Long-term Portland residents often mourn the scrappy, counterculture city they moved to in the 90s or early 2000s. Newcomers say they love Portland too. Who gets to define what Portland actually is?
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Add your commentThe honest answer is that the people who made Portland weird couldn't afford Portland anymore. The weirdness followed them to places like Astoria and Bend and Medford. Portland is now a very expensive city that has murals of the weird version of itself.
I moved here in 1997 when you could rent a house in Alberta Arts District for $450 a month and nobody had heard of Portland except to make lumberjack jokes. What happened to that city is called gentrification and it has a name.
I don't care who 'defines' Portland. I care whether my neighbors know my name. I care whether the business owners on my block recognize me. I care about community density. A lot of what people are mourning is just the loss of that at neighborhood scale, which is a real thing.
keep portland weird was a slogan started in Austin TX btw. we borrowed it from them. if that doesn't perfectly summarize the situation i don't know what does
Every generation of Portlanders thinks they got here right before it got ruined. My friend's dad said the exact same thing about the 70s. The 'real Portland' is always the one from 15 years before now.
I grew up in NE Portland, Cully neighborhood, before it was cool. The families that made that neighborhood what it was are mostly gone. I am genuinely sad about this in a way that's hard to articulate without sounding like a reactionary, which I'm not.
The transplant conversation is hilarious because most of the 'original Portlanders' I know moved here from somewhere else too. Oregon is not a place people are generally FROM. We're all just arrivals at different times trying to claim seniority.
Portlandia both immortalized and killed us. The show came out, everyone watched it and thought Portland was quirky and fun and cheap, and then they all moved here.
I moved here in 2015 from Denver for a tech job. I love this city. I am a genuine Portlander at this point, I know the neighborhoods, I vote in every local election, I root for the Timbers. Why am I less legitimate than someone who got here in 2003?
I still find Portland genuinely weird and fun and interesting. Maybe I'm easy to please. Or maybe the mourning is for a specific version of weird that was also, let's be honest, pretty exclusively white and creative class. Just saying.
Nobody who's complaining about newcomers is complaining about ALL newcomers. They're complaining about the specific wave of well-paid tech workers who drove up prices. That's a class critique, not a gatekeeping one. There's a difference.
Mississippi Avenue is literally a cautionary tale that's given in urban planning classes. People in the neighborhood didn't want what happened to it. It happened anyway. Someone benefited. It wasn't them.
my personal hot take: the real Portland is Gresham and always has been. Working people, diverse, unglamorous, completely ignored in every 'Keep Portland Weird' conversation. That's the actual city.
Can we talk about how McMenamins — which everyone mocks as tourist-y now — was genuinely innovative and important for Portland's identity in the 80s and 90s? Context matters. Things that were once authentic become institutions become clichés. It's just time.
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