ok, well what about Portland, Oregon?

Echoing what Darin said above.

Plus, looking at them walking along the Eastbank Esplanade and Waterfront Park reminds me I need to start running again after the new year.

I know way too many people in that video. It's unnerving.

i didnt know carrie brownstein acted or did comedy

Clay, who do you see? I think I recognize a coupla the tall-bikers from when they lived on Alberta, but that's it...

a bunch of the ppl in the video i've seen at film shoots and some theater stuff that i've participated in over the years, so i imagine all these folks come from a local Portland casting agent. i personally know a few of the ppl but don't want to get too specific because mostly i really don't like them at all lol.

What?! Not liking media-saavy Portlanders? Whodathunkit

I hope this is good, but the clips I've seen were all like LOL LESBIANS IN COFFEE SHOPS LOL which makes me wonder exactly who the audience for this show is.

Although omg that line in the music video "Portland: a place where twenty year olds retire" cracked me up.

leaving early tomorrow morning for pdx. hi again, pnw

I want to move to Portland, sight unseen. Or Seattle, seen for a week several years ago.

Is one more affordable than the other? What are the pros and cons of each city?

I was born in Portland and have lived here almost every year of my life and yet I feel strangely ill-equipped to answer this question in a way that you would find relevant. The best I can say for Portland is that it doesn't consider itself a big city or act like one, which is not true of Seattle. Seattle has always been a striving, ambitious city.

Both cities have plenty of places to go and things you can do, and if you wish you can lead a quiet, happy and unassuming life in either place. Hearsay tells me that job hunting is not easy here. I don't know about the Seattle job situation at all.

i think portland is much more affordable, right? at least based on our glances at its real estate market.

both cities are about the same size, population wise. actually seattle, portland, and vancouver are all about the same size. but bc of their different histories, seattle really does have this alpha city by the sea feel, whereas portland does feel more like a pleasant city by the river. which is i guess what they are! vancouver feels like this even more massive metropolis, even though i'm pretty sure seattle has more people in the metro area.

One advantage we'd have is that neither my or my wife's income is currently dependent on any local economy.

If you income is not tied to locality, then the affordability of housing ought to be better in Portland.

portland is so dope

Seattle is getting very expensive to live in if you don't work at Amazon or Microsoft. I work in social services, live in a 1-bedroom in Fremont, but I should probably go back to living with roommates if I want to ever save any money. The general consensus among many of my friends is that Seattle is quickly turning into another San Francisco and eventually we'll all be driven out to Olympia or Bellingham. Of course that doesn't solve the problem of Washington having an insanely regressive tax system.

On the other hand the local socialist/progressive movement did manage to make $15/hr a real thing. And I'm regularly stunned to be living in such a beautiful place.

Portland is much more affordable for housing than Seattle. It's also got a better public transportation infrastructure. No sales tax in Oregan. No income tax in Washington. Because of the Columbia river gorge (which is beautiful and, predictably, gorgeous), Portland is 10 degrees colder than Seattle in winter and 10 degrees warmer in summer.

both cities are about the same size, population wise. actually seattle, portland, and vancouver are all about the same size.

well the Seattle metro area is about a million people larger than Portland. But pdx and vancouver are both around that 2.3m level.

Rents in Portland have nearly doubled in the last five years due to increasing imports of under-30's. So while housing prices have returned to the sort of pre-bubble numbers, I'm finding myself priced out on a 1br further and further from the centers of the city.

My brother-in-law lived in Portland for the last six or seven years, and just moved to Seattle. There were a lot of reasons but job availability was kind of a big one; he always talks about everyone he knew in Portland having to hustle and have three part time jobs to make it work, even if cost of living was noticeably cheaper than Seattle.

I live like half a day's drive from both places and have spent a good bit of time in both, and from that perspective Seattle definitely feels like a much larger, shinier, more grown-up city than Portland which feels like a really big town. I think I counted 6 or 7 giant construction cranes over Seattle when I was there in July, much more development, condos all over, etc. I also think scenery wise Seattle is much more beautiful. I'd happily live in either though, and it's really kind of a toss-up which I'd move to if it ever came to that.

Portland has really changed radically in the last ~10 years or so in that nobody from here lives here anymore, excepting the burbs.

I probably should choose a diff't time to talk abt this ott.

nobody from here lives here anymore, excepting the burbs

i often feel this way about my own town, wonder if everyone feels this way

I feel like it wasn't always this way -- and not every city has had its signal boosted like Portland has in the last x years -- but then I wasn't always in my mid-thirties either. probably a good deal of my observance is not too far from hey kids get off my lawn.

I want to get on that lawn. This lawn I'm on is not for me.

Seattle: legal recreational cannabis products, ferries, giant ferris wheel, Sounders, Storm, Seahawks, Mariners, Scarecrow Video/Grand Illusion, Fantagraphics.

Yeah, I'd say visit each city first, which is what I did 10 years ago. Portland and Seattle are both PacNW places with considerable immigration rates, but have different vibes, pricing, tech economies, traffic, and sprawl. Mass-transit is viable(mostly) in Portland, for example.

Lunch at Salumi then strolling over to an Angels @ Mariners day game was one of my Seattle highlights.

I wanted to go to both cities for a few days each last month and combine them with a quick visit to my work client in San Jose (so I could write off the travel expenses), but that was too ambitious and without enough planning, so I'm going to try to do that next March.

WmC, I sent you an email re: Seattle. Does yr gmail account still work?

Got it! Will respond via email.

gonna say kingfish otm here as a PacNW-er

I'm regularly stunned to be living in such a beautiful place.

I feel this way a lot in Eugene

In my experience Portland is harder to drive around in w/o getting lost, but Seattle has worse traffic. don't know anything about housing costs.

wmc you should visit
lot of otm in this revive. seattle is more expensive but there are more job possibilities. both are changing and growing a lot. lxy counts cranes from i-5/mercer and saw 18 last week. having lived in both it is a mid-sized city vs big town choice. i've picked seattle but both are great

I always feel like Portland is way easier drive around with the alphabetical street names north of Burnside in NW, the pretty solid grid with street addresses matching up with cross streets on the east side, etc. I always get the big east side east-west streets confused but just when I'm at my most lost I magically end up at the red BALKAN FOODS place at 39th and Belmont and can re-orient myself.

Seattle feels much weirder with more one-ways and diagonals and weird interruptions for water and hills and such.

If this happens, I'll be moving solo. My wife absolutely refuses to be uprooted.

I magically end up at the red BALKAN FOODS place at 39th and Belmont

ha this intersection is totally a kind of mystical navel

as much as I wanna rep for my town, feel like moving away from portland was maybe the stupidest thing I've done in my non-romantic life

really miss aimlessly riding my bike about the place in the non-rain rain

my ex and i visited both about a year ago. very positive experiences in each. my initial inclination is towards Seattle, as I wouldn't really know anyone in either and feel Seattle has a bit more to offer a single transient.

otoh my income isn't dependent on location, so i would certainly reconsider Portland if the cost of living proves more attractive. i also i have a good friend who spent all of the 90s there and visits bianually, so perhaps i could glom onto his social circle.

I can think of worse ideas than the ILX West Non-Noize Colony.

i've been in Nashville 4.5 months and i'm already annoyed. my short list of where to move next in no order of pref:

DC
Philly
Seattle
Portland
NOLA
Denver (never actually spent any real time here. shld prob visit)

Not to detour, but what part of Nashville are you in and what are you hating about it?

East. "hate" is strong, but--
rents are way out of proportion with actual quality of life
public transit is a joke (knew that going in though tbf)
hipster libertarians
too much whitey
"boomtown" feel there is surprisingly shallow/ boring

I lived there from 2001-2005 and just went back last year for the first time in a while to see some friends and was blown away by how the city has changed in the last (at the time) 8 years. East Nashville was not a place you used to want to get too deep into no matter what color you are. Gentrification has some downsides for sure, but it's good for East Nashville.

I guess your willingness to embrace it depends on how many people you know there, though. Once I moved away, several of my old friends actually moved TO there and in the years since I've made a lot of friends-of-friends online and now I'm kind of sad I left.

where are you now?

Atlanta.

ha the girl i'm dating lives there (as far south in midtwown as you can be without being in downtown), so i visit pretty often. i actually dig it there way more than i ever expected to. the PATH trails, Piedmont Park, all the Midtown/ East ATL neighborhoods. and the trees! everywhere!

biggest beef is that downtown seems to be struggling without a strong residential pop. and moving the Braves to the burbs seems short-sighted, even if it makes total sense now demographically.

"What are the pros and cons of each city?"

Somewhat duplicative, but Seattle is more of a big (real, imo) city than Portland (though still not quite a Boston or San Francisco), and probably has more and better-paying jobs and superior cultural/intellectual life, as well as greater diversity (of various kinds) and large bodies of water. Portland, which at last has a river, has more of a tight-knit community of young people of a hip orientation, as well as a few extra degrees fahrenheit, and is cheaper and slower-paced. I would choose Seattle over Portland, easy, but many prefer the reverse.

portland has two giant rivers *ahem*

I've lived in both cities and I prefer the slower pace of Portland. The waspy hipsters are grating and the nearest strip next to our house (Division) has turned into three-mile Pinterest board, but hey our house has jumped $80K in value over the last year so go Portlandia.

while it is exceedingly obvious in retrospect, one thing i wish people told me before i moved to portland is that it is the whitest major city in america. i came here from sf and that is absolutely what i like least about here, though supposedly the trend is improving (full disclosure: i am white)

best thing about portland is the amenities to affordability ratio for sure. there's a crazy amount of delicious, nationally-recognized, relatively affordable food options here and i haven't seen anything remotely like it elsewhere in the country. beer is similar - not only is there an insane amount of beer and breweries and taprooms etc, but prices are better than nearly anywhere else i've lived or visited.

in terms of bike infrastructure, there is also no comparison to seattle. transit is overrated here but i still think it's prob objectively better than seattle. housing prices are definitely better too, though portland has one of the tightest rental markets in the country.

other things portland is famous for:

urban planning and the growth boundary
high levels of civic engagement (this is not always a good thing)
parks and green infrastructure
ppl do not dress up often, which is usually sort of terrible but hey w/e it's liberating
small neighborhood-feel on a large scale
chickens and goats are legal in your yard
the sports apparel industry
food cart pods
across-the-board great thai food (seattle has good thai too but not like us imo)
friendly people (b/c most are midwestern transplants)
voted "most active city" (or something like that) but people eat and drink so much it sorta balances out

superior cultural/intellectual life

i agree with everything in your post except for this

while it is exceedingly obvious in retrospect, one thing i wish people told me before i moved to portland is that it is the whitest major city in america. i came here from sf and that is absolutely what i like least about here, though supposedly the trend is improving (full disclosure: i am white)

The research I've been doing on Portland has been pretty upfront about this. It's one of the bigger downsides on my list of pros and cons.