Nirvana? Possibly not

Migration into Multnomah County smaller than Portlanders might think

By peter korn

The Portland Tribune, Feb 12, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (17 Reader comments)

JONATHAN HOUSE / TRIBUNE PHOTO

A Mayflower Moving truck pulls up onto the Hawthorne bridge in Southwest Portland. Despite perceptions, Multnomah County has not been overrun by transplants during the last several years.

Six months ago Donovan Pacholl needed to rent his house in the piece-of-pie-shaped neighborhood called “the wedge” between Southeast Powell Boulevard and Southeast Foster Avenue.

He posted a notice on the classified Web site Craigslist about the house and received more than 30 responses.

There was a slew of people interested in moving to Portland from New England, Pacholl reports, and a few from the Midwest. Almost everyone who inquired about the rental house was between 30 and 40, with one or two children. Many said they wanted to get rid of their cars and they had heard Portland was a place they could easily live without them.

And there was something else about the respondents that surprised Pacholl. Few of the responses were from California.

For at least three decades Oregonians have lived with the idea that they were being overrun by people moving here from California. But data compiled by the Internal Revenue Service, which traces the location from which every tax form is filed and compares that to the filing location from the year before, shows what Pacholl learned first hand.

Californians are not overrunning Oregon. In fact, in most recent years, just about as many Multnomah County residents left for California as Californians moved into Multnomah County.

That’s not the only thing you probably believe about Portland’s population — and how it gets here — that is wrong.

Another myth is that the nirvana of Portland attracts an unusual number of outsiders to live here. The reality: Many other states and most westerns cities have higher rates of migration than Oregon and Portland.

The IRS data that yields these stats only tracks people who file taxes — which leaves uncounted people who are too poor to file taxes and a lot of people who moved here from outside the country.

Still, the IRS data points out some sometimes-surprising realities about who moves here and who leaves. For instance:

• That tidal wave of incoming residents is a myth. But a ripple may have started.

“The fact that we don’t get more migration is the amazing fact,” says George Hough, director of Portland State University’s Population Research Center, and widely considered the guru of local demographers.

“What people don’t understand is there’s not a lot of migration into Oregon,” Hough says. “There’s no flood.”

There are a few Oregon counties still attracting significant numbers of taxpaying outsiders, and they’re close by — Washington and Clackamas counties. But not Multnomah County.

For most of the past decade, more tax-paying people left Multnomah County to live elsewhere than moved in.

And even the Washington and Clackamas numbers don’t change the reality — that migration to Oregon and Portland is lower than many states and western cities.

Seattle, for instance, gets many more migrants, and many more Californians, than Portland.

But Multnomah County seems to be starting to attract more outsiders. Tax returns for 2006-07 (the IRS groups the migration data in two-year segments) show 3,601 more people moving in to Multnomah County than leaving. A number of those moving in say it’s all about Portland’s growing reputation.

That reputation for sustainability brought Marie-Eve Sirois here with her husband Edmond and their 2-year-old son Louis-Martin. And it doesn’t hurt that Sirois and husband like to windsurf in the Columbia Gorge.

Sirois and family moved to Portland in April 2007 with jobs already lined up. In Quebec City, Canada, she had worked as a project manager for green buildings, and Portland’s reputation in that field drew them here.

“Portland is definitely the capital of sustainable building in North America,” Sirois says. “In Quebec City everybody knows Portland, Oregon.”

Sirois and her family live in the Foster-Powell neighborhood near Pacholl’s house. Surrounding her, she says, are recently arrived couples from New York state, Maine, Washington state and one native Oregonian family.

“We’re like an East Coast crew and we’re all friends,” Sirois says.

Northeast Portland resident Sheri Louis, husband Keith and their two young children were looking to move to the West Coast from Portland, Maine, last year. Their final three choices came down to Seattle, San Francisco and Portland. In October they chose Portland.

“It was the most inexpensive,” says Louis.

Keith is an airline pilot who windsurfs and she teaches parenting classes with an unorthodox approach. Just as she hoped, the classes are being well received, according to Louis.

“Portlanders are open to new ideas,” she says.

• Most of the people moving to Multnomah County come from Washington and Clackamas counties, not California.

Denise McGorrin has been in Portland only a year, but previously she lived for 20 years in California. Based mostly on how many of her California friends said they hoped to move to Portland someday, she figures Californians dominate the numbers of Multnomah County migrants.

“I’m going to say 30 or 40 percent,” McGorrin says.

In actuality, only about one in 10 Multnomah County migrants move from California.

Originally from Lansing, Mich., attorney McGorrin years ago met fellow travelers in Nepal who were talking up Portland. She says she spent nearly 10 years trying to find the right job so she could move here. She now works as an administrative law judge for the Oregon State Employment Division.

Worth the wait?

“I’m thrilled I’ve found the place I’m going to spend the rest of my life,” she says.

The California numbers are so low because most people who move, don’t move far. That’s true just about everywhere. Migrants into Multnomah County mainly come from the suburban areas around Portland.

But even if you are just counting people who move to Multnomah County directly from out of state, Californians are only about one in five.

• Portland residents aren’t moving to the suburbs anymore, but out-of-staters have taken up the slack.

For years, Sophia Tzeng nurtured a dream. Living in New York City with her three young girls, the dream for the divorced Tzeng was very particular — a bungalow with a yard and streets on which her children could freely walk and bicycle.

“I didn’t know where it was going to be, but I knew it was where we were going to,” says Tzeng, an attorney, who also knew she did not want to raise her children in Manhattan.

Tzeng found her dream bungalow in a move to Lake Oswego in 2007. She liked her neighbors in the small houses nearby. Her children liked their school.

Tzeng, 34, could have stayed in Lake Oswego. But last summer she bought a condominium near Couch Park in Northwest Portland.

The trend until recently, demographers say, has been for out-of-state residents to move first to Portland and then, after a few years, to move out to the suburbs of Washington, Clackamas and Clark counties.

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