As a town dies
Throughout history, cities have been where wealth was created, ideas were born, businesses blossomed, and revolutions started. Cities exist for their connections of people to people, and as we have seen in posts on local real estate taxes, they too are economic organisms, whose ability to provide services and amenities to their inhabitants depends in large part on the city’s economy. A city and its residents are symbiotes, each contributing to the other’s health. So when a city dies, its death is painful not just for the place, but also for the people, as chronicled in this moving New York Times article from several months back:
OAKRIDGE,
On Highway 58, surrounded by fir trees … and not much else!
Into the 1980’s, people joked that poverty meant you didn’t have an RV or a boat. A high school degree was not necessary to earn a living through logging or mill work, with wages roughly equal to $20 or $30 an hour in today’s terms.
But by 1990 the last mill had closed, a result of shifting markets and a dwindling supply of logs because of depletion and tighter environmental rules. Oakridge was wrenched through the rural version of deindustrialization, sending its population of 4,000 reeling in ways that are still playing out.
Oakridge, Oregon, built when logging was profitable
Harvard economist Ed Glaeser and others have observed that city robustness depends in part on the variety of enterprises it hosts, because if one business or even sector experiences a downswing, others will be on the upswing, and people will move from job to job. Not so in a single-industry place:
Residents now live with lowered expectations, and a share of them have felt the sharp pinch of rural poverty. The town is an acute example of a national trend, the widening gap in pay between workers in urban areas and those in rural locales, where much of any job growth has been in low-end retailing and services.
But that same phenomenon can be seen another way:
It’s all in how you look at it
As jobs include a higher level of intellectual or informational activity, they tend to cluster — in cities — so that the money flows away from rural areas, which are increasingly being depopulated of permanent residents in favor of vacationers, weekenders, those passing through —
Today, a latte-serving cafe caters to mountain bikers and travelers on their way to a ski slope or parts farther west. A few new fast-food outlets are interspersed with graying motels and empty storefronts. Former workers fondly recall how the town’s 10 bars were mobbed every payday; now, a few old-timers gather in one of three tired bars and a dingy Moose Lodge, needing little prompting to carp about the Forest Service and environmentalists.
— and leaving behind the invisible rural poor.
Expressed in 2005 dollars, the average pay for a full-time worker in rural Oregon fell to $27,600 in 2005 from $34,200 in 1976. Over the same period, average pay in urban counties in
The city mouse can afford to dress better
See what happened? City workers — and the cities that host them, like smart-growth Olympus Portland — got richer, more crowded, and more expensive, even as rural workers lost ground.
The jobs headed down the mountains, and up I-5, to
Oakridge, an isolated and single-industry town, is descending into permanent structural poverty:
About 700 Oakridge residents, from a population of about 4,500 in Oakridge and the surrounding area, visit a charity food pantry each month to pick up boxes of groceries worth $100 apiece.
Two-thirds of public school students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, meaning their families are near the poverty line or below it. About 260 of the town’s 1,200 housing units are single-width trailers.
Rural poverty is shy:
“Every fall we discover that a few families have lost it over the summer and are camping out in the woods,” Ms. Miller said. “So we help them find some kind of housing in town.”
People will travel great distances for work:
When the logging and mill jobs dried up, many of the more enterprising families left. Some fathers communted for nine months at a time to log in
The phenomenon of geographical bachelors is not limited to rural areas in the US — throughout the world, especially in fusion countries, we see breadwinners (almost always men) moving to town to work and remitting money back home, whether they are Oregonians working in Eugene and sending to Oakridge, or braceros working California’s gold agricultural valley —
Portrait of a migrant worker: bracero ID card, 1951
— whose sentiments are beautifully captured in Jack Wesley Routh’s haunting Dreams of the San Joaquin:
I’m sending you some money
I wish it could be more
But it’s harder than I thought
To find the work I came here for
This place is just as pretty
As I pictured it to be
But a man in need of work’s
An all too common sight to see
Working the
So important to
One of the few bright spots in the Mexican economy has been the flow of money entering the country as workers’ remittances—money earned abroad by Mexican citizens and sent back to their families in
In 2003,
Got that?
Are you listening to me?
More money flows into
As a result of their vigorous growth, workers’ remittances now occupy third place as a foreign exchange generator for
Back in
Karen Kephart, 63, who has five great-grandchildren, was one of the first women to work alongside men at the giant Pope and Talbot mill. When she was laid off in 1989, she was running a saw for $13 an hour, equal to $21 in 2005 dollars. Her husband tried other mill work in the region, then retired. To make ends meet, Mrs. Kephart turned to caring for the elderly in
“We had to use our savings to live on,” Mrs. Kephart said in the trailer park that she and her husband moved into after selling their house on the hill, and where they get by on Social Security and modest pensions. “It changed our retirement considerably.”
As I’ve posted elsewhere, the shift from house to mobile home, done for affordability reasons, may turn Ms. Kephart and her family from owners into de facto renters.
Their daughter Tami Parrish, 44, the second oldest of five children, remembers having “to scrimp and save everything we had” after the mills closed.
Ms. Parrish and her two sisters live in the same trailer park as their parents. She too has worked as a caregiver in
Note how many of the residents work in
If you live in Oakridge, you see these signs every day
Here is the flip side of “drive ’til you qualify” — these low-income wage earners are anchored by where they live, and drive as far as they need to find work.
Crowding into her trailer are her husband, an unemployed cook; her 22-year-old daughter, who just started a waitress job making Oregon’s $7.50 minimum wage, and tips; and the daughter’s baby boy, who receives medical care under a federal medical program for poor infants.
A dying town means falling prices, and that creates deep affordability, even as it means living in inadequate housing:
Dazzle Deal, 26, with tattooed arms and a pink pony tail, has three children, ages 7, 5 and 3. She is part of a more recent influx of poor people who moved to Oakridge because it seemed a safe place to raise kids on little money.
Ms. Deal moved from
For nine months she worked at a charity in
Sculpture of a tree planter,
The town is trying:
The town has authorized water and sewer services for up to 200 prime home sites in the hills above, and it hopes to attract retirees and commuters from the
Along with a growing trade in outdoor recreation, becoming a distant bedroom and retirement community may be the town’s best hope, bringing tax revenue and service jobs, though it is not clear how much opportunity this will offer ambitious young people.
Such a hope is indeed plausible, but that future will take years to arrive, for it supports only a very small permanent population. Those who come for idyllic countryside buy expensive property and occupy it lightly, with low density and long spells where the homes are shut up. For instance, in
Nancy walking in Fowey,
“There’s no substitute for having a payroll,” said Dan Rehwalt, 77, who worked for decades as a machinist with lumber mills and the railroad.
Above the fog line and below the snow line, with herds of elk in the surrounding hills, Oakridge offers a peaceful beauty, and residents say it is a perfect place to live, except for the lack of jobs.
There is Oakridge’s epitaph:
“Except for the lack of jobs.”
For want of employment, my city was lost
Each morning as the trucks roll in
A lucky few climb on
And the rest of us are left to wonder
Where the dream has gone
Where the dream has gone
I only hope that time will find
A way to work things out
We will be together
In the life we dream about
Life we dream about
