Pass the Kleenex. Never did Portland’s famed “Keep Portland Weird” sign promise to the skinny-jean, handle-bar mustached set that the city was to “Keep Portland Affordable for the Artsy-Fartsy Set”.

This story tells the tale of Susan Langenes and her husband, both professional musicians, who lived for over a decade in an inner neighborhood apartment complex with other artists. They created a community, cooking together, gardening and playing music together.

Until they received no-cause evictions. New owners renovated the complex and rents tripled. She and her husband were exiled to Milwaukie, a small town five miles away.

“That vision of Portland as a place where people can have the freedom to invent their own job and not have to fight the awful rat race to keep a roof over their head, it may be going away. It makes me sad.”-Susan Langenes

Steven Olsen, 31, moved from Missouri and hoped to raise his two children in Portland due to its progressive values (yay). He now works full-time doing medical billing and his wife works part-time at Goodwill, but a recent $200 rent increase is “forcing” them to move back to Missouri.

“It used to be you could live in Portland on a part-time job, pay your rent, pay your bills and be pretty comfortable.”-Steven Olsen

Sondr Engvaldsen, a self-proclaimed ““aging creative,” has also considered leaving Portlandia:

“The do-it-yourself artist, I don’t think you have much of a chance of making a living here, unless it’s a side hobby. It breaks my heart. I wasn’t planning to leave, but I’m scared I’ll be forced to.”-Sondr Engvaldsen

This article, originally published last month in The New York Post also suggests that “bringing up wages — up to $15 an hour, or more — could help.” Not sure how the $15 dollar hourly wage increase has really helped anyone to be honest with you. Employees are getting fewer hours reflected in their paychecks and customers are having to input their own orders and make payments on restaurant kiosks under the supervision of an employee who doesn’t seem to understand how the new ordering/payment kiosk works. Frustrating on both sides of the fence. Seems their progressive ideals are backfiring in their faces.

Call me heartless, unsympathetic and hard as I say this. I may be going out on a limb here but perhaps it’s time to drink your kale and dandelion smoothie, grow up and move out of the compound. Being “forced” to move five miles away from your city is not a real hardship. And, sadly, in order for people to “invent their own job”, unless you’ve inherited a large sum of money from a distant family member (who probably worked his or her butt off), you need to have some capital to create your “vision”. People are not just going to cut you slack because you are the “free-spirited-artsy-type”, naturally gifted or talented or you just perceive yourself to be that way. There are lots of talented people out there. Lots of talented people who happen to have the money to live inside of the metropolis. You can be one of them, too but chances are you have to work more than one part-time job (especially if you have two kids). Just saying. Life is unfair. Boo-hoo. Judging from this article, these people who are complaining about this situation are able-bodied individuals who can work full-time, 40-hour a week jobs. They can even handle a bit of a commute. My father-in-law and mother-in-law were in their 60s when they were pushed out of the lot they lived on due to increasing rent. The result was them ultimately having to move an hour and a half away from family. My father-in-law made the two-hour 4am (up at 3:30am) trek to the Seattle Shipyards until the day he retired. It’s called grit. If having to work more than a part-time job and living in Clackamas is a hardship, perhaps you should head downtown with your guitar and Bernie Sanders t-shirt and take a long walk along the western bank of the Willamette River and check out some of the other people who live in the city. They call the park bench their “home”. It’s called perspective.