Portland vs. Seattle

Last week, a Seattle blog invited some of its contributors to debate whether Seattle or Portland were better cities to live in. (You can read the rebuttals here.)

The Portland argument came down to: Portland was the first to build light rail, which isn’t much of an argument. The Seattle view was much more along the lines of what I have been saying: Portland’s much-praised land-use planning has “radically accelerated . . . gentrification, rising home prices, the destruction of more traditional communities, the loss of economic and ethnic diversity.”

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