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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

You only need a sprinkling of people with the entrepreneurial spark to kick it off, right?

It helps there to be a strong community of founders, employees willing to take a risk to work at startup for less money, investors, capital, and general energy in the air. PNW tech scene is relatively low-key and apathetic to startups. Anyone with that type of ambition should have already migrated

There was a strong contingent of forward looking tech people and entrepreneurs a few years ago (pre COVID). They have left due to the large restrictions during COVID and the flight of capital and the general decline of Portland due to the riots and the lockdown measures.

Were there more restrictions in Oregon than California during COVID? Or are you talking about something else?

Here's one thing OP might be talking about – the "skyscraper district" of PDX practically emptied out during COVID, precisely because Portland has highly segregated big-B-business and residential districts. The rise of WFH meant that the whole district nearly emptied out overnight – especially anchor tenants like law firms and tech that were most amenable to WFH. Without any residential population in the area, boom: no place for a downtown flagship office.

Since I don't want to stealth-edit my post, another one was the rise of "nuisance homelessness" – the same shelter-in-place order prevented the City from sweeping people into warehouse shelters (but lower-capacity motel shelters were set up); and a combo drug-decriminalization-and-treatment-funding bill gave us the decriminalization but never actually funded the treatment in time, and so there was a lot of open-air drug use. That didn't help the return to "downtown" either.

Yes my company (small startup) closed its Portland office during COVID. It was opened for people who didn't want to be in the bay area. Pre COVID it was en vogue for bay area startups to have a PDX office. Then COVID happened and downtown became a ghost town.

I knew the end was in sight when it became company policy that no employee stay past 6PM without HR approval due to the danger.

Do you think east of the Willamette will be where any tech scene rebuilding might end up? I wonder which neighborhood might have the right mix of housing, office space, and recreation (ie food.)

Danger of what?

All of the west coast went insane, really. It was like the entire region had a competition for how crazy and nonsensical they could make the rules.

As a result, basically every west coast city absolutely destroyed itself and will take at least a decade or more to recover… it they every really do.

This is extreme hyperbole if you have been to most West Coast cities recently. Rents have shot up to new heights for a reason.

Portland specifically is lagging a bit, but they are on the upwards trajectory (with a few big things to fix still).

I go to Portland regularly just so I can enjoy a city that's much nicer than San Francisco. And Seattle recently hit another record population, it is significantly larger than it was before COVID and will soon pass SF.

I suspect the person denigrating the West Coast cities is doing so from their basement in East Prolapse, Kentucky, as a way to rationalize their life choices.

Portland has some major advantages over SF, but as someone who also goes there regularly (~5 weeks/year), I still prefer living in SF at the moment. Not considering the amount of tech jobs there (which is a major factor for me), the city in general just isnt quite there yet. There are also some very major fiscal problems that have to be sorted before I'd consider moving.

Great place though, definitely might end up there one day

I'm not denigrating Portland... I live here. I live two miles from downtown. People need to stop being sensitive

I am a critical person and Portland is currently deserving of much criticism in order to fulfill its potential. No one got anywhere by patting themselves on the back reassuring themselves they had already made it.

+1 to this. As someone who still believes that everything that made Oregon attractive is still there, and won’t be taken from Oregon soon - nature, laid-back culture, quality of life - we can’t deny that Oregon is deindustrializing more broadly. Reasonable people can disagree on the essence and details of the issues - I say this as someone who came here because of the youth culture, and still doesn’t have a family! Even we might agree on many things (as Portlanders usually do.)

But we all agree the state is seriously going to have to think hard about how to attract new business to both I-5 corridor and rural areas - whether it’s through investing in OSU upstream, or attracting more downstream manufacturing jobs.

Paging noduerme, surely they have some thoughts on the matter

De-industrialization is the right word. We are buoyed almost entirely by intel. Without Intel, the state is essentially cottage / mom-n-pop industries.

The financial numbers paint a grimmer picture of Portland than they do of the other west coast cities.

The city, the county, and the state all spend increasing proportions on debt service, and the rewards for earning a lot of money are much less than the neighboring state.

The total fertility rate is also one of the lowest in the country. And Portland lacks a flagship university to bring in young talent.

It might be a nice place to visit during the summer months, but I don’t foresee many high paying jobs or highly profitable businesses being made there.

I don't know how good the school is, but Portland State University is right next to downtown.

It's a decent school, but beset by the same 'Portland problems' that ruin it for the people who would be starting businesses. For example, during the last riot in Portland, the PSU library was taken over and rendered unusable for several quarters. If you were using this public space to do research or to work with friends to start a business... good luck... It's just gone in a day, and the university does nothing, and even encouraged the rioters.

I agree that Portland does need public space to co-work and to be close to research. Unfortunately that would take investment… and that’s not forthcoming, not even public $.

That being said, as someone who took a few graduate stats courses at PSU, I don’t think the library would have been the right place anyway - it always couched itself as a commuter access school that relied heavily on transfers from community college, and the library reflected that. It’s definitely not a well-resourced research institution, and with the retrenchment of federal funding for research and financial aid I’m not sure what it’ll focus on.

Not known for its tech-related offerings. OSU has the edge in engineering but it’s out in the boonies (for historical reasons).

If OSHU could expand to a serious biotech research uni that could maybe fill the gap and kickstart something. That’s where I would start. But I don’t know if it could eve happen. Portland definitely hurt by not having OSU or OU - compared with Seattle/UW, Austin/UT, Madison/UW etc.

Oregon and California were roughly on par. However, the once bustling downtown where you'd normally find people socializing after work, or hanging out, or doing tech-oriented meetups (I.e., the sorts of things that lead to business creation), was beset by 'fiery but peaceful' riots for almost an entire year. Now, the entire industry of after-work social hours, meetups, etc is dead. It is beginning to be revived but on the east side and suburbs, which is more residential and 'suburban' (although east side portland, is definitely more urban than most places). Suburban is okay, but you really need downtowns to create the sort of bustle that leads to that bay area zeitgeist.

One of the underappreciated things about the bay area is that, while it is very suburban, there are several respectably sized downtown cores -- Mountain View, Palo Alto, Redwood City, and of course the Big Kahuna - San Francisco -- all connected by relatively speedy (and from what I understand, much speedier now) rail.

You also need funding. That tends to be harder to come by in Oregon vs Silicon Valley.

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