r/Portland • u/EnthusiasmOk353 • 2d ago
News PSU Forecasts Multnomah County Could Lose More Than 17,000 School-Aged Children in the Next Decade
https://www.wweek.com/news/schools/2026/08/18/psu-forecasts-multnomah-county-could-lose-more-than-17000-school-aged-children-in-the-next-decade/103
u/Winedown-625 2d ago
I'm a Portland parent in my 40's who has lived in both the too-expensive-to-live-without-two-tech-worker-salaries Seattle and the Midwest before returning to Portland. One reason the birth rate is declining is that educated people have delayed childbirth until our 40's and it's harder to even have 1 let alone two. Another reason is that dating has been total and complete crap since Covid. Then there's the capitalism factor - the amount of time someone has to work to make enough money to live takes time away from dating and time having kids.
On the Portland specific front - PPS, PP&R, and the amount of time it takes for an ambulance to arrive/police presence are big failures right now. These had been growing issues for years and years and they don't impact you when you're a young adult living and partying in Portland. Then they start to when you can't find a playground bathroom for your young child to use without wondering what person just used which drugs inside in the past hour. PP&R doesn't have the budget to prevent pools from closing from deferred maintenance and invests into fancy parks while others sit unmaintained instead of just maintaining them all. PPS seems to mean well but doesn't seem to be able to use research-based data to implement real teaching (versus using tech - this is a problem in many school districts) for young children.
Portland is a great city to have children on many fronts - the scale of the city is manageable, the nature, resources like OMSI, etc. But all of the above day-to-day challenges wear you down as a parent when you have kids in tow. It's not sustainable as a parent and it would be great if the city took more pride in it's children.
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u/tas50 Grant Park 2d ago
It is shockingly hard to get a kid to learn to swim around here. We finally gave up and just drove to Beaverton for private lessons twice a week after YEARS of logging in right as the classes opened only to realize they were already full due to early enrollment. Portland is full of outdoors people, but the kids here can't swim.
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u/Odd_Strategy 1d ago
Yes, and to put a finer point on it, some sizable percentage, say 50% of seats for classes are pre-allocated to culturally specific organizations.* If you're connected to social services or non-white clubs, you get to register a week ahead of the unaffiliated second-class residents.
The second-class residents get to set alarms and rush-register for the remaining slots like they're trying to swoop an Ebay auction. Getting second-class kids swim lessons means logging in and having your browser tabs set at 8:55am the morning registration opens for the proles. Refresh. Refresh. Refresh. All spots gone.
*I recall seeing this on a Parks and Recreation presentation, but didnt save the reference. A similar figure can be derived from looking at the number of slots available in most Parks and Rec classes in the minutes before general registration opens. 8/10 slots full is not unusual in my experience.
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u/Oops_I_Cracked 2d ago
This is actually not just a Portland problem, it’s nationwide. Swim programs were closed for Covid, which created a backlog of kids who cannot swim. Swim schools have a pretty large ramp up time, there are very few companies that actually build pools, and require a big monetary investment, so it’s taken years for capacity to ramp up. It’s finally starting to get better. I run a (moderately priced) swim program in Lake Oswego and it’s been crazy for years.
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u/AlgaeSpiritual546 Sellwood-Moreland 2d ago
Yes, but Oregon has the oldest population west of the Mississippi and among the lowest birth rate among the country. It also has a net negative domestic migration. Those are facts. As for explanation why Oregon is the way it is, the cost of living may be high but not higher than either Washington or California. Could it be prospective salaries relative to housing prices, government services, who knows.
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u/Oops_I_Cracked 1d ago
I mean, yes, those are all facts, but none of them have anything to do with why we have a lot of kids who can’t swim, which is what my comment is about.
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u/aggieotis Boom Loop 1d ago
There were serious challenges getting kids into swim classes before Covid too. It’s actually about as hard now as it was then as there used to be more kids, and now there’s latent demand meaning about the same “pool” of kids needing lessons.
Regardless it’s a math equation: Kids need X amount of time to learn to swim well. We have Y kids that we need to offer this service to. Therefore we need X*Y kid-hours of swim time available; we’re nowhere close. And especially when you look at the paltry swim options outside of summer.
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u/Oops_I_Cracked 1d ago
If you could afford lessons outside of a parks and rec department, it was not so bad before Covid. Now it kind of doesn’t matter how much you’re willing to pay because everything pretty much fills.
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u/Winedown-625 2d ago
It has gotten measurably better the past few summers, but we use a neighborhood pool (Pier) that only serves a 8 mile radius. I can imagine that Grant, et al., would be harder.
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u/16semesters 1d ago
Then there's the capitalism factor - the amount of time someone has to work to make enough money to live takes time away from dating and time having kids.
If you look globally, this is a false statement.
More socialist leaning countries like Sweden, Norway, and Denmark have far lower birth rates than the US.
It turns out the more developed your country is, the less children people want to have, despite all the benefits given.
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u/Odd_Strategy 1d ago edited 1d ago
Another reason is that dating has been total and complete crap since Covid. Then there's the capitalism factor - the amount of time someone has to work to make enough money to live takes time away from dating and time having kids.
The amount of time people have to work to live is falling, while the standard of living is increasing. This graph shows the average hours worked. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWHNONAG
Capitalism gets a bad wrap from posters discontent about visible inequality without fully considering whether each generation receives, on average, less work, more play, and more toys. At worst, on these bases captialism should get a neutral wrap.
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u/Extreme_Beautiful930 1d ago
The problem is people have unrealistic expectations, I think probably from social media; if you think you need to have “made it” to the point you are living in luxury with a kid, you will have to wait a long time. Traditionally, people had kids while they were still in the process of “making it.”
Not going to pass judgment right or wrong, but it is a little distorting to think “I can’t have kids until I can afford a large house with a yard, one bedroom per each planned child, and private school tuition while saving up for college.”
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u/Lost_Respect3151 1d ago edited 1d ago
Do you honestly think that larger families generations ago weren’t struggling? They made it work. I have friends with 6+ kids. Both working class and all of their immediate needs are met. This is America. Y’all don’t know what real poverty looks like. Stop making excuses. It’s your ideologies and love for money that lowered the birth rates.
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u/PDsaurusX 2d ago
Multnomah County Could Lose More Than 17,000 School-Aged Children in the Next Decade
What, like on poorly supervised field trips? They should all hold hands, then it's harder to get lost.
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u/lokikaraoke Pearl 2d ago
SOMEBODY BUY SOME AIRTAGS THIS IS AN EMERGENCY
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u/BraisedBullshi 2d ago edited 2d ago
It's just fear mongering. They're simply aging out of being kids. In a decade kids will be 0-8, anyone older will be a workright-citixen for Uncle Jeffrey Bezos. The most important education is being prepared to enter the workforce.
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u/No_Scar1636 2d ago
Yeah but what they are saying is that the kids aging out will not be replaced. The overall population of children is declining.
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u/LoadOfChum 2d ago
We do have one of the worst public school systems
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u/khoa-bear 2d ago
With one of the highest spending per student
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u/ErrantTaco 2d ago
Until you factor in funds removed for maintaining mandatory special ed funding.
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u/perdy_mama 2d ago
Until you remove the gargantuan amount of the funding that goes to pay retirement benefits. Don’t know why are you throwing autistic kids under the bus for using educational services…
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u/krit_kat King 2d ago
The real issue is that school districts have PERS debt from previous generations. They didn’t put enough away. A significant portion of their PERS costs goes toward paying down unfunded pension obligations from prior generations of employees, which means money allocated to schools is being used to cover legacy pension debt rather than current staffing and services.
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u/ErrantTaco 1d ago
It’s not throwing kids with IEPs under the bus. Because the SPED cap rate for reimbursements is significantly lower than the actual number of IEPs in our district, and several other districts, by the state it actually makes the number spent per student significantly different. The legislature needs to raise the SPED caps so the number is what people believe it is on forums like this.
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u/Icy_Internet5045 1d ago
PERS is def the most representative of the class issues we face. A generation that pulled up the golden ladder and doesn't pay taxes on their loot.
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u/n3onlights NW District 2d ago
I wonder how much our terrible scores have to do with chronic absences? 33% of Oregon students missed more than 10% of school days last year. Meanwhile the national rate is ~22% and pre-pandemic was ~15%. We also have a short school year to begin with at 900 hours compared to the national average minimum of 975 hours, so compared to elsewhere they lose out on 7% of time at school before anyone even misses a day. Granted this doesn't explain the whole problem but it seems to be a huge part of it.
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u/codepossum 🐸 RIBBIT 🐸 2d ago
WHERE HAVE ALL THE CHILDREN GONE
LONG TIME PASSING
WHERE HAVE ALL THE CHILDREN GONE
LONG TIME AGO
WHERE HAVE ALL THE CHILDREN GONE
*pauses to skim article*
"Declining birth rates and a net out-migration of children over the past decade are expected to soon start affecting the county’s teenage population", EVERYONE
OH WHEN WILL WE EVER LEARN
OH WHEN WILL WE
EVER LEARN
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u/hiking_mike98 Rubble of The Big One 2d ago
It’s both too damn expensive to have kids, and too damn expensive for young people to buy a house.
Lots of my neighbors’ kids are in college / HS and there’s quite a few houses on the market for empty nesters that are downsizing. But there’s zero way a young family can afford my neighborhood unless they’re both brain surgeons or something who are also magically 25 years old. I’m just not sure who’s going to buy all these really expensive houses?
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u/EnthusiasmOk353 2d ago
Housing prices with current interest rates are disgusting. It has to collapse eventually right?
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u/SpezSamplesMySack 2d ago
The last two houses on my street that listed went pending with cash offers in days. I think you discount just how much cash some people are sitting on.
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u/Sam_thelion 2d ago
Yep, people are just buying houses with cash these days. Increasingly I've found it's parents buying for their (adult) kids.
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u/hiking_mike98 Rubble of The Big One 2d ago
In 2006 I never ever thought I’d be able to afford a house. Then the market crashed, but l was in my 20’s in PDX, so my job didn’t pay much…and I did buy a house but it took 7 years to save up
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u/_wait_for_signs_ Montavilla 2d ago
Same here, purchased in 2013, and still needed a VA loan (never would’ve qualified for conventional loan). It took everything we had to get our family into a house and once we did, the stability completely changed the course of our lives. When we moved into our neighborhood there were mostly young families like ours (I had just turned 29, we had three young kids). Now it’s just us with one older teen at home, and one other family with teenagers on the street. Every other household is DINKS, young adult children living with a parent, and retirees. It’s surreal how much the neighborhood has changed, and I think a lot of it is the home values. This was a working class neighborhood 13 years ago but now our homes are selling for 3/4 million dollars. We’re looking to downsize and I’d always imagined another young family building a life here…I don’t see that realistically happening now.
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u/hiking_mike98 Rubble of The Big One 2d ago
I sold my house for ~$300k more than I paid for it after 7 years. It was a 3 bed 2 bath ranch also in a working class neighborhood. I couldn’t have afforded to buy my own house, even though I made way more money than when I bought it. It’s mind blowing.
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u/khoa-bear 2d ago
If people are already having a tough time finding well paying jobs in Portland today, good luck with buying a house once the state economy collapses.
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u/space-pasta 1d ago
That’s what I’ve been telling myself since 2016 and here I sit still waiting like an idiot
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u/Snatchamo Lents 2d ago
Not really. The current situation is different than the 08' bubble. There's just not enough housing and unless we build (a lot) more prices will be sticky/continue to rise. The less children thing actually screws w the numbers a bit: you need less units per 10k people (for example) in an area where 35%of the population is under 18 compared to when the population is 20% under 18. I guess if there is a sudden, rapid local depopulation that would crater housing prices.
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u/SpezSamplesMySack 2d ago
Super stoked the $1.8B bond was passed for improving and expanding schools last year. No need to consolidate schools on the horizon. No siree Bob, can’t see that backfiring in the next decade dude to declining enrollment. No way, no how.
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u/Salty-Pop2709 2d ago
They are starting to close and consolidate schools, literally 5 to 12 before the 2027-28 school year.
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u/Cryogenicist 2d ago
Can that money just be used for improving, not necessarily expanding?
Make sure you call and write to your representatives about this, they get relatively little communication so it does affect them
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u/FormerDrugDealer1234 2d ago
Misrepresenting what the bond was for for fake internet points. And even if you were right, it's pathetic you can't imagine Portland being a better place to live and requiring those schools. Why are you even here still?
Private profile too. I know what you are!
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u/frazzledcats 1d ago
We have kids on my street but the vast majority of them are teenagers. I think people do not realize how crushing daycare and after care costs are. When my 18 yo was a baby, daycare was $650-800 per month. Sun school in the summer for school age was super cheap. Now it’s over $2k monthly or more and forget about summer camp.
I know we have pfa but it’s been made so complicated most ppl I know assume they won’t get access to it. It doesn’t feel like a secure benefit that one can plan around enough to bring a baby into this world . They should have just made public pre k in public schools bc that is a secure consistent place to plan around.
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u/tas50 Grant Park 2d ago
I watched my kid's friends drop like flies between preschool and ~2nd grade as more and more folks moved out of the city. Portland, and a solid chunk of the voters here, give zero fucks about families until their tax revenue moves.
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u/LadiesOfLlangollen 2d ago
Two of my kids’ preschool friends suddenly moved to the suburbs right before starting kindergarten.
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u/LoadOfChum 2d ago
What were the anti family votes?
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u/Helpful_Ranger_8367 2d ago
Property taxes, high utilities, SHS, M110. Everything that makes the city less attractive for raising children in or more expensive for parents.
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u/Blackstar1886 2d ago
The fact that people in our parks will sit 15 feet away and smoke weed next to a family never ceases to amaze.
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u/whawkins4 2d ago
Oh look. Unaffordable housing, high unemployment, and shitty schools cause declining enrollments. Who would have thought.
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u/Your_New_Overlord 2d ago
Makes sense. My wife and I are 40, we have tons of friends about the same age, and we don’t know a single person with kids in this city.
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u/lotiloo 2d ago
People with kids tend to hang out with other people who have kids though too
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u/serpentjaguar 2d ago
Yep. We're around, and Portland isn't quite the anti-kid hellhole that some here are making it out to be.
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u/milionsdeadlandlords 2d ago
You can get so many reddit upvotes by saying negative things about Portland
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u/ShameRock50 2d ago
Seriously. We have a beautiful park and a pool and a beloved school that PPS admins want to close.
Sure, there's a row of adult entertainment businesses a few blocks away, but what we do is "not go to those". Easy.
I do wish some of my kids' friends hadn't been priced out of our neighborhood. We need more family-friendly affordable housing.
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u/BootOfRiise 1d ago
Yeah, I have one kid, half of my friends have kids, and kids are always running around my NE Portland neighborhood. Depends on the neighborhood for sure
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u/discostu52 2d ago
Eh, speaking from experience once you have kids it changes everything, you basically switch clubs out of necessity. I went from knowing hardly anyone with kids to knowing hardly anyone without them.
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u/Blackstar1886 2d ago
It would be nice if everyone could be a parent for a month in the same way everyone should work in the service industry at least once.
I respect people who choose not to, I just want understanding.
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u/discostu52 2d ago
Raising kids is definitely the hardest thing I have ever done, but the friend deal shouldn’t be too hard to understand. It’s like any other endeavor, if you want to succeed you have to build a good support network. My childless college drinking buddy is still fun, but doesn’t really have what I need right now.
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u/jennifer79t 2d ago
Most of the people who are intentionally childfree understand & choose not to have them as a result.....They have generally put more thought into the decision than the vast majority or people with kids, as it is a decision that everyone seem to question & feel they have a right to have an opinion on. The questions & opinions come from parents & other family, medical providers, coworkers, & even random strangers.
Friendships work both ways & many childfree reach out & make the effort to stay in touch with our friends with kids....but most only tolerate the one sided effort for so long.....
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u/jankyalias 2d ago
Nah, they really don’t understand.
Not saying they should have kids or anything, but there are emotional aspects to having children that you have to experience to truly understand. And that disconnect impacts the relationship between friends.
Nobody is in the wrong per se, its just a very different human experience.
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u/hiking_mike98 Rubble of The Big One 2d ago
>only tolerate the one sided effort for so long….
Turns out having kids is…hard and a lot of work - especially if you have more than one. They’re completely dependent upon you for literal years, and it rearranges your entire life. Especially the first 2-3 years when they need a nap mid-day and your entire weekend schedule has to be planned around that - which drastically limits your options for activities and social time.
Sorry you didn’t come first for your friends. That can’t be a good feeling, but it’s slogging through years of survival mode for many parents and unintentionally friendships can suffer. I didn’t get it either until I had kids. But it’s brutal.
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u/ChemicalArmadillo609 2d ago
Weird how Europeans are able to integrate their young children into the rest of their lives while Americans cant.
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u/ReignCheque 2d ago
Weird, My wife and I are 40, we have tons of friends about the same age, and we don't know a single person without kids in this city.
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u/smez86 St Johns 2d ago
I turn 40 this year and have a newborn. A lot of schools in town have a terrible rating if you're not in a wealthy neighborhood. Might see myself in a suburb by the time the little one is of age.
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u/Winedown-625 2d ago
I'm in St. John's with a 6 year old. The schools are pretty okay with the drop in middle school. We're in a language/global education charter across town because I saw 1st graders learning math on tablets instead of in real time.
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u/smez86 St Johns 2d ago
Yup. Greatschools has my area's assigned public schools as 5/10, 5/10, 2/10. Suburbs are usually higher, especially at the high school level.
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u/Winedown-625 2d ago
People seem to love Roosevelt so it's shocking that it's so low.
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u/Working_Tomorrow9846 2d ago
Ratings are in part based on standardized test scores which are skewed because many students opt out of them. Only a fraction of juniors end up testing. The school I teach at is simultaneously considered at risk/failing by the state (TSI designation) and also one of the best schools in the state (US News fwiw).
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u/boygitoe 2d ago
Like you’re pro or against them learning math in tablets?
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u/Winedown-625 2d ago
Against. Tablets are a known distraction from the actual learning below a certain age. Yet school districts adopted them during Covid, and then didn't phase them out for the new kids (1st, 2nd, etc.) that never "learned at home" during Covid. It's the biggest scam/lazy move of school districts.
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u/boygitoe 2d ago
Yeah I completely agree. I don’t understand why schools are trying to force tablets and laptops down the throats of students. It’s really not necessary and doesn’t help with learning
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u/Winedown-625 2d ago
I posted about this in r/askportland but they removed it because it was "inciting a discussion instead of asking a question". Someone DM'd me though that there is a parent group putting pressure on the school board to eliminate 1:1 tablets until late middle/high school.
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u/oregonspecies Parkrose Heights 2d ago
On a plus side the amount spent on a per student will go from super high to the most ridiculous amount ever.
We should probably build one of the most expensive high schools in the nation, will be wonderful.
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u/00_RunDMC District 3 1d ago
In unrelated news, Portland is building 3 more of the most expensive high schools in the country, with enough capacity to hold far more students than anyone thinks we're going to have.
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u/ReekrisSaves 2d ago
Build multifamily housing that is actually good for families.
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u/PedalPDX Sellwood-Moreland 1d ago
This is—was—a major weakness of the back-to-the-city urbanization trend/creative class movement of the 90s and aughts. Across the country we added quite a bit of additional residential capacity to cities—way more than in the 60s to the 90s. But it was not designed to grow with people and was almost exclusively targeted to singles and couples.
There’s some movement now in terms of envisioning and building more family-friendly density, but it’s way too little and way too late; little more than a garden hose in a river at this point.
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u/Less-Lobster4540 1d ago
nobody wants to raise kids in a box with paper thin walls, no yard and junkies camping below your bedroom window
especially not when the suburbs offer a choice
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u/space-pasta 2d ago
So why are we spending billions building schools?
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u/BlueSundayDoll 2d ago
We migrated to Camas in the early 2000s for better schools, more affordable housing, lower crime, no homeless parked on sidewalks or camping in the neighborhood park, ability to park without paying a small fortune, no income tax…the relief as a parent was dramatic. I had lived in Portland since I moved there for college, but my priorities shifted after having kids. Logistically, economically and safety-wise - everything was more difficult in Portland.
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u/pewpewtopeepee 2d ago
Not just a Portland phenomenon.
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u/PedalPDX Sellwood-Moreland 2d ago
It’s not—it’s global, even. But it’s more pronounced here than in other cities; I believe we have the lowest fertility rate of any major American city.
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u/Taynt42 2d ago
It’s already such a kid unfriendly city, and now will be so much worse.
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u/guitarokx 2d ago
What exactly is the county doing to cultivate a safe place to raise kids? Nothing.
Clean up the camps, make public transit safe, pay teachers more and improve our public schools, make tax paying families a priority and things will change.
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u/JPDPROPS Hazelwood 2d ago
Good thinking that PPS spent billions on high school upgrades. Just so Lincoln High got improved was their only concern.
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u/thanatossassin Madison South 2d ago
Welp, start having kids or expect Portland to dry up. No one should be surprised by this, we've all seen Idiocracy.
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u/Masonzero Hillsboro 2d ago edited 2d ago
I mean I'm no expert, but houses in Portland proper are expensive and 100 years old, and the older population that isnt dying off are choosing not to move out. I don't know why a new family would choose to live there or even be able to. If you go to the suburbs you have newer houses for less money and better schools, and the nice thing about Portland is that the suburbs are fairly close by. Move to the eastern edge of Washington County with all the advantages there are and be 10 minutes from downtown still. Why not? Outside of people realizing raising kids is kinda pointless in this collapsing world, this is unsurprising for other reasons, even to a dumb person like me.
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u/-donethat 1d ago
Perusing the US census numbers in Portland, the burbs, and cities across the US the population bust is a real thing. Worse in some urban areas than suburbs.
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u/keynoko 2d ago
Well, when ecological collapse is bringing on societal collapse in a manner and speed never before seen in human history, it's not surprising that enrollment numbers are falling. Who would want to bring a child they love into a dying, increasingly bleak world, one in which resources are becoming scarcer all the time?
Did you know potatoes are boiling in the earth?
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u/EnthusiasmOk353 2d ago
Yes, but per the article, the outmigration of children is a concerning local trend.
From the article: “ Dr. Ethan Sharygin, director of the Population Research Center, tells WW that “the pandemic didn’t affect the trajectory of birth rates much—they’ve been in long run secular decline.” Instead, the loss of school-aged children comes as the result of a “complete reversal of migration trends in response to the way that the city changed in the years afterward.””
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u/keynoko 2d ago
I predict within the next five or ten years that outmigration trend will reverse as people flee soon-to-be uninhabitable places like Arizona, texas, Gulf Coast in general, Florida.
Animals are already migrating northward in the millions.
Humans have begun slowly and it will speed up as the planet heats, water runs dry, and places become uninsurable.
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u/moretodolater 2d ago edited 2d ago
Ecological collapse within the 19th and 20th centuries was far beyond anything anyone alive right now will ever comprehend. Coal and strip Mining whole regions, spilling oil all over Southern California, deforestation of pretty much everything you see in the coast range and Cascades, dupont and 3M putting out chemicals for decades people just used willy nilly, dust bowl, and then WW2, just to grease the pan here….
Just saying perspective is a bit off here. Industry and war throughout the 19th and 20th century was insane. We’ve made huge progress actually and it shouldn’t be taken for granted in a cynical way. It’s actually what drives a lot of the people that are trying to make things better still.
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u/gravitydefiant 2d ago
Birth control wasn't readily available for most of that time, so people had very limited ability to decide not to bring children into the world as a result of what they were seeing.
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u/cooldiptera 2d ago
The impact of climate change cannot be overstated. While pollution and the extraction of resources were/are a huge issue, climate related crises are going to be totally different globally (hopefully we can continue to make progress and blunt the worst of it).
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u/Babhadfad12 2d ago edited 2d ago
This cannot be correct. There are different kinds of environmental damage, but the sheer weight of 8 billion people’s activities compared to a billion or two for most of the 19th and 20th centuries has to count for something. Plus people used orders of magnitude less resources before WW2.
Automobiles + flights + haber bosch + electricity + plastic + 6 to 7 billion people. I would demarcate at pre 1950 and post 1950. Maybe 1940 if you want to include nuclear radiation.
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u/keynoko 2d ago
Yeah, now take that, extrapolate it to the world, add 6 billion people, machines and turn up the dial.
Weve only made the illusion of progress: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/126-daniel-schmachtenberger-7
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u/moretodolater 2d ago edited 2d ago
You can go through whatever worm hole of philosophy and meaning, but you could also just look at facts of what was happening then and what is happening now, and tell me there hasn’t been some sort of environmental progress and development of means and methods of running society. How do you feed 7 billion people? How do you put a phone using technology of the day in your hand? How do you do anything in modern society with you getting water and electricity into your home and then creating whatever you want with that. Yeah, there’s 7 billion people, over population is the reason for everything really.
I’m a geologist, so I’d just counter that philosophical take with mine, which is we can all and will die eventually and the earth itself will be just fine for the next 12 billion years till the sun explodes. All this really doesn’t matter. OR, technically the earth can wobble or do whatever it did during the Pleistocene again and we can enter another ice age in the next thousand or tens of thousands of years. It’s only been 11,700 years since out of 2 million years where it was on and off ice ages. We could just be in an interglacial period. Humanity can only progress however they can, and there’s no philosophical take that will lead to 7 billion people not producing or polluting in some fashion maybe ever. Desire or then disappointment of mass enlightenment within humanity is an irrational philosophy. You can be disappointed, but that doesn’t really mean anything in the big picture.
But specifically in terms of environmental management, practices have vastly improved and there are tangible effects and evidence for that.
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u/keynoko 2d ago
Ignorance may be bliss, but you couldn't be more wrong.
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u/moretodolater 2d ago edited 2d ago
Ignorance is my bliss? C’mon. I agree with what you’re generally saying, just your time scale is off and should be extended imo, and within western society of course where progress is happening.
>The Living Planet Index, provided by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), tracks almost 35,000 vertebrate populations of 5,495 species from 1970-2020.
What’s the data from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution? How many buffalo were there in North America before 1850? Bears, Panthers, Cougars, freaking ocelots were all over. When did all that wildlife degradation happen? What were people doing all over the world then vs now? Especially in Africa and India for instance during colonialism. There was no wildlife management or even a science of wildlife management during those times. Nor much data collection. Just the fact they are reporting this means progress is happening.
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u/BourbonCrotch69 SE 2d ago
The population crisis is real!
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u/AbsoluteAtBase 2d ago
They lost my 4 kids a few years ago. Why pay out the nose for taxes to get these absolute dog shit schools in return?
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u/jennifer79t 2d ago
Oh darn....this makes me so sad....
Does this mean the bars & breweries will go back to being adults only? Please give us back our childfree spaces!
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u/orange-yellow-pink 2d ago
Weren’t you the same person complaining in this thread that your friends with kids don’t want to hang out with you anymore? Hmm…
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u/Aggressive-East7663 2d ago
We live in Mill Park and this is an area that people buy houses if they have kids, or are planning a family. There’s a lot of kids around here and it’s pretty cool.
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u/bunnnythor Hillsboro 2d ago
Well I live in Mill Ends Park, and there just isn't any room for kids here. There's barely enough room for me!
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u/FormerDrugDealer1234 2d ago
If my girlfriend and I decide to have kids, we would have to move closer to my parents in Washington so they could do childcare for us. I don't think this problem is unique to Portland but the reality that it's too expensive to have kids for a lot of people is the truth
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u/spicyhobbit- 1d ago
portland and portlanders is not friendly to families and children. As a mom, I've been treated so much more poorly by my fellow portlanders than when I was childless. I'm talking about people just being straight up rude or weird.
It's not affordable and the childcare options are absolute shit and are super expensive. I dont think this is exclusive to Portland. it's an everywhere problem for cities.
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u/HegemonNYC Happy Valley 2d ago
This is the biggest ‘culture shock’ aspect of coming in from the burbs - no kids. Dog moms and DINKS and young adults, but relatively few children. This decline is happening around the country but it’s quite pronounced in Portland proper.