Seeing Portland In The Emerald City’s Full Length Mirror

 Sister cities or kissing cousins?

It is a real honor to travel to another great American city—one you’ve never resided in—and enjoy a birthday dinner for eight. Thanks to six good friends who reside in Seattle, the honor was mine this April 4th.

Speaking of honors, when we got to The Walrus and the Carpenter, a tiny room for Seattle’s most popular oyster bar, we were told the wait would be two hours. Normally, two hours means one hour. On this night the hostess was a woman of her word. It took two hours and fifteen minutes to get a table for eight. Thankfully, an accommodating bar up the historic Ballard street hosted us while we waited to dine on local edibles from the sea.

I suppose writing about Seattle as a Portland resident is kind of like writing about your beautiful “Prom Queen” sister. You either come off as adoring, or bitter. And here I was adoring the Hamma Hamma oysters, raw and fried, while also not so secretly seething. 140 minutes for a table? In Ballard on a Thursday? Come on. Perhaps, this was “the Seattle freeze” I’ve heard about. If so, I can deal with it.

Seattle is an opulent city on seven hills. Fresh water lakes and the Puget Sound surround, with the Olympics to the west and the Cascades to the east. Seattle is one part Minneapolis high design, another part San Francisco funky. It is an impressive city, and I suspect the very things that make Seattle attractive to me—the big city feel, vibrant business community and pro sports teams—are the things many Portlanders and Oregonians reject outright. As one good friend here told me recently, “Oregonians don’t want (that kind of) progress.”

This “otherness” is what makes Portland, Portland and Oregon, Oregon. Unlike Seattle and San Francisco, Portland is tucked away, 60 miles upriver from the coast and the world beyond. The city is also nestled in a valley and protected by a wall of western hills (the Tualatin Mountains) and Forest Park green space. To say Portlanders have a fortress mentality may be a bit extreme, but it is true to a degree. Geography is destiny.

Of course, Portlanders and Oregonians do have something to protect. Few would argue otherwise. The “G” word, Growth, is seen as an impolite intrusion in Oregon — a reduction of green space and an increase in traffic, pollution and noise. Yet, growth simply is. There’s no way to stop it, and even with an urban growth boundary, there’s no way to maintain a psychic gate around this precious place. The question is how might Oregonians better align themselves with this planetary force?

Urban planners, economists, engineers and politicians have some good answers, but no one group of thinkers or doers has all the answers. The problem however is well documented. The median income for a Seattle family – $91,300 – is nearly half as much more than the family income in Portland of $63,400. To me, that’s a startling difference for two cites 167 miles apart from each other. Also, one in 20 Seattle homes is valued at more than $1 million. In Portland, the ratio is 1 in 100.

If we are to believe the management guru and best-selling author, Steven Covey, “abundance mentality” is something we can choose to consciously manage for personal gain. It stands to reason then, that the people of a city or state might also invite abundance into their lives for the betterment of the community. Too bad there’s no on-off switch to go from scarcity to abundance in a flash. Like most good things, it’s a process that takes commitment, a plan of action and time.

Naturally, scarcity and abundance are relative terms. A friend from Salt Lake City told me he sees Portland as a rich city, richer than his own, where, for instance, an entire store can be dedicated to selling varieties of salt. Add to this the fact that Portland’s notable restaurants—Le Pigeon, Ken’s Artisan Pizza, Bamboo Sushi, Nostrana, Wildwood, Paley’s Place, Higgins and Andina—are full every night of the week. Clearly the people who do earn a decent wage in Portland don’t mind spending it on entertainment. What my good buddy from Utah is not seeing are the poor. Perhaps, I can take him on a tour next time he’s in town. On the far side of I-205, for instance, there are miles and miles of neighborhoods, but no Whole Foods Market, Zupan’s or New Season’s in sight.

Sadly, one in four Oregonians is under-employed and one in five Oregonians is on food stamps. It’s not a tale of two cities, Portland is many cities in all wrapped up in one—a small out-of-the-way city that’s happy to stay that way; a global leader in sportswear, sustainability and urban planning; a city where “young people come to retire”; the home of world-dominating Wieden + Kennedy, Voodoo Donuts, and more strip clubs and breweries than we have a right to. Portland is a charming mess and I love her. Be that as it may, Portland deserves some criticism.

My friend Charlie, who moved from Portland to Seattle, says no one in Seattle talks about Seattle. No one bothers to justify why they live there. No one wastes time talking about how Seattle is better than other cities. In other words, Portland is precious and in the wrong hands precious is highly annoying.

Let’s examine a recent argument in Portland Mercury’s pages:

It takes ambition to leave behind a steady job and launch a food cart on 82nd Avenue. It takes ambition to sell your car and bike to work every single sopping wet day. It takes ambition to open up yet another store that seems to sell only socks and fake mustaches and terrifying latex horse masks—EVEN THOUGH a store that sold the exact same thing just went out of business in that same location.

Charlie sent me an email in response to the above.

Ambition my arse…. It takes a cretin to open a stupid fucking store like that. A holier than thou snob who thinks they know better than everyone else about what will and will not work.

I think the journalist may have been joking, but that’s also the problem. For many people, Portland is a joke. Fred and Carrie’s fantasia on AMC adds to this. The show skewers the city’s many quirks and lays them on the comedy fire. The thing with comedy is, it has to hurt a little to elicit a laugh.

When you look at a place through a magnifying glass, you get Portlandia. Yet, to properly take in a city, you need to adjust your lens or you can’t possibly see the complexity. Seattle, Portland and San Francisco are all many different things to different people. This truth doesn’t stop the labeling and stereotyping, but it’s a reminder to push past those surface-level readings.

From the outside looking in, Portland may appear to be the tree-hugging capital of the country. There’s also the idea that Oregon does not welcome out-of-state businesses, and that our tax structure and environmental regulations are too tough to grease the wheels of commerce. But you can easily flip this industrial coin on its head, and see that Portland is much like a west coast Pittsburgh, a river city with steel plants and waterfront docks.

Seattle too isn’t all mansions and exquisite coffee. The places we visit seduce us, and we love that about them. It takes residency and time to see the whole picture, and to know if a city works for you or not. I have heard Portlanders dismiss Seattle, and I’ve heard the inverse argument made by Seattle dwellers. To me, it’s all the Pacific Northwest and it’s all good. Given that no place is perfect—trust me, I’ve done a thorough analysis—I’d say “all good” is pretty damn good.