Last week, I wrote about ninth amendment permits us the right to create a toxic environment through local legislation. I just happened to run across this article titled ‘Where People In Portland Oregon Are Moving To the Most’. It is really misleading because it talks about the top 50 cities about where people are coming from or going.

I made that statement last Monday using hearsay and not documented facts. I guess that is why I am not exactly a journalist. However, when I analyze the data I think that it supports my case exactly. So if this was a court of law, I would parse this list into bits and justify my claims last week.

According to the data, the majority of the changes were incoming. The were large slices were from San Diego, LA and the Bay area. Like I said last week, “a better California”. There were also big numbers from Chicago, Boston, New York/Jersey, Atlanta, Dallas, St Louis, Washington DC and other large metro areas. Again, who wouldn’t want to leave most of those places?

Many of the moves within the state are pretty understandable. When I graduated college, I too moved to the Portland metro area for opportunity. My professors only knew of one business that hired chemists in the area. At that time, I wasn’t ready to give up on Oregon with all of our family here, so Portland was the obvious choice.

It is the leaving that I found more interesting. There were three exceptions to places that were less conservative: Corvallis and Eugene which are both college towns that have 20,000 students and all of their support for that effort and Seattle. I don’t have a good grasp of that one.

I feel like Seattle and Portland have always been close. They share the same geographic positioning and climate. They are separated by about 3 hours of freeway and are similar in demographic makeup. My sister lives in that area, so I have been there some. From my long held opinion I have felt like Seattle was a more serious, mature and conservative Portland. That is how I am going to categorize that move. It does seem like the gap is narrowing between the two, so I would consider someone moving there a new start.

The balance of the other moves out are to places that I would consider ‘free-er’. They all would have lower tax rates for sure and definitely a more conservative mindset. Both high on the list Salem and Longview are commutable to Portland. Places such as Kennewick, Bend, Spokane, Salt Lake City and Boise fall into the American Redoubt portion of the country.

Others made the list as ‘I can see that’ such as Houston, Tucson, Phoenix and Las Vegas. Although I don’t know a lot about the politics, at least from a tax standpoint are more conservative.

From 2010-2019, Oregon was the number one destination for people moving into the state for several of those years. By far and away, those people moved into the Portland area. That also skews the analysis a bit. For sure a lot of people moved in, but when you look at the statistics, a lot moved out too as a result of ideological displacement. I have said it multiple times, that this is not the state that I grew up in. The left/right equilibrium no longer exists and this state has become politically unbearable for the moderates.

End Your Programming Routine: I didn’t cover everything here. There are some outliers still like more people moved to Philadelphia from Portland. I found the article in the link very interesting.  From a trend standpoint, I think it is pretty clear that that the data supports my accusation last week.