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Originally Posted by delts145
Anything Portland, especially much of downtown is an apocalyptic cesspool. Who in their right mind would want to compare Portland's trajectory with Salt Lake City? Portland is one of the last cities I would use as a positive example. To make matters worse, those remaining citizens with common sense are fleeing by the thousands.
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I lived in Portland 20 years ago and visited for a week in 2022.
There's no doubt that unhoused mentally ill people are far more prevalent than they were in 2005. But that's also true for pretty much every city in the United States. Portland, like other cities, used to have slums. And troubled people lived inside them. But as the housing stock gentrified everywhere (shortage), the mentally ill and meth-heads were least equipped to compete for the limited rental space so they all landed on the street. It's social darwinism rearing its ugly head again. This problem always existed, we just see it more in a tight rental market.
Both Portland
and Los Angeles have areas that feel uncomfortable to walk around due to people living on the street. The principal difference:
Portland is actually nice to walk around, otherwise. Los Angeles has a few nice pockets, but it's not great overall. Big blocks, big streets, often fewer pedestrians.
Bringing this around to Salt Lake City, there's no doubt that the same problems that Portland faces, SLC faces too. But the answer isn't to cynically give up on our central cities. It's to keep working it. Nice city centers take constant work. I don't think privatizing
all the public space is the answer, which seems to be the direction SLC has been creeping toward for decades (Temple Square Plaza, etc.) Private "mall" plazas DO play a big role in a city. But what Portland gets right is that the city hinges around a lot of public space.
My last defense of Portland:
I lived there without a car. So, there's that.
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The prognosis is that it will take decades to reverse its demise, and that reversal is highly doubtful.
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So, why is the residential rental/buy market so tight?
You should know from living in LA, that West Coast cities can have a helluva lot of people move out and still be a hot market. California's biggest exports are people and businesses. And yet the state is still growing in both.