Portland Is Quietly Becoming America's Next Great Airport

Portland just spent $2.15 billion on a new terminal built from nine acres of Pacific Northwest timber — the largest public infrastructure project in Oregon history. It won World's Most Beautiful Airports. The Washington Post ranked it #1 in America. And it's now the second empire of Alaska Airlines, which runs 130+ daily flights from PDX, opened a $135 million hangar, and is quietly attacking Delta's Atlanta and United's Houston from a Portland base. All of this — while Portland the city is shrinking and its metro just lost 8,800 jobs. This is the story of how a mid-sized American airport became one of the best-designed pieces of civic infrastructure in the country.