It’s no secret that Portland saw a surge of young residents arrive across a couple of decades, from the 1990s to the mid-2010s. But it turns out many have stuck around to help Portland rank No. 1 nationally in a specific demographic category.
People born between 1974 and 1988 — 35- to 49-year-olds in 2023 — represented 24.1% of Portland’s population that year — the largest share of people that age of any U.S. city with more than 400,000 residents, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Western cities led the nation in share of this 35-49 cohort, with Oakland (22.1%), Denver (22.1%), Seattle (21.8%) and San Francisco (21.1%) rounding out the top five in 2023, the most recent year for which specific age data is available…