Oregon Population Thread Including PSU and Census Data

[babs]

Originally Posted by aquaticko

Seattle's economy is strong, but it's not really that diverse. There's Amazon and Microsoft--two tech companies--and Boeing, which...these days, I hardly need say more. At this point, all three are very nearly too big to fail, and there's unarguably a strong set of SMEs that, while dependent on the Seattle "Big Three", would still survive if they didn't, but I can't foresee the city doing too well if, for whatever reason, all three took a major downturn.

As for Portland's situation, I think it's probably the case that the city's economy, as a whole, just isn't that big. It's obviously dominant in the region, but not in the same way that, e.g., Seattle is over Tacoma, or Boston over Providence, NYC over Jersey City, etc. At the same time, there's arguably not a "second city" to Metro Portland, besides maybe Vancouver, which is not strong enough to stand on its own (unlike, comparing those last three examples, Tacoma [with its port facilities and JBLM], Providence [which could tie itself t NYC], or Jersey City [which is a secondary financial hub and port to the NYC metro area]). If Portland were to make a major downturn, I'm not sure where else could realistically pick up the slack.

The relationship between jobs and population is bi-directional, especially in service economies. To say it's about "the economy and jobs" is not really understanding that you can't have them without demand for the goods/services they produce. It's true, housing is secondary--that's why you can find, now and in the present, examples of places where housing is extraordinarily expensive for the average resident yet the region remains economically vibrant; e.g., NYC at the turn of the 20th century or Mumbai now.

Just the same, one of the U.S.' major sources of economic resiliency has always been the mobility of our workforce. In the longer-run history of the country, people have absolutely gone from one place to another for cheaper housing, albeit usually other factors are also involved. Once A/C became widespread, there was nothing stopping a raft of service/manufacturing industries fleeing the expensive (and cold) northeast/midwest for cheaper labor in the south/southwest. That's in part a product of cheaper housing; if your employees can't afford housing off of the jobs you pay them to do, where your jobs for them are, they won't work for you. It works out on a national basis, but that doesn't mean there aren't any regional losers in the process. The failure of the northeast to build enough housing to accommodate the workers who produced/provided the goods/services the northeast, itself, demanded, was a success for a lot of other parts of the country.

There's no reason to think high housing costs don't have negative economic effects, especially since that kind of wealth accrual doesn't usually translate to higher levels of consumer/business spending, which is what keeps an economy going. The housing crisis of the past ~2 decades or so isn't just called a crisis for drama's sake. There are genuine negative consequences to not building enough housing for your workforce; they'll catch up with us, sooner or later.

I have to take issue with your point that it's mostly Amazon, Microsoft and Boeing in Seattle. They have three major retailers based in Seattle: Costco, Nordstrom, and REI. A major airline, Alaska. A major university, UW. Add in T-mobile, Nintendo, Starbucks, etc... The job market is pretty deep and diverse in Seattle. Portland has Nike and its offsprings, Intel, Freightliner, and...?

[PhillyPDX]

Originally Posted by babs

I have to take issue with your point that it's mostly Amazon, Microsoft and Boeing in Seattle. They have three major retailers based in Seattle: Costco, Nordstrom, and REI. A major airline, Alaska. A major university, UW. Add in T-mobile, Nintendo, Starbucks, etc... The job market is pretty deep and diverse in Seattle. Portland has Nike and its offsprings, Intel, Freightliner, and...?

And to scoff at Boeing because of some short term news cycle blips. It brings in over 2x the revenue of Nike relying a well-paid and highly educated STEM workforce, with major industrial and defense sides. It in itself is very diversified.

The diversification is specifically the fact they are different industries, not just that there are multiple big firms. There is no reason all 3 should falter at the same time, save worldwide economic issues. As compared to Nike and Adidas, etc, that are all exposed susceptible to the very same industry effects.

The northeast economies have faltered due to tax rates and unionization, not because of housing. Firms picked up and moved south for cheaper labor costs and much lower tax rates. There is plentiful cheap housing in the northeast and Great Lakes, with public schools systems that make Lake Oswego look mediocre, and yet these states still can’t get people stop the exodus south.

I could buy that Portland, without much headquarter or manufacturing presence, IS more susceptible to high housing costs than most cities. People that choose to work remotely here can very easily choose to do so in a cheaper city. I know many that didn’t move here for jobs at all, it was all about lifestyle. It’s much harder to move an Intel factory, or a plane assembly plant (look at the Boeing fiasco trying to get away from the unionized Everett workforce). This is also likely why the Bay Area CSA has lost a whopping 220,000 residents in the last 3 years.

[aquaticko]

Originally Posted by PhillyPDX

And to scoff at Boeing because of some short term news cycle blips. It brings in over 2x the revenue of Nike relying a well-paid and highly educated STEM workforce, with major industrial and defense sides. It in itself is very diversified.

I agree, but taking for granted that these things are a.) irreplaceable by competitors from elsewhere, and b.) cannot themselves be moved, is hard to justify, considering the history of other such industries. I grant you that, given the military applications of aviation technology--both in terms of R&D and manufacturing--domestic aviation industries tend to be fairly well protected and promoted, but if any country's modus operandi is "toss the baby out with the bath water if it's going to enrich capital", it's the U.S.; only the Brits seem to rival us in that particular playout of stupidity. No industry that isn't systemically important--which I'd argue even the presence of Airbus planes among commercial American airlines makes clear it's not--is immune to the tides of globalization. Everything else flows downhill from there.

And aside from MBAs, no sector of the American workforce is more mobile than STEM workers.

The diversification is specifically the fact they are different industries, not just that there are multiple big firms. There is no reason all 3 should falter at the same time, save worldwide economic issues. As compared to Nike and Adidas, etc, that are all exposed susceptible to the very same industry effects.

Good thing we've never had worldwide economic issues before.

The northeast economies have faltered due to tax rates and unionization, not because of housing. Firms picked up and moved south for cheaper labor costs and much lower tax rates. There is plentiful cheap housing in the northeast and Great Lakes, with public schools systems that make Lake Oswego look mediocre, and yet these states still can’t get people stop the exodus south.

The northeast and Great Lakes are two separate regions, different in too many ways to lump together.

Between the education institutions of New England (MIT and almost the entirety of the Ivy League, to say nothing of elite prep schools), the finance industry in New York, and the political power of D.C., a lot of what happens in this country and globally is still determined by what happens on the Northeast Corridor. The economy of the region hasn't faltered, it's just been growing more slowly than it could've over the past few decades because it's been leaking people to the rest of the country--not (or at least not solely) because of tax rates and unionization (the latter isn't meaningfully higher than the rest of the country, and unionization tends to be higher outside service industries, which are the vast majority of employment in the whole country, especially in the northeast; the lone exception is probably the construction trades, especially around NYC), but because workers at the bottom and middle can do better in places with cheaper housing. However, as long as places like Cambridge, MA, Wall St, and Capitol Hill remain globally significant, the northeast will continue to essentially tolerate high housing costs, rather than thriving as places where anyone from anywhere can come to make a living at any point on the income spectrum, as they used to be in the 19th/20th century.

The midwest, in contrast to all this, is pretty well hollowed out. Chicago is there, but as international finance has further globalized, secondary national centers like Chicago can, at best maintain their importance. To its credit, Chicago has done that so far, but that's a mask for the rest of the midwest, which has never really recovered from manufacturing moving to non-union labor markets in the southeast and steel production being outcompeted by Asian companies. This is reflected in rock-bottom housing costs across the region, including in Chicago which--relative to its dynamism--has very cheap housing, more than competitive even with a much smaller city like Portland, which obviously doesn't have the international standing of a place like Chicago. If someone wants access to the Chicago job market, there's a decent chance they can live in city center, or if they're on the lower end of the income spectrum, there's super-cheap housing available throughout the region; it's become a "drive until you qualify" kind of place, for better and worse.

I'm not sure if you're a homeowner who's been in the same mortgage for the past decade plus, but I'm making the assumption, because you don't seem to understand the extent to which housing costs have skyrocketed over the past few decades, and of course, this is ultimately a major driver of labor costs. I feel like I may have said this before here or elsewhere, but if your workers can't afford to live where you want to employ them, they'll leave, and if you can't find anyone desperate enough to work for you on your terms (the aesthetic grossness of impoverishing your workers such that, e.g., they have to live in their car, aside) you'll have to leave, too.

Housing your labor is part of the cost of doing business; pretending it's a separate issue is just self-deception.

I could buy that Portland, without much headquarter or manufacturing presence, IS more susceptible to high housing costs than most cities. People that choose to work remotely here can very easily choose to do so in a cheaper city. I know many that didn’t move here for jobs at all, it was all about lifestyle. It’s much harder to move an Intel factory, or a plane assembly plant (look at the Boeing fiasco trying to get away from the unionized Everett workforce). This is also likely why the Bay Area CSA has lost a whopping 220,000 residents in the last 3 years.

As I said above, it's specifically that mobility of highly-educated service sector labor--MBAs and engineers--that poses a problem for a place like Seattle. These types of industries don't necessarily set down roots like they used to, and they are globally decentralized. Companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Costco, Nordstrom...they can set up HQ's wherever they want. One point made by one of the urban planning professors I studied under that I've never forgotten is the greatest determinant of where an HQ is set up is where the CEO wants to live. Ergo, maintaining quality of life in the cities where these big, mobile companies base themselves is crucial. Thankfully, Seattle has been building more housing per-person than any other big city in the country for years now (besides, notably, Austin), which has prevented a SF-style housing crunch and subsequent economic fall-from-grace, but their latest comprehensive plan is for less growth than its suburbs account for .

This all means that the real depths that SF has seen in terms of downtown pleasantness has been avoided in Seattle, but there's no guarantee that'll be avoided in the future. Labor's already expensive in Seattle, and housing is obviously part of the problem; housing as a driver of labor costs should be a constant concern everywhere, as poor housing--i.e., being "underhoused" or homeless--drives down the quality of labor and obviously can make downtowns less pleasant as desperate people congregate to access the service density that cities provide over suburbs/exurbs.

Anchor institutions--places that can't really just up and leave--are also important, and both Alaskan Airlines and UW do count, but neither are as substantial as exist in the northeast. When I say "substantial", I mostly mean reputationally; Alaskan Airlines isn't United or American or Southwest, and UW isn't Harvard or MIT. That means that yes, they will place an absolute floor on how low housing costs would go before bottoming out; even assuming a Seattle doomsday scenario where all the big tech and service industry companies leave, people will still want to live there for access to the sorts of institutions that provide employment that can't be relocated (Seattle's function as a significant port city also plays a role). Nonetheless, there's just not as much holding Seattle together as there is the northeast corridor. More importantly, in terms of cities of similar gravity, there's Seattle, Vancouver, and Portland over here, with nothing else for hundreds and hundreds of miles in any direction, and Seattle's comfortably the biggest player in the PNW. If it starts to fall, nothing will be able to catch it; nothing has as much of a draw out here that isn't quality-of-life dictated, rather than employment/housing opportunities. I don't mean to imply in all this that Seattle's economy is weak, only that it's fragile--as prone to sabotage by something as basic as dysfunctional housing markets--as anywhere else; the same applies to Vancouver, whose only really unique quality in comparison is its strong history of Chinese immigration. That's in contrast to Portland, which is relatively weaker (certainly smaller) than either Seattle or Vancouver, but arguably less fragile (less complex) because of it.

Sorry this has been such a long, meandering reply, but these are complex issues without any really dominating variable. "The economy" of any place isn't a thing that stands above the people involved in it; it is the people involved in it, and our needs as individuals are as complex as any business'. Housing is just one of the more basic needs that, for whatever reason, some people seem to think is a separate issue. The more moving replaceable parts a system--such as a metropolitan economy--has, the more crucial it is that none of them fail if it's to continue working as it has been.

The higher you are, the further you can fall--the more essential it is to get the basics--all of them--right.

[PhillyPDX]

Originally Posted by aquaticko

I agree, but taking for granted that these things are a.) irreplaceable by competitors from elsewhere, and b.) cannot themselves be moved, is hard to justify, considering the history of other such industries. I grant you that, given the military applications of aviation technology--both in terms of R&D and manufacturing--domestic aviation industries tend to be fairly well protected and promoted, but if any country's modus operandi is "toss the baby out with the bath water if it's going to enrich capital", it's the U.S.; only the Brits seem to rival us in that particular playout of stupidity. No industry that isn't systemically important--which I'd argue even the presence of Airbus planes among commercial American airlines makes clear it's not--is immune to the tides of globalization. Everything else flows downhill from there.

And aside from MBAs, no sector of the American workforce is more mobile than STEM workers.


Good thing we've never had worldwide economic issues before.



The northeast and Great Lakes are two separate regions, different in too many ways to lump together.

Between the education institutions of New England (MIT and almost the entirety of the Ivy League, to say nothing of elite prep schools), the finance industry in New York, and the political power of D.C., a lot of what happens in this country and globally is still determined by what happens on the Northeast Corridor. The economy of the region hasn't faltered, it's just been growing more slowly than it could've over the past few decades because it's been leaking people to the rest of the country--not (or at least not solely) because of tax rates and unionization (the latter isn't meaningfully higher than the rest of the country, and unionization tends to be higher outside service industries, which are the vast majority of employment in the whole country, especially in the northeast; the lone exception is probably the construction trades, especially around NYC), but because workers at the bottom and middle can do better in places with cheaper housing. However, as long as places like Cambridge, MA, Wall St, and Capitol Hill remain globally significant, the northeast will continue to essentially tolerate high housing costs, rather than thriving as places where anyone from anywhere can come to make a living at any point on the income spectrum, as they used to be in the 19th/20th century.

The midwest, in contrast to all this, is pretty well hollowed out. Chicago is there, but as international finance has further globalized, secondary national centers like Chicago can, at best maintain their importance. To its credit, Chicago has done that so far, but that's a mask for the rest of the midwest, which has never really recovered from manufacturing moving to non-union labor markets in the southeast and steel production being outcompeted by Asian companies. This is reflected in rock-bottom housing costs across the region, including in Chicago which--relative to its dynamism--has very cheap housing, more than competitive even with a much smaller city like Portland, which obviously doesn't have the international standing of a place like Chicago. If someone wants access to the Chicago job market, there's a decent chance they can live in city center, or if they're on the lower end of the income spectrum, there's super-cheap housing available throughout the region; it's become a "drive until you qualify" kind of place, for better and worse.

I'm not sure if you're a homeowner who's been in the same mortgage for the past decade plus, but I'm making the assumption, because you don't seem to understand the extent to which housing costs have skyrocketed over the past few decades, and of course, this is ultimately a major driver of labor costs. I feel like I may have said this before here or elsewhere, but if your workers can't afford to live where you want to employ them, they'll leave, and if you can't find anyone desperate enough to work for you on your terms (the aesthetic grossness of impoverishing your workers such that, e.g., they have to live in their car, aside) you'll have to leave, too.

Housing your labor is part of the cost of doing business; pretending it's a separate issue is just self-deception.



As I said above, it's specifically that mobility of highly-educated service sector labor--MBAs and engineers--that poses a problem for a place like Seattle. These types of industries don't necessarily set down roots like they used to, and they are globally decentralized. Companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Costco, Nordstrom...they can set up HQ's wherever they want. One point made by one of the urban planning professors I studied under that I've never forgotten is the greatest determinant of where an HQ is set up is where the CEO wants to live. Ergo, maintaining quality of life in the cities where these big, mobile companies base themselves is crucial. Thankfully, Seattle has been building more housing per-person than any other big city in the country for years now (besides, notably, Austin), which has prevented a SF-style housing crunch and subsequent economic fall-from-grace, but their latest comprehensive plan is for less growth than its suburbs account for .

This all means that the real depths that SF has seen in terms of downtown pleasantness has been avoided in Seattle, but there's no guarantee that'll be avoided in the future. Labor's already expensive in Seattle, and housing is obviously part of the problem; housing as a driver of labor costs should be a constant concern everywhere, as poor housing--i.e., being "underhoused" or homeless--drives down the quality of labor and obviously can make downtowns less pleasant as desperate people congregate to access the service density that cities provide over suburbs/exurbs.

Anchor institutions--places that can't really just up and leave--are also important, and both Alaskan Airlines and UW do count, but neither are as substantial as exist in the northeast. When I say "substantial", I mostly mean reputationally; Alaskan Airlines isn't United or American or Southwest, and UW isn't Harvard or MIT. That means that yes, they will place an absolute floor on how low housing costs would go before bottoming out; even assuming a Seattle doomsday scenario where all the big tech and service industry companies leave, people will still want to live there for access to the sorts of institutions that provide employment that can't be relocated (Seattle's function as a significant port city also plays a role). Nonetheless, there's just not as much holding Seattle together as there is the northeast corridor. More importantly, in terms of cities of similar gravity, there's Seattle, Vancouver, and Portland over here, with nothing else for hundreds and hundreds of miles in any direction, and Seattle's comfortably the biggest player in the PNW. If it starts to fall, nothing will be able to catch it; nothing has as much of a draw out here that isn't quality-of-life dictated, rather than employment/housing opportunities. I don't mean to imply in all this that Seattle's economy is weak, only that it's fragile--as prone to sabotage by something as basic as dysfunctional housing markets--as anywhere else; the same applies to Vancouver, whose only really unique quality in comparison is its strong history of Chinese immigration. That's in contrast to Portland, which is relatively weaker (certainly smaller) than either Seattle or Vancouver, but arguably less fragile (less complex) because of it.

Sorry this has been such a long, meandering reply, but these are complex issues without any really dominating variable. "The economy" of any place isn't a thing that stands above the people involved in it; it is the people involved in it, and our needs as individuals are as complex as any business'. Housing is just one of the more basic needs that, for whatever reason, some people seem to think is a separate issue. The more moving replaceable parts a system--such as a metropolitan economy--has, the more crucial it is that none of them fail if it's to continue working as it has been.

The higher you are, the further you can fall--the more essential it is to get the basics--all of them--right.

I never meant to say housing isn’t important, just that the narrative that housing is the root cause to population loss is a misnomer. I am fully aware of housings costs. Especially for the forgotten middle that drive the economy that no one seems to care about. Those are the people up and moving to Camas, Idaho, Texas, etc.

When I say northeast economy has faltered. Its relative. Sure it’s maybe not shrinking, but relative to the boom states it’s losing its edge. And the northeast is a lot more than just downtown Boston, NYC, Philly, DC.

And then we’ve discussed before, WHY is Portland building so few homes? What makes it so much easier to build in Texas or Arizona or Florida?

I find this chart to be extremely interesting. It’s dominated by red states. Almost like there is some sweet spot to being a blue city in a red state in the current economic-mobility era.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List...stic_migration

[aquaticko]

Originally Posted by PhillyPDX

I never meant to say housing isn’t important, just that the narrative that housing is the root cause to population loss is a misnomer. I am fully aware of housings costs. Especially for the forgotten middle that drive the economy that no one seems to care about. Those are the people up and moving to Camas, Idaho, Texas, etc.

When I say northeast economy has faltered. Its relative. Sure it’s maybe not shrinking, but relative to the boom states it’s losing its edge. And the northeast is a lot more than just downtown Boston, NYC, Philly, DC.

And then we’ve discussed before, WHY is Portland building so few homes? What makes it so much easier to build in Texas or Arizona or Florida?

I find this chart to be extremely interesting. It’s dominated by red states. Almost like there is some sweet spot to being a blue city in a red state in the current economic-mobility era.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List...stic_migration

It does play a major role, though. My point was that housing costs are probably the defining reason that the northeast, in particular, is losing its edge, apart from the unarguable desirability that warmer climates elsewhere in the country have. Obviously it's not enough to bring down the rest of the regional economy, but in a place like San Francisco where the housing crisis is probably worst in the country--though that could probably be said of California as a whole--it should probably be the leading economic concern.

It's also an illusion to think that the northeast would be what it is without those old and still very successful large cities. Places like that are where major institutions--the types of anchors that don't just up and leave--are set up, because there's enough demand for them and an elite who are interested in bettering where they are, rather than just making sure that they can leave if they want to. Sure, Providence, Albany, Trenton, Baltimore, Wilmington, Harrisburg, Hartford....Smaller cities do exist and often have AN economy of their own, but to think that they'd be just as successful without major center to orbit is just not correct.

That list is interesting, but not really surprising. Florida has always been a draw for northerners looking to retire someplace warm, and they absolutely do build (have built) much more housing than the northeast for the past few decades. Part of the reason some of these places have built more is because they had built less in the past, so there remains lots of easily-developed land that's not absolutely in the middle of nowhere; the flatness of a lot of the urban areas in these places plays a role, too.

It took me a while to put my finger on it, but e.g. in Oregon, there are large areas of relatively flat land, situated between very steep hills and mountains, that've been the locus of the only type of development we seem to do in this country (sprawl); Hillsboro and Gresham are great examples of this. By contrast, the whole eastern half of the country, at least until you get down to southern Georgia/Florida, is continuous rolling hills; there are no really easy spots to develop massive plots of land that weren't already developed by the turn of the 20th century.

Geography aside, at least in Portland's case, there seems to be a very dysfunctional bureaucracy set up, ostensibly to ensure development proceeds in a fair way, but if all it does is slow development to crawl, that keeps vested interests happy, anyway. People here talk about developers as if they're evil megacorporations, but developers ultimately want to build; that's where their revenue comes from. I'd be very happy with public development if we had it here, but ultimately the issue is that Portland too quickly devolves into single-family homes, and no one's willing to admit that maybe their twee 1950's 3-bedroom half a mile from downtown Portland should probably be torn down and replaced with a 10+ story apartment building, so development sui generis is villified. It's an understandable sentiment, but the alternative to densification is sprawl, and eventually you sprawl enough that the only plots of land readily available for development aren't appealing to developers, and it's too far from job centers to be notably more desirable for homebuyers.

The Texan cities are great examples of this. Each have their own appeal, and Austin definitely does benefit from its reputation as a blue dot in a red sea, but it's going to run out of steam eventually if it can't figure out how to grow healthily--that means building some kind of urban rail transport system so that people can get around without sitting in their cars for hours. Houston wouldn't exist without its petroleum industry, and Dallas has a mixed-enough economy that it can be called healthy, but in all three of these cities' cases, the point is that their housing growth isn't the dense kind that creates and benefits from urban agglomeration. As soon as they've sprawled past the point that living in a far-flung suburb actually provides meaningfully-easier access to their job markets, people will stop coming. This is already visible in the drop in metro growth rates over the past decade; they're all still growing fast, but they've also dropped by half, most of them growing at ~10% 2010-2020 versus the 20% or more in prior decades.

In any case, Florida's real estate market is likely to tank over the next decade as no one will insure housing there due to risks of flooding and hurricanes, and Arizona's going to become so hot that people will avoid it for that reason. Idaho and Montana are beneficiaries of underserved housing demand on the west coast, especially California, as well as the image that a lot of conservatives have of them being "liberal hellscapes".

As you're right to point out, housing isn't the only driver that brought people to these quickly-growing states, and housing won't/wouldn't be enough to keep them there.

[PhillyPDX]

This is such an interesting issue. How is there an affordable housing issue with major NEW apartment buildings selling at such an incredibly low cost per unit?

I do get why developers (financial backers) are leery of new starts in this pricing climate to add new units, but it should be a zero sum game, in that it means currently available units are cheaper.

https://www.wweek.com/news/2024/06/0...bargain-price/