The Willamette may be clean, but it is late October so the water is cold!
Not that anyone at city hall would notice.

Next on the agenda is to blow up the Marquam and bury I-5 on the eastside so they can turn the CEID into the next Pearl. It's more waterfront Willamette Riviera for the developer class. Billions of public investment for the sake of those who call the shots. Real estate is a long con game, and you have to be at least a decade, preferably a generation, ahead of the pack go make real money. The big money long haul people in Manhattan barely skipped a heart beat with the last down-turn, and last I heard they are killing it right now with record sales. This kind of hype feeds a certain kind of public sponsored investment machine that is completely irrelevant to 99% of those who actually pay for this crap. Her article is sort of a Marie Antoinette "let them float" thing when you get right down to it. Chicago as some sort of an example of urban sucess? I've seen the stories about kids offing kids at an alarming rate in Chicago...it's an epidemic. Chicago is a very f-up'd place and I would never hold up a bunch of poor people floating in the lake on a hot day as some sort of Nirvana paradise. Just ranting I know...

An article about a river from someone who just got back from Harvard? Cue the Standells:

Dirty Water
I wanna sell you a story
I wanna tell you about my town
I gonna sell you a big fat story, baby
Aww, it's all about my town

Yeah, down by the river
Down by the banks near the esplanade
Aw, that's where you'll find me
Along with lovers, joggers, and thieves

Well I love that dirty water
Oh, Portland, you're my home

Just got back from Boston, you say?

They have their Big Dig. We have to be like Boston. Let's bury all the freeways in the name of "creating jobs" and "urban development" and "protecting the environment" and a bunch of other crap.

Swimming in the Willamette? I think that's one of those "you go first" propositions.

http://blumenauer.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1916

We have been hearing about the Willamette River seems like ever since that boat ride last summer, the Senators, Blumenauer, and others.

Sounds like a plan alright. Plans being rolled out, and now all the chatter about how clean the Willamette.

Under normal circumstances, fine, but I get this feeling something else is in the wings here. Cleaning the river is one thing, but are they promoting this and carrying on because the next step is for us to accept it being clean enough to drink?

Oh her. Didn't she write an article about the strip club in my neighborhood called the Pitiful Princess?

How strange that I, a resident of that neighborhood, have no problem with that establishment's name, but Anna Griffin, who only sets foot in Hazelwood/Centennial so she can poo-poo 'trashy' establishments that don't meet her sophisticated sense of style, thinks the name is worthy of censorship.

To hell with her.

Please, use Gov. Romney's phrasing: "H-E-double hockey sticks." Thank you.

This is timely, as Sam Smith has practiced more real journalism by himself than the entire Zero staff, and he is both deeply progressive and deeply skeptical of mafias of all kinds, including planners.

Bon appetit!

http://prorevnews.blogspot.com/2012/10/word-urban-density.html

Tell her what you REALLY think:

"During a live chat at noon Tuesday, Griffin will talk about her series and answer questions about her work and what the city faces. She recently spent a year studying urban planning at Harvard as part of a Nieman Fellowship, so she has brought that expertise into the reporting of the series and to her understanding of what Portland is tasked with as it looks at downtown. "

http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2012/10/downtown_portlands_future_live.html

I'd bet on the flack position. Either that, or she thinks she's a movie critic and she assumes that the only way to keep getting insider information is by kissing the butts of the people selectively leaking it. If that's the case, you'll never read anything negative about Portland politics from her, because her world will collapse the first time Sam Adams doesn't pick up one of her phone calls on the second ring.

When a reporter converts a PR release into an article, is that plagiarism?

It's all so hypothetically SimCity. "Living and working"....live there?....fine. But working? The game players don't even touch on the jobs component of the equation.

For a more practical approach, go here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/magazine/what-happens-in-brooklyn-moves-to-vegas.html?ref=magazine

D'ya see any major employers lining up for this gig? Didn't think so.

Move along....by streetcar....bike....walking...an just live in Portlandia.

Something is fishy with all this clean Willamette river talk. I too suspect preparation for using it as a water supply.

If it's clean enough to swim in, it's clean enough to ...

If Portland's civic leaders were honestly, faithfully concerned about the environment, they would realize that downtown Portland itself is a massive environmental disaster, built on old wetlands and marshes, that were bulldozed over and filled in by man, then raised up by man when the flooding Willamette River tried to naturally reclaim its ancient floodplain.

There is a reason Lewis & Clark made little to no mention of the land that is now Portland. There is a reason that the Hudson's Bay Company, and later the United States Army, put its outposts in Vancouver - predating Portland by 50 years. That downtown Portland is barely much over 100 years old, and yet certain folks have the gall to proclaim that for environmental purposes more people need to choose to live in downtown Portland over other lands, and other cities that have far longer histories...heck, Oregon City, Lafayette and Champoeg all have more of a claim to historic development than Portland (and we all saw what happened to Champoeg; Lafayette was bypassed by a railroad and dried up when most of its occupants - and the county courthouse - moved to McMinnville to be along the railroad - so much for using rail transport to build up existing communities).

That Portland was then bypassed by Seattle in the international trade business as well as supplying the Alaskan Gold Rush; Portland is a third-rate seagoing port (I guess it's better than some other cities, but hardly a Seattle/Tacoma or a Los Angeles/Long Beach). And Portland has done a good job pushing the maritime industry further and further north - at what point will Portland just cede this business to Vancouver that is working hard to further develop its maritime businesses (save for the Portland-style redevelopment of the Boise property?) Or communities like Kalama and Longview that truly want a "working river" that serves multiple interests?

Reminds me of the Lake Oswego canal that was dug to support the old time farmers.

Portland has an "Office of Working Rivers?" What the H-E-double TOOTHPICKS! ('cause most of the country doesn't know what hockey is)

Oh, it's the Office of Healthy Working Rivers. That's even worse.

With this new river-craze and all the money that could be spent likely having a direct benefit for only a small percentage of Portlanders; maybe we need a new tax on kayaks and canoes - a rowing tax - along with tolling the proposed beach to pay the cost of the price tag.

Erik H...... right on the money.
Who has been the largest toxic waste polluter in Oregon (maybe the N.West)?. Why yes the city of Portland water and sewer dept. has been for decades. The EPA has granted them exemptions in order to dump sewage into the Willamette System.

With all of the money that has been P-double E- D on The Crime Trains and Bozo urban renewal crappo we could have easily reclaimed the TOXIC river.

Do the people of the So What district realize that they are living on a giant Brown Field Site? Just wondering.