Portland is calling

Adam Wickham/Vanguard Staff

PORTLAND’S CULTURAL OPPORTUNITIES are just one of the city’s many draws.

If you build it, he will come,” goes the famous line from the 1989 Kevin Costner film Field of Dreams. But according to the results of a study by two Portland State professors on the city’s uncanny ability to attract and retain young, college-educated students, a better tagline for Portland might be “Don’t build much of anything at all—they’re just going to keep coming anyway.”
Titled “Is Portland Really the Place Where Young People Go To Retire?”—a reference to the popular comedy Portlandia—the recently-released study finds that these young, college-educated (YCE) individuals continue to flock to Portland despite high unemployment, lower pay and a propensity for those who are employed to find only part-time work or work in “non-college” occupations, such as food service.

“Young people do not come here to retire, but do not come here to get rich either,” the study concludes.

“I would presume that people know that moving here is not exactly like moving to the promised land from a job-market perspective,” said Greg Schrock, assistant professor of urban studies and planning at PSU, and one of the authors of the study. “The presumption is that people are trading their earnings, their financial well-being, for other kinds of nonmonetary benefits.”

These “nonmonetary benefits,” such as Portland’s music and DIY culture, quick access to stunning
natural amenities like Mt. Hood or the Pacific Ocean, and its unique transportation ethos are part of what keeps Portland’s “demographic effectiveness” high despite a languid job market.

An area has a high DE if more of the target group move in (or stay) than move out.

For example, if the target group of a study is aging, long-haired metal drummers, and for every 10 who move to an area, four move out, the DE of that area for aging, long-haired metal drummers would be 60 percent.

The target group of the study in question, though, was YCE individuals between 25 and 39, with whom Portland had a DE of 29.2, second only to Louisville, Ky. Among the top 50 U.S. Metro areas for 2008–2010. That beat out Seattle, with a score of 28.5; Austin, with a score of 23.7; and San Francisco, with a lowly 16.2.

So while it’s always nice to beat Seattle, Portland needs to recognize and take advantage of this vast, untapped pool of young talent before it’s too late, as migrants can often be fickle, said Jason Jurjevich, assistant director of the Population Research Center at PSU and the study’s other author.

“You know, just because we’ve had these strong historical trends of attracting and retaining young people with bachelor’s degrees, there’s no guarantee that in the future folks will continue to pour into the region,” Jurjevich said.

Depending on how you measure it, Portland also has either the highest or third-highest rate of YCE self-employment in the U.S.—between 9 and 10 percent—according to data contained in the study. One could ask the question, though, whether those 9 or 10 percent are self-employed by choice or chance.

“Regardless of whether they’re doing it by choice or doing it by circumstances, I think it’s something that speaks to the resilience of the people who are here,” Schrock said. That Portlanders are used to making their own way, whether with business or art or beer, and not having things handed to them is an asset that the city and region needs to value more, he added. “Because the job market here has been so hard for so long, I think young people here are…maybe more accustomed to having to work a little bit harder to differentiate themselves, to distinguish themselves.”

Though most of the data in the study comes from those who have already graduated college, the results are far from irrelevant to current PSU students, Schrock said. “It’s certainly true that students are feelin’ this story as much as the young 25-year-old college graduate who moved here,” he said. “In a sense, the students are further down the labor queue than the graduates are.”

Part of knowing and understanding the difficulties of the Portland job market means PSU students need to be proactive with their job search, said Greg Flores, associate director of Advising and Career Services at PSU. “Work on building a network that can support you in your job search, get involved with professional associations… Also, start your job search early, even if that just means checking out job descriptions while getting your materials ready in the months before
graduation.”

Flores added that ACS can help both students and alumni with choosing a career, resumes, cover letters and interviewing skills. The center will also host two career fairs this fall: an all majors fair Oct. 30 and a nonprofit fair Nov. 9.

Memories of a childhood road trip helped draw anthropology senior Samantha McKeachnie to PSU from Utah, and she soon fell in love with Portland: the nature, the culture, the people. But after she graduates she doesn’t plan on staying in town, mostly because she sees more opportunities to find a job in her field outside of Portland.

McKeachnie says she knows a lot of “transplants” to Portland from the East Coast who are not employed. “I don’t know why they come,” she said. “I guess they just like the sound of it.”

For business administration and accounting sophomore Hayden Taatjes, the environment you live in is something you pay for, just like anything else. “There’s always some sort of trade off,” he said. “You’re not going to find the perfect place with the perfect job.”