Portland vs. Seattle

Last week, a Seattle blog invited some of its contributors to debate whether Seattle or Portland were better cities to live in. (You can read the rebuttals here.)

The Portland argument came down to: Portland was the first to build light rail, which isn’t much of an argument. The Seattle view was much more along the lines of what I have been saying: Portland’s much-praised land-use planning has “radically accelerated . . . gentrification, rising home prices, the destruction of more traditional communities, the loss of economic and ethnic diversity.”

The reality is that it is more Tweedle-Dum vs. Tweedle-Dee. Yes, Portland was the first to waste money on light rail, but Seattle is spending more money on its first light-rail line than Portland has spent on all of its light-rail lines plus its streetcars put together. (If you care about transit, Seattle’s bus system gained market share from 1980 to 2000, while Portland’s rail-plus-bus system lost share. But apparently what we care about is what looks hip, not what works.)

Yes, Portland was the first to drive up housing prices with an urban-growth boundary. But Seattle and King County imposed a boundary in 1985 which, since 1989, has made Seattle significantly less affordable than Portland.
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So is Portland better than Seattle because it was the first to do stupid things like build light rail and driving up housing prices? Or is Seattle better because, when it finally got around to doing such things, it made an even bigger mess than Portland did?

Some of the discussion of Portland vs. Seattle raised features such as Powell’s Bookstore, reputedly the largest in the world. But anyone can order a book from Powell’s or hundreds of other bookstores on the web. When it comes to commercial considerations, long-time readers of the Antiplanner know that my definition of a world-class city is one that has a true Neapolitan pizzeria.

By this definition, Portland and Seattle both qualify: Portland has Nostrana while Seattle has Tuttalbella. New York qualifies, as does Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Phoenix, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, and Washington DC. As far as I can tell, Denver and Vancouver BC do not meet this test. However, Sheboygan, Wisconsin does. Go figure.

Unless cities start giving subsidies to Neapolitan pizzerias, the commercial businesses that are present usually have little to do with urban policy. From a policy view, given a choice between Portland’s idiotic innovations and Seattle’s insane imitations, I’ll have to stick with my preference for Houston (though sadly, as far as I can tell, it does not yet have any true Neapolitan pizzerias).