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Rural Housing
Street Roots • June 1 -7, 2018
W Housing Rural Oregon
BY EM ILY GREEN
SENIOR STAFF REPORTER
harles Buki wasn’t in Coos County to
placate its residents.
C
“You need to get your shit
together,” he told a banquet room full of
locals at their highly-anticipated housing
summit on April 26.
The Virginia-based consultant and his
business partner, Thomas Eddington, had
just spent the previous hour explaining to
the audience that Coos County’s housing
crisis hinged, in part, on the community’s
overall attitude.
“I don’t know what happened, but
somewhere in the last 40 years, you
stopped having pride,” Buki said as he
flipped through slides that illustrated his
point with photos of dilapidated houses and
overgrown landscaping. After clicking
through a few additional snapshots, he
added, “There are a number of folks here
who have never been taught; don’t park
your car on the lawn.”
This drew laughter from the audience, as
did his comments about noticing a lot of
large men in motorcycle leathers and white
women with tattoos.
The housing summit took place at The
quite twice its size, to the north.
The transformation of the site where the
casino sits is emblematic of how this south-
central portion of Oregon’s coast has
changed over the past four decades.
Between 1950 and 1989, the bay-front
property was home to a giant Weyerhaeuser
Co. shipping center and sawmill, where one
of the largest green chains in the nation
once pulled trees. Six years after the mill
shut down, Coquille Indian Tribe turned
what remained of the facility into a
Restoring pride
An aging population, economic decline and
generational poverty contribute to Coos
County’s downtrodden outlook and appearance
Coastal Crossroads
Part I Coos County
Oregon's coastal communities are struggling with a housing crisis all their own -
one that's gotten worse every year following the Great Recession. Short-term
vacation rentals, generational poverty, a growing wealth divide and aging
populations have all pushed coastal communities to an irrevocable reckoning. For
these communities to have a viable future, something has to change, but what?
casino and later purchased the rest of the
53-acre plot so it could add an expansive
parking lot, hotel and RV park.
Whereas the area’s mid-century boom
spanned about 30 years, when salmon
fishing and timber jobs were plentiful, since
in a listless economic rut.
Today the casino is among the county’s
largest private employers, along with
Walmart, the Bandon Dunes Golf
Resort, medical facilities, area
schools and a call center.
Roseburg Forest Products,
which operates a
shipping terminal on the bay, is the only
lumber company that still employs more
than 250 people.
“I spent my summers all through college
and law school working in mills and in the
woods logging,” said Mike Lehman, a
■li fel on g resid e n t and fawner-stat e
representative for Coos Bay.
“It was a vibrant economy, very blue
collar,” he said. “In the mornings, the
streets were filled with busloads of
workers going to the mills to log, and I
watched as that slowly went down, along
with impacts to the fishing industry and
everything else. It always strikes me as
1980 when it really started crumbling.”
Lehman said while timber jobs have
declined, the industry is still alive in Coos
Bay, although it’s become so automated that
production now takes a third of the
workforce it once did. There are also fewer
mills now than in the county’s 1970s heyday.
Docked in the bay that week was a giant
cargo ship stacked high with logs headed for
China where they would be milled and sold.
The decline of the resource-based
economy in the Coos Bay area has led to a
long-term collective depression among many
families that once relied on those industries
for work, said Tara Johnson, director at The
Devereux Center.
“I think that a lot of problems stem from
long-term, generational poverty,” she said.
“There are also issues that go hand in hand
with that, of mental and emotional
detachment and inability to figure out how
to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.”
While her nonprofit focuses on helping
people who are homeless, she said many of
the housed people that stop in for resources
are just as discouraged as those living in
tents. “'That same despair is tnere. We don’t
have a lot of good paying jobs,” she said.
The median household income in the
county is about $39,000 - substantially less
than the statewide median household
income of about $57,500.
When a family slips deeply into poverty
See COOS COUNTY, page 5
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