You know I’ve abortively sketched it out elsewhere but here let’s fill out
The Portland Suburbs Cardinal Direction Representation Scheme
In which each quadrant of the suburbs around Portland, Oregon, takes on the physical form, character, and even similar history to those characteristic of regions elsewhere across America. Let’s explore:
West (Hillsboro, Beaverton) – The Northeast
As the streetcar suburbs stretched east across the river, the more established yet green residences of the Southwest quadrant (Portland has five quadrants centered on the rivershore in Downtown, the river cuts what would be “Northwest” in half radial-diagonally so that the half on the far bank from downtown, contiguous with Northeast and Southeast, is “North”) started making an automobile-enabled stretch up over the hills and into the far valley. Commerce and industry followed, in successive waves of residue-leaving modernization. The abundant hydro and power of the Columbia River, and a comfortable area to attract college-educated executives, scientists, and engineers to promoted chemical and chipmaking industry, and the area is now the “favored quarter” of the region, with best schools and incomes. (The regeneration of the city over the 1990s-2020s first started substantially as a dining/nightlife/culture destination for these types and then lured them to buy fixer-ups) This area greatly reminds me of the northern suburbs of Philadelphia.
East (Gresham, Troutdale) – Florida
The streetcar suburbs made it out east around to Mt. Arleta at about 50th, stretching past in patches. When, post-WWII, the built-up hunger for new housing met the automotive Mass Middle Claas this working-class area (I’m pretty sure The Simpsons “Evergreen Terrace” was Northeast) stretched out past the border of the city at 82nd and kept going until by the 230s they banged into the outlying towns of Gresham and Troutdale where the foothills to Mt. Hood start making the Gorge part of the Columbia River Gorge obvious. The area was built out on an uninterrupted shopping center/minimall road grid with less attention to amenities like parks or sidewalks, but the city had to annex it in in the 70s after the feds required sewage system improvements they couldn’t afford.
Some of the most Cascadian suburbs (traditional Oregon culture isn’t farmers, it’s forest laborers). When the Oregon timber industry fell apart in the later 80s and the city emptied out it got cheap, methy and criminal now increasingly brown and immigrant.
South (Oregon City, Clackamas County) – The Sunbelt
In range to the farming-based Willamette Valley, and having the most “country”-as-defined-since-the-1980s culture. Clackamas is where the guys driving lifted pickups to their construction jobs live. Oregon City is the first capital of Oregon, along waterfalls that required portage but also offered rapids for water power, and apparently a major center of white power for a few decades. Expanding in recent years, development tends to be commuter stuff built around freeway exits with first shopping centers with big box stores and restaurant chains, and “drive til you buy” housing developments beyond.
North (Vancouver, State of Washington) – The Northern Plains
You have to take a tedious route to get there and then they do stretch on, though you’ve never heard of anyone from there. Navigated by freeways for any distance though within a locality the existing farm roads do fine as arterials between some mix of cul-de-sac developments and old-fashioned “someone subdivides a plot into street lots”. Vancouver is a town, cause they did that once. Substantially puffed out by the kind of business park guy who would move anywhere if it gave him a few percent edge on a spreadsheet (WA has lower income tax and makes up for it with a sales tax Oregon lacks).
