Coffee Shops…Or Not!?

I made a map of the East Portland –> East County area where I thought it might make sense to look for coffee shops relevant to us here in Centennial. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t wrong in assessing our neighborhood as super lacking in coffee shops. And I wasn’t! Oh my.

Look at that yellow highlight (approximate neighborhood boundaries), with one Starbucks inside Fred Meyer, drive-thru Dutch Broses at the corners of 174th+Division and 162nd+Stark, and another drive-thru near the 162nd+Stark. We used to have Milos Espresso right at the center of the neighborhood, around 162nd+Division (see the green blob?! that’s the center of the neighborhood!). But now, nada.

As for the rest of the map, the brown coffee cup icons are sit-down shops, the purple car icons are drive-thrus, and the blue shopping bags are coffee places inside grocery stores.

Why do coffee shops matter? They’re “third places” where people can hang out, meet and get to know one another, and just be together. Relationship-building that happens at these kinds of hubs is one of the most important ways to build a resilient community.

Just as another point of reference, this is the image of that 162nd+Division intersection that Portland released in the City’s 2019 Building Healthy Connected Communities Along the Division Transit Corridor report. I dunno that we’ll ever get to this sweet shaded new urbanist vision, especially after the Division Street remodel that ended up with ZERO trees in the median, but maybe a coffee shop would help it feel just that little bit more like a neighborhood than a place that we just move through to get elsewhere.