Over at Human Transit, Jerrett is suggesting that Portland is luring folks with a set of “unmeasurable” attributes:
People do go Portland for the lifestyle at every point on the economic ladder. That includes the young unemployed …
I connect that to the remarkably womblike quality of Portland’s physical environment. The gentle embrace of the forested hills, the wet and mild climate, the famously intimate built scale, the relative lack of crushing big-city monumentalism in its architecture.
Does that explain our declining VMT (guess I’m still hung up on things that can be measured)?
3 responses to “Priceless Portland?”
I do think we need more jobs (which I thought was the main point of the article). Otherwise, we won’t really grow population like we’re projecting.
We’re so much more environmentally friendly than the midwest, but we can’t absorb all of them moving out here without housing/jobs. Should we want to? Sure we’ll be bigger over time, but do we want to grow quickly or slowly? Just food for thought
I think the scale of our natural surroundings as compared to our built surroundings creates the appropriate dynamic in terms of how mobile we are in Portland. If there was a “Sear’s Tower” type building here, I hypothesize that it would seem to put too much of a strain on our transportation system by interrupting the natural/built surrounding relationship with its size.
I think the ironic reality of so many folks moving here, despite the poor job market, is that folks may do one of 2 things:
1. Create their own job (I credit the extreme depth of independent business in this town in part to this)
2. Telecommute/work from home for a company outside of Portland (bringing in lots of money from other states!)
It’s a gut feeling, I don’t have any idea how to prove either point, but it does reflect my own experience.