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Let’s be real, Portland: The honeymoon is over.
When we published our first list of Reasons to Love Portland, way back in 2014, this was a different town. People were still moving here in droves, and national media were still gushing over us as if we were the Manic Pixie Dream Girl of American cities.
Even in those days, we had our detractors: In 2015, Glenn Beck made a list of godless cities to avoid like the plague, and placed us right at the top. (Then, as now, we are #1 in semifactual superlatives.) But now the president hates us; Oregon’s population growth has slowed to a trickle; and rather than send travel writers here to gush over our food carts and bike lanes, New York media are doing things like running very, very long essays about a guy who got bitten by a dog on the way to a doughnut shop.
Traveling the streets of Portland sometimes brings out my inner Andy Rooney, too. Some of my grievances are relatively superficial and some are more serious. It seems two narratives have emerged around the Portland of the 2020s: There’s the doom loop and hellhole story, and then there’s the everything-is-fine story where, if we admit to any flaws, we’re giving in to the Trumps and the Becks of the world.
But we all know the truth: Portland is a beautiful place, and it’s a place that has problems. Not everybody thinks we’re cute anymore—and we’re sometimes not so sure how we feel about ourselves.
But the end of the honeymoon period often marks the beginning of real love, the kind worth fighting for. Portlanders are writing our story together. It’s a story with real stakes as we try to fight fascism with every tool we’ve got. It has fuzzy animals, cute artwork, and a bucketload of snacks. It has smutty parts, too. But most importantly, in the following pages you’ll find people who are long past the debate about how good Portland is—they’re too busy trying to make it better.
No one person in these pages is going to save this city—but no one person ever was. Lots of them are working hard to do it. All of them remind us why this place is worth fighting for. —Christen McCurdy, Interim Arts & Culture Editor
