The Real Reasons Everyone is Leaving Portland, Oregon.

foreign [Music] people are leaving Portland Oregon after Decades of being one of the top 10 most moved to cities they've completely reversed course back when I moved up to the Portland metro area in 2010 Portland was in its Heyday so to speak it wasn't my thing but that whole hipster thing was in full bloom downtown Portland was a great place to meet friends have a drink hang out the music scene was solid and people were really nice to each other sometime around 2017 things changed we had a shift in the crime rate rent and housing prices went through the roof and people started camping out on the sidewalks most people think that last one is the only reason Portland is in bad shape they're wrong it does play a big part but there's so much more to what's wrong with Portland right now and why people are leaving that's what we're looking at today got it get it good let's take a look number 10 changes in the economy Portland is going through a lot of changes and their economy is one of the things that's changing and it has been changing for some time now some industries that we've had for a long time are shrinking while others are growing there used to be a ton of call centers here in the Portland metro area there's still some not nearly as many as we had let's say 2017 2018. Ford had a call center here Netflix had a call center in the Portland metro area and so did Yahoo there's a bunch of other ones those are the ones I can think of offhand each one of them employed thousands of people and some of the ones that are still here rely on automation more than they ever did so that's cut out a lot of jobs that they had here in the Portland metro area now companies like Intel is expanding so that's good but it's just a shift in the economy it's a different person has to move here to do those jobs this has led to some people losing their jobs and others having difficulty finding work then you got the fact that some businesses have just left the Portland metro area because of all the BS Walmart's a prime example they pulled up two stores actually they're pulling up stores all over the country but they pulled up the ones in downtown Portland because they were having problems with people stealing with the homeless wandering in there and those two stores that they shuttered uh really weren't doing that good but more people lost jobs there number nine the political climate the political climate in Portland has become increasingly polarized in recent years this has made a lot of people feel unwelcome in Portland now if you don't know Oregon isn't like Portland most of Oregon I would say is more libertarian than they are let's say republican or conservative organs always had this independent thing where they just want to live on their land they want to be able to do what they want and they want the government to stay out of their business I don't think a lot of people realize that this is very much a Second Amendment state Portland is not the rest of Oregon is they really have that whole attitude let me do what I want to do as long as I'm not hurting other people why we're one of the first places to legalize weed and we have strip clubs everywhere you know it's kind of like that thing I don't need the government telling me no like they're my parent but in Portland it's kind of gotten a little too liberal they're making policies to keep the Liberals happy and it's just kind of snowballed and kept going and going and going it's not always bad policies that change a city or or change a city for the worst but in Portland's case I think it kind of is now Eileen both ways political and I see why some of these things are in place and I understand them but sometimes they've gone too far it's almost like you gave someone an inch you fixed a problem well now they want five other problems fixed and sometimes they're problems nobody else seems to think is a problem but the politics of the Portland metro area has turned into a little bit of a nightmare and it's chasing people out number eight the young people are leaving like I'd said earlier back when I first moved up here the whole hipster thing was going on and there was a lot of young people living in the Portland metro area it was a great scene I was a little bit older but I worked with a whole bunch of the 20 25 year olds and occasionally I'd go out and have drinks with them but just watching how their life was going here in Portland it was really nice everyone was happy everyone loved it here and it's a lot of different things that have chased them out but many young people are leaving Portland in search of a better opportunity elsewhere a study by Portland State University found that a number of young people leaving Portland for other cities has increased by 50 percent in the past five years they're just not sticking around there's too much BS number seven lack of lower paying job opportunities there used to be a time where you know everyone had two jobs in the Portland metro area usually one was a full-time job and then one was maybe a couple days a week well those couple days a week jobs have gone away and it's not just the change in the economy all the garbage going on in Portland has chased a lot of companies out like we've already discussed and with them they've taken a lot of jobs that would have been great for someone that let's say was just getting out of college things like that or while they were going to college I don't know if you know it but Portland has some good sized colleges here you got Reed College which isn't terribly big you got Lewis and Clark you got Portland State you got the University of Portland of course the community colleges in the area tons of restaurants and bars have shut down in the Portland metro area and this course means you lose a lot of server jobs things like that even if you do find a job downtown you probably don't want it too much because you got to go through all the nonsense just to get to work and it's kind of dangerous in a lot of areas now to be fair I brought up in other videos they're trying to clean it up right now the downtown area at least uh they're making some progress not as much as they need but they are making a little progress so just want to be fair about that number six the weather yeah the weather's always been a thing here in Portland people bring up how much it rains how cloudy it is all the time just gray skies and drizzle it seems like to me most the time I say that as we're in the middle of a really really nice day it's like 80 degrees outside blue skies it's great but this is you know three months out of the year the rest of the year it's gray cloudy and rains almost every single day Portland receives over 120 days of rain every year I've also seen other studies where it says it's closer to 150 days of rain now that's not hard rain a lot of times it's just a little bit of drizzle which we get a lot of those days the weather can be off-putting to some people especially those that are not used to it you move here from let's say Dallas and you come to Portland you're like this is insane you moved from Seattle down to Portland you're all this is normal I've said this before but there's a saying here in Portland we don't cry if it rains on our parade we expect it to rain on our parade the other thing they say up here is if you waited for better weather to do something you'd never leave the house but yeah the weather here in Portland kills it for a lot of people number five public transportation people don't want to ride the max anymore that's our train system that goes downtown and out to the airport and even into the suburbs it's really really nice but not anymore and it's not because the trains are bad shape or the service sucks or anything like that there's just a lot of garbage that goes on on the trains these days and it's kind of forced people to not want to ride on the trains Portland has a very sound design and reliable system just you don't know what you're gonna get when you get on that train anymore and that feeling has sort of started to show in the traffic in Portland Portland has some of the worst traffic congestion in the country right now a lot of it has to do with construction but you also have more cars on the road than before the pandemic because people don't want to ride the max right now my opinion I think that's what's also chased a lot of young people out because a lot of young people in Portland they didn't own cars back 10 years ago that just wasn't a thing and they really liked it the train or a bus could get you anywhere where I grew up in Los Angeles nobody rode the bus or the train or anything like that the bus went out I was a kid in Southern California was referred to as the loser Cruiser if you're a dude riding the bus it really acted as a form of birth control at the same time no one was hooking up with you if you rode the bus but it wasn't that way here in Portland when I moved up here it's like why do I need a car I'll just ride the Max and everyone's attitude was totally different that's one of the first things that caught my attention when I moved up here that people were just like why not just take the max I just think they need more cops on the max right now until they figure out what's going on in this city fix it number four the crime rate Portland has seen an increase in crime in recent years the violent crime rate in Portland is higher than the national average this increase in crime has made some people feel less safe as it should living in Portland especially downtown when I first moved to Portland Oregon actually I when I first moved here when I first started making these videos around 2015 Portland's overall crime rate was almost even with the national average their violent crime rate was below the national average right now their total crime rate is 168 percent above the national average their violent crime rate is 86 percent above the national average so the big difference is property crime is almost 200 above the national average got so many people just stealing your stuff those aren't the worst numbers in the country but for a city that five six seven eight years ago was pretty much below the national average on most things that's quite a jump I remember you never heard about shootings in Portland when I first moved here and I'd say in the last three or four years there's one a night two a night it's not just the violent crime businesses are getting broken into every single night in alarming numbers there's been a few that have been robbed weekly again that's one of the reasons Walmart pulled out underperforming stores that were also getting ripped off all the time number three high cost living you know Portland's living that dream the place kind of sucks but they charge you like it doesn't it's almost like getting a three day old cheeseburger at McDonald's and they charge you 25 bucks for it Portland Oregon has one of the highest costs of living in the United States it's in the top 15 now one of the First videos I ever did I brought this up that the cost of living was going up in that video out of the top 100 cities in the United States Portland was ranked 28. now here they are at lucky number 13. this is another reason so many young people have left they don't have the money to afford Portland metro area anymore more and more retirees not like retirees we're hanging out here in the first place I mean it's far too cold and rainy and dreary unless you're into real heavy gardening the place is not great if you're retired never has been on weather alone but now it's gotten so expensive retirees and young people are leaving the only people that are staying are sadly the people that are in the prime of their money making life you know oh and the homeless they're staying the median home price in the Portland metro area is 325 five thousand dollars now if you go downtown Portland or just into Portland itself it's closer to 550 000. that's just the median the median for rent they say is one thousand twenty five dollars but if you go downtown Portland the median is closer to fifteen hundred that's eight percent higher than the national average that's not terribly bad the housing seventy three percent higher than the national average it's kind of making it unaffordable for a lot of people a lot of people moved up here from the Los Angeles area from the San Francisco area because they couldn't afford it down there and they're coming up here and they're finding out yeah it's unaffordable up here now too people from Idaho move here they see the prices and they start to cry on the sidewalk then they start to only fans account and everything's better number two Portland's lost its cool yep Portland used to be the cool place to move just like Seattle was for a while there San Francisco was back in the 60s Los Angeles has been forever Portland was the place to move to if you were young it was just a cool place to live it's not a thing anymore perfect example is like I talked about earlier all the hipsters and the music scene was solid here well when it lost its cool everyone left I mean the hipsters went out of style but whatever style would have replaced them it's not happening here in Portland anymore and it's really unfortunate I mean like I said this was a great place to live for some time I mean Portland's popularity started the late 80s it was always popular to a degree but it really got kicked into high gear sometime around the late 80s early 90s and it was strong until 2016 2017 somewhere around there it just became less of a cool place to live now there's no measurable stat for that and that's just an opinion but it's an opinion of a lot of people Austin Texas that became the cool place to move to that's slowing down a little bit these days also what's the next place all right before we get to number one don't forget we have another Channel called on this day there is a link for that down in the description area alright on to number one and number one the homeless yes let's talk about the elephant in the room actually the 4 000 elephants in the room the homeless population in Portland Oregon has wreaked havoc on this city it's changed the demographic it's changed the crime rate it's changed the traffic patterns it's affected job opportunities it has chased long-time residents out of the city in long-time business owners have decided to set up shop elsewhere it is an epidemic here in Portland now I don't wish anything bad on the homeless people they just affect what's around them they're just people trying to live and for whatever reason they're on the streets whether it's some kind of addiction Mental Health crisis falling on Hard Times made the decision to live under a bridge whatever the reason they're there and in a lot of cases they need help sadly most of them can't be helped to the point where it would get them off the street we all know this this is study after study we'll tell you that some of the people just need to be maintained probably for the rest of their life the numbers vary drastically depending on who who's putting out the numbers when it comes the amount of homeless living in the Portland metro area in my experience the city will put out very low numbers because it looks better if they have a low number of homeless people groups that are helping the homeless that get money from different government agencies they put out numbers that are really hard to believe I saw one that said we have like 14 000 living unhoused in Portland and then the city put out something that said they had four thousand then I saw one that said it was closer to twenty five hundred so I don't know what's going on the way they do that it's a really weird statistic they have a point in time thing so on one night every year or twice a year they will go down and count as many as they can and then they do an estimate because you know when you're living on the street one of the last things you want to do on a Friday night is go someplace and be counted who knows the exact numbers of the homeless in Portland but I can tell you from everything I've read and everything I've seen from living in this Portland metro area it's bad it's gotten a little bit better in the last I'd say year and a half it you know it peaked in middle of the pandemic and so it's gotten better from there but not enough to make it livable here in Portland Oregon yet all right that's today's video hope you guys enjoyed it hope you got some information of it now go out have a great day and be nice to each other

Channel: World According To Briggs

Views: 571,885

Keywords: where to live in America, Top 10, Top Ten Lists, world according to Briggs, United States, Ranked, Lists, Best States, Best Cities, Relocate, Travel Education, States, USA, US States, united states map, Portland, portland oregon, portlandia, Homeless, PDX, portland drug and homeless problem, Portland riots, portland riots 2022, Portland real estate, Oregon real estate

Id: DQtKlu8xZ1I

Length: 14min 59sec (899 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 05 2023