Portland's Anti Family Social Engineering Earns a Dart in the WSJ *But if Portland Really Wanted to Change That...

The Wall Street Journal had a mention about Portland and other cities like it today.

And city leaders aren’t going to like it much. Find it here.

As you know if you live or visit here, city leaders have gone overboard making Portland inhospitable to families of all income levels and the working class through their high taxes, small yards, and rabbit hutch living in a misguided attempt to capture the bike and pedestrian culture.
The gist of the article explains why cities that purport to be reaching out to the cool, young, jet setters, and creative class people find themselves losing jobs, losing families, and losing cache.
It says about Portland,

“Advocates of the brew-latte- and- they -will -come approach often point to greater Portland, Oregon, which has experienced consistent net gains of educated workers, including families. Yet most of that migration—as well as at least three quarters of that region’s population and job growth has been not to the increasingly childless city, but to the suburban periphery. This pattern holds true in virtually every major urban region.”

As Joel Kotkin points out in the Wall Street Journal piece,

“The evidence thus suggests that the obsession with luring singles to cities is misplaced. ...Instead the emphasis should be on retaining young people as they grow up, marry, start families and continue to raise them."

But it’s hard to do that in Portland.
Mayor Moonbeam and the Rainbow city council, along with the entire planning class, don’t like yards for kids to play, don’t want parents to use their car to take their kids to after school activities, and don’t even want mom and dad to have a car even if they could afford one AND the outrageously expensive and overtaxed property.*If Portland would like to change this trek toward anti family negative growth they could be the first around here to work a deal offering school vouchers. Full vouchers. Add to that reduced taxes and transportation flexibility and just watch the families--and capital--pour in.