Urban Gardens and Eating Out in Portland

This short clip by Neighborhood Films http://neighborhoodfilms.net/ expresses perfectly the fusion in Portland of its food culture and urban garden culture. All about Besaws restaurant. I love Neighborhood Films' work.

Plus I love the inclusion of one my favorite songs: Wildwood Flower.

Rainy Portland Trip Postcard

A nice and mellow Portland postcard by Robbie Conaway : "Our trip to The Pacific Northwest where we went hiking and camping in Mt. Hood and Green River Canyon, explored Cape Lookout Trail, ate at the delicious local food carts, barbecued in the rain, fished for Dungeness Crab in Netarts Bay, and drank at the local wineries."

Music by Bon Iver. Here's how it feels to be in rainy Portland.

Summer Most Popular Moving Time

Summer months are the most popular time to relocate. Try to move before May or after August, or you might find movers and trucks booked out. Good thing is, Portland's summers tend to be dry and sunny and Californiate in nature, so there's rarely worry about moving in the rain.

When looking for a moving company, look into a company's ratings and history.

Complete the statement of customer responsibilities and inventory forms provided : the stuff you leave off the list is usually the first to go missing. (wink!)

Review more than one estimate; as they can vary widely. 

Always find out what the company will do with your stuff in case it can't be delivered at the right time: How much would storage cost? Do they arrange it?

For more tips: check www.ProtectYourMove.gov

Summer 2012 - Seller's Market

Tight Portland-area housing market brings stiff competition, bidding wars

By Elliot Njus, The Oregonian 

Oregon New Home Building Rises

Oregon's homeownership rate has fallen from 69% to 65%, reports Elliot Njus of The Oregonian, coming back into balance with rental housing. 

Construction of new apartments has started to climb in Oregon. In 2011, almost 2000 apartments within 80 buildings were given permits to build: that's half the normal pre-housing crisis figure, but has been enough to keep the construction industry above water, leading to some more jobs opening up in those companies that didn't go under.

Permits for new home-builds are also rising, compared to a year ago. 

Oregon home-for-Sale inventory has fallen, which is expected to lead to rising house prices. 

These are modest climbs and improvements, however, compared to the mid-2000's, yet these changes are grounds for optimism.

Postcard to Portland

Here's a sweet 4 minute postcard of Portland, produced by Sockeye Creative. Music by Portland performers MarchFourth.

Summer afternoons I can hear MarchFourth practice by the eastside waterfront...

Overview of Oregon's High Tech Industry

Want a reason to move to Portland? Want to find a job in Oregon's tech sector? While employment hasn't gone back to it's pre-recession levels, there is still quite a lot happening in Oregon's high tech sector.

Mike Rogoway of The Oregonian newspaper says Oregon's high tech sector is alive, growing, up and running, but still struggling.

• Oregon tech job numbers are nearly back to their 1997 levels (57,000 as of April 2012) but still way below their spike of 72,800 in 2001.
• Venture capital money is close to being back up to 2007 levels at 238.86 million (2011 stats)

Intel is the big name, employing 16,200 Oregonians, and it will add 1000 more workers in the next year and a half when it opens DIX, a new research facility in Hillsboro. (Intel's headquarters remain in California, but its most vital operations are in Oregon.) Intel tops the data center industry, with China, Russia and India becoming ever more important, growing markets for Intel chips. Intel's revenues grew 24% last year to $54 billion. Growth has slowed but profits remain high as the company starts seeing positives from the billions it spent improving its factory network.

Several publicly-traded tech companies live in Portland's suburbs. FEI Co, in Hillsboro, is an electron microscope manufacturer with both record revenues and stock prices. Its tools are key in Intel's labs, and it's expanding into biotech and academic research.

Mentor Graphics Corp. just passed its $1 billion in sales last year. A locally started Oregon company, it employs 1000 people in Wilsonville.

Hillsboro's TriQuint Semiconductor's revenues are going up since it bagged a contract that has every new iPhone using a TriQuint amplifier. However, its limited manufacturing capacity has frustrated larger contracts from being filled, letting investors down.

Other companies that occupy a niche: LatticeSemiconductor, and RadiSys Corp.

Many small but promising, privately held start ups are doing business near each other in Portland's Pearl District: Act-On Software, Elemental Technologies, Jama Software, Janrain, Puppet Labs, ShopIgniter and Urban Airship. (Mozilla is likewise planning to open a Portland office). Most do their part to help build the infrastructure of the mobile internet, but don't act as large scale, Silicon Valley-like magnets.

A possibly more influential and riskier venture:  Simple (aka BankSimple) moved to Portland in 2011 and plans to improve the online interface capabilities of banking and similar industries.

Oregon's fastest growing aspect of the tech industry is outside Portland. Data centers (for Facebook and Amazon) have opened in Prineville, Oregon. With their capital intensive facilities (they require hundreds of top-quality computers), Oregon's lack of a sales tax has drawn them here like bees to honey, besides providing an exemption from property tax on equipment.

Find Mike Rogoway's original story: "Investment in Oregon tech companies heats up..."

at The Oregonian.

Alternative Energy is Happening

In 2002 Oregon voters accepted Senate Bill 1149, enabling public utilities companies, like Portland's local PGE, to offer renewable energy alternatives. (The senate bill made into law what PGE had already initiated 4 years before: offering renewable energy to it's customers)

Guess what, a decade on, the program is #1 in the nation:

• Wind companies have invested 4 and a half billion in Oregon already
• Oregon ranked # 2 in the 2010 US Clean Energy leadership index.
• Growth in non-hydro renewable energy capacity has risen in Oregon 530% from ten years ago
• $143 million invested in commercial and private solar projects across the state

Which means, Oregon has avoided putting 3.1 billion pounds of CO2 into the sky. Just another reason to love Oregon's green.

Find a list of all the local businesses who buy renewable power from PGE at GreenPowerOregon.com

Stats on Senior Homebuyers

The Market Enhancement Group recently interpreted the latest data found in the US Census, and found that 5 million senior Americans plan to sell or buy a home within the next 3 years. 

Home ownership for people 65 and over is high, higher than any other age group.

Many plan to pay with cash from equity built in long-owned homes, and therefore won't need preapproval from a lender. Irrelevant to these senior buyers: worry about credit scores and down payment size.

More real estate findings:

• 31% of homeowners own their homes free and clear
• 68% of seniors own their homes free and clear, the rest will do so within the next 6 years
• 15% of senior homeowners plan to sell their home in the next 3 years to buy another home
• 94% of these plan to pay cash for their next home
• Only 1.6% of retirees are moving out of state after they sell their homes
• Florida used to be the main attraction with 1 in 4 retirees heading there, but that has dropped to 1 in 7 between 2005 and 2010. 
• Seniors are staying put: many are staying near to where they worked, only moving an hour or two outside the city, leaving high priced inter urban areas for less expensive property and taxes

In Your Portland Neighborhood

When I was little, our family was the first in our apartment building to get a color TV. All the kids came to crane their necks in our front door to see Sesame Street in color. Yellow big bird, Ernie with his orange and blue striped t-shirt, blue cookie monster. This was years before Elmo. 

I remember a song from that show: Who are the people in your neighborhood? There's the postman, the grocer, the auto mechanic. Even as a child, it gave me a feeling of peace and belonging to know that I lived in a neighborhood where other people lived, who did their work, and kept my world functioning.

Here in Portland's inner neighborhoods you'll find the printer, the professor, the jewelry maker, the barista, the tattoo artist. The singer, the saleswoman, the food cart guy. But truly, you'll never find them and meet them if you don't live in a Portland neighborhood.

A neighborhood is where you regularly travel. You set your footprint there and you belong to it. You are central to its workings, and your interaction with all the other people is what makes it a place worth being in. It's the place your memories are seeded and take root, creating your life.

A good neighborhood contains the lovely and practical things that compose your environment: the big trees, the diverse kinds of homes, the range of human expression in the shops and businesses people have individually designed and run, in the specialties they cook for you to eat. Portland's full of great neighborhoods.

Pocket neighborhoods in big cities are what make life grand, living there. When you live in a true neighborhood, you are recognized and others recognize you for belonging there. Belonging can be a rare thing in the world.

If you have what it takes to live in an exciting Portland neighborhood, you are already comfortable with diversity. That your neighbors may not live or look like you is cool. You know how to navigate city life, and you aren't afraid of it. It energizes, excites, and fires you up, at the same time making you comfortably at home. The character of the homes reflects the range of character of the people who live alongside each other.

You know who you are. Let me put you in a home in Portland that is rooted in its neighborhood, and let the life of depth and richness begin.

Incredibly Low Mortgage Rates...Still

Mortgage rates go up but still remain close to record lows

By The Associated Press 

Finding Home in Portland

Somebody asked me: If you could live in any city in the world, where would you live?

I love these kinds of questions, any excuse to dream my life...and began thinking of the most outrageous and interesting places where I could imagine myself living. Mumbai, Lisbon, Amsterdam? I'm not sure. Copenhagen? Definitely. What about closer to home: St. Paul, Raleigh, Austin, Boulder? Maybe.

But, to my surprise, I realized I already am living in the place that I most want to be: Portland, Oregon. There isn't any other city I'd want to live in. I chose it on purpose and love my decision.

This blog will tell you why you want to live in Portland, too.

And when you move here, I will help you find a home. Not just somewhere to live, a place to crash, a house, the address at which you park your stuff. But a home. Which means: a neighborhood, a community, a place to truly put down roots.