Portland In The Media

[downtownpdx]

Hey everyone, I'm pretty sure this thread exists somewhere but I can't find it so...

Just wanted to share some recent (last few months) glowing articles covering our city. I know none of this makes our problems with crime, homelessness etc. any better. But with all the negativity of the past 2+ years, it's nice that others see what we already know - Portland's still got it goin' on.

Time Magazine - https://time.com/collection/worlds-greatest-places-2022/6194446/portland-oregon/

Cosmopolitan Magazine - https://www.cosmopolitan.com/food-cocktails/g41741341/portland-oregon-food-guide/

Hemispheres Magazine (United Airlines) - https://www.hemispheresmag.com/north-ame...d-or/three-perfect-days-portland-oregon/

Esquire Magazine (we're #1!) - https://www.esquire.com/food-drink/restaurants/a41788671/best-new-restaurants-in-america-2022/

Travel & Leisure - https://www.travelandleisure.com/former-soviet-cuisine-portland-oregon-6831577

[uncommon.name]

Originally Posted by downtownpdx

Hey everyone, I'm pretty sure this thread exists somewhere but I can't find it so...

Just wanted to share some recent (last few months) glowing articles covering our city. I know none of this makes our problems with crime, homelessness etc. any better. But with all the negativity of the past 2+ years, it's nice that others see what we already know - Portland's still got it goin' on.

Time Magazine - https://time.com/collection/worlds-greatest-places-2022/6194446/portland-oregon/

Cosmopolitan Magazine - https://www.cosmopolitan.com/food-cocktails/g41741341/portland-oregon-food-guide/

Hemispheres Magazine (United Airlines) - https://www.hemispheresmag.com/north-ame...d-or/three-perfect-days-portland-oregon/

Esquire Magazine (we're #1!) - https://www.esquire.com/food-drink/restaurants/a41788671/best-new-restaurants-in-america-2022/

Travel & Leisure - https://www.travelandleisure.com/former-soviet-cuisine-portland-oregon-6831577

It's nice when publications choose to focus on the positive things rather than just the negatives. I feel like "news" organizations tend to lean toward the negative since it's more "newsworthy" to them. Portland certainly has it's struggles and issues it's working through right now, but it still has much of what has made it a great city for many years. Thanks for posting these!

[downtownpdx]

A nice piece in Travel & Leisure :

New Portland Rising: How Entrepreneurs of Color Are Turning Crisis Into Opportunity

Portland, Oregon, is experiencing an economic rebirth led by BIPOC entrepreneurs.

By Tony Perrottet

Tony Perrottet is a historian and journalist based in New York City. He contributes to Smithsonian Magazine, The New York Times, and WSJ. Magazine, and is the author of six books.

The backstory of Kann, a wood-fired Haitian restaurant, is not your typical rise-from-the-ashes tale. Gregory Gourdet, a chef whose parents immigrated from Haiti to Queens, New York, in the 1960s, started out with a two-day pop-up in the summer of 2020, when Portland was locked down from COVID and embroiled in Black Lives Matter protests.

His Caribbean-meets-Pacific Northwest cuisine immediately found a following. Four months later, Kann traded its digs at a grilled-chicken restaurant for the Redd, a “food campus” in Portland’s Central Eastside, where patrons dined on dishes like butterfish crudo with watermelon shaved ice. Soon after, Gourdet landed an elegant permanent home on Southeast Ash Street. A stream of accolades have since rolled in, including best new restaurant awards from both the James Beard Foundation and Esquire.

Kann’s ascent stands out as a bright spot in a city that has recently gone through some dark patches. Four years ago, this quirky and progressive town, famously satirized by the TV show Portlandia, was designated an “anarchist jurisdiction” by the Trump Administration after three months of protests. When the dust settled, the city found itself mired in another crisis: a fentanyl epidemic that led Oregon leaders to declare a state of emergency. Retailers like REI shuttered stores, camps for the unhoused sprung up, and real estate values sank.

But an unexpected silver lining has emerged. Restaurants, bookshops, and other stores owned by people of color have begun thriving, helped by public support, more affordable rents, and patronage from city and nonprofit agencies. It is a remarkable shift for a city with a complex racial history. As recently as 2016, Portland was dubbed the “whitest city in America” by the Atlantic. Now that image is finally changing, as entrepreneurs like Gourdet help lead Portland’s revitalization.

(continues) :https://www.travelandleisure.com/portland-oregon-diversity-black-businesses-8710229

[downtownpdx]

Interesting, thorough article on the state of the city:

Can Portland Turn a Corner?

The Oregon city once held a role as a leader in US urban innovation — until crime, housing costs and downtown vacancies surged. Now locals see signs of rebirth.

By Linda Baker
February 13, 2025 at 6:00 AM PST

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/...rban-model-is-seeing-signs-of-a-comeback

To sketch the changing trajectory of Portland’s status as a beacon of American urban policy, you could look at any number of metrics — the thousands of young people who flocked to Oregon’s biggest city in the 1990s and 2000s, or the crime and homelessness rates that spiked during the pandemic two decades later. Or you could just follow the bikes.


In the 1990s, Portland emerged as a hotbed for urban cycling in North America, building an extensive network of neighborhood bikeways and shaded bike lanes and launching community events like the Providence Bridge Pedal and the summer bike festival Pedalpalooza. In the 2000s, “it was off to the races,” says Jonathan Maus, publisher of the BikePortland advocacy blog. “We were golden.”

By 2014, 7.2% of Portlanders commuted by bike — by far the largest share of any US city.

But then the numbers started to reverse. Between 2015 and 2022, the city’s bike counts dropped by a whopping 45%. Just 2.8% of the city’s commuters were still on their bikes in 2021. One of the primary culprits, according to Maus, was a huge increase in solo car drivers. But he also sees it as a sign of diminishing political support in Portland, as issues like police brutality, disorder and public drug use came to dominate policy conversations.

“It was stagnation, decline and plateau,” Maus says. Until 2023, when bike counts ticked up by 5%.

There’s hope that this modest turnaround of the bike scene could be a sign of something bigger — a broader recovery for an embattled city.

(Continues)

[downtownpdx]

Portland #50 in 1,000 Global Cities Index for 2025

https://www.oxfordeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/OEGCI2025.pdf

I know it's another list but this is a very in depth look at cities around the world.

Nice to see, amidst post pandemic struggles, Portland has moved up in the rankings to 50th out of 1,000. Top local rankings are 25th for Environment (7th best air quality in the world) and 34th for Economics (large GDP and high incomes).

Anyway just wanted to share this reminder that our city has a strong foundation despite recent challenges exacerbated by media bashing.

Portland’s balanced results across
categories bode well for the city’s
outlook. It has a fast-growing economy
with a large high-productivity tech
sector, an abundance of natural
amenities and lower cost of living than
neighbouring cities to attract residents,
and an established commitment to
climate change adaptation. All in all, that
is a strong foundation for future success
in the Global Cities Index.

[mhays]

Interesting list, though we can all quibble with the criteria (p 70-72). But it's far too West-leaning -- 46 of the top 50 in the US/Can/Eur/Aus.

[colossalorder]

More attention from NY Times - 36 hours in Portland

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025...o-do-portland-oregon.html?smid=url-share

[downtownpdx]

Some well-timed positive press on the Rose City - Portland #4 in US cities travelers poll

https://www.timeout.com/usa/news/these-a...nd-nyc-didnt-even-crack-the-top-5-101025

These are the best big cities in America according to Condé Nast readers, and L.A. and NYC didn't even crack the top 5

Luxury travel authority Condé Nast Traveler revealed its list of thhis year’s Readers’ Choice Awards: Best Cities in the World for 2025, and according to their well-traveled readership, no U.S. city made the cut. Fortunately, there's also a Best Cities in the U.S. list, but in yet another surprising turn, New York City didn't crack the top five and Los Angeles didn't even make the list. Here are the U.S. cities that were voted best in the U.S.

...

Next up is Portland, Oregon, the original cool kid. Long before farm-to-table and craft everything went mainstream, Portland was living it. With its mix of forests, trails and boundary-pushing food and design scenes, it’s one of the country’s most effortlessly livable cities.

[downtownpdx]

Portland, Once a City in Turmoil, Is Undergoing a Renaissance

It is time to put the Oregon city back on your travel itinerary, as its storied food and beverage scene buzzes back to life

https://www.mansionglobal.com/articles/p...oil-is-undergoing-a-renaissance-ba34f0ef

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED FEB 12, 2026, 4:30 PM EST
MANSION GLOBAL

Last fall, Cy Cain could be found in a whimsical storefront in downtown Portland, Oregon, packing up cocktail cans for a customer. Meanwhile, just across Willamette River, protesters in frog costumes clashed with officers guarding the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement building.

Cain has seen a few different versions of the city since his Straightaway Cocktails opened its tasting room in southeast Portland in 2017. What’s happening now, Cain insisted, is a rebirth of the craft culture that made this progressive city cool to begin with.

“We have had some wild times. We’ve been broken into six times here. We had to track down a guy who stole a bunch of stuff and got super high in his van and passed out,” Cain said. “But we made a very conscious decision not to shut the doors and board up our shop. We’re part of this community. There is amazing stuff produced in Oregon, from the vintners to the breweries, and we’re on the earlier side of it. People come here to test out their ideas.”

That Portland took a stumble during the pandemic is well chronicled. And the city has yet to see a return by office workers to its urban core, which has left some neighborhoods eerily empty. But in other parts of town, from the gleaming Portland International Airport to the vibrant neighborhoods that give the city its character, there is a revival happening in the city’s storied food and beverage scene and an influx of energy in a boutique sauna boom once confined to a couple of small outposts. Zoom in on most of Portland’s leafy neighborhoods and travelers will find little resemblance to the narrative dominating certain political spheres.
...

(continues)

[llamaorama]

That sounds like Portland playing to it's strength, embracing things that make it competitive.

I wonder if 2010s Portland was a victim of it's own success - tech boom inflated costs of everything - housing, wages, etc. It displaced the culture that made the city desirable, and also caused a vicious cycle where very poor people were displaced, became vulnerable to being homeless. And this localized inflation would probably impact the city's budget too, making expenses go up. Then in the early 2020s, there was the huge rug pull with pandemic shutdowns and stuff.

The age of tech and tech-adjacent firms having large downtown offices with a lot of in-person workers is over. COVID was just the start, next it's going to be AI driven layoffs and outsourcing overseas.

I would predict downtown offices will always appeal to law and finance firms which are very personality (human workforce) and handshake driven and like to show off, so office won't go extinct. But outside of the bigger urban cores it will probably stay stagnant like it is now, and older buildings will need to either be converted or knocked down.

Since a lot of Portland's big office buildings are old, utilitarian things meant to be cubicle farms and were never gold-plated or beloved works of architecture, and since the CBD is desirable for other reasons, maybe the answer to high vacancies is some of those buildings come down and the land is redeveloped.

[downtownpdx]

That's a good point - while I wouldn't want to see 1950s style wrecking balls to some of the older handsome buildings, I wouldn't miss some of the 80s/90s high rises being replaced with housing. Of course that wouldn't happen easily, but if downtown can keep momentum going on some of the upcoming public projects like James Beard Market, Darcelle Park, Waterfront Park/Hawthorne Bowl redevelopment, etc., the desirability factor will eventually make downtown property redevelopment more feasible.
Btw that article is from Mansion Global, which I'd never heard of before, but sounds like investor class-type readership, an audience Portland needs to woo these days. A nice step in the right direction.