I lived in Portland for six months and traveled around the whole city so I am going to give you an detailed description of the city.

Portland as well as Oregon in general gets a lot of spill over from California.  I would say that 30-40% of the people currently living there are from California.  A lot of people living in Southern California got tired of the urban sprawl, immigration problems, crime, pollution, traffic, and high cost of living starting in the mid 90s so they decided to move.  Most of them went to three places: Pheonix, Las Vegas, and Portland.  If you look at the population growth charts those three cities have seen dramatic growth in the last 15 years and many of those people came from California.

Portland is a semi big city with itself having 500,000 people and the whole metro having a little over 2 million people.  Honestly, the city still has a small time feel to it.  2 million people is a lot but when you compare it to other similar cities it definitely does not have that “concrete block” feel to it.

Portland is extremely white.  Its one of the whitest big cities in the country.  While you can go to some areas like Gresham, Woodburn, and Forest Grove and find some small areas totally Hispanic it does not compare at all to other cities.  The Northwest part of town is supposed to be Portland’s black side of town, and it WAS historically, but developers have come in and transformed that whole neighborhood into expensive bungalows glutted with yuppies.

Portland is a liberal city.  Very liberal.  It takes after the two major cities its sandwiched between San Francisco and Seattle.  I might go as far as to say its just as or more liberal than those two.  Its very accepting for the most part of homosexual lifestyles or any other alternative lifestyle you can think of.  In fact the current major,  Sam Adams, is openly gay and he won with 58% of the vote.  This city would be a huge culture shocker for anyone coming from the south or a more conservative state like Texas or Georgia.  I can speak with first hand experience being from Houston, TX.

For the most part Portland has become a “white collar” town.  It definitely did not start out that way but gone are the days when many of the people worked at the shipping docks, mills, or lumber yards.  Now the city’s economy is based off high-tech industries like microcomputers.  Nike would be one of the only major non high tech company they have.  If you are thinking about moving here I would recommend you have some sort of degree that specializes in that field.  I have found that you do not need a degree to make it in some cities.  If you have lived in Portland for a long time and are already established than you would not need it either.  But if you not you need a degree to live here otherwise it will be extremely hard to make a good living.

A great aspect of Portland that people may not realize is for the city of its size the traffic is not that bad.  I have argued with people who live there many times about this as they feel otherwise but I can tell you that there are many compatible cities in population that have traffic 3x as bad as Portland.  And the city started planning early building an extremely efficient light rail called the “MAX” that can get you to all major parts of the city.  While having a car is good you really do not need one.

Let me talk a little bit about the neighborhoods so you can have a starting point of where you want to live if you wanted to move to Portland.

Vancouver is Portland’s huge suburb.  What was a small town on the other side of the Columbia River is now a city of 140,000.  Its just like Portland except the housing prices are a lot lower.  When people starting flooding into Portland the properties went way up and the people who could not afford it or didn’t want to afford it moved to Vancouver.  Its also a more conservative part of the area.  Portland was not always as conservative as it is now and when the city started changing several decades ago the people that didn’t like it moved here.

The northwest side used to be what is known as the black side of town but its strategically location attracted developers over a decade ago and now there is only remnants of that.  There you will find one run down house bordered by a nice renovated half million dollar house.

The whole downtown area is the hip “noveau” part of town where you will find college students, artists, and young hip liberal professionals making 100,000 per year but pretending to goes against “the man.”  Tons of shops, book stores, and cafes in the area.

As the city grew and became more expensive your middle class residents got pushed further east.  The east side of town is probabely the worst as far as crime goes.  The problems start getting close to 205 and extend all the way into Portland’s east suburb Gresham.  Gresham is hard to explain.  One part of the city, the side bordering Portland is bad.  The further side is really nice.  When I first saw Gresham I thought that this was the rich part of town.  Its not.  They have some really good parts of Gresham bordering Fairview and Happy Valley but the other half is heavy with crime (by Portland’s standards).  Nevertheless the east part of town will probably be the cheapest part to live in.  And its not even close to really bad places like other big cities.  Hell, by Houston or LAs standards the east part of Portland is actually fairly good.

The west side of town served by highway 26 starting with the west mountains and going to Beaverton and Hillsboro is the best and most affluent. This is where the people with the most money live.  The west hills is Portland’s version of Hollywood.  Beaverton and Hillsborro are home to all the executives working at Nike, Heward Packard, and IBM.  Very nice neighborhood but getting crowded due to underdevelopment.  Highway 26 has the worst traffic of the area.

Overall I liked Portland.  Really fun place to live.  Has a real Northwest feel to it.  Be warned that it rains a lot.  Espcially in the winter.  The summers are fantastic though with barely any rain and nice warm weather.

So what type of person whould like Portland and want to call it home.  A young liberal minded college grad with a degree in some type of high tech industry.  Be warned though that when the ecconony goes south, like right now, Oregon always gets hit really hard.