Heading south on I-5, I can reach the Columbia river in about two hours. Once I reach the Columbia, I've also reached the town where I was born, grew up, and graduated from high school.
To a kid, it was a wonderful town. I assumed all towns of its size -- then, around 25,000 -- were pretty much the same. Looking back now, I realize that in many ways it more closely resembled a mill town in Ohio, Michigan or Pennsylvania than it did small towns in California or suburbs in other states.
In fact, it was a mill town. The economy was based on the two largest (reputedly) lumber mills in the world, a locally owned paper mill, an aluminum reduction plant, and a large port . The local mill workers were 100 percent unionized. Most boys went to work for the mills right out of high school, at the age of 18. Wages were great -- so great that you had to really want to go to college before you'd break free of the town and do so -- and employment was steady.
The town was prosperous. Workers' income supported a large commercial downtown, consisting almost entirely of locally owned and managed businesses. The daily newspaper, although biased toward local business interests, was well written and competed successfully with Portland and Seattle dailies. Unlike most mill towns in the Midwest, moreover, the town was (and still is, for that matter) attractive, with nicely maintained houses on tree-lined streets and excellent parks. The schools were also physically attractive, and I always assumed that they were providing me an excellent education -- a belief that I never seriously questioned until I went away to college and competed with students from Eastern prep schools and large suburban high schools.
I tell you all of this only incidentally out of nostalgia for my childhood. Primarily, it's my response to an article that I encountered this week in the on-line version of my hometown's newspaper -- a paper no longer locally-owned, but still apparently well written and well edited. The article described the desperate straits in which the city now finds itself.
One of the two large lumber mills is closed, and the other has drastically reduced its employment. Easily accessible timber is harder to come by, and the cost of union labor makes local lumber less competitive with that from other areas. The aluminum plant, dependent on cheap hydroelectric power, is shut down. The power is no longer so cheap -- or at least apparently not cheap enough to justify the transport of bauxite ore from far off sources such as Jamaica -- and the market for aluminum has weakened. The paper mill has cut its employment. Other smaller manufacturers have closed down, for one reason or another.
The attractive and prosperous town I grew up in now has over 16 percent of its households living below the poverty level. The typical level of education attained by residents makes it difficult for them to find employment in the new economy, and the sort of businesses that now thrive (at least in normal economic times) are not interested in locating in such an environment. The local high schools -- which probably were at least average for Washington when I attended, with virtually all entering students graduating -- are now rated mediocre at best. And only 55 percent of entering freshman graduate.
The downtown commercial area is dead. It was killed first by construction of a shopping mall outside the city, a fate suffered by many Main Streets in small towns across the nation. Now that mall itself is apparently in dire straits.
More depressing to me than the article itself was the tone of the on-line comments written by local residents. They display no optimism that the town will ever recover its former level of relative prosperity. The commentators see the town's work force, and their children, as undereducated and lacking the skills now sought by industry. The town does still contain a significant number of middle to upper middle class families (11 percent of households earn over $100,000); the children of these families will receive good college educations, but few of them will return after graduation.
The comment writers note (and statistics in the article substantiate) that the town is becoming increasingly polarized between a small affluent elite and a large majority of residents who are unemployed or just barely scraping by. The working middle class that formerly dominated the town and drove the local economy is gone.
Most of all, those commenting on the article see a lack of competence both in the local business community and in city government -- a lack of both the ability and the initiative to somehow lead the city into the 21st century. Whether justified or not, this perception itself is demoralizing to local residents. One commentator, writing on Monday, states:
We need to make this a place where people want to be. I have friends who come up from Oregon to go fishing here, but they stay in other cities, they don't even want to get a room here to fish! If this town is going to survive, it needs to be a destination, not just a gas stop along the way to something better.
Everyone sees the problems, but no one suggests plausible solutions. Maybe there are none.
I now realize that when I read about the desperation of citizens in Flint MI or Youngstown OH, I'm not just reading about remote economic disasters, 3,000 miles away. The same problems are endemic in small cities and towns throughout the country -- and not only in my own state, but in the very town where I spent a happy childhood.
We have a national problem, affecting significant parts of our nation, and we don't really know what to do about it.
----------------------Photo above: My high school
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