I'm not denigrating Portland... I live here. I live two miles from downtown. People need to stop being sensitive
I am a critical person and Portland is currently deserving of much criticism in order to fulfill its potential. No one got anywhere by patting themselves on the back reassuring themselves they had already made it.
+1 to this. As someone who still believes that everything that made Oregon attractive is still there, and won’t be taken from Oregon soon - nature, laid-back culture, quality of life - we can’t deny that Oregon is deindustrializing more broadly. Reasonable people can disagree on the essence and details of the issues - I say this as someone who came here because of the youth culture, and still doesn’t have a family! Even we might agree on many things (as Portlanders usually do.)
But we all agree the state is seriously going to have to think hard about how to attract new business to both I-5 corridor and rural areas - whether it’s through investing in OSU upstream, or attracting more downstream manufacturing jobs.
De-industrialization is the right word. We are buoyed almost entirely by intel. Without Intel, the state is essentially cottage / mom-n-pop industries.
I am a critical person and Portland is currently deserving of much criticism in order to fulfill its potential. No one got anywhere by patting themselves on the back reassuring themselves they had already made it.