https://oregoneconomicanalysis.com/2019/01/29/oregons-housin...
BTW, anyone who wants to see more homes and more housing options in Oregon should vocally support HB 2001. Our YIMBY group here in Bend just had a meeting with our state rep about it and it went pretty well. It's a practical, market-based approach to add housing, and add to the diversity of housing.
I hope Portland will continue to be a beautiful city for my children to enjoy.
> I hope Portland will continue to be a beautiful city for my children to enjoy.
To bring it back to housing, Portland might be a place your children can enjoy because they could actually afford to live there, unlike much of the bay area.
[1] - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big...
In the Northwest the two big geologic hazards are tsunamis and lahars (rock/mud/water/ice avalanches emanating from volcanoes). Your survival odds go way up if you don't live in areas subject to them like coastlines or valley bottoms with a volcano at the head of the drainage.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
https://www.pdxmonthly.com/articles/2018/2/2/the-big-one-is-...
To be clear, a giant earthquake centered on Portland would still be absolutely devastating. But that is a risk shared by most of the West Coast.
With wealth comes illth - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illth
Your personal utility function may make you less sensitive to this particular illth, but it's a consideration nonetheless.
EDIT - I see you edited in a first sentence to acknowledge. Thanks - I'll let this comment stand because I think it's an important point, but appreciate your attempt to balance. Growth is good, but sustainable clean humane growth should be the real ideal - I'm not convinced modern urban design is really up to that.
In terms of sustainability, it's not that hard: denser, less carbon-intensive living, where people can walk, bike and take transit, beats sprawl hands down. People have been making cities like that for thousands of years. What changed is our 'suburban experiment':
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/1/7/americas-suburb...
Strongly agreed on alternatives to driving, and I'd throw in "truly accepting remote work" (not just being "remote friendly but you should take a global trip with us every quarter"). We have a global telecommunications network, we ought to use it.
Supply chains, local food, and not overstraining our watersheds are also all key. We'll have to face the reality that some cities are just built in a way/place that they don't belong, at the size they are at least.
What sensitive information is disclosed in this comment?
One off identities are a limited community resource. If they are used too routinely this becomes a de facto anonymous message board. We know what fully anonymous message boards look like and they aren't pretty. That commons should be saved for situations that call for it and not be wasted for trivial reasons like worrying about one's collection of fake internet popularity points.
It was going to change into a different city either way. The only thing you get to control is what kind of different city: one where, per the article, "only programmers can afford to live alone," or one where everyone can, but it's much more dense?
About seven years ago my friends and I got a 2bd 1.5br apartment for $775 per month in SW Portland. That same apartment is now about double that. In many of the new or renovated buildings you can see a lot of studio apartments with a price floor of $1,300 per month.
Also, little things like a beer that used to cost $2.09 now costs $4.19. What used to be a $4 sandwich is now $7.25, $1.60 tacos went up to about $3. Even prices for stuff like clothing at Goodwill went up significantly over the years that I lived in Portland.
I know this is just my personal experience (and that of my friends), but the genral trend that I saw was an enormous shift to accomodate higher income individuals and families, and an exodus of lower income people all over the place.
I've got a 2000 sqft condo in Atlanta with 20 foot ceilings that costs less than that.
The land is utilized much better here. I'm in an eight story converted factory (each condo is two stories) from the 1800s. If we just had single story homes, prices would be a nightmare.
I work for a tech company based in sf making the same wages as my peers in sf do. It's not scary to leave sf for elsewhere.
I am an SFBA (Marin) resident with a fairly large financial and personal interest in the health and welfare of the city of San Francisco - so this is something I think a lot about.
I think your point is interesting and should be considered.
Obviously it isn't literally true - clearly there would be a point at which enough housing could be built in San Francisco to hit any arbitrary affordability number.
However, it's worth considering that any politically and physically feasible[1] amount of development might not satisfy the latent demand, nationwide, for a house in San Francisco. It is not inconceivable that there are literally 2 million people in the US that would like to immediately move to SF if housing prices were in line with, say, Minneapolis or Denver.
I also think there might be a corollary to this with regard to homelessness in the state of California. I have read with great interest about the successful "house the homeless" projects that have been implemented in places like Salt Lake City which appear to suggest that you can solve a cities homelessness problem by building enough units to house that population. But what if there are (essentially, not literally) an unlimited number of people willing to be homeless in California ? What if the Salt Lake program really only works because it gets cold and snowy there and, really, there are only so many people willing to be homeless there and you can, in fact, house them all ?
If either of those are the case, I don't know what a good solution looks like.
[1] Including the time dimension ...
* The bay area
* Boulder
* Austin
* Portland
* Seattle
And so on and so forth - and even right here in Bend, Oregon!
I have a suspicion that everyone wanting to live in all those places probably isn't actually true.
I don't know about Bend but all other cities you mentioned are desirable urban hotspots with (relatively) plenty of attractive jobs.
I find it very easy to imagine the supply of people interested in moving to all of them outstrips supply by so much as to practically be indistinguishable from unlimited.
There really are a lot of people around and there are as many in not more decaying/depopulating areas to compensate for the Austins and Berlins of the world.
https://oregoneconomicanalysis.com/2019/01/29/oregons-housin...
Housing in Portland is catching up to demand and rents are leveling off.
Seattle is seeing something similar. The bay area is not, because they fight housing tooth and nail.
On the one hand, I really don't like San Fran and don't want to move there. On the other hand, well, NYC is eight million people.
The real places this effect kicks in are global status cities like New York or London, where it’s a status symbol in every country’s elite class to have a vacation home there. It may actually be impossible to supply both foreign and domestic demand for residential via the market.
"There's so much corruption that no amount of anti-corruption drives will eliminate it"
"There's so much alcoholism that no amount of alcoholism reduction will eliminate alcoholism"