I live inside Portland's urban growth boundary which limits building in the metropolitan area.

I have a degree in Urban planning and have worked for a number of municipalities in their planning dept.About 3 years ago I went full time RE.  

Having a piece of paper just to get a job can sound frustrating and that society is full of stupid games (and it is), but well, you gotta play the game sometimes to get out of the game (rat race).

It is odd how our society finds reason to levy more punishment against a sex predator than they do against a murderer.

Slumlords buy property and drive it further into the ground in the hopes that it will become part of a government-sponsored urban renewal scheme.3.

I'm hoping that the legislature here (with plenty of representatives that are NOT from super-lefty urban areas)  will be willing to consider that the downsides of allowing rent control would outweigh any benefits long term,  and there are other approaches to ease homelessness and housing availability crunch that should be considered instead (encouraging more housing construction, incentivising and underwriting riskier tenant pools instead of forcing landlords to take them; reinvestment in mental health and drug treatment programs and transitional housing, working with employers to site new job centers in underdeveloped/struggling areas, etc.)I'm certain that if the state constitution is amended Seattle will implement some kind of rent control.  

It is the myths of a deeply misguided society that spends its time keeping up with the Kardashians and spends billions of dollars a year on online gambling that tells us there is such a thing as life happiness and contentment, and my personal favorite, becoming "a success."

I personally have been doing business there for about 14 years now.. granted there are what I call run down areas.. but not really the war zones like you would get in a bigger urban environment or other cities in the mid west north east.. that city is a known rental market and we have done quite a few there. 

To be honest most folks spend too much time thinking market and then they miss on the stuff below, which is what really matters in a macro sense.Don't buy in the roughest neighborhood in the urban core.

People who still buy in Tulum today are hoping that Tulum will become another Playa del Carmen but that is very unlikely to happen for several reasons, the main ones being:1) Unlike in Playa del Carmen, it's impossible to buy a property close to the beach and certainly not at a decent price;2) Given Tulum's current and upcoming urban planning, it'll never have anything close to the 5th Avenue that made Playa del Carmen world famous;3) There is hardly any land still available for development in the area where visitors want to be in Playa del Carmen.