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A tale of two cities: Portland offers a worrying example for Seattle

Aug. 11, 2023 at 6:00 am Updated Aug. 11, 2023 at 6:00 am
The skyline of Portland in June. This city of 635,000, home to the
world’s largest bookstore and majestic views of snowcapped Mount
Hood, has long grappled with homelessness. But the pandemic turned this
perennial problem into a desperate and sometimes deadly crisis that has
divided Portland over how to fix it. (Amanda Lucier / The New York Times)

The skyline of Portland in June. This city of 635,000, home to the
world’s largest bookstore and majestic views of snowcapped Mount Hood,
has long grappled with homelessness. But the pandemic turned this
perennial... (Amanda Lucier / The New York Times)More
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Jon Talton By Jon Talton
Columnist
Once upon a time, Portland was a quirky, endearing city with much to
recommend it.

“Keep Portland Weird” became a local mantra to encompass the city’s
eccentricity (even though the phrase originated in Austin, Texas). The
television comedy “Portlandia,” starring Fred Armisen and Carrie
Brownstein, affectionately parodied the city’s idiosyncrasies and ran
for eight seasons. It was where young people went to retire, or so a
joke went.

Nothing such as this would be applied to Cincinnati or Charlotte, N.C.

At the same time, the Rose City or PDX, take your pick, was also a
beautiful urbanist’s dream. It offered a real downtown, walkable
neighborhoods including the Alphabet and Pearl districts, and abundant
rail transit, along with Amtrak service at the stately Portland Union
Station. The depot was opened in 1896 and restored a century later.

This was a city that cared about itself, going back decades. For
example, a freeway that would have been rammed through Portland
neighborhoods sparked a revolt in the 1970s. It was canceled. Instead,
funding was directed to light rail. No wonder several of my friends from
Phoenix moved to PDX.

That once upon a time was not so long ago. Indeed, it ran up through the
2010s.

Lately, Portland is known for rampant homelessness, drug addiction and
crime. Portland’s civil unrest after the 2020 murder of George Floyd by
a Minneapolis police officer made Seattle’s troubles tame by comparison.

Late in July, The New York Times delved into the problem, summing it up
this way:

“This city of 635,000, home to the world’s largest bookstore and
majestic views of snowcapped Mount Hood, has long grappled with
homelessness. But during the pandemic this perennial problem turned into
an especially desperate and sometimes deadly crisis that is dividing
Portland over how to fix it.”

The split is between compassion and open arms and citizens affected by
crime, garbage and encampments overflowing into sidewalks and
neighborhoods. Meanwhile, decriminalization of drugs for “personal use”
— including fentanyl and methamphetamine — has further riven Portland.
Sound familiar?

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, an anti-Trump conservative,
called the measure “a public policy fiasco.”

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One friend who moved from Phoenix to Portland told me, “Ten years ago,
Portland was an urban success story virtually without parallel in
America. Today, it looks like the road to the landfill and, in some
areas, the landfill itself. We did this to ourselves from equal parts
denial and sentimentality. Our preoccupation with grand abstractions
such as ‘social justice’ midwifed a crisis that will take years to resolve.

“How do you love a city that can no longer afford to pick up the trash
in its streets yet taxes its citizenry at extortionate rates?”

Was this always Portland’s destiny?

In 1900, it was still the largest city in the Pacific Northwest.
Portland — which was almost called Boston, the name being settled by a
coin toss — offered the largest inland port on the West Coast, along
with large manufacturing, timber and railroad operations.

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But by 1910, Seattle had overtaken Portland to become the most populous
city in the region — and never looked back.

This was a very different Seattle, too. It was a business city on the
make, with “Bill Luck” — William Boeing and Bill Gates with Microsoft.
Although one business executive commented that Gates knew more about the
other Washington than his home state, Microsoft’s co-founder Paul Allen
became a model civic steward for Seattle until his untimely death in 2018.

With a natural deep-water port and then the rise of Amazon, major
corporate headquarters clustered in the Seattle metropolitan area.

In the Milken Institute’s 2023 Best Performing Cities report, metro
Portland’s overall rank was No. 67. Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue ranked No.
34. The rankings covered 200 large metropolitan areas.

According to the Brookings Institution’s Metro Monitor, which looks at
economic performance based on growth, prosperity, overall inclusion,
racial inclusion and geographic inclusion, Portland clocked in at more
than a 16% increase in jobs between 2011 and 2021. Portland’s gross
metropolitan product grew by 31% over the same period.

By contrast, metro Seattle saw a 19% increase in jobs and 59% growth in
gross metropolitan product.

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Portland had Nike, Oregon’s only Fortune 500 company, but it was
headquartered in suburban Beaverton. By contrast, Allen created an
“innovation district” in South Lake Union, anchored by Amazon and 50,000
well-paid jobs as well as offices and laboratories for tech firms and
biomedical outfits. Starbucks’ headquarters is just south of downtown.

Seattle attracted high-end outposts of every major Silicon Valley
company because of a talented workforce, the University of Washington
and lower cost of living. Especially before the pandemic, startups
flourished here.

Portland’s “Silicon Forest,” with Intel semiconductor plants and
Portland State University, pale in comparison.

Perhaps because of its troubles, Portland’s population declined by
nearly 3% from Jan. 1, 2020, to July 2020, according to the Census
Bureau. Seattle added 1.7% more people.

But as my colleague Gene Balk recently pointed out, 7.2% of adults in
metro Seattle felt pressure to move from their neighborhoods because of
crime, the highest percentage among major U.S. metropolitan areas.

Maybe this offers a cautionary tale to Seattle, Portland’s big brother
to the north on the Amtrak Cascades line and Interstate 5. Maybe the two
cities are in the same dilemmas.

The new Seattle City Council looks to be unsettling like the old one,
albeit without Kshama Sawant. For example, Andrew Lewis, who was
initially in favor of defunding the police only to walk it back and
voted against prosecuting public drug use and possession, won the most
primary votes in his district.

This promises to complicate Mayor Bruce Harrell’s plans to fight crime,
“reactivate” downtown — and avoid the fate of Portland.

Jon Talton: jtalton@seattletimes.com; on Twitter: @jontalton. Talton
writes about business and the Pacific Northwest economy in the Sunday
Seattle Times.

There is no “cautionary tale” here for Seattle. Sorry.

Seattle is and has been night and day a better city than Portland
forever. Seattle is home to Boeing (regardless where corporate
headquarters are) Microsoft, Nordstrom, Starbucks, Amazon, Zillow, And
scores of other startups that grew over the past several decades like
RealNetworks, etc.

Portland has had Nike. I’m Beaverton. And some intel chip factories out
in the hinterlands.

Seattle has elected a new Mayor who appears to be cleaning up downtown
and getting rid of encampments. Seattle for fed up and got rid of the
likes of Lorena Gonzalez last election and chose Harrell and a couple
other council members who appear to want the city to be clean and safe.

The reason Portland is having trouble “coming back” is because it really
was never “there” in the way Seattle was and is.

Seattle will be just fine.

Portland was a sketchy place even before BLM. A walk along the
Willamette R. would reveal hundreds of youth sleeping under the bridge
abutments. All they needed was a catalyst in the form of defund the
police. Having a nut for a mayor didn’t help.

This article fails to mention how employers' high turnover policies and
the failure of states to enact serious rent control have contributed to
the problem. Public policy, even from the allegedly progressive side, is
enabling high turnover employment and maximizing return on investment as
its underlying assumptions. It's not just a law enforcement problem. The
entire social fabric of the US has been destroyed by the lack of
permanent jobs and because of how maximizing ROI as the highest value
results in the exploitation of workers and soaring rents. We have fake
progressivism here rather than regulated business. And if you oppose it,
you're targeted for not being a Pro Business Democrat. You can't run for
office opposing these principles because the well-funded interests will
spend large amounts of money to defeat you. The result is phony
progressivism spouting ideologies rather than advocating for the real
solutions.