From the Editor: If you haven’t visited downtown, now’s the time

Published 5:00 am Monday, February 3, 2025

Downtown Portland has been bloodied and battered these past few years.

But I would advise people not to count Portland out.

I have a relatively unusual perspective. My wife, Katy King, and I live downtown and have for more than 13 years. When I say “downtown,” I mean in the heart of the city. From my living room windows, I can see the gorgeous, Italianate Portland City Hall, the façade of the Portland Art Museum, and I have a straight shot view of the length of Southwest Broadway.

We’re apartment dwellers. (For the simple reason that, as a writer and editor, I can’t fix anything other than bad writing. Want to fix a split infinitive? I’m your man. How many editors does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Zero. We just call maintenance and ask them to do it.)

These have not been the easiest of years for downtown. The pandemic shuttered so many government buildings, restaurants and shopping opportunities downtown. Following the May 2020 murder of George Floyd, weeks and weeks of nightly protests rocked downtown. The protests were mostly peaceful, if righteously angry. But unfortunately, a relatively few people took the opportunity to piggyback on the protests and to riot. Sometimes it was because Black Lives Matter, but sometimes it was just petty crime. Alas, the rioters often tarnished the messages of the protesters.

Donald Trump’s decision to put federal law enforcement officers in downtown absolutely made the matter worse. For a while there, Katy and I spent every evening listening to helicopters and flash-bangs, and smelling tear gas in our apartment. We’d just adopted Violet, a rescue kitten. I’m pretty sure she thought she was living in Beirut.

The pandemic led to an economic downturn that further exacerbated the city’s problems.

Unsheltered homelessness burgeoned and policies that were intended to be humanitarian now, in retrospect, seem ill-considered. Tarps and tents blocked sidewalks everywhere.

And that was followed by the unprecedented flood of fentanyl into Portland, as well as almost every community in the Western United States.

Note: Oregon had just passed Ballot Measure 110, which reclassified possession of some illegal drugs as a civil violation, not a crime. I believe that Measure 110 unfairly gets all the blame for increased public consumption of drugs, when really, it’s the fault of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is up to 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine. Mostly it’s produced overseas and foreign drug lords have flooded U.S. markets with it. But I digress.

I was at the World Mystery Convention in San Diego a couple of years ago and a fellow novelist out of Toronto asked me about the utter destruction of Portland. I have to admit, it caught me off guard. “What destruction is that?” I asked. That’s when I realized that much of North America had a false assumption about the dangers in our city.

Throughout the worst of those times, downtown was pretty safe. We hated the boarded-up storefronts and the graffiti. And the large clusters of tarps and tents blocking sidewalks. But Katy and I still walked to restaurants and coffee shops. We shopped downtown and ventured to our drycleaner. We had, not one, but two farmers markets within an easy walk, and they proved godsends during the tough years. The world’s greatest bookshop, Powell’s City of Books, is in our ’hood, and we spent a lot of time there. (I’ve been to the “best” bookshops in London, Paris and Milan; they don’t hold a candle to Powell’s.)

But starting around early last year, things really began to get better. Foot traffic increased. More shops and restaurants opened. Downtown Clean & Safe crews spiffed up community spaces.

And then another friend from out of state asked me about the death knell of Downtown Portland. And I realized: Things were getting much better, but people weren’t getting the word.

A new report has been released, showing foot traffic is definitely on the rise. See our story on Page A1. And a survey of people in the tri-county area (also on Page A1) showed a singularly remarkable factoid: Those from Portland’s outer neighborhoods and from the suburbs, who venture downtown say things are improving. Those who don’t venture downtown say the opposite.

It’s not so much, “If you build it, they will come.” It’s more like: If you get ’em downtown, they’ll see for themselves how much better things are.

Katy and I have been fortunate enough to visit some of Europe’s most beautiful cities, including Venice and Paris. But the very first “fentanyl zombie” — a person standing, unmoving, vertical but unconscious — was in Venice. And Paris has its own problems with an unsheltered homeless population (this was pre-Olympics, mind you).

If you haven’t been downtown in a while, I urge you to pick a restaurant or coffee shop, and give it a try. Or take in a show. Or hit a “Super Bowl sale” at a downtown shop.

The City of Roses is on the rise. Again. But don’t take my word for it. Come take a look.