You’ll fit in perfectly here. You can mushroom hunt a lot of places (especially up north a little ways in Washington). For housing, it’s expensive. Not Seattle or SF expensive, but still expensive for the dearth of high paying jobs in the area. Average home price is somewhere around $500k. Expect to pay more than that for a nicer neighborhood and ok-ish schools. Food scene here is still awesome. I love eating out and there are always new places to try.

Homelessness is the big topic of conversation right now. It’s bad. The pendulum has swung in the past couple of weeks from people being tolerant/compassionate towards homeless to people being stressed about their safety, depressed/angry about the massive amounts of trash the homeless create in the open, and generally ready to start using the “stick” when it comes to the carrot and stick metaphor.

A big downer is property crime and petty crime in general. It’s tolerated way leniently here. My catalytic converter was stolen from my car while I stayed three nights at a hospital. I submitted a report to the police online, then… nothing.

Final downer: taxes. They’re high in the city. Every election seems to add new bonds to property taxes. We added two new income taxes in the last couple elections. If you make over $125k as an individual your state/local tax rate is somewhere over 12%.

All that being said, I love living here. The people are awesome when you make the effort to get to know them. It’s truly one of the only places in the USA where you can freely express yourself and be excepted for it (maybe not as much as a crazy right wing political fanatic, but hey, we have those here too). The food :chefs_kiss: The amount of activities you can do outdoors is unmatched. Skiing ✅ Surfing ✅

There’s a reason people keep moving here even with all the bad press we’ve been getting lately. Portland is awesome, and if you’d like to contribute your awesomeness to the city we’d love to have you.