Shoshana Hoose of Portland is retiring this spring after 27 years working for the Portland Public Schools. For 12 years before that, she worked in the city as a reporter.

I made my first attempt to move to Portland around 1980. At the time, I was a cub reporter in northern Virginia. I had survived my first job at the worst newspaper in America, and moved up a notch to a biweekly paper.

Now I was ready for another career move. I had passed through Portland a few years earlier while headed to Acadia on a camping trip, and it was love at first sight. I decided to apply to this very paper.

The Portland Press Herald editor who interviewed me was not impressed by my Ivy League degree and three years of experience in the competitive news environment of the Washington, D.C. suburbs. Rather, he seemed suspicious about why a journalist working near the nation’s capital would want to move to Portland, Maine.

I never had a chance to tell how I had honed in on this medium-sized paper for the opportunities that it offered, nor how charmed I was by the way of life in northern New England. I was turned down flat.

My reporting career took me to one of the largest newspapers in the country, in Minneapolis, and then to the Statehouse in Concord, New Hampshire. I tried again to get hired in Portland, to no avail. It was only after my New Hampshire editor put in a good word for me with his editor friend in Portland that I got a tryout and job offer — nearly seven years after I had first applied.

I thought of this recently because of the dramatic changes apparent in Portland’s recent Census data. Portland once was so insular that people were suspicious of out-of-staters trying to move here. Now, more than half of the city’s residents are people who have chosen to live in Maine.

It is common these days to have neighbors who relocated from New York City or Boston. In the 55+ community where I live, about half of the residents have moved here from other parts of the country to be near family, or to escape the ravages of climate change.

As I celebrate my 40th year of living in Portland, I feel like an old-timer. If you remember Raoul’s, the Dog Man and the Million Dollar Bridge, you’re an old-timer, too.

Perhaps you recall betting with your friends about when the huge snow pile by Back Cove, nicknamed Mt. Flaherty after the city’s former public works director, would finally melt. Maybe you rejoiced, as I did, when the trail from Back Cove to Portland Harbor was finally completed.

As the city’s trail network has grown, so, too, have the community gardening program and many other amenities.

We’ve seen the city change in other ways, too. When I arrived, many refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia were making new lives here. They were followed by waves of immigrants from Bosnia, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan and, more recently, the countries of Central Africa.

While Maine remains the whitest state in the country, Portland has steadily become more diverse. Today, nearly 30% of the students in the Portland Public Schools are English language learners.

Sadly, the rising cost of living in Portland has squeezed out many middle-class residents. Those of us fortunate enough to have bought homes before the COVID pandemic were able to leverage our home equity to stay here, while others have been forced to move a half-hour or more away to find affordable housing.

My children went to school with classmates from a wide range of incomes. Now, more than half of the students in the Portland Public Schools are economically disadvantaged.

Overall enrollment in the district has plummeted since its peak in the early 1980s. The district’s racial make-up also has changed dramatically. Most of my children’s classmates were white. Now, Black, Hispanic and Asian students make up the majority of the student body. That’s a big change in less than 20 years.

So, what can we make of all of these changes?

Certainly, the high cost of housing is a terrible problem, one that is largely responsible for squeezing out the middle class. But I would argue that other changes are a plus. Portland long ago shed the parochial view of itself that made that Press Herald editor question why I would want to live here.

The city has topped so many “best of” lists that new accolades get a mere shrug. Many of the elements that make Portland special have remained unchanged during my time here. We live in a gorgeous place on the coast of Maine. If we avoid Commercial Street during cruise ship season, Portland still feels like a small town where people know and care about each other. When I go to the grocery store or farmers market, I inevitably end up chatting with a neighbor or co-worker.

We are an artsy community, a progressive community and a place with heart — as shown by the way people have organized against ICE terrorizing new Mainers. To the newcomers who respect what Portland has to offer and lend their talents to make it even better, I say: Welcome!