Emma Levensohn lives in Portland.

For years, Portland has been marketed as a creative city: local, community-driven, full of people making things. A place where artists, writers and small business owners could build something and actually be part of the fabric of the city.

Lately, it feels like something is shifting.

The spaces that once felt distinctly “Portland” are getting harder to find. Not gone entirely, but fewer, harder to stumble into, harder to afford, both as a customer or as someone trying to create something of their own.

Rising costs aren’t just making Portland more expensive. They’re changing what kind of work is possible here.

To be clear, this isn’t a new issue, or one unique to Portland. Cities across the country have struggled with what happens when the places that attract artists and creative people become too expensive for them to remain in long-term. It’s a pattern that repeats itself over and over. But that doesn’t make it any less important to talk about, especially while Portland still has a chance to decide what kind of city it wants to become.

It’s not that people have stopped making things. If anything, the city is still full of talented, creative people. But more and more, that creativity is being shaped by constraint. By time. By money. By the reality of needing to work one or two jobs just to afford to stay.

And that changes what gets made.

Even the pathways into creative work feel narrower. Although institutions like the Maine College of Art offer incredible resources and training, they’re financially out of reach for many. Access to time, space, education and resources is increasingly determined by cost.

There are grants, fellowships and other forms of support available, and those resources matter. But even accessing them often requires time, research, connections and energy that many people simply don’t have.

When you’re working constantly just to cover rent, creative work itself already starts happening in the margins of your life. Searching for opportunities, filling out applications, building portfolios, networking and learning how to navigate those systems becomes another layer of labor on top of survival.

A lot of people aren’t opting out because they lack talent or ambition. They’re exhausted.

A few years ago, I started hearing about people moving from Portland to Biddeford and Westbrook. The mills in Biddeford were filling up, offering space and affordability that Portland no longer could. Artists were part of that shift. It wasn’t framed as a loss at the time, more like a natural transition. Looking back, it reads like a signal.

Because when artists leave, they don’t just take their work with them. They take part of what gives the city its character.

Portland still presents itself as creative, local and community-driven. In many ways, it still is. But more and more, we’re building a city that fewer artists, writers and small business owners can afford to participate in.

Commercial rent has followed the same trajectory. Opening something small, something personal, something a little risky? That feels next to impossible.

It’s not just artists feeling that pressure. Opening any small business in Portland now requires a level of capital that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. Unless you have outside funding, or are willing to take on a loan big enough to fundamentally change the stakes, the barrier to entry is enormous, and fewer people are willing to take that risk.

Downtown rents are in the thousands. Outside of downtown, foot traffic drops, especially in the winter, when the city slows down.

All retail businesses feel that slowdown. Winter is hard across the board. I worked in retail on Exchange Street, one of the busiest streets for retail in Portland. Even there, in the middle of it all, there were winter days where we didn’t make a single in-person sale. It’s difficult even outside of winter. In winter, it can feel next to impossible.

What really changes a place is not just who is there, but what they’re able to do while they’re there. When your time is split between making a living and making something meaningful, the scale of what you can create shrinks. The risk you can take shrinks, and risk is what makes good art in the first place.

And when fewer people can afford to take risks, you lose the kind of work that depends on it. The strange ideas. The in-between spaces. The things that aren’t designed to appeal to everyone, but end up shaping what a place becomes.

In the Portland people imagine, you’d stumble into something unexpected. A pop-up in a back room, an installation that feels a little chaotic, a space that doesn’t fully explain itself. Something you keep thinking about after you leave. That’s part of what people who live here actually want. Not just something nice, but something that makes you think.

What replaces it is safer. More polished. More familiar. The kind of establishments and ideas you’ve seen before, even if you can’t quite remember where.

These changes don’t happen in one obvious way, but in the slow flattening of a place. Fewer truly local-feeling spaces. Fewer places with personality. Fewer places that actually feel like they belong to Portland.

People come to Portland because it’s cool. Because it has a point of view. Because it feels like a place where things are being made, not just consumed. But that feeling doesn’t sustain itself. It depends on people having the time, space and financial room to experiment, to fail, to try something that might not work.

Right now, a lot of those people are still here. There is still incredible art being made in Portland. There are still people creating thoughtful work, opening meaningful spaces, organizing events, experimenting and finding ways to make things happen despite the pressure.

But it’s worth imagining what Portland could look like if the barrier to participating creatively wasn’t so high. If people had more time, more financial stability, more room to experiment without immediately worrying about whether it would financially survive.

Because the issue isn’t that creative people have disappeared. It’s that more and more of their energy is being spent figuring out how to remain here at all.

And maybe the bigger question is what it says about us as a city if that doesn’t concern us.

What does it say if we only believe art matters when it comes from people financially secure enough to make it comfortably? If creative work slowly becomes something only accessible to people with money, safety nets or free time, that changes not just who gets to create, but whose perspectives get seen at all.

Some of the most meaningful art comes from people making things despite instability, not because they’ve escaped it. A city loses something important when creative expression becomes tied primarily to financial privilege.

The loss isn’t always obvious at first. It happens gradually, through the projects that never get started, the spaces that never open, the artists who quietly leave and the people who stop believing there’s room for them here at all.

Tourism is a huge part of Portland’s economy. It always has been. There’s nothing inherently wrong with people wanting to come here, to experience it, to enjoy it.

There’s a difference between a city built around consumption, and one defined by what’s being created within it.

And while Portland is far from the first city to face this tension, that doesn’t mean the outcome is inevitable. These shifts happen slowly, quietly, over years, until one day people start realizing the thing they loved about a place feels harder to find.

What we lose isn’t just what’s here now, but everything that never had the room to become.