Opinion: Can Portland’s new mayor and City Council bring back growth?

Lorelei Juntunen, Mike Wilkerson and John Tapogna

It's hard to remember a more consequential Portland election in modern times than last Tuesday's. Voters navigated a field of 117 mayoral and City Council candidates to find 13 who will usher in the city's new form of government. Their work is cut out for them. The new council must elect its leader, who could prove to be the city's most powerful elected official. And Keith Wilson, Portland's next mayor, must define the relevance of his new position without veto powers or even a vote on most matters.

This challenging organizing work will prove easier than what comes next: stemming recent population losses and restoring the city's reputation for good tax-service value. As they attempt these feats, the 13 winners will find themselves in a swirl of powerful demographic, economic and policy trends.

Well before the pandemic, demographers could see that the city was getting older and that, sometime in the 2020s, deaths would outnumber births. To grow, the city would need more people moving in than moving out.

Then, two big things happened.

The pandemic ushered in the era of hybrid work – increasing mobility for many – and voters approved sizable new public programs and taxes to fund them. When the accounting was done, Portland had the second highest marginal income tax rates in the nation for individuals.

Economists argue that people " vote with their feet " and choose to live in places that offer a mix of taxes and services that meet their preferences. With more mobility, a big expansion in taxes and services, and growing cost of living (driven in part by rising home prices), Portland put that theory to the test. And vote they did. The city lost 22,846 residents from 2020 to 2023, taking with them their talent, networks and importantly, often their jobs.

Population loss is a rarity for Portland – and a recipe for economic malaise. Some conservationists may cheer the exits, but continuing down this path leads local governments into cycles of service cuts and austerity. Cleveland, Detroit and St. Louis serve as postcards of that future.

So, the first question facing Mayor Wilson and the council is "what's your plan to get Portland growing again?"

An agenda of sound fiscal stewardship, improved safety and catalytic neighborhood investments would put Portland back on a growth trajectory.

A pro-growth council would start by recognizing there's no room for increased taxes in the next couple of years. Hundreds of millions of dollars remain unspent across the new city, county and regional initiatives collecting revenue for clean energy, supportive housing and prekindergarten programs. Service delivery should catch up with the revenue before more taxes and services are contemplated.

Next, the council needs to address Portlanders' most profound concern: safety. Asked by the Oregon Values and Belief Center to describe the kind of city residents want Portland to be in 20 years, one word stood out: "safe." It beat out "vibrant," "clean," "livable" and, by a longshot, "weird." The survey's responses suggest that safety begins by compassionately and demonstrably reducing the number of our neighbors who live on the streets—starting with those diagnosed with psychosis, opioid disorders or both. The new mayor brings new ideas and laser-like focus to this topic. Success will require alignment with the new council, Metro, the county commission and the state.

Safety also requires that police response times to high-priority crimes come down from last month's average of 24 minutes to the pre-pandemic norm of less than 10. Slow responses to a 911 call – during in-progress shootings and burglaries – are terrifying. And finally safety means bringing shootings down to below pre-pandemic levels. That requires extending the kind of focus that has benefited downtown Portland during the past year to Centennial, Hazelwood, Lents and Powellhurst-Gilbert.

But safety alone won't turn this economy around. That means executing on the city's abundance of transformative, neighborhood-scale projects: Albina Vision, the Broadway Corridor, the Lloyd District, OMSI and a plan for Waterfront Park. Those developments are to our future what the Pearl District and South Waterfront were to the past 20 years. Newly approved tax increment financing districts and funding support from the state and federal governments will accelerate the work. Many of these projects have the added benefit of increasing housing supply, a key to addressing the pressing concern of housing affordability in the city. Portland's reputation will recover as these neighborhoods fulfill their exciting visions.

The new governing group has already made history. They will define positional roles and relationships that will influence how the city works for the next generation or more.

But will their history-making stop there?

They serve in exceptionally difficult times. People are leaving, and investors are staying away. The times demand turnaround artists in addition to governing pioneers. If you love Portland, root for their success. If they can get Portland growing again, they will go down as one of the most consequential group of leaders Portland has ever seen.