What Falling Crime Concern Misses About Portland’s Changing Downtown

Fewer Portlanders are worried about crime these days, and the numbers back that up. A new area poll found that only 4 percent of city voters now name crime and safety as their top concern, down from 15 percent two years ago. Drug addiction concerns dropped too, from 22 percent to 9 percent. For anyone thinking about Portland security, that’s a meaningful shift.

But a separate report on downtown itself tells a messier story. The Portland Metro Chamber’s 2026 State of Downtown report shows a Central City that’s recovering, though not in the way most people expected. Office leasing just hit its lowest point on record. Vacancy is at an all-time high. And the crowd filling downtown streets these days doesn’t look much like the one that filled them five years ago.

So which number matters more if you own or manage property downtown? Probably both, just not in the way the headlines suggest.

Crime Concern Keeps Falling

The latest figures come from a DHM Research poll of 600 registered Portland-area voters. Only 4 percent named crime and safety as the city’s most pressing issue, a drop from 15 percent two years prior. Drug addiction fell even further, from 22 percent down to 9 percent.

Both issues now sit well behind homelessness, government management, and cost of living on the list of what’s actually keeping people up at night. DHM’s John Horvick chalks it up to Portland’s ongoing crime decline since 2021, and Portland Police Bureau data agrees, showing continued drops in violent crime and shootings since the rough stretch of 2021 and 2022.

That’s real progress. It’s also not the whole picture.

Downtown Is Recovering, Just Not Like Before

While crime concern has eased, the Chamber’s report paints a different kind of picture, one where downtown is settling into something new rather than bouncing back to what it was. Quarterly office leasing averaged just 250,000 square feet in 2025, the lowest on record, lower even than the depths of 2020. Vacancy climbed past 10 million square feet and isn’t expected to peak until later this year.

Foot traffic, at least, is a bright spot. It’s recovered to roughly 86 percent of pre-pandemic levels. But who’s actually generating that traffic has changed. Residential activity is comparatively strong (Portland had more room to grow there than most peer cities), while employee and visitor numbers still lag. With office attendance largely plateaued, the report points to visitors as the one area with real room to grow.

Put simply: downtown is filling back in, but the crowd looks different. More residents wandering through at odd hours. Fewer nine-to-five commuters. Visitors trickling back slowly. That shift changes what a property actually needs from its security plan, whether anyone’s paying attention to it or not. If it’s been a while since your plan reflected how the property is actually used today, it may be worth revisiting what your security plan actually needs to cover.

Northwest Enforcement didn’t just provide security; they co-created a whole new solution that actually fits our city’s challenges.

Brianna, NEI Client

Why the Gap Between These Numbers Matters

Falling crime concern is a sign that public perception is finally catching up with reality. What it doesn’t tell you is how your specific building is being used right now. A property that used to see predictable nine-to-five office traffic might now see something else entirely: quieter weekdays, more after-hours residential foot traffic, or visitors showing up on a schedule nobody planned around.

A security plan built for the old pattern doesn’t automatically work for the new one, even if the surrounding neighborhood feels calmer than it did two years ago. A handful of things are worth a second look as this shift continues:

• Match coverage to how the property is actually used, not how it used to be used. If your traffic pattern has shifted, your guard services or patrol services schedule probably should too.
• Watch the off-hours. More residents and visitors often means a different set of peak hours than a traditional office building ever had.
• Track what’s actually happening on-site. Regional averages rarely capture the full story of one building. Tools like the SRT reporting our officers use turn day-to-day activity into something you can actually act on.
• Revisit the plan periodically. Downtown is still finding its new normal. Whatever worked in 2024 may already be outdated.

Portland has put in real work to feel safer, and the polling backs that up. But feeling safer and knowing what a specific property needs are two different problems, and only one of them shows up in a headline. The second one takes a closer look at how people are actually moving through a space now, not how they moved through it before 2020.

We’ve spent years building hands-on knowledge of the Portland metro and Southwest Washington, and that’s what lets us shape Portland downtown security plans around what’s really happening on a property, not what used to happen there. If your security plan hasn’t caught up to where downtown actually stands, we’d welcome the conversation. Reach out to Northwest Enforcement and let’s talk through what your property needs right now.