Should I Really Be Worried That a Few People Are Moving Away From Portland?

Everyone needs to chill—the plan is working!

COULD BE WORSE: Walking along Northeast Alberta Street. (Tim Saputo)
By Marty Smith

I’m hearing a lot of sky-is-falling rhetoric about Portland’s declining population, but all I can think about is how it’s going to be easier to find parking. We’ve been wishing people would stop moving here for decades; should I really be worried that a few are moving away now? —Member of the Portland 20-Year Club

Way back in 2016, I coined the slogan “Make Portland Shitty Again” on the theory that if we could convince the rest of America that Portland was a terrible place, maybe they’d stop moving here and driving up the rents. Now it’s finally starting to work and everybody acts like it’s the goddamned apocalypse. Where, I ask you, is the gratitude?

My own megalomania aside, cities with falling populations can face some pretty frightening perils. One problem is that infrastructure expenses don’t scale with population: When the pool of taxpayers shrinks, suddenly there may not be enough money to keep up the parks (or the roads or the sewer system), and less money for services in general.

All this makes the city a less attractive place to live, causing more folks to leave. Property values start to tank. Soon, owners find it’s no longer worth it to maintain their buildings, which also fall into disrepair, leading to the classic urban death spiral we see in Rust Belt cities like St. Louis and Detroit.

But let’s not give up on Portland quite yet. It’s true that from 2020 to 2022 the Rose City was eighth out of 69 on the list of fastest-shrinking U.S. cities with populations over 300,000. But listen to the seven cities that shrank even faster: San Francisco, New York City, San Jose, Boston, New Orleans, Long Beach, Chicago, Cleveland and Detroit.

Sure, there are a few of the usual urban-decline suspects on that list (I’m looking at you, Cleveland), but mostly it reads like a “Top 10 Highest Housing Costs” feature overlapped with a “Cities That Let the Most People Work Remotely” list. Say what you will about San Jose, I don’t think it’s in danger of becoming the kind of place where landlords burn down their own properties because no one will rent them at any price.

So everyone needs to chill—the plan is working! Sure, it stings having John Cougar Mellencamp (among others) say mean things about us. But when you think about those rents stabilizing, it hurts so good.

Questions? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com.

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