A Community-based Recovery

Fear at a time of economic, political, and cultural upheaval is understandable. But we cannot allow that fear to drive us further away from one another.

**programming note: you’ll soon hear much less from me — get ready for some wonderful posts from other contributors to begin on Wednesday, the day of Bill Bradbury’s first post.

Ammo isn’t the answer. Small businesses and social institutions are.

Oregon has always had a soft spot for the local entrepreneur. During a debate at the state’s constitutional convention, a delegate laid out their vision for businesses in Oregon: 

association[s] of ‘men of moderate means’--friends, relations, and fellow church-goers whose reputations were well known in a face-to-face world, neighbors joined together to meet local needs and wants and thereby able to rescue their community from foreign capitalists…

This anecdote in David Alan Johnson’s book, Founding the Far West, contains the gender biases and xenophobic tendencies of the era, but still conveys an underlying appreciation for mom and pop shops that has persisted to this day.

In the age of COVID, though, these entrepreneurial Oregonians are facing unparalleled threats. More troubling still is the fact that the counties where small businesses are being hit hardest are also where other economic headwinds are blowing the stiffest. 

A glance at the percentage change in small businesses open around the state reveals the disparate impacts of the recession; the darker the county, the lesser the percentage of small businesses open when compared to January. This data, compiled by Opportunity Insights, makes clear that small businesses have been squeezed along the coast and in many counties east of the Cascades. A closer look at three counties shows these disparities in more detail:

Whereas small businesses in Multnomah and Deschutes counties have seen higher rates of reopening since their nadir in April, things have become even more dire in Curry County, where the number of small business open has decreased by 41.1 percent when compared to January of 2020. 

Several rural counties are also experiencing particularly high drops in employment when compared to more urban areas. Consider that employment in Clackamas County has dropped by just 1.5 percent when compared to January of 2020; comparatively, employment has declined by 7.2 percent in Clatsop County. The graph below further reveals this disparity:

Wasco and Benton have experienced double-digit declines in the employment percentage, while Washington County employment rates have recovered to just a 4.2 percent decline (note, though, this is not an exclusively rural occurrence -- employment has dropped by 15.6 percent in Multnomah County). 

As yesterday’s article on Oregon in The New York Times made clear, this state is much more than Portland. What’s needed to recover in the Metro-area is far different than what’s required to lift up the small businesses struggling along the edges of the state.

Our recovery will only be as strong as it is nuanced. And, our communities will only recover if “neighbors [can] join together to meet local needs and wants…” This sort of recovery, then, necessitates listening to the struggles facing small businesses owners and understanding their unique challenges. 

What we cannot do is become more fractured. That’s the path we’re currently on. The New York Times  reported that:

At Rapid Fire Arms, a gun shop along the main road in Sandy, the owner, Brian Coleman, has sold 4.5 million rounds of ammunition since March, when the arrival of the pandemic drove up sales. Demand for guns and ammunition soared even further, he said, when the protests in Portland turned violent in the weeks after George Floyd died in police custody in Minneapolis.

Fear at a time of economic, political, and cultural upheaval is understandable. But we cannot allow that fear to drive us further away from one another. Instead, we need to accelerate efforts to bring “friends, relations, and fellow church-goers” back together through restoring small businesses and safeguarding social institutions that don’t rely on ammo to make us feel safer and more connected.

It’s impossible to outline an entire recovery strategy in a blog post. It’s also impossible to fully dive into the complex social and economic forces at play in Oregon in the span of just a few hundred words.

So, having acknowledged that this is 30,000 foot strategy rather than an inch-by-inch analysis, it’s worth stating that our economic recovery should also recognize that we need a social recovery.

• Our recovery funds should target anchor institutions that build economic prosperity and social cohesion.

• Our investments should feed two birds with one scone by identifying the businesses and nonprofits that do the best shop of creating positive externalities.

• Our metrics should not just be quantitative evidence of economic growth but also qualitative analyses of community cohesion and engagement.

Our communities don’t need rescuing from “foreign capitalists,” but they do “associations of men [women, and all Oregonians] of moderate means.”