I’m feeling a bit stifled in my city and want to move. My priorities are $1500-2000/mo rent and a path to an affordable house (see: picture), a unionised city workforce, good greenspace with an extensive parks system, good biking infrastructure, a good public university, and a good political scene. That leaves Portland, Minneapolis, Chicago, and maybe an East Coast city I haven’t researched yet. Of those, Portland is at the top of my list because I’m getting an ocean for Great Lakes prices.
What’s bad about the city that makes people move away? Is there a better option in Oregon, especially one that would let me commute into Portland without whatever problems it has?
Honestly, I love Portland. I stayed there for many years, as well as Eugene. It’s really rainy and you got to watch out if you have allergies. But otherwise, it’s a great place. I found dating there to be good.
A nice dating pool would be awesome. Colorado might be the most hostile place I’ve lived for relationships. How did Eugene compare to Portland? I was also looking at the state’s other large-ish cities but have no reference point.
Eugene is a college town. UO is a big school and if you are in your younger-mid 20’s it would be great. It’s pretty close to Portland (90 minute drive on I-5). You can go south and see some gorgeous coastline as well.
There is a property crime problem, and wildfires suck, but it’s good.
Bend Oregon is another option, but it is expensive. I partied there new years 2023/2024 and had the time of my life. I know a lot of people in the LGBTQIA+ community there. Good hiking and skiing.
Avoid anything east of the cascades other than Bend like the plague.
Hood River is an option too. Could look at White Salmon in WA. I’d avoid The Dalles.
UO is my ideal university. John Bellamy Foster teaches there and he’s the eco-Marxist I most want to model my research on.
Go for it!
It’s a good school, has tons of good hikes, has great student energy, good bars around. Highest recommendation.
I was stuck in Eugene over the pandemic, but it was a fine, nice bikeable city. I didn’t want to stay there though, I was a bit too old to make the most of it. In my opinion, Bend is like Denver, but not my cup of tea.
eugene’s cool. I went out there for a solar eclipse a while back. definitely smaller than portland, close to being a college town with U of O. closer to the coast, and also closer to the mountains and dry interior. southern terminus of the Amtrak Cascades line.
I’ve never been to oregon but the whole “we didn’t let POCs in until after WW2” thing gives weird vibes.
Also I suggest adding Milwaukee to your list.
The white supremacist history of Oregon definitely gives me pause, but Colorado is already so deeply reactionary and troubled that it might somehow be an upgrade.
Milwaukee is also definitely a consideration. I like the affordability of it but have only ever been to the Greyhound station so I don’t know their infrastructure.
I was very impressed with the public transit and biking infrastructure in Milwaukee FWIW
I should add the other thing I like about Milwaukee is that it’s only like 30 min from Chicago so you can get Milwaukee prices while still being able to go do stuff in Chicago.
Really closer to an hour, in absolute best conditions, but often 2 hours or more with traffic and parking. And a 2-hour drive includes 90% of the country.
I love Oregon in general and Portland in particular.
There are better housing options than the one you shared. I have an artist friend who was recently able to get a new 2/1 townhome for like $250k.
The green space is truly top tier. There are so many trees. It’s lovely.
The politics are not as good as you’d hope, maybe, but better than a lot of places in the US. We just drastically diluted the business lobby’s stranglehold on city council, so that should be improving.
The lack of sun does fuck people up, for sure. Sun sets at like 4 in the middle of winter. I just deal with it by having winter hobbies like skiing (good skiing within an hour and a half of downtown) and whitewater kayaking (good whitewater the same distance away).
On the flip side, during the summer there’s only sun. If you haven’t lived on the West Coast you might not be used to it, but it simply does not rain at all in the summer. Could be good or bad depending on your perspective. We do have some water security, but it can fluctuate a lot. With the severe lack of snow this winter we’ll almost certainly be in a drought and have a pretty bad fire season.
The public transit is still pretty good for a city its size, but has been dying a death of a thousand cuts due to austerity. I find a bike is the best way to get around town, but you’ll have to be prepared to ride on shared streets: there aren’t as many separated bike paths like MPLS.
I think people mostly move because the rent is really high compared to wages. A lot of artists moved to Olympia, Washington, but I can’t really speak about it. Astoria is great if you can handle it being cold and cloudy most of the year. Salem is like tiny Portland with worse amenities. Eugene is home to the University of Oregon, which is huge, and basically dominates the priorities of the city. Ashland is a tiny but cute town known for its Shakespeare festival. East of the Cascades you get into turbo-racism country and I would definitely avoid living there. Bend has okay politics but is incredibly unaffordable except for retirees and the bike infra is bad.
The politics are not as good as you’d hope, maybe
I mean we always hope for more but Portland and Seattle both are stuffed with socialists (a minority but growing due to young people “aging in” and the obvious collapse of liberalism). I’m probably bubbled but I’m observing the socialists moving toward Marxism, and the liberals moving left toward Democratic socialism pretty quickly. Of course, there’s a good chance that when AOC wins the presidency in 28 the brakes are slammed on that process, just like with Biden…
Any time Portland gets anyone left of center in there’s a huge backlash and swing back to the right. Our AG used to be a Republican until 2016, for example. The mayor has been doing his best to stop using homeless money on rental assistance and public housing. And of course the local news outlets just put out constant hit pieces.
I’ve been pretty jealous of Seattle with Sawant and their new mayor.
True but for Portland the new charter is going to be huge, I just think it will take a couple of election cycles to “burn in”. The DSAers finally got a foothold and they will only get better with governing experience. Im sure one of them will be mayor material before too long
Portland’s nice but a few things: It’s on the Willamette river, 2 hours from the coast. And the coast of Oregon is pretty mountainy and stormy. It rains a lot in Portland, so seasonal depression can hit everyone for like half the year. If you don’t already have a job, there isn’t much industry in Portland proper aside from healthcare, government and higher ed. The neighboring cities have some options like Intel and Nike. Oh also the state has a super racist history, used to be a whites-only state that confederates moved to after they lost the civil war. Portland proper and some of the neighboring areas there’s a bit of diversity but outside that its pretty white and racist.
Outside of these things, it meets your other criteria
The gloomy climate is a selling point if anything. My bones yearn for what used to be English weather and Colorado’s high desert water scarcity makes me too anxious. Is the Willamette river and that general surrounding watershed nice for recreation or is it too polluted like a lot of midwestern rivers?
Not sure about like swimming and water sports but it’s a pretty clean river. The public parks are great though. And for a city this size there’s a million special interest groups. Plus there’s a small PSL presence.
The nice thing about Oregon is you can get “Outdoors” by driving an hour in any direction. Don’t worry about the Willamette. There are many many rivers for outdoor stuff that are basically snowmelt clean. If you like the Great Outdoors Oregon might be your jam.
My bones yearn for what used to be English weather and Colorado’s high desert water scarcity makes me too anxious.
You will want to stay on the wetter Western Cascade side of the state, like Portland, Eugene, etc. Bend, while a great outdoors spot, is the beginning of the eastern Oregon high desert. Great place to visit for outdoors all year round.
The hour’s drive to wilderness is the thing I love most about Colorado and why I moved here in the first place. People fly halfway around the world to visit the places that are casual day-hikes to photograph specific flowers or have specific lighting for me. At one point I paid like $800/mo to live next to the trailhead of a hike that gave me panoramic views of the Rockies and Great Plains for breakfast every morning, a really wonderful lifestyle that I want to maintain.
I don’t know about the Willamette but people do wind sports on the Columbia.
https://www.portland.gov/bes/check-rec
Seems like it’s pretty decent and they test frequently.
Also, the rain isn’t that bad. It’s generally very light and the temperature is mild, as well.
Willamette is safe to swim in except for during very heavy rains when the mixed sewer system gets full and sewage will go into the river (only happens once or twice a year, and only during the winter, when you probably don’t want to be swimming anyway) and during algal blooms when it’s very warm out (a capitalist created basically an algae breeding ground and has been ordered by the state to fix it, but is slow walking it obviously).
There’s a public swimming dock on the river. It gets really popular on the days over 90. This past summer there were organized group bike rides every Wednesday to go swim at the river.
I used to live in the PNW and now live near the Arctic Circle in Scandanavia. I would absolutely kill for Portland sunshine.
SAD can be an issue but I always go somewhere sunny for at least one week in January (the heart of winter) to get some vitamin D. If OP has a good job going south in winter (especially to the desert) is a good option. Supplements can help with SAD as well.
You’ve gotten a ton of comments and info, but here’s one more.
What’s bad about the city that makes people move away?
One of my online friends lives in Portland, and I asked them “hey rant about pdx for moment, tell me why you hate it”. This is gonna be filled with their personal opinions so I can’t say how accurate it is. They’re… Pretty jaded, to my eyes, and very opinionated. Sometimes their opinions are on point, but sometimes they’re heavily generalized from their direct experiences. So take all this with a grain (or several grains) of salt.
Here's some things they said about why the city is bad, arranged in a bullet list from their long paragraph of run on sentences.
I put my notes/questions in parens, I dont feel like asking them about stuff rn. And tried to edit it with brackets to make it make more sense.
- Portland sucks, its just really close to tons of cool stuff (I’m assuming they’re referring to the mountain nearby, the coast, the high desert in eastern Oregon, etc., cause they’re pretty outdoorsy)
- Portland isn’t a city, its an association of neighborhoods masquerading as a city
- Portland is super fucking white, whiter than anywhere [they’ve] lived. It comes from a history where black people were not allowed to live [there], and there’s still tons of casual liberal racism and gentrification and driving out poor people and people of color
- Oregon in general has a fascism problem
- tons of people [there] who are like “I’m a white liberal queer so I know what oppression is and can’t oppress others”, with some people being chillers and accepting they can oppress others, and even fewer actually doing the work to unlearn and address it
- drivers [there] fucking suck. There’s the Portland drivers, who stop at an intersection to let another car go when they have the right of way, and dont know how to zipper, and can’t make a decisive move to save their life, and endanger tons of people. Then there’s the out of towners who learned how to drive somewhere that people actually drive normally and are competent. Then there’s the calidrivers who cut you off run stop signs break suddenly tailgate and fucking suck and endanger people. Also no one knows how to drive on slick roads after rain, and if [they] get ice then good fucking luck and drive super defensively, people [there] treat ice like it doesn’t exist and speed 10+mph over the limit with summer tires, or slow to a 5mph crawl regardless of whether there’s even ice on the road
- there’s no gayborhood, just dispersed [f-slur used here in a reclamatory sense]
- big homelessness problem and the city refuses to deal with it. Right now there’s a program to “relocate people to their families outside portland” instead of actually give people care and social services to get them off the street
- PPB sucks. They’re incompetent until it’s time to beat on helpless people
- lefties [there] are either liberals with a coat of paint, anarchists who want to burn everything and dont care about building, or batshit wackos trying to start a sex cult
- there’s tons of old hippies (they listed this here so I’m assuming that’s a negative?)
- the job market is shit right now
- its in the valley of sickness. There’s mold everywhere
- trimet (their public transit in Portland) sucks. The fact that its some of the best in the nation is a disgrace
- the city builds bike infrastructure that makes [them] feel unsafe when biking, and neglects bike boulevards (idk what a bike boulevard is, but I’m assuming its a dedicated bike path separate from the road (Portland locals care to chime in?))
- I fucking hate the [cishets] [there]. They think they’re queer cause they dress like [queers] and then speak like they know [queer] problems, all while perpetuating casual liberal homophobia and transphobia
- the city shuts down after 9pm. Its gotten better about it over the years, but its still not great
- good luck affording your $900/mo room plus utilities while making $20/hr and can’t get more than 15-20 hours/week. At least [they] qualify for fucking OHP (looked it up, its the states health plan? Looks decent at a glance)
- you’ll need heating in the winter and ac in the summer. Hello giant utilities bill
- everything is fucking expensive
- the cities gonna be broke in 5 years (no idea why, they didn’t elaborate)
Again, take this with salt. I’m sure some criticisms are on point, but dont know enough to differentiate between those ones and the more, uh, personal opinions.
edit one more thing they said that I realized is maybe worth including, even if its a possibly jaded/hyperbolic view
Dont stop on [interstate 5] north of Vancouver at night if your black or visibly trans, and be careful in hood river if your not white, people get disappeared.
Dont stop on [interstate 5] north of Vancouver at night if your black or visibly trans
I’m pretty fucking white but anecdotally that area is a land of contradictions. I stopped at a gas station there once and people tried giving me cash because I looked homeless (they weren’t wrong). But I also know right-wingers move there when they’re too racist to live in portland
This is true. The entire stretch of I5 between Vancouver WA and Olympia is a PVP enabled zone that I would avoid living/stopping in if possible
Good to know. I’ve visited Portland but didn’t really leave the city, and was uncertain about how accurate some of these statements were.
As Femboy_Stalin said, most of these apply to any city in the US, so it sounds like your friend is maybe just jaded about life in the States (fair).
For actual Portland-specific points:
- Portland is very white, that’s true. There are pockets of diversity, but yeah.
- Old hippies are a negative, if you’ve ever dealt with old hippies before. Hippy politics were never incredibly radical, and have remained so. They’re libs who sometimes pretend they’re not, I guess.
- The neglected bike boulevard thing probably means that the city has very little in the way of grade-separated bike paths. Mostly the bike network is low-traffic shared streets a block or two off of main thoroughfares, but they always intersect eventually with the thoroughfares and introduce conflict points with cars.
But yeah everything else is true everywhere in the US, I think.
pretty much all of these apply to every city in the US
This was several years back at this point so things may have changed, but I knew someone who was looking to move to Portland and they found that most landlords weren’t willing to rent to someone that didn’t already have a job in Portland, and most employers weren’t willing to hire people that didn’t already have an address in Portland.
That seems like a miserable catch-22. I haven’t yet attempted to do either but definitely faced that barrier when moving to my current city.
Wait 300k for an abandoned 2 bedroom 1 bath home is now considered an affordable home?
As far as Portland itself, the city is fairly nice. However, anywhere the homes are somewhat affordable even near the outskirts of the metro is filled with turbo racist. The cops are also really aggressive for the west coast if you aren’t white. I’ve visited friends there and I have been pulled over less than when I’ve visited the rural south.
That house in the photo was just absurd to me but not so much so that I could think of a separate post for it. $300-400k is about what I’d spend on a home and you can’t find much better than that for the same price in 3rd-tier Colorado cities. I’m hoping that it can get me a small 1-5 acre homestead outside of a major city.
I’m hoping that it can get me a small 1-5 acre homestead outside of a major city.
If you are saying “me” and not “us (at least 3 adults)”, this just becomes equivalent to the exurban dream.
Even in the cheapest cities (cutoff being 500k county pop), you are not going to get even 1 acre in easy cycling distance of anything, for a remotely affordable price, unless you have at least 6 people on that acre and build the home yourself. This is a mathematical reality: without extensive urbanist ordinances, radial density of a city will obey a smooth logistic decay function, and land value is proportionate to the output of that function. Suburbs and exurbs have residential subdivisions that stretch to the horizon with the assumption that everyone’s just going to commute 30 minutes in a car every time they need something.
However, in those smaller cities I mentioned in the other reply, where the edge of the city’s incorporation line often drops off into farmland or woods, you could probably get some okay land for $15k-20k an acre, excluding buildings.
I have two friends who had the same idea about the homesteading thing and they moved to Tillamook, which is about an hour from Portland towards the coast. It’s politically purple, and you can occasionally find affordable houses a bit outside of downtown on bigger plots like they did. They’re not actually homesteaders, though. They both work remote, they just have chickens and some vegetable plots.
You might also be able to find something similar, space-wise, in Oregon’s wine country mostly centered around McMinnville. Lots of those homes just seem like bubble-era mcmansions though, I’ve never looked too hard.
$300-400k is about what I’d spend on a home and you can’t find much better than that for the same price in 3rd-tier Colorado cities.
Yeah… Colorado prices have gotten pretty ridiculous in the last couple decades. I remember when you could have bought a mansion there for that much if you weren’t looking at Denver or Colorado springs.
I’m hoping that it can get me a small 1-5 acre homestead outside of a major city.
That’s a hard ask anymore in any state that isn’t filled to the brim with assholes. Tbh even like places like Minneapolis or Portland the areas surrounding the cities where you can still buy acreage are mostly filled with a bunch of reactionaries that are sometimes more ferocious than in places in the south they don’t feel like they’re being cornered.
You might try to widen your search to include some more conservative states that have progressive cities in them. For example Madison or Milwaukee are pretty nice if you don’t mind the cold.
My perspective is skewed because i live in property hell but that place would be over a million dollars here
Tbf so is mine, but in the opposite direction. My current home is a 2 bedroom 1 bath a bit larger than the house op posted. When I got it it was probably in a bit worse condition, but I bought it from the bank for a little less than 40k.
The downside of course is that I live in one of the poorer states in the US.
Trying to do the math on how much less I would get paid there compared to buying a house for a dollar.
I would live in one of those premade starter shacks that you get in a survival crafting game if I owned it and didnt have a landlord
Yeah… I’m a transplant here and it definitely makes it hard to move back out of the state. I’ve gotten offers for jobs that pay quite a bit more in nicer places, but it’d be hard to have a mortgage again.
I usually just use the offers to wrangle a pay increase and now make a bit more than my nation wide average. Depending on your field the starting pay here is usually pretty bad, but most companies are willing to do large increases in salaries because they know everyone with an education is looking to move away.
I’m Canadian so I’d rather not be ‘accidentally’ sent to CECOT either way but I’m a journeyperson trades-doer
Yeah… unless you are a connoisseur of small batch methamphetamine, it’s probably best for you to steer clear of this shit hole. The trades here are all contract work with no benefits, shit pay, and literally no work place safety.
But to be fair, that’s quickly becoming all of America unless you actually own your own business that contracts out all their work.
Because then you’ll be closer to me and I’ll want to be your friend
Reddit meetups were a uniquely shameful experience, but it would be really nice to be around other people who are radical enough to not get banned on this website. I think I’ve spotted like two other Coloradoans here over the years.
I’m not in Portland but I have friends there, one of whom is a mycologist and is otherwise extremely cool and smart. Still need to go visit her (probably during Portland pizza week because I am a pizza friend).
The fungi of the PNW, and that whole evergreen rainforest ecosystem, is the biggest draw of the region to me. I love high elevation foraging in Colorado but only the western half of the state has a reliable season for it. Last year I found a single porcini in my otherwise reliable sites because the Rockies make a rain shadow over the eastern half.
That’s why you should stay. We’ll probably never meet, but I know you’re just down the road… or you should leave and have a new adventure. If we ever did meet up, I do some work you would probably be really interested in.
Political corruption work or natural sciences?
Mainly natural resources
I do really like that.
Someone here said Oregon has a speed limit of 55mph which tells me there’s something extremely wrong with that entire state
God that’d be nice. 60-80mph is standard here and it’s way too fast for me. My small car with poor traction was the worst choice I could have made for the Rockies.
No lol.
I have driven all over that state. Maybe on the 1 it’s that slow. But I-5 and I-84? No chance.
I-5 will feel slower but I-84 is quick and gorgeous.
that poster was wrong, they have normal speed limits.
I was making a similar decision a few years ago. With a similar list of places to go.
I ended up in semi-rural Minnesota.
The short list of why:
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Cost of housing was way lower than anywhere on either coast for what we got.
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I’m, for better or worse, a midwesterner and the culture does have an appeal to me.
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This location was one that appeared to be least impacted by climate change in the short (next 30ish years) term, in the models I looked at.
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The water table is quite high here and water is likely to be available in the coming years, as fresh water will be more scarce in the future.
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The politics here are surprisingly progressive, even in semi-rural areas. (I moved from a deeply reactionary state)
Portland was on our short list, the things that kind of killed it for me were the cost, getting anywhere close to the ocean is expensive, and I believe at the time the Pacific Northwest was under a heat dome. Then there were torrential rains and mudslides in the region.
You have potential for tornados and strong thunderstorms here, but nothing like where we used to live.
My sister moved from Omaha to Minneapolis with her wife. They really seem to enjoy it. I’m far enough out from the cities that it’s a decision to go, but not crazy when we want to. My cousin lived in a commune in Minneapolis for a few years in the early 00s, didn’t have a great time with it though lol.
You will learn to tolerate the cold. Once you learn the right way to dress it’s not as bad as it sounds. Cold place, warm people. Even the reactionaries here are better than everywhere else I’ve lived. PSL also has a presence in the cities.
Semi-rural Minnesota right outside of Minneapolis is my other big option. It’d be nice to get a homestead that I can bike from, and especially to have the long-term water stability since that’s the scariest part of Colorado. Is winter driving as sketchy as it is in Michigan? Lake effect snow/ice really killed that state for me.
The plows and winter road care are very robust, at least in my area. I’m in Central Minnesota, north of the cities. If you live on something like a homestead (we’re on 3 acres off of a county road in mostly farmland but still paved) you will want a 4wd vehicle maybe 1-2 days a year based on my experience. Otherwise I can’t imagine it’d be any worse than MI, but I also work from home and my “commute” is taking the kids to school in the morning. So… It can be sketchy, but usually not long.
If you wanna watch it play out in real time keep an eye on 511mn.org over the next few days. We’re supposed to go from pretty warm (40+ F) to 5-10" of snow pretty quickly. This will let you directly see how things get plowed and even the highways and roads themselves look via the camera systems.
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Portland is pretty sick, I like it here. Try to secure a job here before you land though, if you can. Homeless resources are stretched real fuckin thin right now and the mayors new directives are not helping. Getting food stamps and medicaid are pretty easy, anything beyond that is hard.
The city is gets a lot less white out in the outer east side (“the numbers)” and in North Portland, and seems to be all sorts of gay all over the place.
The left-wing scene here can be real frustrating sometimes. I’ve had multiple events with my old org crashed by childish “anti-tankie” anarchists that outnumber principled activists 10:1.
We have lots of good food trucks, like everywhere.
People often leave here cause it’s expensive and they don’t like dealing with homeless people (which in fairness, this situation has caused lots of social problems. Nobody likes seeing needles in the street, and there have been some high profile violent crimes committed by homeless people recently). I’d have reservations if I had young children (like with any big city), but as a childless millennial I love it here.
I bet if you asked people who are leaving, they’d say they “feel stifled in their city”. And people say this everywhere. That’s the problem with shopping around like it’s a menu: you’re consuming the city as a novelty, and nothing ever remains good enough.
The factors that really matter are the connections you make, the quality of life you get, and the things you absolutely can’t live without.
What level of public university is “good”? Does the city have to be big enough to have an international airport and pro sports teams?
I don’t live in an urban area that spans multiple counties (or multiple hundreds of square miles, for comparisons west of the Great Plains). I have a job with a rather modest wage but I save about $1000 a month. Property taxes here are often below $5000 a year. There’s a college in town, a mostly complete retail diversification, and cultural stuff from all over the world, but I can still easily ride my bike over to the wilder spaces. On mass transit I can get to multiple big cities for less than $70 if I so please. And I feel more relevant and connected and even powerful here than I ever did in the big cities I’ve lived in. I suspect there are dozens upon dozens of places like mine. There are at least 3 that I could basically move to whenever I wanted.
If you dream about Portland and your heart is set on Portland then move to Portland. (Or Eugene or Corvallis, or maybe Salem, idk.) But if you just crave “something new”, search deeper for reasons why.
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Escapism yes, privilege no, “hugboxing”
OP works in landscaping/conservation and earns well below the national GDP per capita. Being able to take on a 300k mortgage is mid-range for Americans.
I stand corrected, I did not know.
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A robust urban forest would be amazing. It’s the highlight of my city and the big focus of my municipal stewardship, but we’re also so dry that we struggle to keep it alive and safe from invasive species that homeowners plant.
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If Bull Run gets too low I believe we supplement it with groundwater from a Columbia aquifer. You can tell usually because the water goes from the tastiest water of all time to exceedingly mid.
Do you want to live in a diverse area with a radical political scene, or do you want natural amenities and greenspace and bike infrastructure? Access to these nice things is highly racialized in the US. If you’re in the market for $300k homes and a university gig(?), you should consider where you’d be more of a gentrifier than a middle-class neighbor. I can sympathize with seeking better environs and taking advantage of whatever upward mobility you find, but I’m not going to validate a decision to donate $2k/mo to a rando sex pest landlord because the scenery is nice and whites-only.
There is a flip side to having the freedom to migrate that should be considered: intentionally moving to a more neglected area, a place where the marketing and tourism doesn’t stick. Where there are kinks to your experience and no real estate developers censoring the unpleasant realities in the local subreddit. Where a white boy airing left views at a city council meeting might punch a little more. It takes more research, but you have to consider the nitty-gritty of what you really want from a place. It sounds like you have the resources to make quite the leap, so broaden your horizons. Wherever you look, be sure to fit in a proper visit before committing to a lease.
If it doesn’t exist. It should… r/UnexpectedTopiary
