LINDA SEEBACH: The troubling side of a famously livable city

Scripps Howard News Service
Sacramento Bee

September 16, 2005

PORTLAND, Ore. - Portland is a famously livable city, and its residents tend to be famously smug about the fact. Some of them recognize, though, that the city faces serious economic challenges.

I'm in Portland this weekend, attending the annual convention of the National Conference of Editorial Writers, and our first panel Thursday focused on those challenges, as well as the reasons that the city's political culture is not well equipped to meet them.

The panelists were Ethan Stelzer, director of the School of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University, Tim Hibbitts, who runs an independent polling firm, and Sam Adams, who joined the city council in January. All three are obviously devoted to the city, and if I leave out all the good things they said about it, which I will, that's only because the good side of the story is well known and often told.

The troubling side is neither.

Coming into the city Wednesday morning from the airport, we passed properties whose fences were topped with razor wire, blocks of rundown buildings where young men idled on the street corners and people wrapped in blankets were asleep on the sidewalks next to the buildings.

Yes, I know these things can be found somewhere in any city, and I have no reason to think that the way in from the airport goes through a representative sample of the city, but I just wasn't expecting to see so much evidence of urban decay, not in Portland.

Hibbitts observed dryly that politics in Portland covers the full range of opinion from left, to far left, to ultra-left (and so on). Though Republicans are nowhere to be found, classical liberals are pro-capitalist, because a thriving economy is necessary to support the services liberals want to provide, but having such high concentrations of likeminded people creates a political milieu that assumes it is somehow unseemly to want to make money.

Or, if business success is not exactly unseemly, it's not a high priority either. Before Portland's new mayor met with business leaders, Hibbitts noted, he found time to visit a bikers' group - Portland's big on bicycles - that gets together regularly to ride around breaking traffic laws.

Yet the downtown core has lost 20,000 jobs, while the new jobs are in the suburbs. "We're losing the middle class," he said.

Adams describes himself as a liberal Democrat who favors economic development, which makes him practically a conservative around here. So he has spent a lot of time during his first months in office visiting more than 100 businesses, and working in some common jobs, rather surprising people who encountered their council member bagging groceries. He said that the city's unofficial motto could be, "Portland is a great place to do business as long as you don't make a profit," referring to the fee the city imposes on net business income.

Portland has suffered almost the nation's worst unemployment for several years, and median family income in the city has been declining. Since the recession, Adams said, total jobs have come back, but what used to be living-wage jobs are now service-wage jobs. And many of the people who work in them depend on public transit to get to and from their jobs, an hour or more each way.

Stelzer was somewhat more upbeat than the other two panelists - he said there are more housing units now in Portland than ever before, for instance - but he agreed with Hibbitts that there's little leadership in the business community except in small matters.

Portland's economy also suffers, he said, because the city is "pumping dollars" into the rest of the state. He mentioned a possible initiative - Oregon is big on initiatives - that would require money be spent in the county where it originates. He didn't go into any detail about that, but if he is right that money from Portland is flowing elsewhere in Oregon, it's hard to see how a statewide initiative would pass.

Adams said the incentives Portland can offer to attract new businesses are very modest compared with what other cities put on the table.

"Livability is a crucial tool," he said, "but we over-rely on it." Also, the city is ill-prepared to face increasingly global competition in the world economy.

People are still moving to Portland because they want to live in the kind of place Portland is or desires to be. "Keep Portland weird," someone said, is a favorite bumper sticker. And a lot of them are in a "desirable demographic," ages 25-34 with college degrees.

But as long as the city's mood is self-congratulatory, as Hibbitts described it, the question is going to be: What will they do for a living when they get here?