MILE MARKERS ON THE ROAD TO DETROIT: What happened to the great West Coast cities?

Migration patterns have changed as well. During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, Seattle participated in the region’s boom, which saw the addition of 187,000 domestic migrants. But now the Seattle metropolitan area is losing net migrants while many residents are moving to the state’s smaller metropolitan areas such as Bremerton, Spokane and Olympia.

Portland never achieved Seattle’s economic dynamism but was widely hailed as a model for dense, progressive planning and social liberalism — it positioned itself as a leisure-oriented San Francisco where “young people go to retire.” Despite being the whitest of America’s big cities, it was wracked with almost constant violent protests for much of 2020, extending even to the gentrified Pearl District. Spurred by crime and disorder, the Portland area is now losing domestic migrants. The region added 252,000 net domestic migrants between 2000 and 2020, but since then the Census Bureau has found that Portland’s urban core county, Multnomah, lost 13,000 net domestic migrants while the surrounding suburbs grew modestly.

Some still praise Portland as “an anarchic wonderland.” But now its streets are best known not for quirky food trucks and street musicians but growing fentanyl use. Over the past three years, the LA Times reports, the number of unhoused people in the Portland metro area has jumped from about 4,000 to at least 6,600. Shootings in the city have tripled. Homicides climbed from thirty-six in 2019 to ninety-seven last year. Lower-level crimes have spiked too: more than 11,000 vehicles were stolen in 2022, up from 6,500 in 2019. According to Portland’s KGW-TV, “every forty-two minutes there is a report of vandalism,” often involving broken windows. There were more reports of broken windows last year than during the 2020 riot year.

It is certainly too early to write off the once mighty Pacific cities. They retain many critical natural assets: they’re near mountains and spectacular water views; they have relatively mild climates (likely a big plus in a period of global warming), and a concentration of promising industries. The education base from the University of Washington, Berkeley, UCLA, Caltech and other top schools still gives the region a headstart in many promising industries.

In each of these Western cities, the key challenge is political. No one should expect a GOP resurgence, but there has been some modest pushback to the progressive agenda. San Francisco, for example, removed some particularly radical school board members and replaced its ultra-lenient DA, as did Seattle. There are stirrings in minority communities, as evidenced by a growing shift of Asian and Latino voters to the right, and in Oakland, the local NAACP recently denounced lax policing as a cause of growing violence, particularly in the black community.

Gooder and harder.