City or suburb? It’s not an easy decision

By Todd Murphy

The Portland Tribune, Nov 11, 2005, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Todd Murphy, a Portland Tribune staff writer, is considering many of the same issues facing young families in Portland today. Here is his story.

Cul-de-sac.

For most of our adult lives, neither my wife nor I could have uttered the word without sneering.

Cul-de-sac. You mean plastic, don’t you? Homogenized. Boring. Suburban. We’ve always said that last word in the tone we’d use for white bread. Or margarine.

Since we had left our parents’ homes, each of us had almost always lived in old houses. In 100-year-old neighborhoods. In houses with solid wood mantels and old creaky floors and drafty windows and rooms that never, ever had been called Great Rooms. In neighborhoods that had trees with wide trunks and low-hanging branches. Neighborhoods that had seen generations of kids on tricycles and then bicycles and then Ñ suddenly Ñ graduating from high school.

To us, these were the neighborhoods that defined a city. The neighborhoods that breathed with the city, felt it inhale and exhale.

Suburbs felt nothing, we thought. And breathed, well, breathed not at all.

So why did we spend most weekends in October driving farther and farther west of Portland, around the outskirts of suburbs, watching for “House for Sale” signs? Driving up one blind cul-de-sac after another? Peering at boring?

The short answer is: We’re not sure, exactly.

We still love our neighborhood, just north of Irvington in inner Northeast Portland. We love the fact that we can walk to the Irish pub down the street or to the Starbucks. We love that we can walk our 3 1/2-year-old twin girls to the playground at the local elementary school Ñ where in two years they could attend their first day of kindergarten, two blocks away.

And yet, here we were. Trolling the suburbs in our mini-SUV.

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