Recommendation: "Will Portland Always Be a Retirement Community for the Young?"

Last week I was scrolling through what felt like the entire internet looking for a bit of entertainment. Does that ever happen to you? You feel like you've read or seen everything that there could possibly be of interest, that perhaps you have actually reached the end of the internet?

While I battled back that sense of boredom and despondency that follows this revelation, I reloaded the New York Times and saw Claire Cain Miller's, "Will Portland Always Be A Retirement Community for the Young?" With tongue planted firmly in cheek, this article examines some of the reasons why Portland is an outlier in how cities have grown and changed in the past couple of decades. (Spoiler alert: there is a surplas of college grads, unlike many other urban areas which actively try to seek the same in order to drive their economies).

What I love about this piece is the artful use of structure to help create Miller's argument. She starts focusing on a personal anecdote, then expands to a city-wide perspective, then to a national one. Then she zooms back in, going back to city-wide then back to personal, ending the first section with a rhetorical question. What I love about those first 6 paragraphs is the elegant and balanced way that such a structure emphasizes the problem, allowing for easy comparison. Often, emerging writers will create a point/counterpoint structure for comparison, but here we have the sense of spiraling, of sort of that medieval interlocking spheres as a way of highlighting how enmeshed the problems are.

The shift in the article occurs when Miller posits, "Portland’s residents may, as the saying goes, want to keep their city weird. But do they want to keep it broke too?" Emerging writers often rely on the crutch of starting with a question. They do so dogmatically and often artlessly often asking something as pat as "Have you ever wondered why...." Here, though, you have a writer in full command of how to use that question to turn the article on its heel as well as to advance her own argument.

The next portion of the writing concerns itself with historical trends, starting with national trends then looking at those relating directly to Portland by comparison. This structure is a more common way of handling comparison, yet it's well done here and definitely emphasizes her point that Portland may be at risk of the "the amenity paradox, [which] refers to cities where the same amenities that attract people end up eroding what made a city desirable in the first place."

The article then ends on a tonal note that is, as the College Board might say, complicated. Throughout the article, there is a sense of gentle mockery that Miller tries to lessen by parenthetical phrases admitting to her own personal experience having lived in Portland. While she uses the stereotypes of "designers and baristas" and "kombucha brewing" as coded language for hipsters, she generally sticks to the psuedo-academic tone that relies on studies, experts and statistics. This use of emotionally distant language slips in the last paragraph where she notes that as economic trends change people will be compelled to move to less cool cities, "the ones that people move to when it’s time to become an adult." The implication, obviously, is that for now Portland is a haven for, as her example shows, 35-year-olds playacting at adulthood while holding decidedly non-adult jobs. In some ways, she seems to buy into an argument that the hipsters she decries would inherently object, that is that adulthood comes with decent and steady incomes, health insurance and a tidy 401K.

Moreover, the last sentence which declares that when such a shift a happens, "Portland will find out who the true believers really are." Again the implication is that those who live in Portland now, who are intent on keeping Portland weird are cult-like, or at the very least, irrational in their devotion.

Definitely a fun article to teach since it is easily accessible while still full of examples of interesting rhetorical moves. Most importantly it might serve as a very nice model for student writing with some patterns that would be easy to replicate.

(As a footnote, as an avid nonfiction reader online, I often find myself reading things that elicit hundreds of comments. There is no quicker way to kill your kind view of humanity than to read comments on the internet. Why is that? And why do I still do it? I do find the comments at NYT and to a lesser extent NPR for the most part thoughtful, but at the end of the day, I still think what is wrong with people?)