Hello From Eugene!

[skikir]

Note: I wrote this yesterday after registering and when I hit post it said it would be stored until I registered or such and it seems to have disappeared. If it does come back then please excuse the double posting.

Other than it's central location to great outdoor recreation I wonder what brings people to Eugene. It's not the greatest place for job opportunity. I suspect it's the university that bring people here and then they stay. I've been here for 28 years when a rare job position was open.
The problem or dichotomy with Eugene politics is that you do have a conservative base of old time loggers, farmers, rural dwellers and business people who serve these people and they do exercise their right to religious freedom. On the other side you have a large transient liberal population attending a large (17,000? students) liberal arts university. They come here in the fall, vote in November and leave in the spring leaving the permanent residents with their vote and sticking us with the bill. With a large active cadre of activist campus organizers it is not hard to enroll a couple of thousand shiny new young voters. And, I would venture, there is no effort to make sure they register in the precinct of their home of record (the place they go home to in the fall and where their report card get mailed to.) I would bet that the greatest number of those new voters are registered in zip code 97403 and vote on measures on the ballot they receive for that precinct. I don't think it would be hard to enroll close to 10% of the total student body, well over a thousand. Being young, attending a very liberal university, would one like to offer a guess as to what the bias of that voting block would be? Many of our local elections are decided by less than a thousand votes.
We are having a debate as to extend EMX bus rapid transit to the west of town. There was a town hall meeting where people had the opportunity to talk for 3 minutes in front of the city council. 90% of the speakers were against it. One speaker for it was the university's student body president. For the first half of his talk he represented the student body and then the second half representing himself and pulled out and donned a banana yellow cape! It was so childish I had to laugh.
Of course, I imagine the university dwellers see no problem with this but, I would wonder what their reaction would be if they grew up and they lived in a liberal leaning community and the tables were turned and in their city they had The University Of The National Rifle Association. Would they be concerned about outside voter influence?

[Libertarian]

Originally Posted by rhubarb

I was born and raised in Eugene...how can someone despise the politics of this town? ...

Hi rhubarb,

I've heard on a forum (reddit.com/r/portland) that Eugene is the most liberal town in Oregon, so maybe "biggerjer" is a staunch conservative or something?

I've been trying to find a town in Oregon that I feel like I could call home and buy a house there, but my wife and I (both retired and in our mid sixties) have already lived in Medford and the outskirts of Portland, but from the little sightseeing we've done so far I could not find anywhere in the greater Portland area (including outlying areas like Sandy, Oregon City, etc), where I would feel safe and comfortable calling "home".

I must stay near enough to a hospital with a rheumatologist that it is within reasonable driving distance because of my rheumatoid arthritis and the medications I must inject to keep it under control, so that means living near a relatively large city -- but Portland is far too congested and crowded for my taste and I would have picked Eugene over Portland to try next except that my wife had her heart set on living in Portland (probably because of the relatively large Chinese population) but I think her attitude has changed since we've been here (it's not what she expected I suppose).

So now we are considering moving to Eugene. Perhaps you could help give me some insight into the "lifestyle" there so that I could get a feel for how well we would fit in. We are both retired aerospace engineers in our mid sixties. I'm Caucasian and she is Chinese. I'm a libertarian (meaning socially liberal but fiscally conservative) and an atheist, but my wife has no particular political or religious beliefs. Her English language skills are still somewhat limited (she has only been in the USA for about two years). I have an Oregon MMJ permit because the poison (methotrexate) I must inject every week to keep my arthritis under control causes nausea and vomiting and cannabis is the only thing I know of that completely prevents all that unpleasantness. I wonder how easy it would be to obtain for perfectly legal medicinal use in Eugene?

Based upon what I've said, is there any particular neighborhood or area of Eugene that you think would suit us best? Thank you.