Moving

Ought to I Actually Be Fearful {That a} Few Individuals Are Transferring Away From Portland?

I hear a lot of talk about Portland’s population decline, but all I can think about is how it’s going to be easier to find parking. We’ve wished for decades that people would stop moving here. Do I really need to worry about a few moving away now? —Member of the Portland 20-Year Club

Back in 2016, I coined the slogan “Make Portland Shitty Again,” based on the theory that if we could convince the rest of America that Portland is a terrible place, maybe they’d stop moving here and put rents in the to drive up. Now it’s finally starting to work and everyone’s pretending it’s the fucking apocalypse. Where, I ask you, is the gratitude?

My own megalomania aside, cities with declining populations can face pretty frightening dangers. One problem is that infrastructure spending doesn’t scale with population: as the taxpayer pool shrinks, there may suddenly not be enough money to maintain the parks (or the roads or the sewage system) and less money for services in general.

All of this makes the city a less attractive place to live and causes more people to move away. Real estate values ​​begin to fall. Soon, owners find that their buildings are no longer worth maintaining and they too are falling into disrepair, leading to the classic urban death spiral we see in Rust Belt cities like St. Louis and Detroit.

But let’s not give up on Portland entirely just yet. It’s true that the Rose City was ranked eighth out of 69 on the list of fastest shrinking US cities with populations over 300,000 from 2020 to 2022. But listen to the seven cities that shrank even faster: San Francisco, New York City, San Jose, Boston, New Orleans, Long Beach, Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit.

Sure, there are a few of the usual suspects of urban decline on this list (looking at you, Cleveland), but for the most part it reads like a feature on the “Top 10 Highest Costs of Housing” wrapped up with a “Cities That renting most” overlaps “People work remotely” list. Say what you want to say about San Jose: I don’t think there’s any danger of it becoming a place where landlords burn down their own properties because nobody wants to rent them out at any cost.

So everyone has to relax – the plan works! Sure, it hurts when John Cougar Mellencamp (among others) says mean things about us. But when you think about rents stabilizing, it hurts so much.

Questions? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com.

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