The responses are gutting
The responses are people who sound suspiciously like trust fund kids failing to comprehend inflation. Yes, candy used to cost pennies kids, but pennies were worth a lot more, and you got paid a lot less.
It’s not the numbers, it’s that Dream of the 90s that Portland still offered in the early 2010s – a survivable (outside the black “inner city”) economy with not-meaningful work that left manual-labor weirdos and college grads who could use a mouse with an opportunity to dabble and draw reward from “alternative” scenes where everyone was aligned with you against the world beyond
And in the course of this you’d do normal life event stuff like meet friends and mates, form households and careers anyway, only with better opportunities than you could get outside this world