We got a good lesson this week in “you can’t go back.“
Twenty years ago, we first visited Portland and its shiny new district, the Pearl. It was built in an area that used to be an industrial wasteland, one of the blighted areas near downtown Portland. It started out with a conversion of a couple old single story brick warehouses into condos, with the cement loading docks serving as their front patios.
Portland had some very smart urban zoning policies, including forcing developers to include storefronts / windows on the ground floors of all buildings, encouraging public art, and enforcing multi-block clear site lines to make their downtown, and eventually the Pearl, pedestrian friendly.
The Pearl quickly took off, and over a dozen mid-rise condo buildings were built in the next ten years or so, along with innovative parks and great restaurants and retailers.
We visited fairly regularly. For a long time, we dreamed of being able to move there, but could never quite make it work – the prices were always just out of reach. Still, we always enjoyed spending time in the Pearl.
We just got back from our first trip to Portland in almost ten years, and how things have changed. The pandemic was really hard on the Pearl District, with many stores and restaurants closing permanently. And apparently It never managed to recover. At last count, there were over 100 empty storefronts, and the streets feel empty. It’s a ghost town, and almost every block has blank or boarded up windows.
At the same time, probably because of construction issues with some of the buildings, homeowner association fees have skyrocketed with some buildings charging each tenant as much as $2000 or $2500 a month in fees. This has made these units almost impossible to sell, but for some strange reason, prices still really haven’t come down as much as I would have expected.
Walking through the Pearl District this time was heartbreaking, like seeing an old friend who has fallen on hard times. It had been such an innovative combination of old and new, and now it feels like the old is taking over again, with issues creeping in from the surrounding neighborhoods – crime, homelessness, and general disarray.
It’s a sad end to what was once such a beautiful and hopeful place, and maybe a metaphor for what’s going on in the rest of the world.
Maybe one day it will rise in the ashes again. We can always hope.