Portland, Oregon Least Livable City In The USA. Consider Vancouver, Washington As Alternative To Becoming A Tax Slave To The Oregon Ruling Class And Also Be Able To Park Your Car.

How the City of Portland Oregon Went from "Most Livable City in USA" to One of the Least Livable From Public Transit Routes that Cost Citizen Upto $24 Per Ride to Idiotic Sidewalks that Destroy Public Street Access Right of Ways, Portland is Becoming a Jobless Designer Showcase Lex Loeb Contributor Network . The city of Portland is overly advertised as a model city. The original Most livable city label came from a time when it was one of the nation's least diverse in terms of minorities fueling a sense that it was partly a racist designation. The safer better schools than the national average for inner city schools that the city has is due to the lack of minority slum areas that bring down averages in other similar size American cities. The schools show evidence of continued decline since and much of the blame gets placed on minorities problems including language difficiency. The drop out rate is too high even in the best of the public schools to give the school district any credit for spending upto $15000 per student per year to gets such terrible results with about 40% dropping out system wide. The city was a relatively quiet sleepy town compared to what it has become with a large influx of new people. Portland has consistantly over rated itself becuase it thrives by brining new people in and pumping up limited real estate assets which thanks to state land use laws is designed to create a high density manhattanization of property values in one of the largest metropolitan areas on earth. The state and local programs are tied together by the self described progressives who run every aspect of state and city politics as if Portland is the only city that maters in Oregon. Cities outside of Portland know very well that laws enacted in the state capital are mostly taylored to the portland liberal elite dictates. One would think that with all that tailoring the laws to Portland that Portland would be the most incredible city on earth and a world capital like Paris that as a national capital happens to suck France dry for supporting finances. Paris is a gritty dirty big city with some subsidized amenities esecially cheap for tourists not for locals. Portland is moving in that direction except most of the amenities are stupid or worthless to average citizens. The city has come to be run by vindictive hipocrits and the mentally challenged when it is now actually trying to make parking for cars next to impossible with one of the world's most automotive metropolitan areas on earth as the whole reason Portland even exists. The mayor got caught driving his big SUV to a big box store, possibly drunk, to go shopping at a store that was just one step above the city's love for walmart corporation. What an embarrassment that should have been considering this guy's pashion and policy mindfulness for making people ride bikes. What began as livability based on a moderate size city with less racial divisions and tensions has evolved into a more crowed more diverse city where what is supposed to make it most livable is green sustainability. The mayor commented back when he was in the city council that portland has become the most european of cities becasue it installs old fashioned mostly made in europe street cars with fixed tracks set in the streets. People who actually walk a few blocks downtown have noticed they can walk faster than the trollys. The streets with these fixed in place trollys have lost street acccess car parking as they have slowed down cross town traffic stopping ever other block. More of this expensive wastful nonsense is going to be built as the city and state have invested public money into going into the manufacturing business to make old fashioned obsolete trollys. At the same time the city is a vengeful streak. The fire department is shutting down businesses and land owners with expensive regulations that are supposed to make building occoupation safe. It looks more like the commissioner in charge and the fire department are out to gentrify downtown by ridding the city of buisiesses they don't want because they go so far as to tear down building leaving empty lots and business owners suing the city. Then the other day I noticed that the city fire bureau is not even in compliance themselves. Yes they did earthquake proof a few fire stations for good reason but spending so much time intimidating building owners and businesses they seem to be over looking the fact that the city's largest employer happens to be the OHSU medical campus that is built on top of a hill over looking the city of Portland. The campus is huge comprised of many many large buildings. To get a fire truck up to the campus it has to come from a fire station downtown down an unreliable hill prone to sliding. It is unbelievable that the city is concerned about a few restaurants ,adult bookshops and night clubs being unsafe when there is no OHSU on site fire station as there should be. There are research labs and hospitals facilities with heavy equipment that is prone to electrical fires and other disasters. Labs are vented and buildings probably are all to code with sprinklers but even so emergency services are something like a half mile or more down a steep hill with a winding road that can quickly become completely inacessable. We are talking about of the denseist populations in the United States up there on pill hill durring working hours. When the city sees a problem with a private building they get vindictive and set out assessing fees as if they are in the raquettering business. OHSU hospital should have an on site city fire station. Likewise many schools in the area are not safe for an earthquake yet and one just went up in flames. The city recently put a restuarant building owner out of business because he decided to put his own life at risk from fire building a palazo like mixed use living quarters for himself on the top floors of his building with out all the necessary permits. The city went balastic. Yes they love mixed use but not if they don't control every aspect of it. The city also did not seem to like the roudy reputation of the restaurant and it's patrons that were not gentrified enough. Portland has become downtown urban center flush with poor people and people being dispalced by the gentification of the poorer inner city neiborhoods in recent years but the prices for everything downtown are gentrified with the city pushing the gentrifation. What is happening is catastrophic . The biggest population emerging downtown does not belong there. The city has other departments that are keen to create "low cost housing" downtown to get up the critical mass of population there so the stupid trolleys will have people to transport. Since the city has an honor system to pay for using public transit few people have been paying to ride public transportation over many years. Its can be cheaper to be fined a couple of times than paying for monthly bus passes. Low cost housing , some with federal subsidies, is not necessarily low cost enough for the people with no where else to live. It is one scam or an other. A $2000 a month appartment can be considered low income housing while others are wharehoused in old fire trap rooming houses with well paid social workers running a human circus downtown. Fortunately there is no where left to park so people are increasingly heading out with their cars and their money to the suburbs becasue Portland is becoming a big bother to deal with. How it makes sense to have cars going round and round the block to find rarer and rarer parking spaces and keep things sustainable to save energy makes no sense. You see that every day now. The public parking lots originaly built by the city as free places to park to help downtown businesses survive are now a giant private scam that makes parking spaces more valuable per square foot than entire multi story buildings for human occupation. Once in a while the city flips back realizing that they made a bigger parking mess than they should have but at the moment the city is almost blocking cars from entering downtown by turning major streets in to bike lanes. Parking spaces in total are becoming so rare beause of artificial limits that developers are better off building parking lots than anyother kind of building in the downtown are or just clearing a lot to ground level. The parking lots downtown fill up leaving cars driving all the way up to the top, back down and to another lot just to repeat the process. It is very curious that the city supported the election of President Obama when he came into office and the first thing Obama does to stimulate the economy is cash for clunkers and road building stimulus programs. Why do these liberal urbanists vote for someone like that when they positively hate the automobile? It makes no sense. Portland gets stimulus funding and it repaves the freeway passing though downtown but they really don't want cars coming downtown with the demographic people who tend to carry the most money with them to buy stuff. Portland is becoming a jobless liberal european workers paradise. The only place where there is constant job growth and salary increases is in the public sector. The city has an official unemployement rate of 10-15 percent higher than the national average. Other estimates including people not actively looking for work puts the city unemployment level above depression ear levels at 25% and worse. Already the city and school district cannot afford the high life they created for themselves . Desperate, and inspite of the creation a "state rainy day fund " the city and state govenrments want to keep on growing even when business is not able to pay texes to support government growth in a severe recession so what the city does is to try to raise taxes on businesses that are one step away from moving out of town and out of state if necessary. All that will be left is a $25 per rider glory of a public transit center and genetrified condos that will probably all be owned by exclusive members of the communist party or Oregon by the end of the recession with major tax hikes. Portland planning is one big racket with little substance . Close