Keep Portland Weird: The Decade It Was True

"Keep Austin Weird" started in Texas, around the year two thousand, as a slogan invented by a local activist to support small independent businesses against chain-store competition. Portland borrowed it, or perhaps independently arrived at it, and in the mid-two thousands formalized the phrase with the help of Powell's Books and other independent businesses that had a vested interest in the city's reputation for eccentricity.

Then "Portlandia" arrived. The sketch-comedy series, created by Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein and broadcast on Independent Film Channel beginning in two thousand eleven, built a nationally recognized satirical portrait of Portland's particular brand of liberal self-consciousness: the feminist bookstore, the farm-to-table culture, the artisan pickle enthusiast. Audiences who had never been to Portland recognized Portland. Portlanders watched themselves being watched and mostly seemed to find it fair.

The show ran through two thousand eighteen. Its seven-year run nearly perfectly overlapped with the period in which the Portland it satirized became unaffordable for most of the people who had made it what it was. The tech-era migration of the two thousands and twenty-tens pushed housing prices beyond what artists, musicians, and small-business owners, the exact population that produced the material Brownstein and Armisen were satirizing, could sustain.

"Portlandia" ended the same year that Portland's reputation for weirdness was becoming primarily historical. The city it depicted with fond mockery had been gentrified out from under the joke. The phrase "Keep Portland Weird" remains on stickers and T-shirts and is now used mostly by people who moved here recently enough that the original Portland is, for them, a matter of faith.