Garbage As Part Of The Environement In Portland Oregon USA

The People Who Gave Me a View of a Garbage Can Multiplex in Front of My Front Door Want to Expand Design Review Though Out City! Lex Loeb Contributor Network . Imagine having a city good taste czar. That is what Portland, Oregon is famous for. I happen to be one of the victims of the program. Now I get to look out my front door every day and night and see a multi color garbage can multiplex. The colors are Walmart Blue and Green, Rubbermaid brown and yellow. This color scheme used though out the city is supposed to be there to promote environmentalism with recycling being the rational. The trade off is that the whole scheme is beyond ugly. Yet this not only passed the city's stringent design review procedures it has become a model for future design review development. It just got worse. Now my back door is graced by city sponsored ugly plastic mulching bins and the neighbor was very nice and cut down the shrubs between the houses to improve my view of their mulch farming operation . It is a virtual feast of plastic crap for the eyes and is most certainly improving property valuations. I actually worked on appealing the property taxes and the county refused to lower the assessed value by even one cent even with a newly remodeled foreclosed house on an adjacent lot from the same tax period. The racket gets better! The city is so proud of its plastic multi garbage plex that it now adds value and sustains one's property values. (See the photo attached to the article) Things even get worse than that. A few years ago the design conscious city of Portland came into the neighborhood and put up no parking signs in every body's front yard in the vicinity especially in view of people's front doors. It is for public safety that they needed actual signs on sign posts supposedly instead of just painting curbs yellow the way they used to. The streets are narrow and parking in these places can cause it to be difficult to get a fire truck into the area. Then again it is the same city that juts out curbs into the street and puts traffic circles in residential cross sections so that emergency vehicles can't easily get though . Design review in Portland is truly exceptional. I once went down to a design review meeting and the argument that took hours was whether a one story brick building that houses the newspaper's credit union should have its original brick exposed or if their architect would be allowed to stucco over it. The building is nondescript and the issue was complete nonsense but the whole thing was really more about creating a process that would give a lot of people employment. It could not make any difference if it were brick or stucco because the building was already out of context as a tear down on a major blvd. Obviously the whole process was a complete racket. There was virtually no public interest in the facade remaining brick or being coated with a flat coat of stucco. Over many years the process has become an even bigger scam because it ultimately does it is water down any potent new design aesthetics and reality sets in when you have a constant front yard view of a permanent multi color plastic garbage can multiplex on and a permanent plastic mulch farm view from your back door. The purpose of such ugliness is obviously to improve property values which they do in any case because this clearly is the community aesthetic. .