Nancy Rommelmann on How Portland Traumatized Itself

In recent decades, no major American city can match the sharp ups and downs of Portland, Oregon. From a poor but pretty backwater burg of white gearheads and provincials in the 1980s, Portland underwent an exceedingly unlikely – and quite radical – transformation to become one of the country’s most distinctive and culturally vibrant urban renaissance stories in the 2000s (the New York Times memorably declared Portland “cool and refreshingly unneurotic” in 2007). But then, in the 2010s, ...