I want to relocate to Oregon (Portland, Eugene, etc.) I need advice please! :D

[redguard57]

I am also looking to get a county job or something.

I think you need a better plan then county job "or something" if you want to make this happen. Except for the DC area, the government sector has been in attrition mode for 6 years.

I've said this before on here and I'll say it again - Oregon has one of the worst economies in the country. I'm not sure exactly why, but I've been shocked since moving here 3 years ago by how bad it really is. It's not Mississippi or Michigan bad, but it's Rhode Island bad - no strong economic sectors for the medium skilled people, only a few for high-skilled people, and for the rest there are horrid service jobs and they feel lucky if they get full-time versions.

You've got the worst of all worlds here - high unemployment, a poor job market, low salaries even for good jobs, high housing costs and an egregiously tight rental market. If you are on the lower end of the income scale, you can kiss getting a decent rental for an affordable price goodbye. The only silver lining to that is that crime in Oregon is fairly mild. If you stay away from trouble - meth and heroin - trouble will probably not look for you even if you have to live in a bad area.

People blame the decline in the timber industry... but that was 20-30 years ago, people! With NAFTA, Canada will always be able to out-produce us on timber, you've got to move on. There is something else going on - an extreme anti-growth attitude.

Portland metro is not as bad as the rest of the state in unemployment and job market, but it is still below average for a city of its size. If the state was just Portland, I wouldn't say all this.

We're lucky the state is not that populous or else the media would cover it like it does Detroit. Outside Portland you see double-digit unemployment and still relatively high living costs.

[bler144]

Originally Posted by redguard57

There is something else going on - an extreme anti-growth attitude.

I agree with a lot of your post, but I think this is incorrect. From my observation the reason Oregon doesn't have more economic growth has more to do with the fundamentals just not being that strong.

Washington and California both have some constraints on growth, but market demand in both places is much stronger and they grow nonetheless.

Oregon is relatively remote and sparsely populated. Portland has a middlin' port (technically larger than Seattle or Tacoma, but only half the size of the two together) and the state only has one other port in the top 150. And in terms of rail/air, there's no real competitive advantage to being here.

When Intel/Nike were setting up, one major advantage was that land was cheap and infrastructure was sufficient. Now land really isn't cheap, and [at least in the metro] a lot of the infrastructure is straining at the seams.

That's not to say some people won't choose to locate businesses here (natural beauty, coffee), but there aren't a lot of purely economic reasons to locate here vs Kansas or Texas or even WA/CA.

[PNW-type-gal]

Growth tends to stay where it started and near the infrastructure that supports it. A lot of WW2 industries helped west coast cities (aircraft, ship yard industries) and in the 50s and 60s things grew up around that. Portland had the transient Kaiser shipyard on the Columbia building Liberty ships, but it wasn't a true "shipyard" in terms of structures. Unlike Boeing in Seattle, when the war was over, the temporary shipyards shut down.

Seattle was a smaller city than Portland prior to WW2, but Boeing - and all of the support industries - rapidly changed that. Having a city that had boomed during the war and continued to grow in the post-war period was the turning point between the two cities.

[redguard57]

From what I've read, Oregon had politicians in the 1930s and 40s that were very hostile to the Franklin Roosevelt administration - so a lot of New Deal and WWII infrastructure money dedicated for the west coast went to Washington and California. You can see it in the sense that we have far fewer New Deal legacy projects than our north and south neighbors.

Oregon's land use laws are insane. I live in Bend where there is huge demand for affordable housing. Not even affordable, just cheaper than what there is. The housing costs here are already ridiculously high, but if you could build developments that had an average sale price of just 10-15% lower than the over-inflated ones available you'd sell them out in days. However, the process to extend the urban growth boundary is an almost insurmountable hurdle.

[jgreco5]

We came, we saw, we left. Could not find jobs, tried for 6 months.

It was great while it lasted. Loved the city, job market terrible.