Thought I'd just collect some imagery I've taken since the move and share here for anybody who wants a view of PDX.

Voodoo Donuts, in downtown's Old Town district

A MAX train passes through Pioneer Courthouse Square, downtown Portland

Salmon Street Springs at Waterfront Park, downtown

Panorama at Pioneer Courthouse Square, downtown

A small part of the weekly Portland Saturday Market, downtown in Waterfront Park and Old Town

Rowing teams on the Willamette near the South Waterfront

Viewing downtown from above the old reservoirs on Mount Tabor in the inner SE side

The Portland sign in Old Town

A streetcar pulled up at the NW 10th & Glisan stop in the Pearl District

The old downtown area of the St. Johns neighborhood

Night dining at one of the many, many food cart pods (SE Division St. in this case)

A panorama of The Fields park in the Pearl District

Looking down NW 10th along the streetcar line in the Pearl District (downtown would be behind me in this photo)

Tanner Springs Park in the Pearl District

Tanner Springs Park in the Pearl District

A MAX train pulls through the Old Town district

Pier in Cathedral Park under the St. Johns Bridge

Food cart pod, SE Hawthorne

The streetcar takes a turn in the NW 23rd district

The weekly downtown farmers market at Portland State University

The weekly downtown farmers market at Portland State University

Pedestrian street, Old Town

Waterfront Park, downtown along the Willamette River. This was created after a freeway was demolished.

The St. Johns Bridge from Forest Park, looking into the St. Johns neighborhood. Mt. Rainier (juuuuuust visible), Mt. Saint Helens, and Mt. Adams in the background.

The beach at Kelley Point Park, where the Willamette and Columbia rivers converge

Infill development on East Burnside

The Fields park in the Pearl District

Inner SE Belmont

Late afternoon in Pioneer Courthouse Square

Artwork on a building, inner SE 11th Ave

Flags at a food card pod, St. Johns

Hope y'all enjoy!

Thanks y'all

The convenient connection of major cities to link up with the interstate highway system necessitated the construction of inner-city highways. 

I just want to point out that connecting cities with highways did not in any way necessitate building highways *inside* the cities, destroying low-income neighborhoods in the process. The highway system originally was not intended to enter and pass through cities - in other words, it was meant originally to be more like its inspiration, the German Autobahn.  It was a massive mistake in American planning to do so.

Eisenhower himself didn't even want them inside cities:

"[The President] went on to say that the matter of running Interstate routes through the congested parts of the cities was entirely against his original concept and wishes; that he never anticipated that the program would turn out this way"

https://seattletrans...through-cities/

Here are a few photos I took of the main neighborhood park in our part of Portland, St. Johns. This is Cathedral Park, located on the banks of the Willamette River under the St. Johns Bridge. The hills across the water are another, very large park - Forest Park, which is a 5,200 acre urban forest in central-city Portland.

Down Under the St. Johns Bridge by Kara Buchanan, on Flickr

Cathedral Park December Vibe by Kara Buchanan, on Flickr

Bridge to the Hills by Kara Buchanan, on Flickr

How unfortunate

I think Road diets are pleasing aesthetically but I have yet to see any of them, here in FW, result in more pedestrians which is unfortunate...  Berry St. has definitely had more pedestrians since Social Distancing went into affect but I think more people are out in more areas of the city

I lived just off Magnolia Avenue for a decade before leaving town and the road diet absolutely made a difference as to the pedestrian activity on the street.

Good

you can honor the people who served in later wars without even mentioning the Confederacy

Zoom was already significant in corporate settings, but now it gets a lot more press. We use a combination of Zoom and Microsoft Teams for things at our company, depending on the nature of the video needs. I've been here nearly two years and that's been our standard but the pandemic definitely brought out the stragglers at the company who had not gotten a handle on how to operate those platforms.

Surprised to see this thread exists! Hi from the Pacific Northwest!

Also, a bit of formality before moving on - you can call me Kara now. 

We do live in Portland proper! I love it here and have no desire to move to Vancouver, WA.    We live in the St. Johns neighborhood on the peninsula on the north side, the "fifth quadrant" of Portland. We're not far from the point where the Willamette and Columbia rivers converge, actually. (And our neighborhood has the best of Portland's many, many spectacular bridges!) It's really beautiful here, St. Johns is very walkable (St. Johns was a town before it was part of Portland and it has its own little downtown, central plaza, etc. that are really cute and full of great businesses), and we have some absolutely *unreal* parks all around us. I work in the Pearl District and it's amazing having a front-row seat to all the stuff still happening along the streetcar line!

I'll have to share some photos here in the other cities photo forum sometime! I'm not actively writing about city planning/urbanism/transportation at the moment (though I do own a domain where I might start doing it again), but it's heavily informed my songwriting in our newly rebooted band and so I'm still putting out the good word one way or another. 

I agree w/ Urbndwlr

traffic exists because people want to be there

trying to speed up traffic in an area where people like being because it's comfortable to walk is backwards as heck

Hang in there.  Although I am not personally one to believe in miracles, but it seems like the stars and the planets have aligned (BLM, Corvid-19, Exposing of Bad Trump to all eyes except for a dwindling hardest of hard core) that you and many of the multi-millions of people should not have to wait much longer for this nightmare to end. 

 

2021 will be the beginning of a journey back to America's value of empathizing with the those who are being their beautiful selves.

 

Just 15 weeks until the General Election (12 weeks before early voting can begin)

Unfortunately, removing him from office will not instantly cure the deep threads of transphobia in American society but it would at least defang it a bit and stop it from being actively, constantly pushed by the highest office in the land. So that little bit of relief, I would take.

Kool-Aid comes in many different flavors. Stop drinking the Kool-Aid exclusively coming from Trump's enemies; the Democrat Party and the bias mainstream media. Trying reading articles from Trump's supporters and his allies occassionally. Only when you have read from both sides can you be educated enough to come to a fair decision.

 

Do you mean the supporters and allies who are totally A-OK with his administration doing things like making it legal for doctors and EMTs to deny people like me health care because they just think we're gross? Because yeah...that and many other things make me not want to hear from them. If you're gonna deny my basic freaking humanity and right to exist then don't be shocked when I don't want to listen to a word you have to say.

Also the administration is now passing around a memo explaining how to "identify" women like me, which will almost certainly lead to a bunch of us being targeted for abuse and worse.

I don't know how I'm gonna make it through 2020 y'all

What's going to happen if the pandemic continues into the fall?  Is the November general election going to be postponed--or even cancelled?  That would mean Trump gets a new four-year term without an electoral decision.

Just to be clear, that is not at all what would happen.

"The 20th Amendment, moreover, provides that “the terms of the President and the Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January.” Thus, even if the election were somehow canceled, Trump and Vice President Mike Pence’s terms would still expire as scheduled — although, as explained below, the question of who would succeed them is devilishly complicated."

https://www.vox.com/...ion-coronavirus

Oregon has been *entirely* vote-by-mail since 1998 - it's not an optional alternative way to vote here, it's the entire voting system. It's extremely simple and convenient and as soon as we did it the first time after moving, it became utterly, completely baffling to me that the entire country doesn't do it this way.

A few weeks before an election, every registered voter in Oregon gets a ballot in the mail. You fill it out and either mail it back or drop it in an official drop box. And...that's it. It works really well. It's been working really well for years. It's popular and Oregon gets great turnout as a result.

In addition, as of 2016 Oregon also moved to automatic voter registration, via the DMV. As of 2016 if you get a driver's license or ID card or renew your existing one, you are automatically a registered voter. It moved from an opt-in process to an opt-out process. Once you get or renew that license you get a voter registration notice in the mail, from which point you have three options - quoting from the Oregon Secretary of State web site here:

• Do nothing. You will be registered to vote as a nonaffiliated voter (not a member of a political party).
• Choose a political party by returning the card. Joining a political party will allow you to vote in its primary elections.
• Use the card to​ opt-out and decline to register to vote.​

The operative word here might be "eligible". Not every person over 18 years of age who pays electric and phone bills is eligible to vote. The Election Administration need to be more sophisticated than that! As discussed above, there are long-proven registration and voting systems in other states utilizing the USPS (a vital and required part of the national infrastructure) that is easier to protect from "hacking" than electronic systems. Early voting via the postal system (as in Iowa where I sleep most nights) works fine for me...

 

*waves in Oregonian* Yeah, I just...it's surreal to see all the hand-wringing and accusations about how evil mail-in voting is when it's *so* common and routine and safe here.

It's depressing that the worst elements of our political system have tried to reframe the lockdowns as "people who LOVE FREEDOM!!1" vs. "these people want to stay home indefinitely" - that is absolutely NOT the case. Do these people think those of us who support the mitigation procedures are ENJOYING this? I haven't seen my second-closest human being to me in coming up on two months. It sucks. But the lockdowns were supposed to buy time for the government to set up the rest of the systems we need to reopen safely - massive increases in testing, extensive contact tracing, huge new supplies of PPE, increased masking policies, etc. - and instead we just winged it without a plan, failed to do anything meaningful with the time in lockdown, and said "reopen anyway - be a warrior."

I cannot say fully how livid I am with certain stripes of our leadership on here because I am trying my best to remain civil. I can't even *begin* to imagine how terrified I'd be in a state that didn't even do as much as we did here.

(Not that we in PDX are reopening anytime soon - while Oregon's rural counties are beginning, Multnomah and the surrounding counties have declined applying to open because we know we haven't reached all the contact tracing and PPE requirements. At least the state thus far has a small and manageable caseload.)

I'm a liberal and I will not wear a mask.  They, from what I have read, are not effective 

 

 

We should all wear masks. It's not about being "effective" at blocking *you* from getting the virus - it's about people with the virus and not knowing they have it (either because symptoms haven't manifested yet or because they are asymptomatic carriers) being prevented from spreading it to others. All of us wearing masks should be the norm and a sign of respect for our fellow citizens.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered after the fact that I had moved from one city with a repurposed Montgomery Ward building to another:

No driveway in this one, though.

That's incredibly disappointing, though unfortunately I can't say it was a surprise. 

 

If you read the ordinance (I admit I've been so curious I've labored through the painful document over the years), you'll notice that it treats commercial properties like the wolf and single family residential like the innocent victim.  It does not appear to even contemplate that it is totally possible to have the two right next to each other and have a very graceful coexistence.  There are very few local examples of this, I'm sure in large part because it is forbidden in the ordinance to put them that close to each other, unless in a MU or form based code district. 

This is very true - something I tried to do for my whole run of writing in FW was to at least show people there are other ways of doing things since FW in many cases has very few surviving or good examples of this sort of thing. When one looks outside of the Metroplex one can find *massive* varieties of blending different types of uses in close proximity.

(This obviously isn't the norm in a lot of places but I've always loved this funky little arrangement up here.)

Never been there, but interesting to visit.  I take it this is a combination restaurant and residence.  Is this common in Portland?  Don't they have zoning laws that prohibit a restaurant or other commercial retail in a predominantly residential neighborhood, which is what this appears to be?  I like economic growth but I don't think I would like to see this kind of blending as a norm in Fort Worth neighborhoods.

 

Out of curiosity - why? Whether this particular form or just this mixing of residential and commercial.

Nobody would be saying this needs to happen every block but what's the problem with this proximity of use interspersed occasionally? It's not *that* far off from existing historic commercial buildings already in the middle of neighborhoods like Fairmount (whether they are used for that purpose or not in the present day, they were at one point, even if today's residents would fight their existence).

This particular arrangement is not common but it happens sometimes - there are other examples of it on this particular street. Portland zoning has a mixture of residential, commercial, mixed-use, neighborhood commercial, etc. that is woven together. This street passes through multiple residential areas that are mostly but not entirely residential, but itself features a blend of historic single-family homes, mixed-use structures, small commercial buildings, etc.

These are some of the neighboring blocks around this pub.

EDIT: for the deeply nerdy amongst us, this is the zoning map for this particular area of the city:

Keeping the fence there is...awkward. I don't mind the building setback but I'd like to see the fence and its associated concrete ledge get removed.

It's not like a huge thing but it just feels a little off to me.

It's a re-zoning, so changes would be reflected in new development happening along the street.