The world around you is always going to change. Always. Once you accept that and understand you have control over your own world, how you interact with it, how you respond to it, what you do to change it in ways you like....this shit goes away. Or you can just bitch and moan. We don't really care.

So you had the benefit of being here through all the cheap years, and the start of the boom years, and didn't manage to acquire the skills or put forth the effort to secure your place in it.

Bye, loser.

I'm with @3. I've lived in NYC and Seattle and both of those cities are nothing like the cities they were when I lived there. In fact, in NYC every single place I ever hung out in or frequented or loved is actually gone, literally no longer there. Seattle is getting there. Once they demolish the Showbox it will be one step closer to being totally gone, too. I live where I live now (and its not in Portland) because it is where my retired mother and I can afford to live. My mom has always done this and is fine with it and loves where she lives and "grows where she's planted" (her words). I miss living in cities, but being physically disabled, big cities are hard places now, even if money were no object. I go to OHSU for my health care and those trips are difficult and exhausting and most of Portland is basically not accessible at all.

Change is the only constant in life. I left NYC because I wanted to. I left Seattle because I got sick and could no longer work or live independently. I don't know if I would still be able to be living in Seattle if I had never gotten sick. It is at least 5X as expensive to live there now than when I lived there and while I had a decent paying job I did not have a job that paid over $100K which is what you need to live in Seattle proper and be able to live comfortably. If I had had to leave because I could no longer afford to live there and I wanted to live there I would be bitter, too, no doubt.

I personally believe people of all kinds should be able to live in cities. What used to make cities desirable is that they were extremely diverse and interesting places to live. NOW, the problem is there are very few cities in this country where people WANT to live and the people who get to live there are the people with the most money. There is no consideration of or interest in diversity. Those with the most money get everything and everyone else gets told to fuck off, that they are of no value, and they are forced to lived elsewhere.

There's only two things that will change the current situation: a change in values (people valuing diversity and human beings and cultural experience over money > never happen) or an event that causes a catastrophic economic collapse that makes the gap between the haves and the have nots collapse enough to allow for more people with less to live in cities again, like say NYC in the 1970s. I don't see that happening either. America will most likely end up being like a third world country in most places, with pockets of obscene wealth sequestered from the rest of the population (perhaps with walls built around them to keep out the undesirables). Whatever happens, I'll be long dead and for that I am grateful.

Yeah, nobody cares.

Have fun at the Muncie McDonald's, you self-centered twerp.

Wow... A lot of defensive transplants in the comments, lol. I'm with IA on this, and so are the other six native Portlanders who still actually live here. This city is a disgrace these days, and so is the bullshit hipster culture that seems to have set up shop here.

This type of post is an IA staple. It is always written by people who seemingly have no idea what this city was like before 2005 or so. You think there are junkies NOW? Where the fuck were you in '89, friend -- when much of downtown and the eastside was both a literal and figurative shooting gallery? You think it's "pseudofornia" because goddamned trains don't take up half the Pearl anymore, Division doesn't look like gasoline alley and someone's selling an $11 burger? Your bar for "California" is somehow even lower than that of your parents, who we just KNOW blamed California for every little problem Oregon has... because somehow a kid running away from Wheeler to shoot up under the Steel Bridge is fucking California's fault. Have fun in Rainier, dipshit. You'll love it: It's bleak, depressing, drug-addled, and bigoted: You know, everything you once loved about Portland!

Jesus Christ. How many of the commenters are from Cali? Show of hands, please 🖐

Listen to all these entitled transplants. Unless you were invited to Portland...get the fuck out!

And you want to talk about entitlement, how about all of the "natives" (Beaverton isn't Portland by the way) who shit on city expansion at the expense of their community because they hate outsiders. Pathetic.

From one dipshit to another: Been here for 30 years...enough time to see this shithole go from a livable town to a dump. 10 years? You're definitely part of the problem.

Oh go retire in a gated community you turd.

Well Mark Pinkerton...30 years still doesn't make you a native Oregonian, so perhaps you should watch out in that glass house of yours.

"Been here for 30 years." Then why don't you know what it was like here 30 years ago, Mark? What made it a "livable town?" The Meier and Frank Christmas display? The hookers who worked out in public. The junkies who squatted by the railyard? The abandoned houses?

"If you actually see what the rest of the world is like, you will see that there is a suburban exodus happening everywhere. Thanks GenX! All your warbling and whining about your boring life in the burbs singlehandedly put into motion gentrification at alarming rates! (Accurate but kidding)"

If we really want to get into it, blame the Greatest Generation and the ensuing Boomers for buying into the suburban myth in the first place. Sure, they'll spin yarns about hanging out on stoops and playing stickball, but the first time someone told them that a white picket fence, a pure-grass lawn and no neighbors of color was the American Dream, they packed up and moved to some of the blandest places imaginable while redlining the folks who remained in cities right out of that same dream. Gen X moved back in, but didn't think that boomers and their expendable retirement income would move right back in behind them... or that Millennials and their parents would all want to move to cities at the same time.