What Portland should learn from history

Cities usually rebound from declines but it’s hard to do without help from healthy businesses

The abandoned Packard plant in Detroit, Michigan. (Photo courtesy historicdetroit.org).

Portland has the lowest consumer and business sentiment rating among 47 cities included in a national survey. Its total crime rate was second-worst in the nation in 2024, according to a study based on FBI statistics. It has the worst housing outlook in the nation, according to LendingTree.com. It has one of the highest cumulative tax rates in the nation and schools that rank well below average in most measures for both instructional time and educational outcomes.

Portland has fared so poorly in reports issued over the past few months that there are only two questions, closely related, left to ask. How much lower can the city sink and how long will it take for it to recover - assuming it does?

The answer to the first question is not much - at least according to rankings. There aren’t many cities and states left below Portland and Oregon. The second question is the more interesting one.

First, the good news. History tells us that most cities do rebound from difficult times. The bad news? It sometimes takes decades and cities that fall as far as Portland rarely reach their previous peak.

Cities decline for a variety of reasons and it’s hard to find a close comparison for Portland. To try to learn what might lead to a rebound, I looked at some of the cities that suffered steep declines then rebounded to some extent. I’ve organized them into groups based on the circumstances that lead to their decline.

Some cities fit in multiple categories but I selected the characterization that best defines each city.

Victims of industrial decline

Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit

Pittsburgh and Cleveland were among the United States’ first industrial centers. They benefited from favorable locations near waterways, proximity to natural resources (especially Pittsburgh) and two of the wealthiest/most powerful businessmen in the history of the nation - John D. Rockefeller in Cleveland and Andrew Carnegie in Pittsburgh.

Detroit, of course, rose to great heights as the birthplace of the U.S. automobile industry. Just as Pittsburgh and Cleveland benefited immensely from Rockefeller and Carnegie, Detroit was fortunate to be the home of Henry Ford.

One lesson from these cities is that sometimes success is due to a non-replicable confluence of circumstances. You might give birth to one industry, as did Pittsburgh with steel and Detroit with automobiles, but eventually competition will catch up and encores are difficult.

And even if you somehow birth two American industries, continued success still isn’t guaranteed. Pittsburgh has rebounded better than Cleveland and Detroit, in part because of educational infrastructure that dates back to Carnegie, but none of these cities are likely to reach their peak influence again.

Hurt by racial strife and/or crime

Memphis, New Orleans, St. Louis, Chicago

These cities camp out near the top of crime lists and have stagnant or declining population. But if you roll the calendar back a century, St. Louis, Chicago and New Orleans were three of the nation’s most important cities, and Memphis was much more important than it is now.

Few cities, if any, handled integration more poorly than Memphis. It has never fully recovered, though economically it received a major boost when Memphian Fred Smith, who died recently, founded FedEx there. Memphis also is home to AutoZone and world-renowned St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, giving it a firmer corporate foundation than Portland has.

Racial tensions also contributed to the declines of Chicago, St. Louis and New Orleans, though those cities’ stories are more complex. To an extent they reached unsustainable heights. St. Louis was the launching point for westward expansion in the U.S. In 1904, St. Louis hosted both the World’s Fair (at a time when World’s Fairs really mattered) and the Summer Olympics. It’s unimaginable that a city could pull that off today. Before the Civil War, New Orleans was the world’s fourth largest port. Even as shipping routes changed, it maintained outsized cultural influence for decades. Before the West Coast was fully settled, Chicago was America’s undisputed second city, behind New York City.

In a sense, these cities had nowhere to go but down. But they received an assist in their decline from incompetent, often corrupt, political leadership. Their worst years have come when leadership and crime were the worst.

Up and down on the West Coast

San Francisco, Seattle

If you want evidence that cities can rebound from lows, the two best examples might come from the major cities closest to Portland.

San Francisco was epicenter of two of the biggest boom-bust cycles in U.S. history. First, there was the mid-1800s Gold Rush upon which the city was built. Then there was the dot-come boom and bust at the end of the 1990s and early 2000s. The city recovered both times, with the help of a five-star location and two of the world’s top universities, which played a major role in turning the Bay Area into the world’s leading tech center.

Seattle is famous for the 1971 billboard “Will the last one to leave please turn out the lights” as the city suffered from a steep decline at its signature company - Boeing. Seattle was so successful in converting to an economy driven by powerful technology and retail companies that it barely mattered when Boeing move its headquarters out of Seattle in 2001. Seattle’s current problems have far more to do with high cost of living and poor political leadership than with the current struggles at Boeing, which remains a significant manufacturing employer in the Puget Sound area.

The lesson from Seattle and San Francisco is that a truly elite corporate class can overcome just about anything, including poor political leadership. From the 1970s through today, these two metro areas have produced more than their share of paradigm-changing businesses - Microsoft, Costco, Starbucks, Amazon, Apple, Intel, Meta (Facebook), Google and more.

Portland’s place

Present day Portland has elements of all three of these categories. Oregon lost the industry it was built on - timber - in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Though rural Oregon was hurt more by this decline than Portland was, it still removed headquarters companies and the traditional leadership base from Portland.

As was the case in Seattle and San Francisco, technology helped offset the loss of our image-bearing industry. However, our tech industry always was a branch of the Bay Area’s tech industry. It didn’t have strong roots. Our original tech giant, Tektronix, has shrunken beyond recognition and the Bay Area tech company that fueled our growth in the ‘90s and 2000s, Intel, is in severe decline.

Portland does remain the nation’s premier hub for sports and outdoors apparel, led by Nike and Columbia Sportswear. Even with Nike’s recent problems, that industry likely will remain a defining part of Oregon. But it’s not big enough to carry a state by itself. Even on a per capita basis, Portland lacks the strong corporate foundation of Seattle and San Francisco.

So, what can we learn in aggregate from these other cities?

First, on the positive side, there is hope. As noted at the start of this column, all the cities mentioned rebounded at least somewhat from their low point. Also, our issues should be easier to solve than location-based problems such as those New Orleans, Cleveland and St. Louis faced when their waterways no longer were central to U.S. commerce.

Now, for the negatives. The first step to solving a problem is to recognize you have one - and as obvious as our dire straits should be, the Portland leadership class remains either in denial or fixated on the wrong things.

Also, similar to what Cleveland and St. Louis learned in their heydays, we aren’t as special as we once thought we were. Portland’s pitch in the 1990s and 2000s was largely based on livability - and a big part of that pitch was low cost of living and natural amenities.

Cost of living now is a disadvantage and, it turns out, there are other cities with great views and outdoor opportunities. Granted, few cities have Portland’s combined access to the ocean and mountains. But Boise, Salt Lake City and smaller cities in the West are growing while Portland’s population is stagnant. Mountains, a good job, reasonable taxes and functional government evidently is a more appealing combination than mountains, ocean, unreasonable taxes and dysfunctional government.

The overall lesson from these cities should be clear. Some are in red states and some are in blue states, but cultural issues don’t determine whether cities thrive or struggle. Cities’ fates are determined by whether they can provide well-paying jobs and effective leadership. It’s hard to do either without a successful business community. To rebound Portland must see its business community as a big part of the solution, not the problem.