Shelley McLendon struggled for years to find affordable theaters to stage her sell-out adaptations of movies like “Road House” and “The Lost Boys,” as well as sketch and improv comedy shows.

“It wasn’t just affecting me — it was affecting everybody else,” McLendon told State of Wonder during an episode she guest curated. “So you had all these companies, from comedy to straight-up drama to dance to poetry, looking for places to put up a show—places that were not only available, but affordable. We were all in competition.”

McLendon decided to go in search of her own space. After two years of hunting for the right building, she opened the city’s first new theater in some time, the Siren Theater.

McLendon’s story is a bright light in an otherwise darkening theater landscape. The list of performing companies who have lost their homes or struggled to find new ones as a result of Portland’s booming real estate market continues to grow at an alarming rate, starting with the companies sent scrambling after the close of Theater Theatre in 2013 and most recently seen in the displacement of three of the city’s dance companies — Northwest Dance Project, Conduit Dance and Polaris Dance Theater.

Read the full story: http://www.opb.org/artsandlife/article/could-the-arts-get-pushed-out-of-portland