You need density for trains, but Portlanders think it is a war crime to ask you to work from an office or tear down a dead mall to build housing, so…
NIMBYs are usually not against new stuff in their backyard, they really just don’t want to lose the historic parking structures and culturally relevant SFHs already there.
Perhaps you are harboring NIMBY views you refuse to acknowledge and you are feeling defensive? Are you holding onto the corpse of Lloyd center?
Those are not conflicting things. Mourning something does not imply disliking the thing that replaced it.
Why are people assuming that the kitchen coworkers are reasonable and that I am somehow making assumptions? I was there, I heard the conversation, HN replies did not. Portlanders are notorious for this sort of tradeoff-ignoring woo woo bullshit anyway, frankly it isn’t an extraordinary claim.
The only other categories are heavy manufacturing (which is harder to argue for) and single family homes, which are not dense by definition.
I’m not sure if you’ve ever been to Portland but the predominant problem is still too much office and retail space (much of it empty) and not enough residential space; every apartment I have lived in and almost every apartment building I walk by day to day has vacant ground floor retail.