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Looks like all the Portland haters are out in full swing.
These two cities are a little apples and oranges. Well, more like apples and pears. Portland's downtown (including the Pearl and part of NW) is more user-friendly that Seattle's downtown, in my opinion. Not that it's better or worse, just different. Like Macs and PCs. Guess which one would be Seattle...
Here is an aerial photo of Seattle, I think you can quite easily see the "underdeveloped" portions of the city, which are at the fringes of the downtown core. You can just barely see the Space Needle in the lower right of the photo. The triangle in the bottom center of the picture where there aren't any scrapers is all land owned by a single family, the Clise family. Quite recently they were shopping it around to a buyer who could promise a grand project on the scale of Rockefeller center in Manhattan, but obviously the market cooled quite fast and they are just sitting on the land again.
WOOOOOOOW. Some of you are soooo off base it's not even funny.
I will readily admit that Seattle has twice the skyline that Portland does....but there is a reason.
And it has NOTHING to do with the "fact" that seattle is bigger, better, or "top tier". Portland doesn't and has never wanted to be part of the "skyscraper race".
Portland has STRICT height requirements on buildings. One reason being that the people of Portland as well as the Portland City Council (PCC) do not want views of Mt. Hood blocked off from residents in certain neighborhoods on the west side of the river.
I have also read numerous times that when architects propose new high rises (potential skyscrapers) to the PCC, they are required to take off 10-15 stories off of the design in order to build. Portland has nazi-like urban planning....
To me it seems like Seattle is a WANNABE Chicago and NYC. They just plop up tall buildings left and right to make it SEEM like its "huge" when in fact its really not. All you Seattle people always talk about how much bigger Seattle is than Portland...well i suggest you stop going by skyline heights and start looking at the numbers....
Portland's estimated population as of July 2008: 575,000 145.4 sq mi
Seattle's population as of April 1, 2009: 602,000 142.5 sq mi
Not really that much of a difference wouldnt you say? And yea i know Seattle has a bigger metro area and Boeing and Microsoft and this fortune 500 and that fortune 500 hundred but it doesnt change the facts that i just listed above.
So Seattle homers next time you think about saying how much smaller Portland is, remember those facts.
I give the slight nod to Portland because I had a better time there (and Seattle's rather meager public transit makes the downtown less accessible), but they are both fantastic and distinctive cities. The Pacific Northwest is probably my favorite region.
Portland is overall much less dense than Seattle. Even the Pearl is less dense than the densest areas of Queen Anne and Capitol Hill.
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