The Week Observed: August 8, 2025

What City Observatory Did This Week

The gender cap in perceptions of cities. A new YouGov survey of 2,000+ Americans reveals striking gender differences in how cities are perceived across the country. Women rate Portland a remarkable 31 percentage points higher than men—the largest gender gap among 50 major cities surveyed. Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco also score significantly higher with women.

The geographic pattern is telling: West Coast cities consistently appeal more to women, while Southern cities—particularly in Texas and Oklahoma—resonate more with men. Every California city except Bakersfield rates higher with women; every Texas city except Houston favors men.

These perceptions largely come from Americans who've never actually visited these places—only New York City had been visited by a majority of respondents. The ratings reflect secondhand impressions from media coverage and word-of-mouth rather than lived experience.

The findings suggest our mental maps of American cities are deeply gendered, creating a cultural geography where women are metaphorically "from Portland" and men "from Oklahoma City."

Must Read

America's unshakeable belief in a non-existent trend in murder. File this under extreme cognitive dissonance. As we have always pointed out at City Observatory, the data shows decades of steady decreases in crime in US cities. By every measure, but especially by murder rates, crime is vastly lower now than it was in the 80s or 90s. Despite a blip in disorder and crime in the wake of the pandemic, crime rates are again continuing to decline, almost everywhere. But survey research shows most American's steadfastly believe just the opposite.

A recent YouGov poll asked survey respondents whether, since 1990, the murder rate in US cities had increased a little or a lot, or had decreased, a little or a lot. A majority of Americans think the murder rate is up. Only about one in five know that murder rates are down substantially.

Here, for example, is a tabulation of the FBI data:

The truly scary thing about murder in the United States is the fearful and deeply wrong notion that we have that our cities have become more dangerous, when the reverse is actually true. It's a sign of the times perhaps that belief has become so unmoored from facts.

Allston Freeway widening will likely be downsized due to loss of federal funding. In a project with many parallels to Portland's I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway widening project,