Portland Hipsters Are Pissed That They Can No Longer Afford Rent With No Jobs
Source – Susan Langenes and her husband, both professional musicians, lived for over a decade in an inner neighborhood apartment complex with other artists. They created a community, cooking together, gardening and playing music together.
But last year, when their building was sold, the tenants received no-cause evictions. After new owners renovated the complex, Langenes said, rents tripled. She and her husband ended up in Milwaukie, a small town five miles away.
To make ends meet, Langenes now works as a web designer and plays gigs only occasionally. The city she’s lived in for years, she added, has lost some of its friendly, creative culture — and forced her to change, too.
“That vision of Portland as a place where people can have the freedom to invent their own job and not have to fight the awful rat race to keep a roof over their head, it may be going away,” she said. “It makes me sad.”
What the fuck did we just read? These hipsters are up in arms because they were forced to “change” and get jobs? Newsflash hipsters, your “vision of Portland as a place where people can have the freedom to invent their own job” that’s supposedly “going away” isn’t real. What is real, and normal people usually realize after 10 years, is that your time is up. Once you’ve lived with a bunch of other people in your band for over a decade it’s time to either grow up and get a job or move the five miles to Milwaukie.
Listen, I’ve got no problem with people living in communes and creating music or art or whatever. If you want to hold on to the dream that’s fine, but don’t start bitching and moaning that you can’t do it in a freshly remodeled complex in the heart of the city. That’s just not the way the world works. If you want to garden and play music nobody likes with a bunch of other single speed cyclists then you have the same two choices every hipster faces at some point in life.
You can either build yourself a yurt in the middle of nowhere and start a Kale farm, or you can stay in the city by getting a good paying tech job for some startup that you think is somehow socially responsible just because they have bean bag chairs and ping pong tables. The choice is yours.