Portland Downtown Office Vacancies Rising
10th February 2026
Twenty-seven percent of Portland-area offices remain vacant, according to commercial real estate firm Colliers. That’s a slight decline from the previous year, but vacancies in downtown Portland are 34 percent and rising. Nationally, downtown office vacancies are only 19 percent.
“Portland’s prolonged commitment to remote work, ongoing concerns around tenant safety, and high tax rates compared to nearby locales hamper the downtown office market and cloud occupancy projections,” says Colliers. Problems with homelessness and drug use are supposedly declining, but that hasn’t stopped restaurants from recently closing.
My friends who still live in Portland say it is still a great place to live as long as you avoid downtown and a few other areas. However, TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, hitched its future to downtown by using it as a hub for most of its bus and light-rail routes. Light-rail ridership is currently running about 58 percent of pre-pandemic numbers, while bus is doing better (but still less than the national average) at 75 percent.