What Should We Do About the Concomitant Damage All These New Arrivals Do to the Local Housing Market?

Do we just resign ourselves to 20 percent rent hikes, every year, forever?

By Marty Smith
What should we do about all these new arrivals and the concomitant damage they do to the local housing market? Do we just resign ourselves to 20 percent rent hikes, every year, forever?
—Someone in Portland, Probably
In recent columns, we’ve been arguing that the solution to Portland’s housing crisis isn’t more housing, it’s fewer people. Persuade the nation that Portland sucks, throw in a few well-timed smallpox outbreaks, and the problem solves itself.
And finally, with your help, we’ve come up with the three best arguments to dissuade new arrivals.
No. 3: We hate you. Moving here won’t make your life better; it’ll just make Portland worse. Every blithely oblivious, 415-area-code-having brogrammer who moves to Portland and treats our actual tall-bikers/punk rockers/street crazies like theme characters in some ersatz hipster Disneyland moves us closer to open hostility.
We know you’re geeked on karma. Do you really want to spend your life absorbing the bad vibes of a million rain-hardened souls?
No. 2: The big one. You read that New Yorker article about the coming megaquake. Isn’t starting a family in Portland equivalent to premeditated negligent homicide?
When Portland turns into a Mad Max-style post-apocalyptic wasteland, all your CSS expertise and beard-straightening skills won’t help you. Do you really want to look down at the broken, lifeless bodies of your children, knowing they’d still be alive if you’d been willing to live in a town with a little less kale?
No. 1: Portland is over. You’re a cutting-edge millennial itching to relocate to a happening town that will be the au courant envy of your RISD classmates. Portland it is!
Or is it? Sure, Portland has been hip for a while. Quite a while, in fact. Didn’t Portlandia just finish its SIXTH season? I heard Carrie Brownstein doesn’t even live here anymore. How much longer before Portland becomes old news? Do you really want to be the guy who moves to Seattle in 2001 to get in on the whole grunge thing?
Everyone who entered is a winner! Send me your mailing info and receive a Dan Saltzman mask, suitable for infiltrating City Council meetings, and get your “Portland Is Over” T-shirt at cafepress.com/makeportlandshittyagain.
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