Portland City Snapshot
Manufacturing—particularly specialized, small-batch production—benefits from being in cities. Firms get to tap a rich labor market, dense supplier networks and often sophisticated consumer markets for their finished goods. And cities benefit from manufacturing’s economic multipliers and family-wage employment opportunities. Increasingly, cities see this emerging sector as rich with possibility for promoting entrepreneurship, innovation, and economic growth. But members of the Urban Manufacturing Alliance (UMA), including many city decision-makers, told us they know remarkably little about smaller scale manufacturers. These innovative businesses often combine design, art, and production. As a result, they often do not fall neatly into the data collection categories that government has used to classify manufacturers for generations. What’s more, the data that do exist are often at the metropolitan level, which can swamp nuances as this sector grows and establishes itself in modest-sized clusters at the hearts of cities. The result is a dearth of understanding by city policymakers on this burgeoning sector within their boundaries. The impact, potential, and needs of these businesses are poorly understood.
The Urban Manufacturing Alliance conceived the State of Urban Manufacturing study as a way to fill this information gap and begin to give our members and other decision-makers information they can act on immediately in Baltimore, Cincinnati, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Portland. Longer term, we hope this information serves as a foundation to expand our understanding across the country. We have collected information directly from hundreds of manufacturers—including nearly 100 in Portland—on the nature and challenges of their businesses; we also spoke with numerous Portland-based organizations that support these firms, such as Prosper Portland, the City’s economic development agency. In Portland, we accomplished this in collaboration with our research partner, Portland State University (PSU).
Our goal is to begin to understand what the small-batch manufacturing sector looks like, who its entrepreneurs and employees are, and what cities can do to help these firms thrive and grow into larger jobs generators, and retain them within the urban core. We have released a snapshot of our findings for each of the six inaugural State of Urban Manufacturing cities, as well as a national report, that identifies promising practices that might be shared among cities to help these firms succeed. Finally, we hope the conversations we have had with businesses and stakeholders as part of this study have created relationships that will continue to grow the sector and the promise it holds for cities.
To help ensure that, we have developed a “manufacturing ecosystem map” for each city that includes all of the organizations we worked with directly as part of the State of Urban Manufacturing process. There are other organizations that we haven’t worked with yet and we encourage Portland stakeholders to continue to increase the coverage of this tool, which will help producers—and the organizations that support them—match the right resources to business needs or identify where gaps exist.