There is a strong sense that Portland is leading the way for the Pacific Northwest, toward some sort of community innovation. At times, it works; other times, the city feels self-congratulatory.

Portland, Seattle and Vancouver are the world's cities of the twenty-first century, and aren't so easy to define. As industry and culture take flight from the East Coast, well-planned cities like Portland are becoming the future of America: from high-tech to literary, the infectious environment has doubled the population size in just a few years. This is not to the liking of some Portlanders, who call outsiders Californians, and scorn anything that doesn't comply with their strict definition of what it means to be Portland.

This is different from Oregon's longstanding tradition of racism (Oregon is 89% white and has the lowest minority population in the Pacific Northwest), but it is rather a corruption of this ideal of maintaining a utopian sense of city-planning, environmental practices and clean maintenance in this soggy-wet kingdom.

The conflict this creates is a strange-brew. Since Californians (New York, Midwestern and Silicon Valley Immigrants) are bringing more high-tech jobs to the Silicon Forest, the economy has become less and less reliant on the timber industry: Portland's greatest enemy and benefactor. A few years ago, I was with some friends in a bar called the Boiler Room. Since the bar was small (it only fit about ten people), everybody started talking, and the question came up: Where are you from? So-and-so said Oregon City and so-and-so said Northeast Portland and so-and-so said Vancouver.

And then it was my turn and I said California. Immediately, everybody started hissing and booing. They were being kind of facetious, but on cue I stood up and said, "...And I'm sick and tired of all you Oregon people coming into my state and stinking it up!" I got an uneasy applause for that. But the stereotyping of Californians persists, and in some cases, violence has been committed against them because some see the influx of Californians as a threat to the Portland way of life. The problem with Californians, in the mind of an outspoken component of Portland, is that they take with them a culture that is not their own, that they raise real estate prices and subvert the utopian ideals of Portland.

Drill down, and you'll find that this stereotyping comes almost exclusively from a band of young immigrants, who themselves moved to Portland recently and who adopted their own sense of the utopian ideals of a unique city. Nobody likes too much immigration into their city, but I have always argued that Portland's particular circumstance should embrace it. Portland is an immigrant city; like any other culture that has the ability to become dynamic, the city needs to learn to embrace its immigrants. The richness of New York City wasn't built from Brooklyn.

When my wife asked one of these Massachussetts-Portlanders about this apparent paradox ('But don't you want to see Portland become more diverse?'), he answered, 'Well, Californians like you guys aren't the problem.'

I wondered what made us any different from other Californians, or was he just uneasy with the question? Drill down, and the influx of Californians has done more positive than negative to the City of Portland: Imported cultural and racial diversity, imported new design ideas to restaurants and shops, imported new economy, and a sunny disposition.

The Portland tech-hippie immigrants have been moving north and east, or south and east, into the parts of Portland that could be called the Hood, or parts infested with meth problems (Oregon has the worst meth problem in the United States per capita). They see themselves as gentrifying the community, bringing with them their small mom-and-pop culture. This gentrification should be welcomed, of course, but the residents of those communities complain of the same thing these imports complain of: raising real estate prices and bringing unwanted culture.