Burnin'

Dana Tims at The Oregonian is reporting that Oregon’s wine industry is under intense pressure to change and that big changes are indeed underway.

At a time when recessionary pressures on the state’s $1 billion wine industry are threatening to leave tons of grapes unpicked this year, Ken Johnston, general manager of vineyard operations for Winemakers Investment Properties, is developing more than 550 acres of vineyards west of Silverton — huge by Oregon’s traditional mom-and-pop standards. His business model relies on efficiencies of scale to help keep long-term costs and consumer prices down.

Industry insiders are impressed.

“It’s absolutely a game-changer,” said Joseph Wagner, whose family founded Napa Valley’s Caymus Vineyards, which has relied largely on mechanical harvesting for the past five years. Not only has the method worked, he said, but it has actually increased the quality of the fruit at harvest.

There is no way, he said, to underestimate its potential for Oregon’s wine operations.

On the surface, automation doesn’t sound too appealing. It smacks of factory farms and corporate agriculture. And that’s not Oregon! Yet, a higher yield of fragile pinot noir grapes will drive prices down, and that’s something that desperately needs to happen, if Oregon pinot noir and pinot gris is to become more than a niche product.

Tims’ article also points out that Silverton is nowhere near the Dundee Hills, but a perfect place for pinot grapes nevertheless. This is the kind of news I get excited about. Yamhill County is a special place. But there are lots of special places in Oregon that are ideal for cultivation.

I love Oregon pinot noir, but I do not love paying $25 to $60 for a great bottle of great local wine. I do it because I’m a fiend, but I also look favorably upon Washington state’s broader range of varietals in the $10 to $20 price range. And I discovered a wonderful wine merchant in SE Portland who specializes in unearthing amazing ten dollar bottles from Spain, Italy and France (and California and Oregon on occasion).

Price is important. Quality is important. May the two frequently meet.

Cheers.

Simon Dumenco, writing for Ad Age, taps a nerve when discussing the rise of social gaming and what it means for our culture.

In FarmVille, of course, you “work” your own plot of land, while FrontierVille stokes nostalgia for Manifest Destiny. (“Howdy, Pardner! Come join us on the frontier, where you’ll carve out a home in the wilderness and raise a family.”) Cafe World makes you a small-business owner/operator.

If only.

Think about all this for a moment: An American gaming company is captivating millions around the world by getting them to obsess about fake food, fake business and fake real estate. How America-right-now is that? The country that gave the world the housing bubble and the KFC Double Down (according to figures recently released by the World Health Organization, 67% of Americans are overweight) is betting big on pixelated playgrounds filled with sprawling plots of land, farm-fresh produce and fantasies of “cooking, slicing, chopping, sautéing and baking your way to the top of the culinary world!” in Cafe World’s words.

FarmVille has become the most popular game application on Facebook, with over 61.6 million active users and over 24.1 million Facebook application fans in June 2010. If you spend any time on Facebook at all, a portion of your friends will spam you with Farmville requests. Dumenco asks, “How America-right-now is that?” I might simplify his rhetorical question to “How American is that?” Day-dreamy ambition is indeed an American trait. F. Scott Fitzgerald spent his entire career addressing the topic, and he’s one of our most literate 20th century voices.

Dumenco admits to being depressed by the rise of social media gaming. I know what he means but it’s important to make room for the imagination. There are more imaginative things to do than play games, online or off, but on the grand scale of attention robbing activities, Farmville and its lot are relatively innocent. First person shooter games are another story. Giving kids toy guns is bad enough, but now we provide the whole killing experience via the click of a mouse. Now that’s depressing. It’s also sick and wrong.

Samish Island in Skagit County, Washington is an idyllic Puget Sound beach community. It was our great fortune to spend a relaxing week there in a beautiful beach-front home with stunning views of Bellingham Bay, Mt. Baker and Orcas Island.

We had planned to visit Orcas and maybe North Cascades National Park while there, but we found we didn’t want to leave the cozy environs of Samish and its nearby communities for long. We did venture to Bellingham, Mount Vernon and LaConner, but the little towns of Edison and Bow, just a few miles from Samish, offer essentials like lunch along the slough, bottles of wine and fresh-baked peanut butter cookies. When you include the restaurants on Chuckanut Drive, there really is no reason to wander too far.

The Oyster Bar on Chuckanut Drive–an historic road that hugs the coast–is now one of our favorite restaurants anywhere in the world. It’s a charming roadhouse with a long history and an even longer wine list. The views of Bellingham Bay and the San Juan Islands from every cozy table are enthralling. The service is impeccable and the food is pretty damn good too.

It was fun to slow down and experience the rhythms of the tide. At low tide, we saw the water retreat a quarter mile, revealing tidal pools, clamming opportunities and lots and lots of birds, particularly hungry herons. At high tide, seals came in close to see who might be playing on the beach. Of course, our girl Lucy was there to greet the sea dogs when they poked their heads up.

Overhead we saw jets coming in for Vancouver, BC landings. At night, we could see the milky way, and one evening we saw seven shooting stars in the span of an hour.

Samish Island is low key and glorious at the same time. It’s also accessible and remote. There are lots of old cabins and some impressive new homes too. There are wild berries growing along the road, crabs in the bay, and most residents have a nice garden. Samish Island–named for the Samish Indians–is nourishing, not just in food stuffs, but in spirit. It’s a great American place.

We first tasted Pinot Noir from Oregon’s Umpqua Valley a few years ago while living in South Carolina. Brandborg Winery has pretty solid distribution in The Lowcountry and our local wine merchant, Claude, stocked the Elkton-made product. The wine created–as wine will sometimes do–a curiosity about the terroir. This weekend we got a chance to experience it up close and personal.

See more photos on this Flickr Slideshow from the weekend

Brandborg’s tasting room is one of the more obvious structures on the town’s main drag. We found Terry, the proprietor, enjoying his lunch and some wine on the deck adjacent to the entrance. He followed me inside the building after a bit, and said he’d be my host today. I said great, sell me a bottle of your Estate Pinot Noir. After getting me to taste his other two pinots, and telling me about the winery’s recent writeup in The New York Times, he did.

Soon thereafter, Terry’s wife Sue appeared unexpectedly at our table with complimentary cheese, chips and watermelon. Sue also informed us of the couple’s favorite restaurant in Florence, told us about a good six-mile hike in Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area and about house rental options in town, should we want to return. Terry also had nice things to say about River’s Edge Winery down the street, and Bradley Vineyards around the bend.

When we arrived at River’s Edge, owners Mike and Vonnie Landt were there to greet us. Mike said Lucy girl could come inside and enjoy the A.C. with us. We sipped pinot noir and Vonnie mentioned that there was a barn dance in the community center that night. She also said Florence is a pretty cool place if we’re headed to the coast. Mike and Vonnie seem like good people and their wine is one to stock up on, as it has very limited distribution.

Both River’s Edge and Brandborg buy fruit from Bradley Vineyards, so we figured we better head over there too. Bradley is situated on a picturesque southern slope. Unlike the first two venues, here the grapes and the tasting room are situated together. I opened the door to the little cabin and found Bonnie Bradley entertaining another couple, but I managed to buy two glasses of Baco Noir and we found a shaded spot to take in the stunning views of this northernmost section of the Umpqua valley.

After our three wine-centric visits, we headed to a city park and changed in to our swim suits. The Umpqua River is one of Oregon’s great waterways and it’s particularly inviting on a hot summer day. Lucy doesn’t like to swim but she’s a strong swimmer. When Darby and I waded out from the shore, Lucy decided she better join us. What a good girl.

The drive from Elkton to Reedsport was easy and the scenery was stunning all the way. Just before town, there’s a platform for elk viewing. We didn’t stop, but there was a herd of elk lounging in the meadow. At Reedsport, we turned north on 101 and entered the Oregon Dunes. With fresh water lakes on one side and the ocean on the other, it’s easy to appreciate this remote area of the Oregon coast. Just before the bridge to Florence, there’s a Best Western overlooking the city. Turns out they take dogs, have King beds and rooms with a balcony. I have to have access to the outdoors when I’m in a hotel. It’s a rule (and in Oregon, it’s typically a reality).

The Siuslaw River Bridge to Florence is a classic 1930s art deco creation, and as soon as you cross it and enter the coastal city of 9000, you hang a right and bing, you’re in Old Town. We had been advised to call Waterfront Depot for a reservation, which I did. Matt, the host, told me there were no tables available but he’d fit us in at the bar. When we arrived 25 minutes later, there were no seats at the bar, but Matt said we could sit at his most excellent six top, until the party which had it reserved arrived. Matt’s plan, while bold, worked flawlessly! We enjoyed a cup of chowder, glasses of wine and Manchego cheese with olives and marinated roasted red peppers, and soon enough Matt showed us to a great two-top against the wall.

I don’t often find the inspiration necessary to rave about a restaurant, but Waterfront Depot in Florence totally impressed Darby and me in every way. The food is great, the atmosphere is great, the service is great, the prices are great…we can’t wait to return.

In the morning, we grabbed coffee in Old Town, then headed out to Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area, just to the south of Florence. The area is popular with ATV enthusiasts, and we saw some on our way in, but when we reached the spit that runs back toward the mouth of the Siuslaw River, there was no one. We parked, the lone car in a beach access lot. On a beautiful sunny Sunday morning in July! We hiked up and over to the beach and ocean stretching forever before us, seemingly untouched by man.

Men’s Health named Portland, Oregon “America’s Most Patriotic City.”

The magazine came to its conclusion after factoring the number of registered voters who turned out for state and federal elections in 2004 and 2008, money spent on military veterans, percentage of residents who volunteer, and finally, sales of fireworks and U.S. flags.

Portland wins lots of media contests and has long been the darling of The New York Times, but this new designation from Men’s Health Magazine is surprising to me, for Portland is home to lots of free thinkers. Of course, free thinkers are the people who make America great, but they’re often marginalized in favor of another, simpler view of patriotic Americans.

Speaking of Portland’s free thinkers, I met Jeffrey Thomas at Meatapalooza on Wednesday and just days later a huge, flattering feature by D.K. Row appears in The Oregonian on Thomas.

Row is the paper’s art critic and he asks Thomas, a former art dealer, some great questions about the art of selling art.

Q: Can you remind us how tough it was to sell art back in the ’80s here in Portland?

A: Remember, this was a timber economy and in the 1980s, Oregon went through its first of many recessions. We went through three years of lapsed timber sales; this little business called Intel was just starting up, so we really had no tech industry. Interest rates for houses were 12.5%.

So it was a tough time to get interest in cultural activity. There was a lot of money in town but you did not show it. It was very old school WASP. Nobody showed their wealth; no one supported anything. There was this anti-philanthropic thing going on. You just didn’t show that you had money. That made for a tough environment to create cultural activity and awareness that would draw people here.

Q: And people think it’s tough now.

A: It was nothing like it was then. There was just no cultural awareness. It was a country club for a few families and everyone else was part of the working class. There were few galleries, and only a handful of people interested in them.

Today, Thomas is a producer and photographer’s rep for Polara Studio. His Polara bio says, “…in his mind every day is a birthday party, which sort of explains the applause and flowers that he constantly showers upon everyone around him.”

Thomas is @bonegypsy on Twitter.

Fred Wilson is a managing partner at Union Square Ventures, a venture capital firm. He writes the popular “A VC” blog (“musing of a VC in NYC”), and has invested in numerous game-changing tech companies, including Twitter, del.icio.us, Etsy, and FeedBurner.

I’ve been reading his blog off and on for years, but have never seen him speak. Thanks to The 99 Percent, part of the Behance Network, we can now hear his thoughts on the all the various ways to run your own show.

Wilson describes various types of organizations that entrepreneurs run.

• the sole proprietorship
• the partnership
• marriage partners as business partners
• the boutique
• the federation
• the project
• the tour bus
• the startup
• the breakout
• the company

I feel like my new company, Bonehook LLC, borrows freely from several of the examples above, namely the sole proprietorship, the partnership, the boutique, the federation and the project. I’m the sole owner of Bonehook, but I have a partner in AdPulp. In the creative services arena, small firms are often called boutiques, and I have no problem with that. The federation model that Wilson describes is perfectly resonant, as the work Bonehook does is totally dependent on my network of collaborators who step forward on a project basis to help solve client’s marcom problems.

I also like the examples Wilson gives for each model: Matt Drudge; Openshop Studios; DailyLit; Union Square Ventures; Allen & Co; Avatar; Hype Machine; Red Stamp; Foursquare; and Twitter.

In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster–now in its 52nd day–British Petroleum is losing value fast, which means the company’s shareholders are taking a huge hit.

In response, British businessmen and politicians are rallying around BP and the company’s beleaguered CEO, according to Reuters.

On Monday, the chief executives of some of Britain’s biggest companies including Vodafone, BG Group and WPP gathered for a party at BP’s headquarters to show their support for embattled BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward.

BP confirmed the meeting but denied it was a party.

London Mayor Boris Johnson, a close ally of Prime Minister David Cameron, said the threat to BP’s dividend, which U.S. politicians want cut, was a “matter of national concern”.

“There’s something slightly worrying about the anti-British rhetoric that seems to be permeating from America,” he told BBC radio.

The gusher is leaking 40,000 barrels of oil a day–much higher than earlier estimates–but shareholders are worried about their investment and anti-British rhetoric. I would say I’m stunned, but I’m not.

I’d also say I’m stunned that a company is allowed to operate a rig like this off our coast with no plan for the inevitable worst case scenario, but I’m not. A lot of rich people have spent a lot of money to buy influence and keep regulators at a cozy distance. And this is what you get when there’s no real oversight.

See more photos of the damage this gusher continues to cause at Boston.com. The image above of a reporter swimming in oil is comes from Time Magazine. And here’s a report from ABC News:

I like to visit Omaha at least once a year to reacquaint myself with my place of origin. I need to walk the hills, breathe the air and feel the positive vibrations of the people of The Corn in order to remember who I am.

I am from the middle. The Heartland. It’s a place of immense beauty, but interestingly, not everyone can see it due to its subtle nature. My interest isn’t in moving people to see what I see in the vastness of the Nebraska sky or the swirly patterns of its rivers. It’s personal, this need to reconnect with the patterns of my making.

My grandpa, Eldon Burn, shared the best parts of Nebraska with me when I was young. For example, we used to load Prince in the station wagon and head south, past Nebraska City to farmland owned by friends. Prince (and later, Duke) always cried with excitement the entire ride, springing into action on the crunchy cold ground once we arrived, his nose and legs ready for duty. Duty meant finding a covey of Bob White quail, and Prince never failed to perform his assigned tasks, just as Eldon’s one good eye never failed to bring down one, two or three quail in perfect sequence.

It’s been decades since I have hunted quail, but the hunt is eternal. It’s the game that changes. Now I hunt for work, talent and hometown experiences that need revisiting.

Seeing the impressive collections at Joslyn Art Museum, especially all the Western and native art is an experience I need to have every so often. It helps me to vividly imagine what it was like for my ancestors who came from Europe to this totally wild place, where it was common to sleep with a rifle under your blanket in a house made from sod.

I think of the word “fierce” when I contemplate 19th century Nebraska. Even if you were headed for points beyond, just getting across the state on horse, foot or wagon would have been an epic journey. Just as it was an epic journey from the British Isles, France and Russia–the countries my ancestors migrated from—to Nebraska.

It goes without saying that people form their identities in response the climate and land where they live. On Sunday, I made it a point to climb the highest hill I could find near Omaha’s Old Market. From the pinnacle in Little Italy south of downtown, you can see for miles. In 19th century terms, you can “scout” and there’s a lot to pick up on, including a massive amount of building and rebuilding in downtown and along the riverfront.

In other parts of the U.S. ambitious developments are floundering. Not so in Omaha. Unemployment is under 5% and retailers have not fled, they’ve converged. There’s a new baseball stadium going up north of downtown, new hotels, new warehouse living, new running trails, a new pedestrian bridge across the Missouri, and that’s just a slice of the action.

Omaha has it going on, and I’m proud to see the city grow and become ever more vital to its inhabitants and visitors alike. If you’ve never been to Omaha and you don’t know people there, you might be wondering when you will have occasion to change that. There are myriad answers—the College World Series every June, Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder’s meeting, BigOmaha, or any number of concerts at Qwest Center or smaller indie rock shows at Slowdown, a venue owned by Saddle Creek Records. Once you visit, you will know people in Omaha, and that will make your return visits all the more enjoyable.

To see more photos from my visit, click over to this Flickr set.

SEATTLE—Out-spoken and fearless urban planning expert, social critic, author and journalist James Howard Kunstler is a man on a mission. He wants to shake the American people awake with his special brand of righteous anger, and tonight he’s on stage in a grand ballroom at the Westin to do just that.

Kunstler is here to deliver the opening keynote at Living Future 2010, “the unconference for deep green professionals” put on by Cascadia Region Green Building Council, a chapter of the U.S.G.B.C. (and my wife’s employer). Kunstler is an interesting choice to open the unconference, for he is a rabble-rouser of epic proportions.

He says, “People call me a ‘doomer,’ but I call myself an actualist.” One of the things he’s being “actual” about is suburbia, which he says is “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.” Kunstler says, “We’ve invested our identity in this. Suburbia is part of the American dream.”

Kunster claims the suburban dream is over, despite our lingering dreams. He claims builders and others are waiting for the bottom, so they can resume building, but “no combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run suburbia.”

Americans are conditioned to want something for nothing, he says. Kunstler reminds the liberal audience that President Obama said, “We won’t apologize for the American way of life.” Building on that, Kunstler says he is sorely disappointed by the nation’s elite cadre of environmentalists who are more concerned about producing electric cars than they are about living in walkable communities. His word for it: techo-grandiosity.

“We are not a serious society, not at all,” he practically spits form the podium. He tells a story about speaking at the Googleplex in Mt. View, CA. “The whole place is like a kindergarten. It seems the whole idea in business today is to be as infantile as possible.” Worse yet, Kunstler says the Googleites don’t know the difference between energy and technology, which is his way of saying technology isn’t going to solve all our problems.

Lack of political will is another sore point. He says we’re spending stimulus money to fix highways, when “we have a train system that would embarrass the Bulgarians.” Sadly, “we can’t afford to be clowns.”

During the question and answer session, a psychologist in the audience asks Kunstler if he doesn’t have a more hopeful image he can share, one that will make an already paranoid people feel less paranoid. In true Kunstler fashion, he says, “we can’t fix everything with therapy.”

When the talk is done, people applaud, but not as vigorously as they might. It seems the air’s been sucked out of this vast ballroom.

One attendee tells me he found Kunstler’s talk depressing. And therein lies the crux of the matter. Kunstler paints a broad canvas where all sorts of American ugliness are put plainly in view. Yet, most people working on solutions—like creating green buildings—are busy addressing one small part of the problem, not the entirety of the matter, and they want to feel good about their contributions. But Kunstler doesn’t care about making people feel good. His thing is to sound the alarm and make it ring loudly in our ears.

[UPDATE] Here are two other takes on Kunstler’s Living Future speech, one from Sustainable Industries and another from Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce.

Last Saturday, Darby and I had the extreme pleasure of finding our way to the heart of the Dundee Hills. After a quick stop at Dobbes Family Estate in town, we motored west and up the hill toward Domaine Drouhin, except we never found Domaine Drouhin. Instead we found De Ponte Cellars.

In winemaking, as in many things, location is crucial to the enterprise, and De Ponte Cellars is on “the hillside” that is home to several of Oregon’s top producers. De Ponte’s slice of this precious hillside is also home to one of the oldest vineyards in the Willamette Valley. This scenic property was acquired by the Baldwin family in 1999 and soon De Ponte Cellars Winery was born.

According to Dundee Hills Winegrowers Association, the location is mostly about the Jory soils.

This special volcanic soil has excellent minerality and drainage. Also, the Dundee Hills benefits from being drier and warmer than many pockets that surround it. All of these factors together combine to showcase unique characteristics found in the best Pinot noirs from this region. Our wines tend to be very focused with great clarity and complexity. Some of the descriptors are bright red fruits, exotic spices, and a gorgeous minerality in the structure.

So, De Ponte has location, soil, climate and family on its side. De Ponte (pronounced Duh Pon Tay) also has winemaker Isabelle Dutartre. Dutartre learned the art of winemaking in the Burgundy region of France where she’s from, and each of her De Ponte vintages reflects her uncompromising commitment to quality and tradition. To learn more about Dutartre, see this video from Wine Is Serious Business.

I think it’s important to note that another one of “the hillside’s” best winemakers is also a woman–Anna Matzinger at Archery Summit. Pinot is a delicate grape and getting the pure essence of this delicate fruit in the bottle is an art and a science, one being mastered by women. But cheers to anyone who can do it well!

De Ponte also produces pinot noir under the Clay Hills label. We tasted the winery’s various offerings, and the 2008 Clay Hill Pinot Noir at $26 turned out to be the wine we were looking for.

See my iPhone picture of “the hill” in question on Flickr.

I’m grateful to literary blogger, Maud Newton, for sharing this 1964 documentary from BBC on poet Phillip Larkin, widely regarded as one of the greatest English poets of the latter half of the twentieth century.

Also from YouTube, these excellent clips of the poet reading his poems, “Water” and “Aubade”.

Cathy’s Book is a transmedia storytelling experience written and produced by Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman (with illustrations by Cathy Brigg). First published in 2006, the book includes an evidence packet filled with letters, phone numbers, pictures, and birth certificates, as well as doodles and notes written by Cathy in the page margins.

Cathy’s Book is a huge success and now two more books, Cathy’s Key and Cathy’s Ring round out the trilogy. All three are presented in print and online in a complimentary and overlapping fashion.

One of the author’s, Sean Stewart of Fourth Wall Studios, spoke to ARGNet about building “interactive arcs” into the stories, so that a reader might send an email and go through a 3 or 4-step investigation to arrive at a satisfying endpoint.

Online or off, the magic here is the series of interactions taking place between readers/followers/fans and the storytellers. Stewart explains:

MA: What was your favorite out-of-book element in the trilogy?

SS: Actually, I think my favorite thing we did was to build a gallery for readers to post their art…and then put some of those pictures in the printed books. There is something very beautiful to me about closing that circle: the books invite you into Cathy’s life beyond the page, and then, eventually, circle around until your life is part of her printed world. That for me is a lovely version of The Dance – that cooperative give-and-take between artist and audience that is seems so clearly to be part of what the next evolution of art will be.

With the rise of digital culture, writers are now required to think beyond their manuscript. And while the writer remains the architect of the story, as the larger experience of the story unfolds, others with a deep interest in the story emerge to help bring finishing touches and/or new ideas to the table. This could be somewhat off-putting to the storyteller, put in needn’t be. When you tell a story in the ancient tradition–around a campfire!–the people gathered there clearly impact the pace of the story, the details left in or taken out, the ending, etc. Thanks to the interactive abilities of today’s always-on mediums, we’re getting back to that more familiar model.

Read more about transmedia storytelling on AdPulp: Brand Narratives Will Benefit from Transmedia Storytelling

The Oregonian is running a feature on Gerding Edlen Development Co., one of Oregon’s biggest real estate companies, and its CEO, Mark Edlen.

Between 2002 and 2009, Gerding Edlen built 3,200 condos valued at $1.6 billion. Naturally, that didn’t work out too well for anyone. The article goes into all the juicy details of investor losses and bank repos, but that’s not the part I’m interested in. This is:

With the condo boom over, Edlen is trying to reposition the company to be the national leader in green building makeovers.

The green economy is in.

Gerding Edlen’s strategy is to buy completed or partly finished buildings at bargain prices, retrofit them with state-of-the-art energy-efficient technology and then either sell the buildings or hold them and lease them out.

Edlen is convinced sustainable building has finally arrived as a viable business strategy, thanks in part to the Obama administration’s view of the green economy as one of the country’s primary economic engines.

“You’ve got to get your hands dirty and do deep retrofits,” Edlen said. “It’s about insulation, new windows or reglazing existing windows, it’s about new water-use strategies.”

The Oregonian article is followed by several negative comments from readers—sadly, that’s often par for the course in a public forum. Yet, I think Gerding Edlen deserves some praise for keeping their head above water during the deluge. And their new course is the right thing to do, for their business, the people who buy or rent from them and for conservation of our natural resources.

In related news, The Economist recently asked, “Is Oregon’s metropolis a leader among American cities or just strange?”

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Joel Kotkin, a Los Angeles-based demographer and author, thinks that places like Portland, San Francisco and Boston have become “elite cities”, attractive to the young and single, especially those with trust funds, but beyond the reach of middle-class families who want a house with a lawn. Indeed Portland, for all its history of Western grit, is remarkably white, young and childless. Most Americans will therefore continue to migrate to the more affordable “cities of aspiration” such as Houston, Atlanta or Phoenix, thinks Mr Kotkin. As they do so, they may turn decentralised sprawl into quilts of energetic suburbs with a community feeling.

That is not to belittle Portland’s vision. It is a sophisticated and forward-looking place. Which other city can boast that its main attraction is a bustling independent book store (Powell’s) and that medical students can go from one part of their campus to another by gondola, taking their bikes with them? Other cities will see much to emulate…Adam Davis of Davis, Hibbitts & Midghall, a Portland polling firm, says that Oregonians like to consider themselves leaders but also exceptions. They are likely to remain both.

It’s safe to say Gerding Edlen’s desire to retrofit old buildings to exacting green standards is a leadership position and an exceptional path, not frequently taken by real estate developers.

As for Kotkin’s claim that Portland is an elite city, I don’t see it that way, although I know what he means. Houston would be a much easier choice for a young family to make. Portland is, in fact, an expensive place to live and the wages here have not kept pace with the rise in cost of living, particularly real estate valuations.

Anyone who is on the ground in Oregon today knows the economy is weak, but I think the future portends good things. Many people are retrofitting not just buildings, but their entire way of thinking and doing business, and as this process unfolds we’re going to see business and civic interests align in impressive and unprecedented ways.