ones.
Oregon and the PNW is a unique place on this planet! I moved to PDX (now live in Eugene) in 2006 from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The climate there was killing me -- the oppressive heat, bugs chewing on me all the time! The South SUCKS -- i hate it! Since moving to Oregon my healh has improved; i love every day here; i love the mountains, and there are none more beautiful than Oregon.
I have heard that Oregon has the highest suicide rate ... i can't figure that out! :)
Have you seen the mountains in Montana and Colorado?
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.
- J
J, a very cogent observation and analysis of what has happened in Portland! I agree with you completely, which is why I call the late 70s, 80s, the Golden Age, though I mostly refer to the arts then. Great comment. Thanks for taking the time to share it.
No sweat, boss.
I sent your post to my Grandmother and she wanted my opinion on why things changed. Can't be flip with Grandma.
j
p.s. Minimum wage doesn't cut mustard, let alone buy a squeeze bottle.
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