With threatening weather, we chose a 15-20 minute ride to SE Hawthorne to introduce some members to an older shop that we value a lot.   Its website clearly states its mission:

“Common Grounds Coffeehouse has been riding the waves of the specialty coffee industry for over 20 years. Although much has changed in that time, we continually aspire to represent the absolute best thing a great coffee experience brings us all: community. We believe that providing our customers with outstanding coffees, teas, homemade baked goods, and breakfast and lunch fare may bring them into the cafe, but it’s the community we all create that makes it truly special.”

To demonstrate their success at meeting their goal of creating community space, we again found H’s friend Bob having his coffee and reading the paper, 2+ years after our last Sunday visit.

Today’s discussion started with frustrations regarding the pushback we felt against improving our City’s bike infrastructure while cities across the country are instituting some impressive projects, and the recent design charrette for Sullivan’s Gulch where one presenter explained how NE Broadway is missing out on bicyclists’ presence because so many try to avoid the unsafe lane there.  It then morphed into a rich discussion of economist Thomas Piketty’s recent research/findings regarding income inequality, why such inequality is unhealthy for most countries’ economies, its relationship to environmental degradation, why this degradation is occurring in capitalist as well as non-capitalist countries, and how we fear that unlike previous economic/environmental prognostications (Malthus, Ehrlich) the world avoided, it might be too late this time.        4321 SE Hawthorne    commongroundspdx.com