Ever since COVID-19 hit, a widely cited study has consistently ranked Portland at or near the bottom of North American cities in terms of the pace of its downtown recovery.
In fact, the most recent quarterly report from researchers at the University of Toronto suggests activity in downtown Portland hasn’t picked up much at all over the past three years. The study — based on cellphone data — suggests downtown remains nearly as slow as it was during the heart of the pandemic in 2020.
A new, separate study with similar methodology suggests downtown Portland is much busier than that — provided you accept a more expansive definition of downtown.
Approximately 2.4 million people stopped downtown at some point during July, according to new data from the Portland Metro Chamber. (Some of those 2.4 million are people who came downtown multiple times.) That’s the highest monthly total in more than three years, 65% of the number of pedestrians downtown in July 2019.
The University of Toronto study, by comparison, puts downtown’s recovery at just 37% of 2019 visitor numbers, 61st among 62 North American cities.
What’s the difference between the two studies?
The University of Toronto researchers used an extremely narrow definition of downtown Portland that excludes Portland State University, and many big offices and popular destinations more than seven blocks west of the Willamette River. It ignores the Portland Art Museum, the Park Blocks, Powell’s City of Books, Keller Auditorium and Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.
“I think it doesn’t make any sense to compare cities as they have done,” said Mary King, an emeritus professor of economics at Portland State University. “They’ve taken very arbitrary definitions of downtowns and very different definitions of downtown.”
Like the Toronto researchers’ report, the new Portland chamber study uses cellphone data to count noses. But the chamber (formerly known as the Portland Business Alliance) also counts most of Portland State as part of downtown, along with Old Town and most areas within 11 blocks of the Willamette.
The chamber’s count suggests the number of people downtown this summer has nearly doubled since the low point of 2020.
“The current narrative that we’re somehow deficient and worse off than other areas is a false narrative,” King said. She said downtowns are evolving, primarily because of the advent of remote and hybrid work, and that phenomenon isn’t unique to Portland.
Of course, downtown Portland faces some severe issues. Homelessness, a sharp rise in shootings, accumulating garbage and a decline in hotel bookings prompted Gov. Tina Kotek to convene a task force that hopes to revive the city’s core.
Many of those issues appear to be substantially worse in downtown Portland than in other cities, according to data presented to the task force at its first meeting last month. But other phenomena, such as rising commercial vacancies, are being felt in urban centers across the country as office work falls out of favor.
“The pandemic has changed that norm. And so we were trying to figure out what does that mean for us going forward?” Kotek said after the task force meeting. “We also have some other issues that are different from other places. The level of unsheltered homelessness, for example, is significant in Portland.”
Portland would place near the middle of the 62 large cities the Toronto researchers track if you apply the chamber’s pedestrian count to the academics’ ranking. Of course, some of those cities might object to how the researchers defined their own downtowns — and that might affect their own placement.
“I think it’s very hard to be able to, without knowing every city really well, to know what is downtown,” said Iain MacKenzie, an observer of Portland civic affairs who works for an architecture firm downtown. He said the Toronto study doesn’t capture most of the activity in the city’s core.
Offices, shops, hotels and restaurants have been generally open for more than two years. Major events, including Cinco de Mayo, the Rose Festival, the Waterfront Blues Festival and the Providence Bridge Pedal, have brought tens of thousands of people downtown.
On the Fourth of July, MacKenzie said he and his partner had to jostle with thousands of others for a view of the fireworks on downtown’s southern edge. He said the Toronto study’s boundaries are too narrow to fully capture that activity.
“I feel like that data creates a very, very particular view of one particular part of Portland that is not necessarily the whole of downtown,” MacKenzie said.
The University of Toronto professor leading its downtown recovery project was unavailable to comment on how researchers there landed on their definition of downtown Portland. The researchers’ website indicates they defined each city’s downtown “based on the areas of highest employment density.”
But King, MacKenzie and others point out the Toronto researchers don’t appear to have applied that methodology consistently across cities. They defined San Diego’s downtown, for example, as including the city’s popular zoo and its airport.
A University of Toronto spokesperson says researchers are “analyzing how recovery rates and rankings vary based on these definitions of downtowns. Portland is one of the cities we’re looking at.”
They expect to have results of their review posted within a few weeks.
Oregonian reporter Shane Dixon Kavanaugh contributed to this report.