The City of Portland is footing the bill for most of the roads you drive on, while missing out on essentially the only revenue they could receive from you, whet

The City of Portland is footing the bill for most of the roads you drive on, while missing out on essentially the only revenue they could receive from you, whether it be funding Tri-Met or paying for the other costs of running the city. Most of your waking hours are spent under their protection for police, fire & EMS, yet at most they are getting nominal taxes from your employer. Wilsonville, OR pulls a similar scheme wherby they have a large taxable commercial base, but since they have very few residents they need to provide little school or medical funding, thus making the tax burden on businesses there minimal. City Of Industry, CA does the same thing but to an even larger degree, and Intel Oregon liked to use this exact strategy to minimize their tax burden. When it comes to utilities, the cost to serve a house in Oregon City with Gas, Electricity, Internet, etc both for maintenance and installation is significantly higher. Where I could pull fiber to a 50 unit MDU in tens of hours and get a 40% uptake rate, suburbs and exurbs (which Oregon City is a mix of) would take me a few hundred hours to connect 50 homes, just due to the sheer quantity of extra wiring needed. Then you get into the uptake rate, and you are looking somewhere like 20% to 25% with a massively higher maintenance burden (somewhere on the order of 2x to 3x). This is why 3rd party ISPs and WISPs focus on apartments and condos, and why Centurylink covered Portland with fiber, but won't cover suburbs like Kent, WA with fiber. The ROI is bad, and doesn't make sense.