Rising Real Estate Prices Pushing Out Portland Small Businesses

Microcosm Publishing's eclectic offerings seem perfect for Portland's alternative culture: guides to anarchy, the politics of biodiesel, even "Adventures in Menstruating #2."

Yet the North Portland company closed its doors Thursday and is headed to Bloomington, Ind. -- driven out of town, the owner says, by the increasing cost of real estate.

"One of the principal incentives for coming here was that this was one of the places on the West Coast that was cheap and affordable," said Joe Biel, Microcosm's owner, who moved his then one-person company from Cleveland in 1999. "That's no longer true."

Biel's departure -- combined with the growing struggles of low-budget, edgy businesses to find affordable locations -- suggests that Portland's attractiveness is pushing back on the very people who helped create the city's progressive self-image.

"I saw the same pattern in New York," said Justin Hocking, the executive director of the Independent Publishing Resource Center on Southwest Oak Street. "This could be foreshadowing of what's to come in Portland."

Certainly, Portland remains a magnet for creative entrepreneurs and a bargain for those fleeing even higher-priced California cities. Their presence has produced hip, sometimes socially conscious, businesses such as Stumptown Coffee Roasters, Voodoo Doughnuts and worker-owned City Bikes. And rising real estate prices are signs of good health for the city and its business districts.

Yet some low-budget, cutting-edge companies are having trouble coping with gentrification that they unintentionally helped launch. The Back-to-Back Cafe, a worker-owned cafe once on East Burnside, closed for good after its building was redeveloped last spring. Rising rents have sent three bookstores --Laughing Horse, Looking Glass and In Other Words -- to cheaper locations.