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It’s tempting to reduce Portland to a single story in a single place.
The Structural Issue
Everybody does it. The president sees old footage of downtown rioters and decides the whole city needs the National Guard. We mock him, but when an event occurs that’s sufficiently shocking—like federal agents tear-gassing a crowd of families last weekend—our collective attention narrows to the three square blocks next to the Old Spaghetti Factory. For a moment, that’s Portland—and understandably so.
But Portland is a city of neighborhoods. In each one, dramas lurk that aren’t so easily captured by viral video. Often, alarming events are unfolding inside buildings you pass by each day without a second thought.
In the Eliot neighborhood, the tenants of a low-income apartment building have watched an open-air drug market relocate into their hallways, thanks to inaction and the unintended consequences of reforms overseen by the city’s housing authority. Four miles south, in Hosford-Abernethy, a squad of historical preservationists are trying to block the demolition of Cleveland High School, and have renewed parents’ anxieties about whether a new building will ever arrive. In every part of Portland, skinny fourplexes are rising—but at the southwest corner of the city, in a neighborhood called Ashcreek, an amateur surveyor stands in the way.
This week’s edition of WW is dedicated to the tales behind those doors. None of them is the story of Portland. But they are the stories of Portland, hiding in plain sight.
