UNION, Ore. — Once a month, every month, the food bank in Union opens for two hours in the Methodist church.
But so many people turned out in October that it took three hours to get to them all, said Gracie Tarter, who has run the pantry in the northeast Oregon community of 2,100 for 11 years. When they were done, 192 residents and 64 families had been served, she said, about 11/2 times normal.
“It seems like it used to be a stigma if you had to go and get food,” she said. Now, “they need it.”
Collectively, things are starting to look better for rural Oregon. Jobs are coming back for the first time in years. Unemployment rates are slowly declining.
Yet individually, places like Union, far from the state’s main population centers, face a gloomier reality.
“Every place was affected to some extent by the downturn,” said Bruce Weber, an economist and director of Oregon State University’s Rural Studies Program.
“A lot of the story today is about which places are resilient and which are not.”
In the Columbia River Gorge, there are more jobs today than before the recession, and the unemployment rate is near 6 percent, a full percentage point lower than the statewide average.
In Union County and some of its sparsely populated neighbors in eastern Oregon, the recovery has crawled. For every 10 jobs that Union County lost in the recession, which officially ended in 2010, it had only gained four of them back by 2014.
Most southern Oregon counties have fared even worse, recovering fewer than one in 10 jobs lost during the most recent downturn. And the problem isn’t purely cyclical, either.
“For the most part, a lot of our rural areas have been dependent on resource industries,” where employment has been shrinking over time because of regulations and technology, said Mark McMullen, Oregon’s state economist. Coos Bay, for example, never did recover all the jobs it lost in the 1980s, he said.
A quarterly report issued this week by McMullen and his Oregon Office of Economic Analysis brought renewed spotlight to the state’s uneven recovery.
Although Oregon as a whole is expected to recover all the jobs lost in the recession by early 2015, much of the growth has been concentrated in urban areas and the Gorge. More people are working in Portland than before the recession, and Bend is now picking up jobs faster than any other metro region.
Some rural, resource-based economies may never grow to what they once were, or at least not within the horizon that analysts can forecast.
“There’s a lot of movement and growth in technology, business services and hospitality — that is not what drives rural communities,” said Chip Massie, executive director of the Klamath County Chamber of Commerce.
A double-digit unemployment rate gripped Klamath County for 63 consecutive months, until the streak finally snapped in January. Even today, the southern Oregon county’s jobless level is 9.7 percent, and 2,300 people can’t find work. Statistics don’t show how many more people have stopped looking.
Farther west along the southern Oregon coast, Mike Lehman hasn’t noticed any decline in residents turning to the safety net of services provided by the Oregon Coast Community Action, the Coos and Curry county nonprofit he oversees. He said all of its core programs, including housing and energy assistance, have a waiting list.
“In rural areas, poverty shows up in a very different way than it does in urban areas,” he said. “You don’t see a number of homeless folks on the streets. What we see is huge doubling and tripling up of families in apartments and homes.”
Coos County has recovered about two in 10 jobs it lost in the most recent downturn, Curry County only half that. The latter county, bordered by California and the Pacific Ocean, is one of only four statewide where more than 10 percent of workers— about 800 people— are unemployed. That rate did not change at all in the past year.
“That’s probably the one thing you find in rural communities on the south coast, is this high degree of hopelessness,” Lehman said.
Near the opposite corner of Oregon in Union County, where Tarter runs the food bank in the city of the same name, joblessness appears less severe. Seven hundred people, or 7.4 percent of the labor market, are unemployed and looking for jobs.
More people started turning to the food bank three years ago, and demand has remained high since, Tarter said. “This month is Thanksgiving, so it will be busy, too.”
As housing markets and government budgets begin to improve, so are conditions in many parts of rural Oregon, McMullen said. The two industries often have an outsize impact in non-urban areas.
“It’s no coincidence that our rural areas turned around at the same time that those industries did,” he said.
Collectively, the areas outside of Oregon’s main population hubs of Portland, Salem, Eugene, Bend, Medford and Corvallis have been gaining new jobs for more than a year, expanding near a 1 percent annual rate.
The counties that continue to struggle the most tend to have smaller populations and long drives from major metro areas, said Weber, the Oregon State economist.
Small places don’t generate enough income internally to keep the economy circulating. They must bring money in, Weber said.
“When you’re in a rural place, you’ve got to find something that makes you different and can generate enough activity that people build businesses around it,” he said.
The Columbia Gorge, in contrast, is nearer to Portland, stretches along Interstate 84 and has a niche agricultural industry.
But Massie has noticed some hopeful signs in southern Oregon’s Klamath County, too.
To be sure, he said, no one is jumping up and down in the county seat of Klamath Falls, a city of 21,000 where the chamber is based. But business owners feel like they may have found the floor, and are now seeing things start to tick up, he said.
In response to the recession, Massie said the chamber and others have shifted their views on economic development. Landing new factories that create hundreds of jobs seems more distant; lifting current businesses that may need to expand feels more realistic.
“We need to start creating jobs — two, three, four jobs at a time in the places that we already have a significant interest,” he said.
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