I went to Portland for some café hopping. There was a time when this city was an object of admiration. It was a perennial fixture on lists of “the most desirable cities to live in the United States,” with its urban growth boundary, streetcars, walkable small blocks, countless coffee roasters, and craft breweries. The popular television show Portlandia exported to the world the image of a city where “the dream of the 1990s is still alive.” This was, without a doubt, the capital of slow living and counterculture.

That city is now eerily empty.

By feel, it seemed to be at roughly one-quarter of its pre-pandemic level. The downtown office vacancy rate is around 36%, while the office attendance rate is 56% of what it was in 2019. REI has pulled out, and Nordstrom Rack has taken down its sign. Remote work, overly liberal policies, the spread of fentanyl, and ever-rising housing costs. All of these things happened simultaneously, amplifying one another like an echo chamber, and as a result, the city has become trapped in what urban economists call the “urban doom loop.”

The “urban doom loop” is a concept that American urban economists have discussed extensively since the pandemic. It refers to a vicious cycle in which urban decline accelerates through a process of self-reinforcement.

Portland spent half a century building a city designed for walking, and its physical framework remains almost perfect. And yet, there are hardly any people walking. The hardware remains, while the software has simply disappeared.

As I walked through this nearly deserted city, the things I kept encountering in the cafés I happened to enter were old Japanese audio systems. Sitting proudly in the back of one shop were speakers by Diatone and Yamaha. The turntable was a Technics SL-1100. In another café, and then another, I encountered the same scene again and again. In the corners of an almost deserted ideal city, only half a century-old Japanese audio equipment was still playing out loud.

This is not a coincidence. In New York, Devon Turnbull, who was behind the fashion brand Nom de Guerre, was inspired by Japan’s jazz kissa and audiophile culture to launch OJAS, an endeavor that treats sound systems as cultural artifacts and has received enthusiastic support. The man who rummaged for parts in Akihabara and stayed at the homes of elderly audiophiles in Fukushima to learn from them is now at the forefront of the post-apparel movement. Japanese vintage audio is now beginning to be seriously reevaluated overseas, much like city pop.

When you think about it, Japanese audio from the 1960s through the 1990s was a historically unique phenomenon. There has never been another time in human history when 100 million middle-class people all spent large sums of money on dedicated audio equipment. Furniture-style stereos were altars to an era when “music was a family heirloom,” while the massive quantities of amplifiers and cassette decks produced during the bubble economy are now continuing to rise in value on used markets around the world as things that “can never be made again.” It is fair to say that the entire “texture of the era,” with the city pop revival and its equipment intertwined, has now begun to be seriously exported.

A city is not its buildings, but rather a collection of the habits of the people who walk through it. Portland has lost that software—the habits of urban life—but it is fascinating that the hardware Japan created during its period of rapid economic growth and then casually discarded crossed the Pacific and has become a new kind of altar in this empty city, playing music.

The ruins of Portlandia, and the altars of the Showa era.

Perhaps, I find myself imagining, somewhat arbitrarily, that somewhere where these two things intersect, there may be the seeds of the next culture.

Even so, the city has no vitality.

Even the once-thriving coffee scene had little of interest to offer.

A Geisha coffee that wasn't particularly impressive in taste cost $60 + TAX + TIP!

The “urban doom loop” is visible in that price.

Perhaps the very existence of the café has simply outlived its purpose in this era.

You can see it in Starbucks’ decline as well.

If this city is still somehow at the cultural forefront, then it feels as though the platform of urban life that has structured society for more than a century is rapidly coming apart.

A city can change its face in an instant, and its residents are required to change even faster.

Otherwise, they will be caught up in the vortex before they know it.