Tyler Carney

Tyler Carney, a 29-year-old computer programmer, moved here from Tulsa, Okla. in September when the Internet-security company he was working for relocated to downtown Portland. He was laid off two months later, and today is living off the $417 in weekly unemployment checks. He has trimmed expenses, such as cutting out restaurant meals, ending cable and switching to slower Internet service. Mr. Carney is spending most of his days job-hunting, but has no plans to go back to Tulsa anytime soon.

"Portland is a little more progressive than Tulsa was, as far as the culture goes," he says. "This town is awesome. Tulsa tended to roll up the streets at night."Scott Thompson, president of Lexicon Staffing, Inc. in the Portland area, says the information technology staffing firm continues to get calls from new arrivals looking for work. Many, he says, are less interested in jobs and more interested in Portland's quality of life, such as the city's proximity to the Oregon coastline and the Cascade Mountains.

"You have to wonder what would inspire someone to walk into a situationwhere you have higher than U.S. average unemployment rate," he says.For Brian DeGrush, 28, it's a visit he paid to the city two years ago to see friends. He says he loved the social life and the green landscape, and when he went back about a month ago with his girlfriend, it was to scout out jobs and neighborhoods to live in.

On Saturday, he graduates from the MBA program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, but hasn't yet found a job.If he doesn't find work soon, Mr. DeGrush says he and his girlfriend will probably just move to Portland over the summer and hope for the best. "We're debating just trying to find part-time stuff and scrounging by until something more permanent opens up," he says.