Keeping Portland weird, for all its charm, exacted an economic price

Portland and Seattle, separated by 173 freeway miles, once rivals for primacy of the Pacific Northwest, now mostly compete for Major League Soccer’s Cascadia Cup.

The economic feud that drove the historical rivalry has cooled.

The Seattle region enjoys nine Fortune 500 corporate headquarters, including No. 2 Amazon, No. 11 Costco, No. 13 Microsoft and No. 116 Starbucks. 

By comparison, metropolitan Portland is the headquarters of No. 88 Nike, No. 757 transportation services company Greenbrier, No. 819 Columbia Sportswear, No. 906 Portland General Electric, and No. 912 Radius Recycling.

Seattle sits beside a natural deep-water port, now part of the Northwest Seaport Alliance (that includes the Port of Tacoma). It is the sixth-busiest cargo harbor in the nation measured by container volumes.

Portland’s route to the Pacific Ocean comes from the Willamette and Columbia rivers. It is the only major city on the West Coast without containerized shipping.

While Amazon, Costco and Microsoft are Wall Street darlings, Portland’s two largest private-sector employers are in trouble. And one of them isn’t even headquartered in the Rose City.

Nike, based in suburban Beaverton and with 15,522 employees, faces a turnaround challenge with the return of veteran Elliott Hill as chief executive, following John Donahoe.

After Donahoe became CEO in January 2020, Nike shares began a swoon that would erase around $30 billion in market value. Now with Elliott persuaded by the board to come out of retirement, Nike shares are trending up.

“This is a big organization with more than 80,000 employees globally, so this isn’t a quick fix,” Stifel analyst Jim Duffy told The Wall Street Journal. “We’re probably going to be looking at the end of 2025 or the end of 2026 before we start to see the benefits of new leadership, at least in reported financials.”

Meanwhile, semiconductor giant Intel, with 22,000 employees across locations in suburban Hillsboro, is confronting its own problems. The company, headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif., has lost half its market value compared with 2021.

I’m writing this column on a computer powered by an Intel processor.

Intel, which was searching for takeover targets earlier in the decade, is now the Wall Street prey instead of the predator. One of Silicon Valley’s most legendary companies is encountering a buyout offer from Qualcomm.

Yes, Qualcomm, from what some people still consider lowly San Diego, at least from an economic standpoint. When I worked there 40 years ago, the city was mostly known as a beautiful tourist and Navy town. 

But the self-styled America’s Finest City was stunningly transformed thanks to wireless technology from such firms as homegrown Qualcomm and life science outfits birthed by tech transfer from the University of California, San Diego; Scripps Research; and other institutions.

The military and tourism are still important, but the Qualcomm bid for Intel shows the city’s reach.

For Portland, the stakes involving the fate of these two companies are enormous.

Portland was founded six years before Seattle, in 1845. It was the economic center of the Pacific Northwest until the 1890s. Then, in 1897, a ship with the ironic name Portland, arrived in Seattle with gold from the Klondike River in Canada’s Yukon Territory.

Seattle leveraged its strategic location to use the Klondike gold rush to begin its rise as the most important city in the Northwest. The city was served by three transcontinental railroads (soon to be four with the Milwaukee Road’s Pacific Extension).

Boeing was founded in 1916 as Pacific Aero Products — 13 years after the Wright brothers’ historic first flight — and a year later took its present name, after founder William Boeing.

Portland was overtaken in population by Seattle in 1910 and the Emerald City — once the Queen City of the Northwest — never looked back. By the 2010s, Seattle was one of America’s superstar cities.

The first time I visited Portland was in the 1990s, and I was impressed by “The City That Works.” Downtown was dense and inviting, including Powell’s Books. Portland’s MAX light rail system began operations in 1986, reaching 60 miles, along with three streetcar lines.

With The Oregonian, Portland retained one of the best newspapers in the United States.

Oregon Gov. Tom McCall, a Republican, removed a freeway that marred the riverfront in the 1970s, opening the Willamette for recreation with the lovely Waterfront Park. Portland was at the forefront of advanced transit- and pedestrian-friendly urban planning.

Seattle stopped freeway construction, too. But Link light rail didn’t begin here until 2009.

Still, even though Portland’s population is only 124,580 fewer than Seattle’s, it always struck me as small and insular, compared with Seattle’s magnet for world-class talent, corporations and culture. Portland recently saw a population decline while Seattle grew.

Portlanders liked it that way. It was the place “where young people go to retire.” “Keep Portland Weird” is a popular slogan. The television series “Portlandia” with Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein captured the city’s hipster vibe.

Urban scholar Richard Florida praised Portland’s density and innovation. This was the center of Silicon Forest, with a cluster of tech outposts.

Then came the pandemic, civil unrest and rising crime. A friend from Phoenix moved to Portland in the 2010s and came to regret it.

He told me, “I now spend hours each day picking up the trash and drug paraphernalia in my neighborhood. … I miss Phoenix more than ever if only because it works. Portland (‘The City That Works’) no longer does. From Tom McCall to the current catastrophe seems like the blink of an unclouded eye.”

Portland never created an innovation district similar to Seattle’s in South Lake Union, never benefited from Amazon, Microsoft or other major headquarters. Nor did the Silicon Forest gain the startups and high-end outposts of Silicon Valley in Seattle, powered by the University of Washington and other institutions.

Now Portland, like Seattle, is trying to turn itself around. But much will depend on the future of Nike and Intel.