Portland's Ambitions

When I left Portland 8 years ago, I told everyone I knew and everyone I met that I would be back. In that time, I've lived in the Midwest, the South, in the Rockies and in Tahoe; each place with a different culture and pace of life. Having finally made it back home, I've been thinking a lot about what Portland was when I left, what it is today, and where it's likely to be in 5 or 10 years. As I made new acquaintances during freshman year of college and told them I was from Portland, the typical response was "Oh, I've heard Portland is a nice city." Now when I tell people, the response is almost always "Oh my God, I love Portlandia." Well, yes, Portland is a nice city, and yes, as much as I hate to admit it sometimes, Portlandia nails a lot of Portland's quirks on the head. For now, Portland is a place many aspire to live- but what does my city stand for, and thus where is it headed?

A characteristically fantastic article by Paul Graham helped frame this question for me. He says that great cities attract great people, and they all send a palpable message, a message you can hear and feel as you walk around. For New York, that message is "You should make more money." For Silicon Valley it is "You should be more powerful." For Cambridge: "You should be smarter," for Los Angeles: "You should be more famous," and for DC: "You should be more connected." His characterizations are pretty spot-on; so what is Portland's message?

Some of the first messages that jump to mind, probably skewed too much by Portlandia, are "You should be cooler" or "You should be hipper," but I know Portland is more than this caricature. We have a famous sign in town that reads- "Keep Portland Weird"- maybe the message is, "You should be weirder." Or maybe just "You should be more interesting."
 

More interesting almost gets at what I feel, but still not quite. Graham says that San Francisco and Berkeley send the message "You should live better" which I think applies for a lot of the West Coast from Santa Barbara north. But I refuse to believe that this one hedonistic slogan stands for everything Portland is about. It does fit with the sense that Portland is saying "take a breath" or "slow down and relax" though. Portland has a history of cultivating activists, and with high rates of homelessness contrasted with the natural beauty and bounty that surrounds us, I think a message you hear quite often here is "You should care." As in, "You should care about fellow humans. You should care about the Earth." This has been a message that Portland has been sending for a long time, and one which will undoubtedly outlive the current hype and trendiness.

I think the reason I had a hard time coming up with anything fitting, is that I don't think Portland is sending a message that you SHOULD be or do anything in particular. I think what Portland says is "You should do that." As in, "That crazy idea you just had? You should totally do that." You want to open up a shop that only sells varieties of salt? You want to raise goats in your urban backyard? In Portland, the response is "Yeah! You should do that."

So Portland is booming. People are moving out here not to prematurely retire, but to try interesting and weird stuff, just because they can, and because the community will support them. I fear the low-hanging fruit, though, is becoming scarce. The food and beer scene is amazing, along with the music and art. The Portland lifestyle is unbelievably rich and varied, but what is going to sustain the city in the long-term, when the buzziness of it all wears off? Over at the tech blog Silicon Florist, the question is asked: How do we make Portland the next Portland? I don't pretend to know, but a lot can be learned by looking at how we got here in the first place; coming together to encourage the pursuit of interesting and crazy ideas for their own sake, because they get people excited, and because screw it- why not?