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The name is everywhere: Schnitzer Steel. Schnitzer Hall. Schnitzer Properties.
Patriarch Sam Schnitzer fled from Ukraine to Portland in 1905 and started a scrap metal business. His son Harold got into real estate in the 1970s. Now under the control of Harold’s son, Jordan, the family empire owns 200 buildings.
But from those real estate holdings came something far more important: Over the course of 30 years, the Schnitzer family donated $80 million to various philanthropic Portland causes. They funded a remodel of the Portland Art Museum, paid for a new diabetes center at Oregon Health & Science University, and renovated a shabby venue for rock concerts into the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.
The current overseer of the family’s empire (now called Schnitzer Properties), Jordan Schnitzer carried on the family tradition. Though sometimes a polarizing figure, Schnitzer has for the past 25 years shared his vast art collection through the family’s foundation with more than 180 museums and exhibitions, often shipping works across the country at his own expense. (A series by contemporary artist Jeffrey Gibson, They Teach Love, is currently on display at Kennesaw State University in Georgia.)
Schnitzer has also funded art museums at the University of Oregon and Portland State University in his family’s name. In spring 2024, Schnitzer gave PSU $10 million to build a new home for its art and design school and maintain the campus art museum named after him.
Jordan Schnitzer says his family, like dozens of other families that came to Portland, built small businesses that grew. “It’s like building a house. You build the foundation brick by brick by brick. We, and others, were instrumental in adding our bricks to build Portland’s house.”
And Schnitzer has pitched in to give Portland a hand with its stubborn homelessness crisis, too. In 2019, he purchased Multnomah County’s new but never used Wapato Jail for $5 million. The county had sat on the property for years, saying it was too expensive to turn into a homeless shelter. Schnitzer turned around two years later and rented it out for $1 a year to Helping Hands, an Oregon nonprofit that offers shelter beds.
“What was always inculcated in me by my parents was: The riches of a city are its citizens,” Schnitzer says, “[and] to whom much is given, much is expected.”
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