The urban arboretum

Great companies fill a city with great citizens, and Amazon is playing a big part in making Portland a place where curious people come to think big, explore, and push the evolution of technologies forward.

While challenging and satisfying work matters a lot, for some folks, where they work matters just as much. Many Portland newcomers and natives agree that the city offers a high quality of life. Here’s how.

Big and Getting Bigger, but Always User-Friendly: As Portland grows vertically, it develops more urban offerings rapidly, with all the entertainment, recreation, arts, and culture opportunities of much larger cities, but without the horizontal sprawl. A commitment to sound urban planning, solidified in the 1970s with the Urban Growth Boundary, keeps the city’s accessibility intact. A nice result is that the city’s northeast, southeast, northwest, and southwest quadrants operate like villages, with many of the essentials of daily life easy to reach.

Peculiar and Proud of It: Independent, entrepreneurial, and creative thinkers with challenging and compelling ideas have always had a voice in Portland. Craftsmanship is appreciated here, as is excellence in engineering and design.

Livable and Congenial: How many U.S. urban centers turn into ghost towns at the end of each weekday? That’s not the case in Portland, where neighborhoods are places where people live, work, shop, find sustenance, and seek entertainment. Consequently, people know their neighbors and community is a real thing and not a real-estate buzzword. And when individuals, groups, and businesses act on the community’s benefit, people rally.

Community Supportive​: Portland has all the amenities of big-city living on a human-sized scale, and Amazon’s Community Investment program here offers an incredibly diverse number of ways to lend a hand. With focus areas addressing education, hunger, environment, and housing, Amazonians in this city support more than two dozen local nonprofit community partners with volunteer opportunities, financial support, and creative problem-solving. With more than 3,000 dedicated volunteer hours each year, it’s clear that Portland employees are into giving back.

Easy on Two Wheels or Two Feet: Portland consistently ranks in the top for its well-used bike-friendly streets, but it’s remarkably pedestrian-friendly too. City blocks are relatively small and quickly traversed from corner to corner.

Changes of Scenery are a Short Trip Away: Outdoors, Oregon has more geographic diversity to explore than many states, from spacious Pacific Ocean beaches (all with public access), mountains of the Cascade Range, the sunny high desert, temperate rainforests, the rolling hills of wine country (18 American Viticultural Areas, in total), and the gorgeous Columbia River gorge. Best of all, you can reach many outdoor attractions within two hours or less.

A Little More Type B than Type A: Perhaps unusual for tech centers, in Portland, collaboration is favored over cutthroat competition, because when you regularly see familiar faces, bad behavior is easy to remember (see Livable and Congenial, above).

Let’s Talk About the Weather: The fact is, a few months of mist are what keep things green and gorgeous year-round. Another fact: Summers in Portland are glorious.

More facts:

• 3 professional sports, 5 hometown teams: Trail Blazers, Timbers, Thorns FC, Winterhawks, Pickles
• Many schools with top GreatSchools.org ratings
• #2 most well-read city in America
• In the top 10 U.S. metro areas with the highest density of restaurants
• Many seasonal farmers markets inside the city, with more on the outskirts
• Eminently accessible public transportation