That's because Portland is so much more selective than Seattle. Obviously, Seattle will accept just anyone. Not so, the Rose City.

We're looking for only the best, most progressive-thinking post-graduate slackers to reach our city's goal of full under-employment for the creative class.

Hey, Sam Adams can only employ so many hot 20-something guys to write tweets before it arouses suspicion.

Surprised that the unemployment rate for this age group in '09 was only 15%. There are a lot more coffee shops and brew pubs around here than I expected.

Hm. Let's see. You have Dell and the whole of Silicon Gulch as employers. You have new employers actually moving in, instead of moving out. Property values aren't collapsed, and you already have so many University of Texas students and grads around that the hipster plague isn't quite so bad. (Oh, it's bad around the time of SXSW, but one good summer heat wave, and they do what Portland's hipsters won't do and go home.) Best of all, Austin already has so many attention-crazed bozos filling the available bookstore and other "groovy retail' spaces that anybody moving there these days usually has a plan for real work. I never thought I'd say anything good about Austin, but there you go.

And then there's Dallas-Fort Worth taking #5. Fort Worth I can understand. Dallas, though, has every opportunity to become another Portland, seeing as how our new mayor-elect has the same attitude about spending as Sam Adams. Admittedly, he's honest in saying he wants to spend all of the city's money on new playgrounds for the rich instead of dropping "creative class" gibberish, but it's the end result that matters. With him in charge and a cadre of developers and other greedheads overseeing city government, we could be just a couple of years away from our own Naked Bike Race. And that's when I move to Houston.

Ouch. Behind Albany, NY. I almost spent a year in school in Albany in '76. The place was an utter cesspool. Thank goodness that university in Boston let me in at the last minute. But a year of that line of study was more than enough chasing my father's dream for me. And I moved here right afterwards. To think the city I once loved deeply has fallen this low is both sad and more sobering than I care to think.

Hey, we beat Fresno AND Birmingham, Alabama. Isn't this cause for celebration?

One of my cousins spent a few years working for Head Start in Albany. She ran into problems with an old boy political machine and had no trouble believing what I told her about Portland. She even refused a tour of downtown, having seen enough downtowns revitalized using no-bid contracts without regard for who was being displaced.

We visited Powells and Hoyt Arboretum instead.