I'm feeling a bit stifled in my city and want to move. My priorities are $1500-2000/mo rent and a path to an affordable house (see: picture), a unionised city workforce, good greenspace with an extensive parks system, good biking infrastructure, a good public university, and a good political scene. That leaves Portland, Minneapolis, Chicago, and maybe an East Coast city I haven't researched yet. Of those, Portland is at the top of my list because I'm getting an ocean for Great Lakes prices.
What's bad about the city that makes people move away? Is there a better option in Oregon, especially one that would let me commute into Portland without whatever problems it has?
The gloomy climate is a selling point if anything. My bones yearn for what used to be English weather and Colorado's high desert water scarcity makes me too anxious. Is the Willamette river and that general surrounding watershed nice for recreation or is it too polluted like a lot of midwestern rivers?
Not sure about like swimming and water sports but it's a pretty clean river. The public parks are great though. And for a city this size there's a million special interest groups. Plus there's a small PSL presence.
I don't know about the Willamette but people do wind sports on the Columbia.
https://www.portland.gov/bes/check-rec
Seems like it's pretty decent and they test frequently.
Also, the rain isn't that bad. It's generally very light and the temperature is mild, as well.
The nice thing about Oregon is you can get "Outdoors" by driving an hour in any direction. Don't worry about the Willamette. There are many many rivers for outdoor stuff that are basically snowmelt clean. If you like the Great Outdoors Oregon might be your jam.
You will want to stay on the wetter Western Cascade side of the state, like Portland, Eugene, etc. Bend, while a great outdoors spot, is the beginning of the eastern Oregon high desert. Great place to visit for outdoors all year round.
The hour's drive to wilderness is the thing I love most about Colorado and why I moved here in the first place. People fly halfway around the world to visit the places that are casual day-hikes to photograph specific flowers or have specific lighting for me. At one point I paid like $800/mo to live next to the trailhead of a hike that gave me panoramic views of the Rockies and Great Plains for breakfast every morning, a really wonderful lifestyle that I want to maintain.
Willamette is safe to swim in except for during very heavy rains when the mixed sewer system gets full and sewage will go into the river (only happens once or twice a year, and only during the winter, when you probably don't want to be swimming anyway) and during algal blooms when it's very warm out (a capitalist created basically an algae breeding ground and has been ordered by the state to fix it, but is slow walking it obviously).
There's a public swimming dock on the river. It gets really popular on the days over 90. This past summer there were organized group bike rides every Wednesday to go swim at the river.