They are Portland the same way that Brooklyn is New York. Manhattanites would object, but for the rest of the world...
That's actually one of the things that really amused me when we lived in Portland, a group of my wife's co-workers would lecture us that since we lived on the west side we were not real Portlanders and did not understand what urban living is because we were "suburbanites". We both enjoyed telling them we just moved from New York and they have no effin' clue what urban living really means. I mean, if you do not need another mortgage to afford parking a car, you do not live in a proper urban area...
"difference without a distinction" I believe is the correct term. Me and most of the world would consider them Portlanders.