When I say ugly, this is what I mean

I know the people who live near it are unhappy.  Who can blame them?  Their space and light have been intruded on.  There was no parking allowance made for this building either.  And that is also taking its toll on the neighborhood.  I think the building is really inappropriate for its site.

source

And here is another one.  No yard.  Light taken away from neighbors.  And so very ugly.

source

It used to look like this before they put up those monstrosities on its site.  You can see that it had a yard and trees and fit with the neighborhood.  They divided the lot and put up two houses on hormones.  I think there should be a rule: a new house cannot be more than 10% larger than the average size of a house in that immediate neighborhood (excluding outliers).   And what happened to valuing trees and green space!

Some time ago (a year?) we went for a walk in this neighborhood, which is south of Division.  It's my favorite kind of neighborhood with modest comfortable old houses from the first half of the 20th century... lots of styles and fun things to see.  There were these new houses on hormones stuck in the middle of this neighborhood of much smaller homes.  Those new houses were so out of place, dwarfing their existing neighbors.  It was so evidently richer people taking over the neighborhood of poorer people.  Not improving it.  Just taking it over.

There were signs up from some developer who was snatching up properties.   I wanted to deface those signs and tear them down.  And an old institutional building had been torn down and replaced with those awful houses that looked like they belonged in the suburbs (if you read the article, the developer intended that).  I meant to blog about walking in another great  Portland neighborhood but I was so horrified by what I saw that I didn't take a single photo.   Nor did I blog about it.  Butit left a hole in my heart.

So please, if you are thinking of moving to Portland, don't.  It's a bad time.  We are suffering terrible homelessness, not enough housing, sky high rents and real estate prices, unbridled growth, lots of gang violence and shootings, and conflict on the streets amongst bicycles, cars and pedestrians.     I'm with Tom McCall.... come and visit but don't move here.   More people are making our problems much worse.