Peter Platt will often sit and work at a bar table by the floor-to-ceiling windows of his stalwart Pearl District Peruvian restaurant, Andina. From time to time, he’ll pause and look up, out at the scene on NW 13th Avenue. It’s the best way to watch the city change, right in front of him.

When outdoor juggernaut REI closed its doors in early 2024, Andina was no longer a restaurant that people walked past on the way to something else, it seemed to Platt. It became the end of the line. That matters because foot traffic—a critical metric to suss the retail health of a city—matters, Platt says, and foot traffic in the Pearl District has taken a beating since the pandemic. Andina is surviving on the strength of its 22-year reputation, but destination dining can draw only so many patrons. In Platt’s view, what Portland’s neighborhoods need most is a series of pedestrian corridors, stretches of shops and restaurants to keep people out of their cars and on their toes. REI’s flight amputated a corridor that once drew guests from the southern end of the Pearl up to where it sat at NW 14th and Johnson. Now there’s not much along that stretch north of Andina, and one less reason to visit the neighborhood. “There’s still a psychological barrier where a lot of people who drive from the outer neighborhoods say, ‘I don’t go downtown anymore,’” Platt says. “We’re feeling that.”

Certain narratives of the past five years have been told countless times: COVID curbed travel, offices went virtual, vandalism and crime took a toll on downtown. Business owners pleaded with the city and state for some sort of response. Police presence increased, and the state repealed Measure 110, the 2020 ballot measure that had decriminalized most drug possession under a certain threshold.

These changes have not translated to the urban scenes everyone dreams about: families and travelers milling about safely from block to block, shopping bags and doggie bags in their arms—images of a thriving city. But we’re seeing some signs of progress. The most recent data from Downtown Portland Clean & Safe shows foot traffic in a 213-block district that makes up the urban core grew 3 percent in 2024 compared to the year before, and jumped 58 percent from 2021. February 2024 was a highlight, thanks to good weather, the Portland Winter Light Festival, and the Biamp Portland Jazz Festival. In that month, visitors to the downtown core jumped 10 percent compared to the same period in 2023. But the causes of downtown’s tourism slump are multifaceted and may require more than a few policy changes, Platt says. Business travel has gone the way of Zoom, nightlife the way of Netflix. “There are fewer reasons for people to go out,” Platt says, “and more enticements for them to stay in.”

A few blocks away from Andina, Scott Congdon runs the hip Hoxton hotel, at the intersection of NW Fourth Avenue and Burnside Street. In late February of this year he was coming off a good weekend—the hotel had hosted Deftones, in town to play the Moda Center. That made his Monday a busy one: One guest’s car got clipped by a hit-and-run driver at the valet, and another guest had to be 86’ed after tying one on at the bar. But that’s business. “Busy is a good thing right now,” Congdon says.

What makes it hard to stay busy isn’t as specific to this neighborhood as some may think, he says; it’s about supply and demand citywide. When Portland started to pop as a destination in the late aughts, there were very few hotels in town to accommodate the crush of tourists arriving to check out the city. In response, developers and international boutique hotel chains went all in on Portland hospitality, spending the next decade scouting locations and awaiting permits. In a two-year period between 2018 and 2020, the Woodlark, Kex, Jupiter NEXT, the Hoxton, and multiple Hiltons and Hyatts opened within city limits. By the time the Ritz-Carlton began taking reservations in 2023, the city was oversaturated with hotels and vacation rentals.

Pre-COVID, ambitious endeavors like the Ritz or the recently opened luxe thermal springs hotel Cascada made all kinds of sense. Now, it’s harder to see how Portland can fill all these rooms. According to Travel Portland, city center hotels sold over 400,000 more rooms in 2019 than they did in 2024, despite having 8.8 percent fewer available to reserve. Without a boom in business travelers, hoteliers here will continue to struggle.

To balm the bruising of the city’s reputation throughout the pandemic, Travel Portland took out a full-page ad in The New York Times spinning the city’s protest culture as a good thing, as a “passion [that] pushes the volume all the way up.” The agency funded influencers to shoot videos, and invited chef Matty Matheson and artist Alex 2tone, hosts of the podcast Powerful Truth Angels, to see the city for themselves.

It all helped, says Travel Portland vice president of communications and international tourism Marcus Hibdon. Despite the fact the city’s hotel rentals are still below prepandemic levels, we’re inching upward. However, according to Hibdon, companies tend to book future events years out, so in some ways we’re still in the lag between when COVID shut everything down and when Portland opened back up again. It will take time before that train is again chugging along. “We’re still recovering,” he says. “But word of mouth is working in our favor again. People coming to Portland are seeing a city that’s vibrant, with great events, a food scene as good as it ever was, and they’re going home and telling people they had a great time.”