NYT: Rural Oregon Town Feels Pinch of Poverty

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/us/20poverty.html?_r=1&hp&ex=1156046400&en=87d2fc4dfdb35536&ei=5094&partner=homepage&oref=slogin

For a few decades, this little town on the western slope of the Cascades hopped with blue-collar prosperity, its residents cutting fat Douglas fir trees and processing them at two local mills.

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.

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.

Most parents here, said Shelley Miller, who heads the family resource center at the public schools, are “juggling paycheck to paycheck.”

[ret5hd]

1. a post-hydrocarbon economy writ small. (nt)

[ixion]

2. it's because of clear-cutting, NOT tighter environmental regs

If the lumber companies had been replanting their trees, rather than skull-capping the forest, perhaps their might still be something left to log.

[bemildred]

3. And overcutting. And selling logs instead of milling them. nt

[silverojo]

4. Just curious....

1) Since they're small-town folks, did they vote Republican?

2) Isn't it amazing how Republicans are the first to whine when ecomomic problems start affecting THEM?

[RamboLiberal]

6. About them voting Republican - I was wondering same thing

and if you note they benefit by many Federal programs, programs that mostly Dems put in and Repubs would love to cut. And the programs might even be better except for the morans who vote Repub.

[WHEN CRABS ROAR]

5. I live in a small coastal Oregon town

Same thing is going on here. The fishing is down, along with Federal and State services. Time to vote the bastards out!