Every big stage in Portland belongs to you.So do the bills.

Paul Allen opened it in October 1995 as the Rose Garden: $262 million, of which the City put in $34.5 million and Allen and his lenders carried the rest. The financing didn't survive: Allen's Oregon Arena Corporation went bankrupt in 2004, creditors took the building, Allen bought it back in 2007, and Moda Health's name went up in 2013. Then, in 2024, the whole arc ended in a single line item: the arena transferred to the City of Portland for one dollar. The dollar bought roughly 1.5 million annual visitors, a major-league anchor tenant, and enormous strategic control. It also bought the biggest building-cost question the City has ever faced in this portfolio.

The question: Not whether the building has users, but whether the public owner captures enough value and transfers enough risk under its contracts.

Sources:WikipediaWikipediaCity of Portland, Spectator VenuesCity of PortlandOPBPortland Civic Lab

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill finished it in 1960: a gray glass-and-aluminum curtain wall around a free-floating concrete bowl, the roof carried on four seventy-foot piers. Portlanders called it the Glass Palace, and in 1961 the city dedicated it to veterans who made the supreme sacrifice. It has survived a demolition proposal (2009), earned a National Register listing the same year, and become the National Trust's first Portland National Treasure (2016). It is worth the most as Moda's complement, not as a smaller copy of it. The renovation is financed and underway; what comes next should be decided by evidence, not by another rendering.

Sources:WikipediaNational Trust for Historic PreservationCity of PortlandPortland Civic Lab

The Rose Quarter is not two arenas. It is publicly owned real estate beside major transit lines: parcels, garages, plazas, air rights, reversion clauses. And it sits on ground with a memory. This is lower Albina: in 1956 voters approved the Coliseum's construction, and building it destroyed 476 homes, roughly half of them inhabited by Black families, the first of the clearance waves that I-5 and the Emanuel Hospital expansion would continue. Land like this is exactly what gets quietly undervalued inside an arena negotiation, one schedule-B exhibit at a time. It is also exactly where the district's future carries obligations older than any lease.

Sources:Karen J. Gibson (hosted by City of Portland)Portland City CouncilPortland Civic Lab

Sport has been played on this block since 1893, when the Multnomah Amateur Athletic Club raised a grandstand over what had been a Chinese vegetable garden supplying much of the city's produce. The stadium itself went up in 1926 for $502,000 and has cycled through five names on its way to the loudest proof in the portfolio: every Timbers MLS home match has sold out since 2011, and the 2019 eastside expansion added capacity on roughly $75 million of private money. That is the financing model this analysis keeps asking for, already working. What the City still lacks is a current, complete picture of the building's condition, what it will cost to keep up over its life, and who pays for what under the operator agreement.

Sources:WikipediaCity of PortlandCity of Portland, Spectator VenuesPortland Civic Lab

It opened on the Fourth of July, 1917, as the Public Auditorium. A 1968 modernization kept only seventeen percent of the original structure (mostly two walls) and produced what the critic Ada Louise Huxtable called "a building of unrelieved blandness." The blandness works: Keller is the economic engine of Portland'5, with 179 events, 395,255 attendees, and $10.7 million in charges-for-services revenue in FY2024–25 (more than half the system's earned revenue), inside a building that needs major work for decades to come. That is the distinction the debate keeps missing: Keller is not an unsuccessful venue. It is a successful venue in a building that, over the long run, may be too expensive to keep standing.

Sources:WikipediaPortland City CouncilSäzän Group / Portland'5City of Portland / Portland'5Portland Civic Lab

It opened in 1928 as a movie palace (the Portland Publix, renamed the Paramount two years later), and by 1982 it was deteriorated enough that the city condemned it, paid the owner $4.1 million, spent $10 million restoring it, and relit a replica of the original rooftop sign: PORTLAND, in five-foot neon. Today it is culturally central and heavily used (199 events, 294,058 attendees in FY2024–25), and the money it earns does not cover what it costs to run once every expense is counted. Call that what it is: the public paying for culture on purpose, not a management failure. The discipline is knowing exactly what the subsidy costs and what it buys.

Sources:WikipediaSäzän Group / Portland'5City of Portland / Portland'5Portland Civic Lab

Built in 1987 as the New Theatre Building and renamed for Oregon's former First Lady in 2007, it holds three theaters under one roof, sharing one big repair bill. The three draw very different crowds. The question is not which theater to kill. It is: what is the cheapest way, over the long run, to house the programs Portland actually wants?

Sources:WikipediaSäzän Group / Portland'5City of Portland / Portland'5Portland Civic Lab

The raceway sits on the grave of a city. Vanport was wartime housing for Kaiser shipyard workers, nearly 40,000 people, Oregon's second-largest city. It drowned on Memorial Day 1948 when a railroad berm gave way; fifteen people died and eighteen thousand lost their homes by nightfall. Portland acquired the emptied site in 1960 with an intact street grid and little else, and the first races ran on Vanport's own streets (Cottonwood, Lake, Victory Boulevard), with leftover foundations as trackside hazards into the 1970s. Today PIR is a business the City runs inside its parks bureau: ticketed events, a loyal user community, real revenue coming in. Its danger is the oldest one in public enterprise: treating this year's positive cash flow as surplus while the asset quietly consumes itself.

Sources:WikipediaPortland International RacewayPortland Civic Lab

For sixty years this block was the Portland Hotel; for thirty more it was the parking lot a department store razed it for. The square that replaced the parking lot in 1984 was paid for partly by fifty thousand Portlanders buying inscribed bricks at $750,000 total, and the hotel's wrought-iron gate still stands on the eastern edge. "Portland's living room" is the rare cliché that is simply accurate: free public use, civic assembly, festivals, vigils, corporate rentals. It runs on a mix of City support (≈$470,000 a year under the 2022–25 agreement), event fees, sponsorship, and donations. Profit is the wrong measuring stick. The right one is keeping the commercial side and the civic side visible, each on its own.

Sources:WikipediaPortland Parks & RecreationPortland City CouncilPortland Civic Lab

Walker, Erv Lind, and Sckavone stadiums; East Delta's fields; the Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center; the Community Music Center; Multnomah Arts Center; the amphitheaters and Waterfront Park. This is the least visible ring of the portfolio, and possibly its highest public value per dollar. Walker Stadium shows the model: a 1956 ballpark in Lents Park, named for the Parks Bureau's first Sports Director, that the Portland Pickles took over in 2016 under an agreement allocating rent, cleaning, security, and maintenance. It seats about 1,500 and has squeezed in 4,387: the kind of over-capacity night no spreadsheet in the city currently records.

Sources:WikipediaPortland Parks & RecreationPortland Parks & RecreationPortland Civic Lab

A new ~3,000-seat Broadway-capable hall at Portland State (estimated at up to $449 million in concept materials, $447 million in Resolution 2026-270's), recommended by the steering process in June 2026 and referred toward the full council in August. Today it is exactly one thing: a possible replacement for Keller. Every judgment about it follows from refusing to treat it as anything more until the proof arrives.

Sources:Portland City CouncilCity of Portland, Office of Arts & CultureOregon ArtsWatchPortland Civic Lab