Returning to Portland

Ok, this will be a long one. I first moved to Portland in 2007 with my future wife. I lived near Lloyd Center and worked at a middle school in Gervais. Yes the commute was rough. We got married in the Rose test garden and had our reception at the Kennedy School.

We both hated our jobs so we moved back to California for work. We moved back to Portland to open a food truck in 2014. By that time we had a 2 year old daughter. We lived on the border of East Moreland and Woodstock and our cart was in Sellwood. I would call this peak Portland. It was the fastest growing city in America. It felt like the entire city was 30 somethings like us with toddlers. Every food cart pod was booming, it was so much fun. We expanded several times. It was beautiful and alive and super cool. We loved it until we didn't.

Unfortunately Portland suffered badly from the growth. Traffic was unbearable all hours of the day. But far worse was the homeless problem. We lived near the Spring Water trail and it was during those years that it went from a few tents to absolutely full. I had never seen a syringe just lying on the ground until then, and I had lived in SF for several years. Our car was stolen from right in front of our house the day after Christmas. It was found two months later. The police informed us that it had been used as a "crack taxi". Our carts were regularly broken into and I found human feces behind our carts many times, often with my foot. A couple moved in (parked their house) across the street from our house and the lady would scream "Fa@@ot!" over and over some nights. We gave up around 2017 and bugged out to Astoria, and later California, but that's another story.

Now our daughter is about to enter highschool and even in our super rich Northern California school district that we financially squeezed into things look bleak, and we sure as shit can't afford anything more expensive. We find ourselves once again looking north.

I joined this reddit to see how people feel nowadays about the Rose City. So....not good. But we investigated anyway this last week. I hardly searched the city top to bottom, but we did look at houses from Lake Oswego all the way to Linnton. We toured high schools in both cities Including Lincoln and Grant. We also checked out businesses for sale in Oregon city and Portland. What I saw makes me think some people here need some perspective, both in regard to how much better it has gotten as well as what all the other west coast cities look like these days.

There used to be tents EVERYWHERE. Along the 5 from the 405 all the way to Jansen Beach. All along the Spring Water trail. You could see them driving over the Ross Island bridge. All the sidewalks from around SE 124th to the Willamette. Those places still have tents, but WAY fewer. I don't know what the statistics are, but from my experience either the appearance has gotten much better or the problem has moved to somewhere I did not see.

I walked Hollywood boulevard a year ago while on vacation. Only the absolute worst Portland has could rival that level of homelessness and trash, and that's in the center of LA! And anyone that thinks Portland is some sort of homeless hell hole had better not step foot in Oakland California. In fact, they better avoid most of the East Bay. And Sacramento. And most of LA. The amount of trash on the street in all those places dwarfs the problem in Portland.

And the schools! Holy shit! Have you seen Lincoln? Grant? I know you paid a ton for those, but damn! Believe me you got what you paid for. Nothing in California comes even close! They look the private schools for the ultra wealthy. I'd have to be Palo Alto rich to send my kid to a school that nice in California, but in Portland I can buy a sub $400,000 condo and she's in.

So that's it. Rant over. I like Portland and I think it's a lot better than it was 8 years ago. Yes, I know it got even worse than that in the interim between then and now, I visited in 2021 and felt like crying. But it's better now, and I want to believe it can be the place that I fell in love with again.