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Comment by simook | Hacker News Reader

As exciting as this is to see. It's hard for me to watch Portland change into a different city. I think the hardest aspect right now is the amount of trash that is being thrown aside in the roads, parks, and greenways. I was born and raised in this area and it's been tough for me to witness this beautiful city being treated that way. If you want to help clean up Portland, I strongly recommend volunteering with the SOLVE Organization.

I hope Portland will continue to be a beautiful city for my children to enjoy.

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I definitely hope we can keep Oregon 'green'!

> 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.

"To bring it back to housing" ellides the important point GP made. They even acknowledged the excitement and advantages of growth, but pointed out some of the cost as well. If you want to advocate, don't blind yourself to those of us sensitive to the literal trash, noise, and other side-effects of growth.

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.

Whether people throw their shit on the ground is more of a cultural thing than an 'urban design' thing.

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...

Agreed littering is cultural, but if e.g. 1/1000 people do it then it's also very much a function of density. If we're going to increase density we need to be even more proactive about sanitation, trash, noise, and "misbehavior" or edge cases in general (crime, mental health, etc.).

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.

Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create them routinely. On HN, users should have an identity that others can relate to.

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.

Fair, maybe I shouldn't do this. FWIW, it's actually rather the opposite - I'm not concerned about my points collection. I have no collection, and almost never comment or participate in these things. I just prefer not having a persistent "identity" for this sort of thing, but acknowledge that most people with that preference offer more noise than signal. Perhaps I should just go back to "never."

As exciting as this thread is to read, it's hard for me to watch its subject change into a different one. I think the hardest aspect right now is the number of meta-level comments that are being added in replies to replies.

I seriously considered moving to Portland, until I read articles like this one[1] which predicted that Portland would basically be destroyed in a major earthquake.

[1] - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big...

Yeah - that and the obvious: for some people, the climate is awful. I grew up on that side of the mountains and... I hate it.

Thanks for the link; that was an extremely well written article.

It's hard to find places that don't have hazards of one kind or another. There were 37,133 deaths from automobile accidents in the US in 2017, for example. [0]

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...

All that new construction is constructed to the appropriate seismic standards and they've been doing a good amount to strengthen other infrastructure. They could do more, of course.

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.

And what about "the big one" earthquake expected in California in the coming decades?

> As exciting as this is to see. It's hard for me to watch Portland change into a different city.

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?

Bingo! You can choose the keep the physical form the same, like they've done in Boulder, but then what changes are the people, because only a certain class of "landed gentry" can afford to live there, served by people commuting in from the surrounding towns. That's very much change too, even if it's not the form of the buildings.

As if the tsunami of people is a force of nature. It's not. The one thing we're not allowed to talk under capitalism. The job creators must have maximum "freedom". More jobs, of any kind, are always good, right?

If the notion is that we're going to restrict where companies can office, this seems like a bit of wishful thinking, and possibly difficult to implement under the US constitution. It's a subject that doesn't get much discussion because there's not a foreseeable political regime where any policy to change the status quo on this front would be likely to be implemented.

Every city changes. That’s the nature of time.

The only constant in life is change. --Heraclitus

What about the homelessness problem?

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