Clark County Eviction Forms: Fill & Download for Free

Depends on how you define “quality of life.” If you look at the “best of” lists that business magazines publish, the emphasis is on costs for housing (tailored for wealthy people), jobs (again, tailored for wealthy upscale folks in IT, banking, or land speculation), and security (the crime rate and how well the police respond).But if you’re below the “median”—which is a lousy way to determine how well an individual or family can survive in this cutthroat economy—Portland is not particularly high quality. People earning less than $35K a year struggle—badly. Housing prices are ridiculously high within three to eight miles of the city core and infrastructure funds are unevenly and unfairly distributed—which means that a lot of areas east of the Willamette have pothole-filled roads, the schools are shabby and slowly closing, one by one, police response is slow and often unhelpful, and the homelessness situation is bad and getting worse.Costs are through the roof and about to achieve escape velocity. As I noted, it’s impossible to buy a good home near the city core for any reasonable amount and the homes in the older neighborhoods often require a lot of renovation. Many aren’t worth it and the land speculators that buy up these depressed properties usually tear them down and put in expensive apartments—which are about 30–40% empty because no one can afford them. The tenants the companies want usually prefer living downtown or in the already gentrified neighborhoods. So there’s a lot of available housing, yeah, but you won’t be able to afford it.Food is expensive. Portland is beginning to develop “food deserts,” neighborhoods where the closest supplier of healthy, fresh food is many blocks, sometimes miles away. Yes, Portland has a really terrific transit system—but even that is getting expensive and the emphasis is shifting away from buses to light rail with fixed stations that are a pain in the ass to get to and from—especially if one has a cart-load of groceries for a family of four.Gasoline is expensive—but isn’t that the story everywhere? Alternative ride-share programs are a scrambled mess. When I lived there, both Uber and Lyft gave me a world of shit because I’m trans. (A Russian driver threatened to leave me on the freeway but I had my phone out and ready to call 911, so he just cussed at me a lot.) There’s always Zipcar. They’re fairly affordable but there aren’t enough of them and the locations are concentrated near the city core.Politics. O lord have mercy but Portland has always had weirdly screwed-up politics. As near as I can tell—because I’m living in Tucson right now, but I’ve been following this very closely—the City Council are all at each others’ throats. The NGO business alliances lobby for lower taxes on the megacorps, the Council bickers among itself about racial tensions and police misbehavior (both of which are not new and of real concern), and the land speculators and scumbag property management companies merrily jack up prices, ignore maintenance issues, and just love to evict, evict, evict their tenants. (Gives them an excuse to raise rates) They’re talking about rent controls. Wake me up when that happens, will you? Sometime in the next century.Portland has white supremacists crawling out of their meth labs up in St. Johns and the Tualatin Valley to ally themselves with the Proud Boys and other johnnie-come-lately’s (they’re almost all from out-of-state) to clash openly on the streets with the antifa dissidents. (Hint: if you see such a demonstration downtown, walk the other way, fast. Tear gas can be very hard on even healthy people)Wait! Is there a silver lining to this terrible dark cloud? Why yes, yes there is. Ganja is cheap and legal. The scenery is beautiful—maybe four or five months out of the year. The rest of the year, it rains buckets and the clouds never part. The people are, for the most part, very friendly and entertainingly weird. The restaurants are terrific and the food carts are awesome in the extreme. Powell’s Bookstore is still a National Treasure and the main branch of the Multnomah County Library has to be seen to be believed. The city is jammed with good community colleges and three major world-class universities—I should know, I graduated from Portland State—and the art and music scene is still remarkable and very satisfying. Not necessarily for the artists and musicians, though. The clubs and venues and art galleries screw their clients on a regular basis and it used to be possible for a player or a creator to make a reasonable living in Portland. Not anymore.I know this is true as well; I was a pro musician for nearly twenty years in Portland and somewhere in the late 80’s, early 90’s, the costs of that kind of profession began to grow untenable. So I retired, got married, and went to work for an autoparts chain—but that’s another story for another time.Sure, if you have a lot of disposable income and a top-notch job in IT or finance, you’ll love Portland. But if you’re just an ordinary person with an average job, don’t bother. You’ll go broke in a hurry and you might just wind up living under a bridge like a lot of people who also thought that Portland would be a nice place to live—until their job disappeared and they couldn’t find another.But I have a confession to make: I’m going back because I have a job offer there and I lived there for forty years and loved it, even as it changed around me in several unpleasant ways. I have roots there, friends and history and I actually miss the rain. I probably won’t live in Portland, but more likely across the Columbia in east Clark County. There is still affordable housing there for me and my sister to buy and both of us got the Call to come home and stand our ground in a place worth fighting for. I’m a cranky, crazy old trans lady with a master’s in rhetoric and composition and I teach English to undergrads who hate writing and don’t understand why they should study this thing called “rhetoric”—even as the rhetoric of media is warping their brains into pretzels. So I’m going home in about a year and I’m going to be the equivalent of the Dutch kid with my finger in a hole in the dike.What the hell, someone’s gotta do it and it might as well be me.

Yes, to pick a popular example.. When Enron went under, plenty of educated, young upwardly mobile professionals found themselves suddenly without employment and worse they were living paycheck to paycheck. There were not enough jobs to absorb the immense jobless population, some could not be taken in by families and others ran through their emergency savings quickly. Texas is not very good when it comes to helping people with unemployment benefits , food stamps and emergency support services. Many of these folks were denied services and as a result there were those that killed themselves at the thought of not being able to take care of themselves.Hughes Tool closed shop back in the 80’s (during the oil and gas downturn) and left many of their trained and educated diverse workers stuck like chuck. Plenty of their workers were in Hiram Clarke and lost their homes. More than a few people wound up evicted from their new homes in Glenn Iris, Waterloo, Almeda Plaza and etc.. , subdivisions of Hiram Clarke. They wound up right under 610 bridge, in the men’s shelters and in Houston’s downtown bum village.The Houston Medical center was another one of those that suddenly laid off a lot of workers unexpectedly. Many of the hospitals there were nonprofits that turned over to for profit religious groups. Highly trained and educated nurses suddenly found themselves terminated or laid-off in the early 90’s. Quite a few women went homeless and could not bounce back from a long bout of unemployment. What was so bad .. the hospitals had trained these women and begged them to remain long term. Then a few years later started importing subpar workers from the Caribbean. ( There were plenty of lawsuits regarding minor mistakes..) Other hospitals followed suit with importing nurses through agencies and more American medical workers lost their homes. They could not afford the rising rent and became qualified as transients..with no real permanent place to live.I work with young children and, during the last economic downturn, families are not bouncing back. It is disheartening to see more and more numbers of skilled, educated, and talented hardworking folks losing value to automated technology, downsizing, and needless layoffs. Many of the companies don’t even need to lay-off it was so that salaries could be reported as profit. So many children that were middle income now qualify for programs for low income, at-risk populations. Their parents are working in devalued jobs that were once middle income classed, but the pay is not enough to place the family into a stable home. Homes that use to cost 30k are now inexplicably $550k-$1m in our area..and there are very, very few jobs and businesses that will qualify for a mortgage loan or a salary that would justify that kind of commercial build. to move in to a less but still over priced 150k home..families would have to earn another 3–5k to pay for maintenance and gas to commute from xurban and suburban outlying towns inside the county.