Downtown for All:
An Urgent Action Plan

Portland's downtown is at an inflection point. Office vacancy is approaching 40 percent, businesses have relocated, and commercial property values have fallen — eroding the tax base that funds parks, housing, mental health services, and neighborhood programs citywide. The pandemic hit Portland harder and longer than nearly every comparable city in the country.

But Portland has something most cities don't: A civic community that takes these challenges seriously and is willing to act together.

Downtown generates roughly 37% of Portland's local tax revenue on just 3% of its land area. The stakes are citywide — and so is the opportunity. The Commercial Real Estate Skunkworks — a Bull Run Center member initiative representing civic, nonprofit, and business institutions — was formed to meet this moment. Downtown for All is the result: A focused assessment of what's holding downtown back and a concrete call to action for restoring confidence, unlocking investment, and building a downtown that works for everyone.

Downtown for All is built on the work already underway. The Mayor's New Downtown Taskforce, the Chamber, Downtown Clean & Safe, Prosper Portland, city bureaus, philanthropic partners, and private stakeholders bring significant resources, expertise, and relationships to this work — and their continued leadership is essential.

What this framework adds is a shared structure for aligning those efforts around common priorities, measuring progress, and filling genuine gaps — and a vision for ensuring that the future of downtown is planned to serve the full community in a way that builds growing citywide pride and investment in downtown over time.

The research and stakeholder engagement behind this report point to a clear opportunity: With a coordinating function that spans the full range of downtown stakeholders, Portland's existing investments can work harder and go further. That is the animating idea behind Downtown for All.

Portland has talented organizations working hard on downtown. What's been missing is a dedicated function focused on sequencing major initiatives across sectors, aligning capital timing, tracking shared metrics, and maintaining continuity across administrations and budget cycles. That function would strengthen everything else, not compete with it.

Cities that have navigated comparable recoveries — including Detroit, Philadelphia, and San Antonio — have relied on exactly this kind of dedicated coordination capacity to give fragmented efforts a common spine. Portland can do the same. Any model would be developed in close collaboration with district organizations, business leadership, and city government, and designed from the outset to be additive.

Because downtown recovery is systemic — and a narrow playbook risks solving one problem while reinforcing another.

The 40 strategies are a comprehensive catalogue: best practices, proven models from peer cities, promising local ideas, and efforts already underway. The breadth is intentional. Land use, public safety, economic development, housing, arts and culture, retail, transportation, and governance are all connected. Understanding the full landscape is the precondition for making smart choices about where to focus first.

And focus is exactly what comes next. The research behind this report points clearly to a smaller set of high-impact initiatives capable of delivering visible results within three to five years. The next step is disciplined prioritization — a process that, done well, produces the kind of genuine alignment that attracts resources, political will, and sustained commitment.

Portland is in a rare moment — one where decisive action can set the city's trajectory for a generation.

Billions of dollars in catalytic investment are already advancing: the Broadway Corridor, Albina Vision, the OMSI District, the James Beard Public Market, and others. These projects represent years of community vision and reflect deep confidence in Portland's future. Together, they are the most significant reshaping of the Central City in decades.

The conditions to maximize that investment — a welcoming, safe downtown; aligned civic and business leadership; a public sector delivering on time — are within reach. The choices being made right now will determine whether these forces converge into lasting transformation. Downtown for All is about making sure they do.

Directly — because structural barriers are often what stand between a good idea and real results.

For building owners and investors, the framework addresses loan covenant constraints, distressed valuations, and conversion costs through loan modification assistance, office-to-residential conversion incentives, streamlined permitting, and capital alignment tools designed to make transactions financially feasible.

For small businesses, it tackles insurance costs, permitting complexity, and risk-heavy lease structures through collective insurance programs, a retail navigation ombudsman, master lease models, and storefront activation grants.

For civic and nonprofit organizations, it protects long-term access to affordable Central City space through community land trust expansion, nonprofit real estate acquisition support, and mission-aligned investment tools.

Lowering friction and removing barriers is as important as launching new programs — and this framework treats it that way.

With honesty and a commitment to integrated solutions.

Downtown for All is not a homelessness or behavioral health strategy — those challenges require dedicated systems and sustained public investment. But the framework takes seriously what anyone who spends time downtown already knows: that behavioral health crises, visible poverty, and inconsistent crisis response are real barriers to a thriving downtown, and that recovery depends on addressing them directly.

The framework's most direct response is the proposed Neighborhood Safety Centers — co-locating police, mental health clinicians, crisis responders, and community service providers in an integrated, accountable model that improves public safety while strengthening pathways to care. It also calls for screening major initiatives for impacts on unhoused and low-income community members and tracking outcomes for vulnerable populations alongside economic indicators.

The goal is a downtown that is genuinely safe and welcoming for all Portlanders. Portland has spent years caught between approaches that emphasize enforcement without root causes and services without accountability. Downtown for All insists that a better path is available — and that recovery depends on taking it.

Arts and culture are not an add-on in this framework. They are central to what a recovered downtown looks like.

Portland is entering a remarkable moment of cultural infrastructure expansion: the Portland Art Museum's Rothko Pavilion, the James Beard Public Market, the OMSI District's Center for Tribal Nations, Albina Vision Trust's landmark redevelopment celebrating Black culture and community, and new music venues are collectively reshaping Portland's civic and cultural identity. These projects have been years in the making, and they depend on — and will help create — a downtown that is safe, welcoming, and economically alive.

The Civic Playbook builds on this momentum through Design Portland, Seasonal Activation Campaigns, a Festival and Events Fund, and Downtown Film and TV Production support — positioning artists and creative producers as active agents of recovery. The framework tracks arts and culture attendance alongside traditional economic indicators, sending a clear signal: a recovered downtown is a place people want to be, not just a place where office space gets filled.

Portland's creative ecosystem is one of its most distinctive assets. This framework asks civic leaders to invest in it accordingly.

As an initiative of the North Star Civic Foundation, the Bull Run Center convenes civic, business, philanthropic, and public-sector leaders around complex challenges that require cross-sector coordination and durable alignment. Downtown recovery is exactly that kind of challenge.

Over the next year, Bull Run members will convene a broad set of community stakeholders to help refine and sequence the Downtown Playbook into a focused implementation agenda. This is the first next step.

Concretely, consistently, and publicly.

Downtown for All proposed a shared “Performance & Recovery Framework” to assess strategies, sequence decisions, and reinforce accountability. It builds from the Governor's three measurable 2030 commitments — full foot traffic recovery, 2 million square feet of net office absorption, and 2,500 housing units in the pipeline — and extends them into a broader set of indicators aligned with Downtown for All's five priorities.

Indicators will track worker presence, vacancy rates, storefront activation, safety perception, capital deployment, housing pipeline, fiscal contribution, and arts and culture activity. Progress will be organized across four time horizons: Reset (2026), Rebound (2028), Recover (2031), and Renew (2040).