Portland, Oregon is the bête noire of many a red-stater’s imaginings, regarded as the epitome of a leftist hellhole or woke dystopia.
Even San Francisco, where pedestrians must negotiate piles of human excrement and organized shoplifting goes unpunished, barely holds a candle to Portland as the stuff of conservatives’ (and many others’) nightmares.
Like Jerusalem or Rome, the word Portland has come to stand not merely for a city, but also for a sort of spiritual reality. Whether the spirit be a dark or an enlightened one depends on point of view.
A libertarian podcaster I know who advocates for a national divorce—as do I, as at least a first step to peaceful coexistence among Americans who are increasingly at one another’s throats—routinely uses Portland as one end of a spectrum with Alabama at the other. “Let Portland be Portland and Alabama be Alabama,” he says.
As a native Alabaman the juxtaposition does not displease me. The older I get, the more appreciative I become of the place that formed me.
So it was with fear and trembling—but actually, just curiosity—that I made my first-ever visit to fabled Portlandia. My daughter and her husband live there and they served as guides for the week I spent in their town.
A week is not long enough to get to know a place, of course. But I feel comfortable in saying this: Portland is not terrible.
I know it’s trite, but people are people everywhere. When you get to interact with them personally, you find that many are quite nice, and, at least outside of the political realm, most take a live-and-let-live attitude toward others. I found this to be as true of Portlanders as it is of southerners, who pride ourselves on friendliness and hospitality.
Here, then, some on-the-ground impressions of Portland:
People
Everyone I encountered was unfailingly friendly. Not only my daughter’s friends (naturally), but store employees, fellow transit riders, even strangers on the street.
I don’t know what I was expecting. Turning the wrong corner into a riot and being attacked by a black-clad Antifa thug? Getting yelled at for accidentally misgendering someone?
More seriously, I confess to harboring geography-based stereotypes that are hard to shake. If you are a non-southerner, you may have heard or even believed that southerners are slow and dim-witted. Well, we grew up with reciprocal negative ideas about northerners (to include west coasters), mainly that they are brusque and rude.
There are certainly nasty individuals to be found anywhere. But my preconceived notions of generalized northern impoliteness have, happily, been shattered again and again, in Boston, in Chicago, even in New York City—and now in Portland.
Even the young woman whose toes I stepped on as I exited a row of seats during a concert at the Moda Center, and to whom I apologized, assured me it was “no problem.”
By the way, is it the usual thing now to thank the driver as you exit a public bus? I don’t remember this being customary when I rode buses a lot as a child and young adult. Yet I observed that everyone does it in Portland, and also in Seattle. Perhaps I’m the impolite one!
Homelessness
I saw a few sidewalk tents in Portland, but not block after block of them, as I had been led to expect from images on the Internet.
Then again, I spent most of my time in Northeast Portland, one of the “good” areas, I gather. My daughter tells me the city tries to limit the big homeless encampments to parts of town that tourists don’t tend to go.
Our Uber driver lamented that homelessness is the first thing outsiders think about Portland, but suggested that the perception is worse than the reality. “Look, there are 50,000 homeless here,” he said sarcastically, pointing to a field with two lonely tents in it. (As an aside, the same driver volunteered that he lived across the river in “boring” Vancouver, Washington.)
The upshot is that the unhoused (so called) are not everywhere in Portland. Depending on where you go, you will not be tripping over them or having to thread your way around the tents and broken-down RVs you’ve read about. On the other hand, if poverty tourism is your thing, you can probably seek out and find it all there.
(As to the causes and solutions of homelessness generally, I have my thoughts, but they are beyond the scope of this little travel report.)
Crime
We had a rental car for a few days, and my daughter at one point advised us to move the snacks that were lying on the seat to the trunk. “Someone would break in for a bag of trail mix?” I asked. They might, she assured me.
I did see one car with a busted-out window that looked as though it had occurred from a break-in rather than an accident. (It happens. One of my car windows was smashed in in Birmingham, Alabama. The thief on that occasion got a microwave oven, though, not a mere bag of munchies.)
National chain stores have reportedly closed many of their Portland outlets due in part to crime. A Target we visited had quite visible armed security, and we noticed that whole counters of such things as toothpaste and OTC medicines were under lock and key.
However, the folks I was with didn’t seem overly worried about becoming crime victims. At night, in the entertainment districts, I saw many people out and about and enjoying themselves, including women walking by themselves (always a gauge for me of the level of fear or lack of it).
In Portland as in any city, local knowledge—and, preferably, having a local guide—goes a long way in avoiding problems.
In General
The parts of Portland I visited pulsed with life, and the vibes I got from the people passing on the sidewalks or encountered in coffee shops and restaurants were positive ones.
The Saturday farmer’s market on the Portland State campus was one of the largest I’ve seen, and it was bustling. Small businesses in “our” part of the city appeared to be thriving.
I have no reason to disbelieve reports (including my daughter’s) that there are sections of the city, among them the downtown core, that have been hollowed out, boarded up and essentially abandoned. But as with those endless tent encampments, I somehow managed not to see the worst.
Rents in Portland may be sky-high, but something keeps drawing young people there. Most of my daughter’s friends, I think, were not natives, but went there for jobs or educations. This doesn’t happen in towns that are truly economically flat-lined.
Portland’s widely bruited wokeness exists mainly as background, the default window dressing, as it were. You can fly a pride flag with impunity, but it might not be a good idea, say, to stand in a food truck line wearing a MAGA hat. Liberal tolerance has its limits. (If I’m making an unwarranted assumption here, I welcome any Portlanders to correct me.)
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the university town I live near, is about as rife with woke signifying as Portland. I’m no stranger to the culture.
My favorite store window sign in Portland, by the way, warned, “No racism allowed within 10 feet of this doorway” (or something to that effect). What does that even mean? How is it enforced? Is racism tolerable at 11 or 12 feet? I have questions.
Conclusion
If you are an avid traveler who likes visiting different cities, Portland need not be avoided, and you might enjoy it, as I did.
Mine was a personal and family visit, not a journalistic assignment, of course, and that can make a world of difference to one’s appreciation of a city.
A highlight for me was playing trivia at a bar as part of a team with my daughter and son-in-law and their housemates. Another was getting to see my son-in-law’s band play. At my stage of life, feeling accepted by the youngsters adds a rosy glow to anything. (Why do I hear “Gooble gobble, gooble gobble” in my head now?)
I also enjoyed going to the famous Powell’s bookstore, which occupies a whole city block and is three stories high. Regrettably, though, I was only allowed (by wife and daughter) an hour there.
Finally, it must be said Portland is a great place to get away from, in that it is a short drive from such scenic majesty as the Columbia River Gorge to the east and the Pacific coast to the west, both of which we visited during our trip.
Would I choose to live in Portland? No.
The weather doesn’t suit my clothes, to reference a Harry Nilsson song. Too cold and wet, at least during much of the year. For that matter I could say the same about my present home in North Carolina. I like rain, but prefer it warm, more like it is on the Gulf Coast where I grew up.
A more significant reason is, indeed, the politics.
Among U.S. states Oregon trailed only California and New York and maybe a couple of others for most tyrannical Covid policies in 2020-2022.
Governors, mayors and health officials across the country bared authoritarian fangs and trampled civil liberties during Covid. But in some states the tyranny was worse than in others, which suggests that large parts of their populations either expect or are willing to tolerate a greater level of oppression.
The Cato Institute report on freedom in the 50 states, which takes into account both personal and economic liberty, ranks Oregon near bottom, at 46th (Alabama comes in 30th and North Carolina 24th). (Cato updates its report periodically, so if you are reading this much after 2023/24, these rankings could have changed.)
Oregon actually does pretty well on the personal liberty axis, but dismally when it comes to economic/regulatory freedom. Interventionist policies that override individual choice, free markets and property rights are not unconnected to problems such as homelessness and crime, I might note.
There are many other places I wouldn’t choose to live, either, for a variety of different reasons depending on where one is talking about. That doesn’t mean they aren’t worth a visit. I include Portland in the list.
So, go see Portland for yourself. It’s … well, it’s not terrible.
I can’t seem to write an essay without having observations and thoughts that don’t fit in the main body. Here are a few.
Before I left for Portland, a neighbor reminded me (enviously, I think) that “They have legal weed shops there.” Yes, they do, and that’s probably part of the reason the state rates comparatively high on the personal freedom scale. I favor decriminalizing pot everywhere and ending the drug war in general, but I’m personally anti-marijuana. You can read why here.
Government gangs plunder their subjects in a thousand different ways, but one place Oregon refrains from mugging you is at the cash register—there’s no sales tax. It was a new experience for me to only pay the exact sticker price for things.
The Portland airport has a special “sensory room” where “neurodiverse” passengers who feel overwhelmed or overstimulated by the sights and sounds of an airport can “recenter.” Only in Portland, I thought to myself. To tell the truth, I might have used it myself had my plane not been about to depart when I discovered it.
I spotted the sad sign you see above in a window in Seattle, not Portland. Also, it was in Seattle, not Portland, that I witnessed a mentally ill or perhaps drug-addled man shuffling along a downtown street, muttering, with his pants down around his ankles—and being ignored by all. Make of that what you will.
Gooble gobble:
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