Readers have alerted us to a controversy brewing in the Hillsdale section of southwest Portland. Apparently some of the residents there are taking umbrage at the plan by Chase Bank to locate a branch in the neighborhood.

Portland's a funny place. On the east side of town, neighbors have to fight methadone clinics, gangster halfway houses, drunk tanks, homeless shelters, centers for the criminally insane, cell phone antennas outside their kids' bedroom windows -- on the west side, they protest Holocaust memorials, rec centers, streetcars, and bank branches. (Although Fireman Randy is about to stick the SoWhat District with an immigration jail next to a grammar school, which is deliciously ironic.)

Anyway, in Hillsdale, Chase and its landlord are apparently seeking a legal "adjustment" to build a branch that is less dense and has more parking than the city's straitjacket of land use rules normally allows, and some of the neighbors are vowing to fight it. (One guy even went so far overboard in his outrage as to have to take down an overheated blog post and apologize for what he said.) The location is on Capitol Highway near Bertha Boulevard, along a stretch of road that's already got lots of retail and several traditional parking lots next to the stores.

One gets the impression that the neighbors are more upset about a large national bank moving in than they are about the parking. We can't say that we blame them. We despise Chase and its ilk, and are happy to have pulled our measly accounts out of there after they stole our business in the Washington Mutual debacle.

Since we left Chase, its behavior has only gotten worse. And it's now actually taken over all of the financial functions of the state of Kentucky, and will get to use idle state funds to make profitable loans to its customers. These guys will never stop reaching into the little guy's pocket, and they operate with the full blessing of the Obama sellout team. (Or maybe it's the other way around.)

But we digress. One important thing that the Hillsdale neighbors can do if that branch does get built: never use it, under any circumstances. Better yet, informational picketing -- it can be pretty powerful.

In the meantime, it appears that the real estate in question has been vacant for a long time, and that any Portlandia dreams of a granola and bike co-op with five stories of creative class condos above it are never going to come true. Maybe the neighbors ought to settle for a bank branch, before the county decides to site a big, dense methadone clinic, with no parking at all, at that location, like it does from time to time in the Buckman neighborhood.