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Portland is apparently a little less livable even for the rich, it looks like.
For the past two years, upper-crust British magazine Monocle—which caters to the sort of people who might pop in to Vienna for a great sausage stand on the weekend, or scout Rome's old Olympic Village for real estate—anointed Portland as the only city in America worth including in a list of the 25 most livable cities in the world.
Related: Portland is America's Only Habitable City, According to Notable British Magazine
We lost that status in Monocle's July/August 2016 list.
We're still one of the most livable cities in the world, at number 24; the top three are Tokyo, Berlin and Vienna. But Honolulu has leapfrogged us, landing at number 23, just a little bit better.
We are a lesser America now.
World-hopper Tristan McAllister's write-up praised us for our strong housing prices, population growth and silly "City that Works" slogan—the things many Portlanders fear or mock most.
Related: What's the Deal With Portland's Rising Rents?
We are also loved, of course, for our coffee, beer, late-night-dining, transit, biking and "world-class urban park," by which we assume he means either Laurelhurst, Forest, or Tabor. (By our personal count we've got a whopping three world-class urban parks.)
McAllister dings us for affordability worries brought on by our density-forward urban growth boundary, our diversity ("Portland is widely seen as the whitest city in the country") and our utter paucity of international flight connections (a laughable nine, as compared to Honolulu's 21, Canadian Vancouver's 64, and Munich's 231 out-of-country flights.)
But the most fun part of these Monocle write-ups is always the numbers they come up with to compare cities. Like Auckland in New Zealand, we have only one (mostly) daily newspaper.
Global warming, perhaps, has given us a relatively high 2,341 hours of sunshine—more than most cities on the list by far, never mind that Honolulu's 3,000 hours dusts literally everyone else.
Our 53 cinemas put cities many times our size to shame, but our mere 6 museums make us seem culturally illiterate compared to, like, everybody. Our 27 indie bookstores is great if you're west-coast or Australian, but really shabby compared to the hundred-bookstore cities of Europe and Japan.
Oh, and apparently our 7-minute ambulance response time is pretty good.
There's just one thing that worries us, because it goes right straight against the heart of Portland's traditional appeal: "Yes," writes McAllister, "the city is pleasant but many areas are too shiny and new, meaning it sometimes lacks character."
We are looking so hard at you, Division Street. So hard. Because you're making us worse than Honolulu to moneyed business travelers seeking "authenticity" and "character." That's no mean feat.
Willamette Week