PORTLAND, Ore. — After a years-long barrage of bad news about Portland's central city, a task force spearheaded by Gov. Tina Kotek is busy figuring out what needs to be done in order to get the area on a path to recovery. But some recent data suggests that "recovery" looks very different depending on what metrics you use and the lens through which they're examined.
Many Portlanders judge the central city by their experiences and appearances. If they head downtown to eat, go shopping or see a show, their personal impressions are the only metrics that matter. If they didn't have a good time, they're less likely to come back.
Then there's the news coverage. The Story has talked about businesses and organizations that have left the central city in recent years, even mainstays like REI. At the same time, there's the coverage of summer festivals and other events that bring thousands of people out, things like the Waterfront Blues Festival, Pride or Rose Festival events.
Finally, there's the 1,000-foot view — looking at the data. KGW reported previously on a study from the University of Toronto and UC Berkeley that looked at the number of phones in a city's downtown at a specific time, comparing that activity to the same time period in 2019, pre-pandemic.
At the time of that report last year, Portland ranked 60 out of 62 cities for recovery. The researchers said downtown Portland had only recovered about 41% of the activity it had in 2019.
Those numbers have since been updated, and they suggest that downtown Portland's situation hasn't gotten any better. In fact, according to the study, it has gotten a little worse — Portland fell to number 61 out of 62, with only 37% of the visitors it had in 2019. The city ranked just ahead of San Francisco at dead last.
The study's results are pretty damning, but it left some of us scratching our heads. How can the city only be getting worse, when more people seem to be coming back for events, new restaurants and shows? As it turns out, the answer has a lot to do with the study's parameters and methodology.
Over the past weekend, the Oregonian/OregonLive published a story that took a deeper look at the study. After taking stock of the parameters, they realized that its definition of "downtown Portland" was quite narrow.
The study only included the areas between the Hawthorne and Burnside bridges, going as far west as Southwest Broadway. The area does not include central city spots that tend to attract many visitors — Powell's Books, the Portland Art Museum, the Keller Auditorium or the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. It does have Pioneer Courthouse Square and the waterfront, but the rest is mostly hotels, shops, government buildings and office space.
In fact, the area studied is only a part of what the city of Portland considers to be downtown, and it's likely much smaller than what most Portlanders think of as downtown.
The Portland Metro Chamber, what used to be called the Portland Business Alliance, did its own study of downtown recovery — looking at a much broader area, but using similar methods of tracking phone locations. The area covered by the chamber's study roughly goes from Old Town down to Portland State and out toward I-405. According to them, downtown Portland is actually on the upswing.
"The slow and steady progress has occurred on two very distinct fronts, which is first off, visitors — people that want to come to our festivals, even restaurants visit our stores — that has slowly but surely been creeping up and is nearly 70% recovered," said Andrew Hoan, president and CEO of the Portland Metro Chamber. "So that is a good story. That's the sort of recovery momentum you want to see."
During July of this year, Hoan said, 2.4 million people came into the downtown district, probably the highest point since early 2020. It isn't where the city was at back in 2019 — downtown saw 3.7 million visitors in June 2019, according to the chamber's data — but it is a big improvement. There wasn't a single month this year that didn't see more visitors than last year.
"And then secondly, we also really look granularly at the employees, and you can distinguish them because, you know, employees sit in office buildings most of the day," Hoan continued. "And what we have seen recently is something very encouraging, which is that number is now more than 50% recovered. So we were really challenged, I think, towards the end of last year — the momentum has started to swing. And we're seeing positive growth in both those who are coming to sort of play and shop and have fun in our festivals, and also to … the lifeblood of the downtown, which are the workers that come into these office buildings. We're starting to see them come back in, and that to me is going to be the bellwether of our recovery."
Hoan pointed to a full slate of events this summer in downtown Portland, each of which brought out thousands of people over the course of several days or weeks. Those included the big events like the Waterfront Blues Festival, Pride and the Rose Festival, but also ongoing events like the concerts in Pioneer Courthouse Square.
"This is the Portland we all remembered, where we're celebrating, we're gathering. We're listening to live music this last week, and we just had a paint-off in downtown Portland — I mean, the things that really make us who we are," he continued. "And this is what people know about us. It's our collective gatherings and funky experiences that you can really tap into. And I think you saw the summer festival season just absolutely crush it this year."
At the same time, Hoan acknowledges that there's still a long way to go. He's on the governor's central city task force, and he's optimistic that having so many different people working together will help to improve downtown.
"What is important to understand about the Toronto study and about our data is that it isn't as bad as we have been told it is," Hoan said. "But it's also not what it should be. And public safety, cleanliness, livability issues, the challenges that we see with chemical addiction, drugs and our street, public safety concerns … they're real, and they cannot be ignored. And it is important that we address them."