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Posted Sep 18, 2014, 8:37 PM
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Eurosceptic
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Join Date: Apr 2003
Location: Pittsburgh
Posts: 24,339
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Will Portland Always Be a Retirement Community for the Young?
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/ma...the-young.html
Quote:
Will Portland Always Be a Retirement Community for the Young?
Like many residents of Northwest Portland, Matthew Hale doesn’t own a car. Instead, he prefers to walk or ride the bus to the city’s innumerable coffee shops and breweries and live-music spots. On weekends, he and his wife have no problem hitching rides to the Pacific Coast or the Cascade mountain range. Everywhere he looks, Hale told me, there are people just like him — bearded, on skateboards, brewing kombucha. “It’s really chill,” he says.
Portland has taken hold of the cultural imagination as, to borrow the tag line from “Portlandia,” the place where young people go to retire. And for good reason: The city has nearly all the perks that economists suggest lead to a high quality of life — coastlines, mountains, mild winters and summers, restaurants, cultural institutions and clean air. (Fortunately, college-educated people don’t value sunshine as much as they used to.) Portland also has qualities that are less tangible but still likely to attract young people these days, like a politically open culture that supports gay rights and the legalization of marijuana — in addition to the right of way for unicyclists or the ability to marry in a 24/7 doughnut shop. “It’s really captured the zeitgeist of the age in a way that no other small city in America ever has,” said Aaron Renn, an urban-affairs analyst who writes the Urbanophile blog. According to professors from Portland State University, the city has been able to attract and retain young college-educated people at the second-highest rate in the nation. (Louisville, Ky., is No. 1.)
City dwelling is generally considered a good thing for the overall economy. Proximity and serendipity offer employers a better chance to hire the perfect person for a job as opposed to someone whose skills just sort of match, according to the work of Enrico Moretti, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley. Chance encounters in dense cities, Moretti has argued, lead to innovation, which subsequently leads to income. And as the baby boomers retire, the pressure is on the young and highly educated to spur urban economies. As a result, many American cities are remaking themselves to lure human capital, offering various perks, like cheap housing and tax breaks, in the hope that smart young people can attract others like them. The Greater Houston area has added more than a million residents since 2000, in large part through generous tax breaks and the growth of the energy sector. Las Vegas is in the middle of a privately funded $350 million project to transform its derelict downtown into a tech incubator. Parts of Detroit have more or less been turned over to the online-mortgage billionaire Dan Gilbert. Other cities like Austin, Tex.; Boulder, Colo.; Raleigh, N.C.; and Nashville have tried, in some way or other, to spark their own little Silicon Valleys.
Portland, meanwhile, has the opposite problem. It has more highly educated people than it knows what to do with. Portland is not a corporate town, as its neighbors Seattle and San Francisco have become. While there are employment opportunities in the outdoor-apparel business (Nike, Adidas and Columbia Sportswear are all nearby) or the semiconductor industry (Intel has a large presence in Hillsboro), most workers have far fewer opportunities. According to Renn, personal income per capita in the city grew by a mere 31 percent between 2000 and 2012, slower than 42 other cities, including Grand Rapids, Mich., and Rochester. And yet people still keep showing up. “People move to New York to be in media or finance; they move to L.A. to be in show business,” Renn said. “People move to Portland to move to Portland.” Matthew Hale may have all the kombucha he can drink, but he doesn’t have a job.
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