Neither JK nor I have (although I'm speaking for JK without knowing him) nothing against shopping local. What irks me is the 'holier-than-thou' attitude taken by those who think that local is superior to big-box. Is it? Sometimes it is and sometimes it's not. For decades upon decades it's been okay to patronize either store, neither the store nor their employees nor the customers were 'judged'. Now there is a large group of people who essentially condemn big-box stores, they condemn the people who work in them and they condemn people who shop there.

Would I rather go to starbucks or to the local coffee shop. Well based on the last time that I stopped in at a 'local' coffee shop and got slow service and coffee that I was less than impressed with I choose starbucks.

JK's sarcasm is a bit on the mark but the flaws that are showing up in this master plan continue to be ignored by the master planners. You can build multi-use buildings but do the folks that live above really work in the businesses below? If we are at 10% that do I'd be surprised. Rather, we have folks living in the suburbs who commute to jobs in downtown and folks downtown who commute to jobs in the suburbs. When you combine that with how unfriendly Portland is to business (take the fur store as an example or the huge city business taxes that drive businesses out as another example), it becomes a situation that won't go away no matter what a master planner's dream.

Oh and note, we still haven't seen the numbers for bike riders in Dec, Jan, Feb and March. Wanna bet as the weather gets better we start seeing all kinds of numbers about the bike riders?