I shuddered when Money magazine recently blessed Portland with their #1 ranking for most livable city. Look at our sibling cities, Seattle and San Francisco: In the past few years, both have enjoyed #1 rankings. Now, with bottom-of-the-barrel, one-bedroom apartments renting for $1500 in San Francisco livability for those who aren’t incredibly wealthy is a quaint memory of a bygone era.
Money quoted a 31-year-old computer geek in Portland who boasted about his $1,000-a-month Pearl District apartment and imminent move to a 3,000 square-foot home in Irvington. Of course, while incomes soar for some twenty percent of our city, an equal number of families flirt with the poverty line. Money failed to mention that Oregon is ranked as the hungriest state in the nation, with one out of five kids missing one meal daily.
Another family quoted in Money, from somewhere in Northeast Portland, gushed about the excellent school system. Somehow I don’t think their Northeast neighborhood was around the Killingsworth area, where Jefferson High School has the worst academic status in the state, and fifty percent of tenth graders read at an eighth-grade level or below.
Sure, there have always been good and bad sides of the tracks/river/town. And, yes, I understand that Money doesn’t have the same editorial mission as street roots, but before we pound our chest that we’re #1, we should consider what this means about our priorities.
Livability–that elusive grail for these rankings–is based largely on affordability. In turn, affordability is often based on finding “affordable” housing. Look at San Francisco, Seattle, and Denver in the past decade: As more people were drawn to the livability of those cities, the hunt for cheap rent moved through the economically weaker neighborhoods, gobbling up “affordable” housing. Already in Portland, such changes have swept through the Pearl District.
Currently, Portland has no mechanisms to slow these changes and to preserve livability for lower income brackets. Without rent controls, landlords have unrivaled power to capitalize on population increases. Yes, such are the forces of a free-enterprise market. But at what cost do we want to be #1 for some, and unlivable for others?