A Tale of Two Cities
Austin and Portland have had very different recent trajectories--but in the long run, which city will be better off?
I never planned to start a festival in Texas, and especially not one in collaboration with one of America’s most revered postmasters and an Austin nightlife and culture legend. But as is always the case, what you’re able to do in this world has everything to do with relationships. And my introduction to Austin was thanks to one of its best and most treasured people—my good friend Cathy Cochran-Lewis.
I met Cathy when I accepted the job of Portland Conference Chair of the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) Portland conference in 2009/2010. Cathy was the past-president of the organization, and quickly became a mentor and a friend. Economically speaking, those were hard and transitional years in media, events and food—but as always, hard times are when there is the most opportunity—if you are able to keep your head down and play the long game. But in the middle of the Great Recession, that was pretty challenging—as it is today.
Once among the culinary world’s most iconic and storied organizations, IACP was founded by a group of cookbook authors and teachers that included the likes of Julia Child, Jacques Pepin, and Madhur Jaffrey. In its glory days, the organization attracted nearly 2,000 of its members to a host city—as it did in Portland when it first hosted the annual IACP conference in 1998. By 2009, a fledgling economy, a rapidly changing food world, and a shift toward digital media had cut IACP’s attendance in half. But back then, having a national food event in Portland was a big deal—so a group of about 20 of us did everything we could to make sure the Portland conference was a success—and it was a huge success and in many ways laid the foundation for Feast, which we launched only two years later.
But I digress.
In the hyper-competitive and challenging world of events, I learned early on that the only way to survive was to either be good at production or good at sponsorship, and I decided to focus on the latter—not necessarily because I enjoyed asking brands and organizations for financial support (At least not in the beginning), but because being good at making partnerships would guarantee I’d have a job doing what I loved. And so, our small but mighty Portland group raised more than $100k of local funds for IACP in 2010, and helped pull off one of the most successful conferences to date.
When you’re good at sponsorship, opportunities find you.
After IACP had wrapped over a meal of fried chicken and biscuits at Adam and Jackie Sappington’s legendary and beloved Country Cat, Cathy asked me if I’d be interested in helping with another project she oversaw—the Texas Hill Country Wine and Food Festival, an Austin event that was the largest food festival in Texas at that time, and like IACP, had also fallen on harder times. A few months later, I signed on as head of partnerships, and much like IACP, a small group of collaborators were able to bring the festival back into the black. After that year, the event was sold to Austin’s event powerhouse C3 Presents, who replaced it with the Austin Food and Wine Festival—and I was out of a job. So even though my first Austin gig only lasted for a year, it introduced me to a wonderful community that at the time felt a lot like Portland’s—young, creative, scrappy, passionate, and food-obsessed. And thanks to Cathy, I was embraced by the Austin community, and Austin became something of a second home for the next decade.
At the time, I was also a contributor to the television show Unique Eats on the Cooking Channel, and this is how I got to know many chefs around the country—and how I first met Aaron Franklin. Unique Eats traveled the country profiling some of the country’s hottest restaurants, and at the time, Franklin Barbecue was a real game-changer—both for Texas barbecue and for restaurants in America. When the producers had decided to profile Franklin, I was asked to be one of the talking heads—and Aaron and I became fast friends.
In making programming for festivals, the best types of collaborations are always with chefs who have an existing relationship—or at least a mutual respect. Aaron and Rodney Muirhead from Portland’s Podnah’s Barbecue, also a barbecue pioneer, already knew each other, and we arranged for the two to collaborate at the Hill Country Festival in 2011. That was the first time Aaron and I worked together on an event, but it wouldn’t be the last. The following year, we debuted Feast Portland, which featured nearly ten Austin chefs, including Aaron.
Fast forward to 2014. Aaron envisioned a new type of food and music festival in Austin—one that combined the culinary energy of Feast with the rock and roll energy of Austin—and he asked me and James Moody to be his founding partners. Moody was one of the guys behind Austin’s Fun Fun Fun Fest, a music festival that was one of the coolest events of its kind in the country. He is also the owner of Guerrilla Suit, a creative agency that created the Hot Luck brand, among many other iconic Texas brands. So between the Franklin team, the Feast team, and the Guerrilla Suit and Fun Fun Fun Fest teams, we had a dream team that launched Hot Luck in May of 2017.
(Launching new events always takes a lot longer than planned.)
These days I’m pretty focused on Portland and I don’t get to Austin as much, but it’s hard not to compare the two cities and their corresponding growth over the last 14 years. Perhaps more than any two cities in the country, Austin and Portland are often compared.
My first trip to Austin was August 6th, 2010. At the time, Portland felt bigger than Austin to me, and it was. Austin’s 2010 Metro population was around 1.4 million, compared with Portland’s 1.85 million. It was also a lot less expensive. In 2010, one could still purchase a home in parts of Austin in 2010 for around $200,000, which even in 2010, was not possible in Portland.
And much like Portland in those days, chefs were moving from all over the country to take advantage of a similar recipe that contributed to Portland’s rise—cheap rent, a respect for creativity and originality over formulas, a city that seemed to value quality of life over thoughtless growth, and a deep appreciation for good food. And much like Portland, Austin saw an increase in restaurants, coffee shops, multi-family housing, venues, independent retail, hotels and all sorts of urban amenities in the years leading up to the pandemic. During those years, our cities felt like they were on a similar growth trajectory—and with a similar type of backlash that growth always brings.
However, during the early pandemic years, Portland’s growth stalled while Austin’s boom continued. Austin was one of the rare cities that experienced population growth during the pandemic while Portland’s population went in the other direction. Plus, companies like Tesla and Oracle moved their headquarters to Austin.
Utopia, right?
Not so fast. Fast forward to today.
In 2024 with an estimated Metro population of 2,274,000, Austin’s metro is now larger than Portland’s by 30,000 people. Still, even though Portland’s city population has experienced a decline, the Portland Metro area population continues to grow—albeit at a cooler pace. It must also be noted that the City of Portland’s population decline has not nearly been as severe as cities like New York and San Francisco. Even Nashville and Dallas lost population during COVID. We the people of navel-gazing Portland tend to believe we are the only ones facing city challenges—but we are not.
And then there’s the real estate numbers.
At $650,000, Austin’s average house price is $100,000 more than Portland in 2024. And while Portland’s CBD office vacancy rate is pushing 30%, Austin’s now surpasses 20% and is growing at a rate of nearly 5% per year.
My takeaway?
It’s easy to look at the last four years since COVID began and declare which cities are winners and which are losers—but I believe it’s far too soon to make such judgements. What COVID taught us all is that we need to prioritize resiliency—and we must plan for the cities of the future. Remote work is changing our central cities everywhere, and this will force us all to make big decisions on how our cities will look and function. So even though the numbers aren’t great in Portland, they seem to be approaching an equilibrium. And the numbers aren’t really great in any city right now–at least not in America.
This is not to say everything is perfect—not even close. Oregon needs to take a hard look at its livability, its affordability, its bureaucracy, its tax policies, and how some of our long-held ideologies may no longer be serving us. But as anyone close to the action can tell you, change is happening–even though it feels painfully slow. That said, cities are complex organisms. And while I don’t believe we have all of the right answers, we are finally asking the right questions. But there is a lot of hard work ahead.
Back to Austin. It’s funny. I get asked quite a lot why I wouldn’t move to Austin. I mean, I have a community and a festival in Austin. Why not just jump ship?
The answer is simple. Portland is home. It’s in my blood. Other than a year in Madrid and one in New York city, I have lived in Portland for the last 22 years. I grew up in the suburbs here. I went to school in Eugene. My family has been here for 120 years–since my great grandfather opened a grocery store on the corner of Killingsworth and Albina in the 1910s. Everything I love about this city is still here–our restaurants, our coffee shops, our world-class wine country only an hour away, and the 80 miles of hiking trails in Forest Park. I’m grateful to Austin for treating me like one of their own, but Portland will always be home.
Plus, I am reminded of what I learned back in 2009. To repeat what I say above: Economically and culturally speaking, these are hard and transitional years, but as always, hard times are when there is the most opportunity—if you are able to keep your head down and play the long game.