In 1980, I got assigned to the Air Force base in Tacoma, WA (14 months). So on one of those weekends, I decided to check out Portland, OR (roughly 2.5 hours away).
The best description of Portland in 1980? It was a working-class town....built on logging, shipping, and manufacturing. Almost 400k in population. It had a unique 'brand'.....rough characters, artists, blue-collar wage-earners. The city was probably on it's third revitalization of the century.
Walking around for eight hours on a Saturday, and five or six on Sunday....I came away with this odd feeling. The city had lumberjack characters, hippies, intellectuals, and some abundance of something called 'forward-thinking' (I must have heard or read the expression ten times over the weekend).
About three years after this trip....I noted that someone in Portland had started the expression....'keep Portland weird', and they'd made bumper-stickers for the slogan.
For a number of years after the trip....I had this idea of returning and just settling down there. The climate....the characters....and job-potential were plus-ups for me.
Portland today? Over the past 50 years, the city has faced escalating challenges leading to perceptions of "decay".
It's evident in downtown store-front vacancies, homelessness camps, open drug use, and business exodus. This isn't a straight-line collapse but a story of early successes breeding unintended consequences. Policy choices by the mayor and city council....created ripples of economic shocks, and social crises.
Somewhere in the 1990s.....job growth stopped, with exodus-migration starting up.
The city Wal-Mart? It closed two years ago....mostly over shop-lifting.
The past five years? Decriminalized small drug possession was staged by city leaders.....redirecting funds to treatment of junkies. Fentanyl became a major problem.
Drug overdose deaths per year? Count-wise....the suggestion is that it's up to near 700.
It is a epic saga in some ways....a city that had a five-star 'brand', and managed to bring it down to one-star.
