It’s cleverly done but not specific to Clickhole’s conceit, I wonder how they apportion concepts between them and The Onion

I was aware of Pittsburgh as an alternative when I came to Portland and honestly that would’ve been the time to get in on the ground floor.

Why not? I dunno, the west coast vibe really is (was?) something, also Pittsburgh was foregrounding its eds-and-meds economy and even though Portland HAS been hanging a healthcare economy off OHSU it led with the “where young people go to retire” bohemianism and I like that

(Brooklyn AND Portland had a scene; Pittsburgh AND Portland had low cost of living…)

but now as it’s filtered into taken-for-granted that you’re “supposed” to live in a city the people moving to cities – Portland, Pittsburgh, any city now – are the same careerists that made the suburbs “the suburbs” when you were supposed to live there

and from a structural perspective I get that – those urban leaders that think the purpose of a city is to serve its inhabitants have healthier tax rolls with which to do that; those who know it’s to recirculate money through property development get a chance to do THAT

but I don’t like the culture it creates, and it especially grates when the new normies think city-dwelling exempts them, as if app coding all day and then having an IPA at the interchangeable brewpub is fundamentally different from filing TPS reports and going to Applebee’s