This is very much what I’ve been thinking about Portland but friendly reminder all the “Keep ____ Weird” stuff is it harkens back to a “weird period” usually starting around 1970 when the economy’s relationship to land radically changed and the “weird order” drew on a reserve of buildings built under previous orders that were not and would not have been built in a weird economy.
Housing shortages were actually a huge political issue after WWII, that’s what both urban projects and Levittowns come out of, and neither ‘50s suburbia or sometimes-starchy-sometimes-mean urban streets were really considered a frontier idyll, dreamers tended to be drawn to more outlying specialty outposts.
More broadly, the modern system of homeownership (30-year amortized mortgages on single-family spec-built individual plots with values slated to increase indefinitely) does have some issues and may be at the end of productive cycle
But the previous system, 5-year lump sum (usually turned over once, but watch out if there was a credit pinch, owner-built, a depreciating and filtering-down asset like vehicles such that a fashionable high-end district would be a subdivided slum in a generation) [farm mortgages were their own ball of wax] had its own problems, pretty clearly tending towards European-style class war
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