If I’m on the east side of the Willamette River, I’ll shop and peruse along NE 28th or up and down Hawthorne Street. For me, that always means a trip to Powell’s Books and Music Millenium. Here’s a very solid PDX cafe roundup by the team over at Eater.Īfter getting a coffee, it’s time to explore the city by bike. Crema is great but if it means going out of your way you don’t need to make extra effort to chase it down - there are so many wonderful hipster coffee shops in Portland (all staffed by people who have the “1820s whaling ship” tattoo starter kit) that finding them and comparing them is part of the fun. Once I have wheels under me, I typically head to Crema on NE 28th, near the famed Laurelhurst Theater (where you can watch movies while eating pizza and drinking beer for just a few bucks). Leave your skateboard at home unless you’re going to the famed Burnside Skate Park.) (Note: the city is great for skating features but terrible for skating as a mode of transportation. Cars are considerate and know the rules of the road - unlike LA. Walking is fine but nothing is as breezy as PDX by bike, so don’t hesitate to get one.
#SUMMER SOULSTICE SANTA MONICA PLUS#
Portland has multiple bike rental shops, plus e-bike stations, and it might be the last city in America where e-scooters are still a thing. (For an in-depth look at the Portland homeless situation, check this recent breakdown by the LA Times.) With that said, the short answer is that the homeless-tourist overlap is less present in the summer of 2022 than it was in the summer of 2021.
To be clear, even commenting on the homeless situation feels out of my depth and beyond the scope of this piece… but it’s also something that travelers are sure to witness and develop feelings about - so ignoring it feels equally absurd. I would imagine that much of this is due to the fact that the city has begun to break up encampments in residential areas but not in industrial areas, meaning if you want your encampment to be semi-permanent, it’s better to set up in a less populous space. On the ground, there are still plenty of encampments but they aren’t as likely to obstruct traffic or create conflict with residents and tourists as they were in the summer of 2021 (this is my impression but the observation feels fairly obvious). Travel Portland, the tourism board for the city, features an excellent breakdown of what is being done on their site. Nearly a year later, I’m back in Portland for the summer and thrilled to report that the homeless situation - which is complicated, linked to large-scale local and national issues, and should never be looked at simply as a scourge of society rather than an outgrowth of larger systemic failures - has been mitigated somewhat. I’ve never gotten more feedback on a piece in my life and I write about guns. I stand by that idea, though it certainly set off a firestorm. Travelers should be part of the beloved city’s recovery. My thesis was this: Portland fell on hard times during the pandemic which exacerbated the city’s homelessness problem. But that piece wasn’t so much about what to do ( though it did have some A+ reccomendations, so revisit it) as why to visit. The last time I wrote about my home city of Portland, Oregon, it was for our 2021 Fall Experience Guide.
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