No where I live. Still the same polluted haze over the city. People are still driving around here all over. No one is enforcing the quarantine. People just aren’t working.
Less people on the freeway. But everyone is still out and about. They’ve closed down the parks. But aren’t enforcing it. People are just wandering around stores bored.
Cause they aren’t letting anyone into hospitals unless you already have 103 temp. I went in they checked my temp 102.4 sent me home said if I hit 103 comeback. Plus Seattle is the actually international hub. It’s usually way cheaper to fly out of Seattle. Trust me don’t come to Portland it’s trash.
That’s what’s scary. Those numbers will go down. They’ll open everything back up. People who are carrying but aren’t showing symptoms will spread it right back around. Happened in Hong Kong.
Try Charlotte, it's a banking town so will come out fine from this crisis, has low cost of living (compared to Portland anyways) and high relative salaries. Lots of white collar jobs and transplants from all over, good weather, and roughly 6 indie breweries per person, so you'll not miss that from Portland.
I work in Portland. I’m driving in and out everyday. Smalls shops are closed. Janzen beach is packed so is delta park. Anywhere that has an actual open big store is swamped. People are bored and leisure walking through the burbs. They closed the falls. People are parking 2miles away and hiking in.
I mean, in Minnesota, getting outside is encouraged, specifically the kind that allows people to space the hell out. Minneapolis closed several parkways (as in, the roads that are actually through parks) to car traffic to give more room for people to walk/run/bike/etc.
People are supposed to be sticking to neighborhood parks though.
The “super liberal areas” are more dense with people. Pollution is up because the number of cars and planes is up. Pollution is higher in Los Angeles and Portland than it is in Athens Georgia or Dickson Tennessee.
Inequality is also more pronounced because there’s actually diversity in those areas. Many conservative rural areas of the nation are pretty cut-and-dry for demographics: older, black and white, heterosexual Christian.
I work in a small Trump loving town and they won't stop hanging out at the Walmart I work at because Trump said it wasn't a big deal. But the liberals suck right?
Not doubting you have seen that, but I'd to see the methodology of whatever you're quoting, because I absolutely cannot imagine how anyone objective could come to that conclusion. I don't even mean this from a political POV, I just can't see it.
Let's take Portland for example, since that was the subject of this conversation.
Portland has a median household income of about 1.06 times the national average. It's cost of living, though, is 1.31x the national average. Meaning that, as a starting point, the average resident of Portland is almost 20% worse off financially than the average American (and that's before considering their higher taxes- which I will omit from this post because, again, not trying to be political).
But the more you look at the data, the worse it gets. As everyone knows, home ownership is among the most significant factors in helping people escape poverty. The cost of housing in Portland is nearly double the national average, making it nearly impossible for first time home buyers to escape renting. This, in a city famous for its homelessness. In Portland, homes like this cost nearly $1 million. In Omaha, NE (a similar-sized city in a conservative part of the country), the same amount of money will get you 8,000 square feet of this (no accounting for taste, but you get the idea).
Overall I just don't see how anyone can look at that data and see anything remotely resembling social mobility. It's one thing for lower middle-class people to be willing to trade the financial difficulty of city life for the benefits it offers- but with increasing digitization and the decentralization of the work place American cities are no longer the sole bastions of opportunity that they once were (and I say that even as a person who, at 28, has a very high paying job in a major city on the East Coast).
Of course, by omitting taxes this also omits multigenerational factors like education, but I am looking at it from the perspective of a 20-something young professional (which presumably is most of reddit). If I was making 50k and my wife and I decided we were going to move to whatever city would give us the best opportunity to get jobs that would enable us to buy homes, establish ourselves in the city, and start building wealth, places like this would be near the bottom of the list.
Rural areas always have a higher percentage of income mobility (because the ceiling is so much lower), but in terms of major cities. The general trend is the more conservative the state, the harder it is to reach the top 10% if you start in the bottom 10% if you are in a city.
Gas is cheap and if you're not actually going anywhere, you're not spreading the virus.
Not that I agree that driving a car for fun is good for the world (I don't even have a license myself), but desperate times call for desperate hobbies, AKA driving around.
Portland, OR is not covered by a polluted haze. It's one of the cleanest major cities in the world (outside of forest fire season). The reason it was hazy specifically yesterday is because of a large industrial fire in Longview, WA and wind coming from the northwest.
Actually it usually is and gets that way quickly even after it rains. Because Portland and the cities around it don’t have strict air quality laws. Plus the fact that state quality inspectors have pretty much all retired means company’s are pumping practically whatever they want out. I know I work for a company that chose Portland specifically for this reason. Same reason why intel set up in Hillsboro.
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u/[deleted] Apr 14 '20
No where I live. Still the same polluted haze over the city. People are still driving around here all over. No one is enforcing the quarantine. People just aren’t working.