Two Counties, Two Classes
Last summer, I drove across the Columbia to the Vancouver Waterfront. I walked the Renaissance Trail, stood on the Grant Street Pier, and ate at a new restaurant on the river. Mount Hood was visible in the distance, boats sailed on the water, and families strolled the promenade. The waterfront, a $1.5 billion redevelopment of former industrial land, was bustling, with busy boutiques and crowded restaurants. The promenade was full of people who, 20 years ago, would have been on the other side of the river.
The 2026 State of the Economy report, released by the Portland Metro Chamber and presented to the Portland City Council on April 14, frames the regional comparison as a story of two policy environments: employment in Multnomah County remains below its 2020 level, while employment in Clark County stands at 114 percent of its 2020 level. The overall divergence is documented; the income composition of the shift is not.
New arrivals to Multnomah County average $73,540 in income, while those moving to Clark County average $106,715. That $33,175 difference per new resident, across a state line just 20 minutes away by car, is not the result of different policy choices producing different outcomes. It is the signature of a region sorting itself by income, with higher earners choosing Washington and lower earners left to bear more than their share of taxes for the public hospitals, schools, and transit system concentrated on the Oregon side.
The employment data show the same pattern. In 2025, the Portland metro area lost 8,800 jobs, ranking fourth-worst among U.S. metro areas even as national employment grew. These regional losses mirror the income data. Job losses were concentrated in professional services, manufacturing, construction, and information—the higher-wage traded-sector industries where employees produce goods for external markets and work from either side of the Columbia. Conversely, the sectors that gained jobs were health care, education, and government. These are lower-wage, local-demand sectors whose jobs require physical presence in Oregon. The region is not losing jobs at random; it is shedding the specific roles that grant geographic mobility while retaining the personnel who must remain.
The housing data support the same conclusion. Multifamily permitting in Portland fell from 2,092 units in 2023 to 868 in 2024 and 656 in 2025, the lowest level since 2011, while Clark County now accounts for 57 percent of multifamily permits across the seven adjacent counties that include Portland.
The proximate causes are regulatory: permitting speed, land-use rules, inclusionary housing requirements, system development charges, and design review have raised the cost of Portland multifamily construction relative to Clark County’s. The underlying cause is the migration of higher-earning households to Clark County.
The Chamber’s framework misses the dynamic captured by the income data. It treats two jurisdictions within a single metropolitan economy as if they were two separate economies in competition, casting one as successful and the other as failing. From that framing comes a familiar agenda: restoring confidence, repairing public-private partnerships, and competing to retain and attract talent. The agenda answers a different question than the one the data raises.
The question the data raises is what such a division produces over time. The answer is consolidation. Multnomah County is becoming the residential location for the workers who staff the region’s hospitals, schools, retail establishments, and public agencies, while Clark County is becoming the residential location for the professionals whose incomes have continued to rise during the contraction. The county losing the higher earners is also the county that contains the service sector and the tax base that funds them.
Washington’s lack of a state income tax, paired with Oregon’s high one, allows higher earners to take their income from the metro economy without contributing to it. The professional class whose work is remote or Washington-based pays none of Oregon’s state income tax, nor Multnomah County’s Preschool for All tax, Metro’s Supportive Housing Services tax, or the local high-earner surcharges that fall on incomes above $125,000. Oregon loses revenue in two ways: through income sourced across the line, and through the consumption that follows the household to Vancouver.
The arrangement is available only to workers whose jobs can be sourced to the Washington side. Oregon taxes income where it is earned, not where the earner lives. Remote work from a home in Vancouver qualifies. A commute to a Portland office does not. The work-from-home rates show who is in that class.
In 2023, 21 percent of workers in the Portland metro area worked from home. The rate rises with income: 34 percent among Multnomah County residents earning more than $75,000, compared with 14 percent among those earning under $35,000. The pattern is the product of recent policy choices and a long-standing tax differential that a mobile professional class is now exercising at scale.
The Chamber recommends restoring confidence, repairing public-private partnerships, and competing to retain and attract talent. The data describes a region not competing with Vancouver but retaining the bottom tier of a two-class system across the state line.