Roseburg

Okay, Roseburg. It’s the capital of the southern Oregon timber industry, which fell hard with the end of harvesting on federal lands in the early ‘90s.

It’s got a population of 20,000, in a town center at a bend in the river and several residential neighborhoods, with more modern retail north of the city center around I-5. Several thousand more live in outlying areas, and Roseburg is seat of Douglas County stretching to the coast counting 110,000 population in total.

The airport offers no scheduled passenger service. Flights to major mountain west cities are available 83 miles to the north or 90 to the south; equivalent service is available 15 miles from Bend.

The only college in the area is a community college.

The town center, oriented around a “couplet” (parallel one-way streets) for a Main Street in Oregon tradition, has government buildings and a roughly five square block downtown. The downtown is early-20th century in character, solid frontages of storefronts with 1-2 stories of residential above, with churches, banks, and apartment buildings on the periphery.

The downtown is not pedestrianized, but has been designed for cars to park on the periphery. One block of storefronts is block-through, with entrances on each of two opposing sides. Many storefronts are empty. Several bars and restaurants are active, with a few (plus a co-working space) that look to have opened recently. Other stores remain looking a little out-of-time, and several storefronts have been occupied by nonprofits, street-level offices, or enterprises that look to create low returns while occupying high spatial volume. A gym occupies one sizeable space, two large markets stand empty. Despite this emptiness, only the markets look truly dilapidated; others have intact windows and clean interiors and reasonably fresh paint and facades. Scattered throughout are several civic monuments and monumental-looking fraternal lodges.

Sloping away from this downtown, the town center contains more stores, warehouses, restaurants, and bars. On the I-5 corridor, several hotels and travel-oriented businesses serve the freeway, mostly north of the town center.

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So, in some ways this is kind of what I’d been expecting to like - a resource extraction town for a collapsed industry, leaving a fully built-out but intact infrastructure ripe for use. With poor flight connections to finance centers and a local economy still tapering off as the legacy population drifts away, an obvious hope is to market the small-town experience to internet workers or others who generate resources in a way that doesn’t require an existing resource base in physical proximity, while in the interim, the courthouse, the remaining private-lands timber industry, and the highway services support a basic level of services.

The maintained facades, the nonprofit offices occupying storefronts, and the general effort to keep downtown looking active suggest a level of coordination by local elites in support of the city’s viability.

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And it’s… Cascadia. It’s green but at the same time younger than the east coast or rust belt - the wilderness hasn’t been carved into as much, the people not guarded, exhibit the good down-home parts of “country” without much “narrow-minded bumpkin”.

Many stores and bars have signs at the doors saying to take hoodies off, no backpacks, no tweekers, this site recorded on camera. There are at many points one to three people who are obviously homeless or on drugs in view. A Greyhound bus stopped in front of one dilapidated market and disgorged 7 vagrant-looking people. Every day the city police log lists like 6 arrests. On sites where these mugshots are compiled and shared around you see these are usually about heroin, meth, thefts to buy heroin or meth, or parole violations by people with convictions about heroin or meth. Even among apparently functional people working behind counters and bars, there are more facial scabs than you expect.

There is, frankly, an absurd level of pro-military sentiment. Signs in all sorts of windows, military discounts everywhere, banners from some past event benefiting some charity for military families. A veteranarian’s office is painted with the American flag, silhouettes of dogs and soldiers saluting or wearing helmets. I wondered if there had been a military base closed nearby because even after a week traveling through much more “red”-than-Portland country I had seen more of that stuff but nothing near that level. I never saw any murdered-out trucks or Punisher skulls or Black Rifle Coffee or 5.11 or any other military-adjacent aesthetic, though. Wearing Chinese-replica BDU pants, I was sporting more of a tactical look than anyone I saw.

Douglas County gave 64% of its vote to Trump in 2016.

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The clear signs of people coming together to keep downtown appealing, all the monuments, the particular aesthetic of the places catering to a downtown crowd (and of that crowd itself), the legacy of what you’d expect from timber barons and their clerks… I was like “oh I get this, there’s a strong country-club Republican strain.”

Knowing that the region’s forest workers were pretty radical (that’s an important thing about Oregon, its normative rural experience isn’t of yeoman farmers but forest workers) I was wondering when I was going to get a sign of that, eventually I realized the yay-military stuff was the expression of class solidarity I was looking for.

Knowing both of those I turned to the addicts and fuckups and was like “ohh, you’re the third player in this drama, the unvirtuous poor that the virtuous poor and white collar types can bond over identifying against”.

A good deal of the nonprofits taking up space downtown seem to be the prison-industrial-complex type, the therapy or treatment you get sentenced to, designed to employ the first group turning the third into the second.

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Seeing Roseburg makes some things about Portland make sense. That, say, when timber collapsed some of the “worker” types or their kids moved to, or stayed in Portland and brought the ethic to food service.

Traditional Oregon is weirdly exclusive, had an anti-Californian sentiment in particular but I’ve heard stores from Washingtonians about getting their cars pelted with rocks in the 80s, the state’s most famous statement of boosterism included a direct request not to move here.

There’s very much a sense that Portland has become swollen with non-Oregonians who seek to impose themselves on traditional, rural, Oregon, I could see a distaste towards any idea of making Roseburg more Portlandish.  

When I walked in to look at the co-working space (it’s really just a period office building with individual offices) I overheard a guy saying that he could accept if they just made up a list of the guns it was okay to buy…

And the thing about a strong local elite invested in the future of your town is the town is under the control of a strong local elite with an interest in its future, presumably wanting to keep or develop it as its own playground.

At the same time, whoever owns all those buildings would very much like to see them filled at competitive rates  I’m sure, and property owners are the backbone of any local elite. (I do not know the in-town landholders’ relationship to the woodland barons.)

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So. Promising. It’s a charming Portland-in-miniature, houses are still available in the $100s and apartments at $500/br/mo. Between empty and underused space there’s maybe 10 years of solid expansion before all the slack has been taken up, and by all appearances the local system would love to see it happen and has no better pitch than quality-of-life-experience, being what Portland was in the 90s.

(Even the class system isn’t terribly off, a lot of the “Portlandia” years were about importing a middle class to fit between the old money in the West Hills and the retreating border of “Felony Flats” across the river to the east.)

That said it’s not abandoned just waiting for my guiding hand, there are preexisting power structures and culture to accommodate or challenge. And if undermining the local culture is the last thing I want - it’s what appeals to me, and the loss of which I’m mourning in Portland – I’m already thinking “okay that’s honestly too Republican, but that’s the only way to end up with a tolerable culture after it floods with creatives so hey”.

This is assuming it does take off, which I honestly think is a good assumption, as the big west coast cities fill up and cascade down (in the interim, look at Olympia, Visalia, Sacramento, Eugene, and Fresno) but isn’t inevitable. Oregon environmental laws and declining influence of Republican state legislators could further undermine the rural economy. Things could just keep declining past the point of being able to keep up appearances - the VA hospital just closed its emergency room, and there are two more in the area but the reasoning was the difficulty of recruiting and maintaining specialized staff, and that’s a bad sign.

Maybe I’m just psyched to see an authentically Cascadian town again and I should check out some others before getting swept away, in Oregon alone I’m still virgin on Albany, McMinnville, Forest Grove, and Coos Bay.

Still, I dunno. Might be a site for a good life.