Who’s moving here? Young and childless

City’s a magnet for twenty- and thirtysomethings

By JENNIFER ANDERSON Issue date: Fri, Nov 11, 2005

The Tribune When Dave Hersh decided to pack up his New York software company and move to the West Coast four years ago, he left nothing to chance.
The 29-year-old and his five business partners spent months analyzing every aspect of doing business in San Francisco, Seattle, Portland and Boulder, Colo. — from the crime rate to the business climate to the number of sunny days per year.
They loaded into a van and visited each spot, talking to locals and, in Portland, catching up with then-Mayor Vera Katz during a workshop designed to recruit young entrepreneurs to the city.
“It was a big decision, a loaded one,” said Hersh, now 33. “At the end of the day, Portland won out because it was the best mix of quality of life and business needs.”
Today, Hersh’s company, Jive Software, is a thriving workplace in downtown Portland that has expanded to 17 employees, including software engineers, graphic designers and other techies in their 20s and 30s who came to Portland for many of the same reasons.
They and others in the so-called “creative class” have come to start their own companies, ski on the weekends, ride their bikes to work and be part of the independent arts and culture scene. And they’ve come to Portland — the world capital of microbrews and independent bookstores — whether they had jobs or not.
In fact, statistics show that 20- to 29-year-olds are the fastest growing demographic in Portland. The Portland Multnomah Progress Board, the city entity that tracks such trends, analyzed figures from the 2000 U.S. Census Bureau and found:
• More than a third of all newcomers to Multnomah County were in their 20s. The group accounted for 51 percent of the county’s 20- to 29-year-olds in 2000.
• The only age group that had a net gain in population in the county was 20- to 29-year-olds.
• Multnomah County has lost population to the five surrounding counties (Washington, Clackamas, Clark, Yamhill, Columbia) in every age group except the 20-to-24 range. It’s likely that these people are moving for housing reasons rather than changing jobs, said Scott Stewart, research director of the progress board.
Stewart said that despite the bumps in the economy in the past decade, the green space and liberal culture of Portland have been a magnet for young people, especially those with higher levels of education.
“The trick is to keep them,” he said. “One of the phenomena is that over a period of a few years they establish careers, have possible partnerships and marriages, then move out to the burbs.”
Stewart said the flight from the city to the suburbs isn’t unique to Portland. But since Portland does serve that role within the metro area, he calls it the “portal to the region.”
The progress board also found that the largest demographic leaving the city is families with children. According to the report:
• More families with children left Multnomah County than moved in. No other county in the region had a net loss of families with children.
• Sixty-seven percent of the county’s net loss of population within the region was from the age groups that most represent families with children between ages 5 to 19 and adults from ages 30 to 44.
• Multnomah County had net population losses compared with its regional neighbors in every household income group, including wealthier families with children.
So why are people coming, and why are people leaving? Here are some of their stories.

Work force was in place
The biggest factor driving Hersh’s search for a new location was the presence of a strong technology work force. He’s been pleased with what he found here.
“We’ve been able to build a fantastic team, much better than we’d be able to afford in other locations in Seattle or the Bay Area, competing with Microsoft and Google,” he said. “Here we have world-class people, the same we would have had in other locations. But we don’t have to pay those high salaries.”
The taxes in Portland and Multnomah County are higher than in other areas, he’s found, but in the big picture, the cost of living is still less expensive in Portland than other cities, he said. Being from New York, there was never any question that he would locate the business downtown.
By the end of the year, he plans to add at least three employees and expand his office, a leased space above a storefront at Southwest Third Avenue and Alder Street.
Other than the lack of racial diversity here, Hersh said, he hasn’t been disappointed with much.
Hersh’s story soon will get some national attention: A couple of weeks ago, representatives from the Software Association of Oregon and the state of Oregon visited his company to feature it on a DVD to recruit technology companies to Oregon.

Homegrown business takes off
Twenty-eight-year-old Laura Brian also found success here, building it from the ground up. After graduating from Willamette University and living in Syria on a Fulbright scholarship, she had the world in front of her but moved to Portland to be near family.
She planned to stay here only temporarily and then head off to graduate school, but soon got a job at a camera store and stuck around while she pursued her passion, literary fiction.
She produced a literary project called Eye-Rhyme, a twice-yearly fiction and poetry journal, but found that the cost of printing was so steep that she might as well do it herself. So she and her husband, Austin Whipple, invested their savings in letterpress equipment and signed a commercial lease for a storefront on Southeast Clinton Street.
Today, after almost four years, Pinball Publishing is starting to turn profitable. Brian and Whipple moved to another inner Southeast location and have built up a clientele based on neighborhood buzz.
There’s been a tremendous amount of community support for an upstart business like hers, Brian said: “I think people are just excited to see businesses working. If we tried to do the same thing in a place like Manhattan, it would’ve been impossible.”
She said the biggest reality check so far for her and her husband has been their recent purchase of a home in Southeast Portland’s Mount Scott-Arleta neighborhood, which was farther from their business and the city center than they’d like, but all they could afford.
“It’s getting hard in Portland,” Brian said. “We were used to being able to walk to work. … Now we’re definitely not in walking distance, and we need better bikes to bike commute. We have to plan differently, but it’s still nothing to complain about.”

The established aren’t forgotten
Both Hersh and Brian received loans from the Portland Development Commission, which has been a big player in recruiting the creative class to Portland.
In addition to recruitment, the PDC wants to offer enough support for the large pool of creative talent already in Portland, according to Anne Mangan, the agency’s creative services liaison to the city.
“We don’t want people here to feel displaced,” Mangan said. “It’s all deserving of attention, and it’s a balancing act to make sure whatever initiatives we take on serve the whole population. When you’re here and hear a lot about new community coming in, you can’t help but wonder who’s going to employ all these people and who’s going to be put out of a job.”
To that end, the PDC offers initiatives that serve the local community, such as a series of career tool and business development workshops.
The PDC also tracks state employment statistics and relies on the 2004 study “The Young and the Restless: How Portland Competes for Talent.” The study found that the greater metropolitan area is the eighth-fastest growing American city for 25- to 34-year-olds, and the fourth-fastest for college-educated 25- to 34-year-olds.
In addition to things that made Portland attractive, the study pinpointed the challenges that Portland faces when it comes to drawing new talent. These include a lack of diversity, the stability of public schools, the weather, the rising cost of living and the weak job market.

Not for everybody
For 21-year-old Portland State University student Arys Nogueron, the diversity issue has him wanting to return to Miami after living here for two years.
Nogueron, who identifies himself as Hispanic, came here for the premed program but is trying to transfer to another school this year because Portland isn’t his kind of place.
For the first time in his life, he said, he experienced racial slurs at the Beaverton restaurant where he worked part time. “There’s a lot of underlying tension,” he said. “There’s a lot of liberals and conservatives, and they clash.”
Another thing he can’t get used to is the pace of life here, something he sees as a “lack of energy.”
“If you want to raise a family here, it’s awesome because it’s safe and tranquil,” he said. “But I miss the energy. Portland goes to bed at 10 p.m. unless you smoke weed or drink. I love the people (in Portland), but something’s missing.”
Many people in the 30-to-44 age range aren’t leaving the area, but they are leaving Portland for more affordable housing opportunities.
That’s the case for Becca Cohoon, 42, a mother of three who moved her family three years ago from their tiny house in Multnomah Village to Forest Grove, where they have a large home on a third of an acre, surrounded by farmland.
Her children — ages 15, 13 and 7 — attend the schools there, and her husband has a short commute, since he works for Washington County. She’s been making the hour-and-a-half round-trip commute by light rail to her job at Oregon Health & Science University, but is thinking of looking into telecommuting.
“Financially, it was a better deal,” she said of the move to Forest Grove.
Software engineer Derek Demoro, 33, also chose to live outside the city after moving from the Bay Area with his wife, a graphic designer, last year.
They looked at homes everywhere from Northwest Portland to Sellwood, but the housing market has been “insane,” he said. It’s skyrocketed higher in the past few months.
“When we first moved here, we could get a pretty nice house for $300,000,” he said. “Now that house is $400,000. It’s a big stress on us now. … The problem is, every dream house we see is almost as expensive as the ones in California, like $700,000.”
Demoro, his wife and 8-month-old son are renting a home in Lake Oswego until they settle on a place to buy.
Mangan, of the PDC, said she’s mindful of the population that is struggling to afford to live in the city. The agency hosts workshops on how to buy a home and finance improvements, and continually works to create mixes of retail and housing.
“The more that people move outside the city, the more atrophied the city becomes,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with people living in the suburbs, but you want to have both communities revitalize and create community wealth in the city.”