The whole city is seriously liberal. Avoid the entire east side except for maybe a little further out, Happy Valley might work for you. The SW Hills close in (Bridlemile) has rated 10 schools and might be a little more conservative, but if you want to get an idea just how liberal the city is read an issue of the Oregonian. Check out Lake Oswego and West Lynn as both have better schools, but good luck getting a decent house in any of these better areas for $400k. I'd stay in Tulsa unless you are really unhappy there.
alexia | Portland, OR | Report Abuse

Make sure to get a house with space for your children as they will be inside 300 days of the year.
Michele | Marana, AZ | Report Abuse

Portland is a beautiful city – in August and September. Maybe the best place in the whole country to be those two months. Otherwise, it is an overpriced liberal hippie city so jealous of Seattle it can barely stand itself.. The skies are grey and rainy from Halloween to the 4th of July every year. You will literally goes weeks without seeing blue sky or sunshine in the winter. It is not the rain that makes it depressing, it is the endless days of grey skies. You mentioned being conservative which is going to be an issue for you in the Portland metro area. Portland is liberal to point of being ridiculous – repetitive protests and demonstrations every time the hipsters don’t get their way. Watch the TV show Portlandia – it truly is not an exaggeration of the lifestyle in Portland. We lived there for 10 years and loved the natural beauty, but eventually got tired of the constant grey overcast skies and Eurpean wanna be politics, and endless tax increases. If you are liberal, LGBT, love to smoke pot, and believe in Bernie Sanders politics, you will love it. If not, you might last for a couple of years before you are looking for an exit.
Lake | Beaverton, OR | Report Abuse

My husband and I are in our late 50s and grew up in Seattle. I also used to live in Tulsa and quite enjoyed it. We have been in the Portland area (PDX as it's known) for 17 years and this city is not for the politically faint of heart. The extreme liberal slant can cause the extreme right to come out as well. Not a lot of in between at least that you can talk about openly. It is one of the least "churched" areas in the country but there are church communities that are nice, but nothing like Tulsa. People are standoffish, smiley but not warm and unless you are totally into whatever they are into, strong bonds have been hard to come by. We have been fortunate to live in Lake Oswego and find a neighborhood that is very unusual, very nice people on our street that we've gotten to know. Lake Oswego is also very full of money and often full of itself, so we consider ourselves very lucky to have found nice ordinary folks. Saying that, the housing prices are around $500,000 for a very modest small home with very small yards right next to your neighbor. This isn't just in Lake Oswego, but in Portland as well. Portland has very high taxes, beware and the city always wants more. The groceries are very expensive, the roads are poor and they are trying to make bicycles the preferred mode of transportation. The schools all vary like any city, Lake Oswego schools are very good. The West side of Portland, Beaverton is crawling with people and the houses are cookie-cutter, but expensive. The traffic everywhere is horrible with few back routes. This winter has been another nightmare for the area as the city does not clean streets, but leaves people stranded at the top of hills til the snow melts. Oh, and the city streets are full of homeless people in tents. I hate to be so negative, but this place is not my cup of tea and we are considering relocating after retirement. Overall, this area is beautiful to look at when out travelling around and paradise if you ski, hike, drive a subaru and like travel to the beach on a regular basis. Otherwise, it's constantly raining except for the occasional summer sun. That's beginning to really get to me. Good luck, I hope you make the right decision.
Patty | Lake Oswego, OR | Report Abuse

If I were in your position, I'd stay away. This place is a freaking joke. I've lived here since 1996, aside from some travel while in the army. I'm only on this website to find other places to live. $400k? Why would you want to be one of the many americans who overextend themselves by paying so much money for a house? It's a very unreasonable way to live for most people. However, you could consider it an investment because the cost of housing continues to rise on an unpredictable scale. In general, this is the most hippie-filled city I've ever seen! It ranks very high in the "least manliest cities," according to this website. That doesn't surprise me, since it's rare to find someone who doesn't know how to change his own oil or a tire on his overpriced foreign car. I, too, lean to the right, and I am incredibly out-of-place as a result. Another poster was correct in writing that people throw nasty fits when they don't get what they want, even though the large majority voted in their favor. That doesn't make much sense, does it? Currently, I live in Sherwood, OR, which is in the Portland-metro area. It's a more expensive suburb, which puts the commute times close to an hour on a reasonable day. It's ridiculous. Did you read about the growth statistics on this website? Higher than 40% in a half generation is a reason to consider other options, if you ask me (and you kind of did). I worked in EMS here for 8 years, and was always very aware of the traffic patterns. It has increased an incredible amount in that timeframe. Who wants to live in a city where 10% of their day, ergo their lives, is spent just going to work and home? Philosophically speaking, how does that mean a happier person can thrive here? At what point is family time important? The big city life may be for you, and I will personally (and very subjectively) vouch that the Portland metro area - which has well more than one million people - is greatly better than Tulsa in so many regards, but it's unkindly different. People are generally very careful drivers, and most just kind of go the speed limit, myself included. This is much different than the majority of what I've seen on California and Washington roads, so that's a positive. No place in this metro area leans conservative. In fact, you're probably never going to find a right-leaning area within a 30-minute commute unless your commute is by helicopter. 30 minutes... that's a joke. Pretty soon this place is going to be like SF, which is horrible! An hour will be the new norm, and desired standard if we keep getting California implants. The “secret” is out, I guess. I'm not cynical by nature, and for many years I said I loved it here. Being a geology student, this place has been great to me. It has more volcanoes in the city than any other city on the planet, which is, if nothing else, simply interesting. Mount Hood is generally referenced as being about 60 minutes away, and it's true as far as I'm concerned, weather permitting. In terms of the weather here, don’t let anyone frighten you about the gloom of the overcast. It certainly does exist, and I’ve found one source that has averaged Portland as having 255 days per year of overcast, with and without rain. However, it’s not a deal breaker for most, as the climate is moderate, with below freezing temperatures as a fairly rare occasion, compared to many of our neighbors and other northern states and cities. The ocean is nearby, and so is some of the best fishing in the U.S. I’ve personally climbed Oregon’s tallest mountain, skated, surfed, and caught an 8-foot sturgeon all in the same week. It’s worth mentioning that I could have done this in a single day, but I was trying to enjoy my vacation. To top it off, I did it all within an hour-and-a-half from my home in Sherwood, with the longest commute being the surfing near Seaside, in the northwest corner of the state. You can consider Vancouver, Washington. It borders Portland, and is much less expensive. The traffic in and out of Portland from the ‘Couv has been pretty crappy for as long as I remember, but it’s getting so much worse. It is an everyday occurrence to see bumper-to-bumper traffic until people are on the north side of the river (into Washington state). There is a carpool lane, but it operates 3-hours per day, and only stretches for a few miles on the interstate, really serving no positive purpose for commuters. I’ll wrap it up by writing that if there were half the number of people, the cost of housing would be lower, which would help convince me to stay. However, I’d still be constantly bumping into hippies and liberal crybabies everywhere I go, so that’ll probably drive me out of the city. But if that were to become a non-issue, I’d love to stick around, provided everything else fell into place. More people means higher costs and lower housing availability (which by the way is considered a “crisis” here currently, but that’s more focused on rental properties). That “high paying job” you speak of will not mean much in a city that has multiple sources recently citing that $65k/year is the poverty line for a family of 4 in Portland proper. Once I finish graduate school, I’m getting the heck out of here. How’s Tulsa?
Stephen | Sherwood, OR | Report Abuse

If I were in your position, I'd stay away. This place is a freaking joke. I've lived here since 1996, aside from some travel while in the army. I'm only on this website to find other places to live. $400k? Why would you want to be one of the many americans who overextend themselves by paying so much money for a house? It's a very unreasonable way to live for most people. However, you could consider it an investment because the cost of housing continues to rise on an unpredictable scale. In general, this is the most hippie-filled city I've ever seen! It ranks very high in the "least manliest cities," according to this website. That doesn't surprise me, since it's rare to find someone who doesn't know how to change his own oil or a tire on his overpriced foreign car. I, too, lean to the right, and I am incredibly out-of-place as a result. Another poster was correct in writing that people throw nasty fits when they don't get what they want, even though the large majority voted in their favor. That doesn't make much sense, does it? Currently, I live in Sherwood, OR, which is in the Portland-metro area. It's a more expensive suburb, which puts the commute times close to an hour on a reasonable day. It's ridiculous. Did you read about the growth statistics on this website? Higher than 40% in a half generation is a reason to consider other options, if you ask me (and you kind of did). I worked in EMS here for 8 years, and was always very aware of the traffic patterns. It has increased an incredible amount in that timeframe. Who wants to live in a city where 10% of their day, ergo their lives, is spent just going to work and home? Philosophically speaking, how does that mean a happier person can thrive here? At what point is family time important? The big city life may be for you, and I will personally (and very subjectively) vouch that the Portland metro area - which has well more than one million people - is greatly better than Tulsa in so many regards, but it's unkindly different. People are generally very careful drivers, and most just kind of go the speed limit, myself included. This is much different than the majority of what I've seen on California and Washington roads, so that's a positive. No place in this metro area leans conservative. In fact, you're probably never going to find a right-leaning area within a 30-minute commute unless your commute is by helicopter. 30 minutes... that's a joke. Pretty soon this place is going to be like SF, which is horrible! An hour will be the new norm, and desired standard if we keep getting California implants. The “secret” is out, I guess. I'm not cynical by nature, and for many years I said I loved it here. Being a geology student, this place has been great to me. It has more volcanoes in the city than any other city on the planet, which is, if nothing else, simply interesting. Mount Hood is generally referenced as being about 60 minutes away, and it's true as far as I'm concerned, weather permitting. In terms of the weather here, don’t let anyone frighten you about the gloom of the overcast. It certainly does exist, and I’ve found one source that has averaged Portland as having 255 days per year of overcast, with and without rain. However, it’s not a deal breaker for most, as the climate is moderate, with below freezing temperatures as a fairly rare occasion, compared to many of our neighbors and other northern states and cities. The ocean is nearby, and so is some of the best fishing in the U.S. I’ve personally climbed Oregon’s tallest mountain, skated, surfed, and caught an 8-foot sturgeon all in the same week. It’s worth mentioning that I could have done this in a single day, but I was trying to enjoy my vacation. To top it off, I did it all within an hour-and-a-half from my home in Sherwood, with the longest commute being the surfing near Seaside, in the northwest corner of the state. You can consider Vancouver, Washington. It borders Portland, and is much less expensive. The traffic in and out of Portland from the ‘Couv has been pretty crappy for as long as I remember, but it’s getting so much worse. It is an everyday occurrence to see bumper-to-bumper traffic until people are on the north side of the river (into Washington state). There is a carpool lane, but it operates 3-hours per day, and only stretches for a few miles on the interstate, really serving no positive purpose for commuters. I’ll wrap it up by writing that if there were half the number of people, the cost of housing would be lower, which would help convince me to stay. However, I’d still be constantly bumping into hippies and liberal crybabies everywhere I go, so that’ll probably drive me out of the city. But if that were to become a non-issue, I’d love to stick around, provided everything else fell into place. More people means higher costs and lower housing availability (which by the way is considered a “crisis” here currently, but that’s more focused on rental properties). That “high paying job” you speak of will not mean much in a city that has multiple sources recently citing that $65k/year is the poverty line for a family of 4 in Portland proper. Once I finish graduate school, I’m getting the heck out of here. How’s Tulsa?
Stephen | Sherwood, OR | Report Abuse