This is Oregon Insight, The Oregonian’s weekly look at the numbers behind the state’s economy. View past installments here.
Oregon’s next decade of job growth will likely mirror the last, state forecasters expect, with hiring concentrated in urban areas that increasingly dominate the regional economy.
To a large degree that reflects the urbanization of Oregon’s economy, and of America’s. But it also reflects some lingering effects from COVID-19.
Overall, the Oregon Employment Department expects the state will add 300,000 jobs by 2030. That’s roughly 17% growth – a strong pace but down from the robust 21% growth in the last decade.
That growth won’t be distributed equally, though. Oregon’s fastest-growing counties in the Bend and Portland areas will grow by 18%, economists expect. The tri-county Portland area will add more than half of all new Oregon jobs in the coming decade, according to the forecast.
Counties on Oregon’s southern and eastern border, by contrast, will grow just 11% in the coming decade.
That disparity looks a lot like the last decade. Jobs are concentrating in affluent parts of the state where employers can recruit highly skilled workers for technology or professional jobs, and where there is high demand for health care and other personal services.
“In general, urban areas are attracting labor from other areas in the state but also labor force from other states as well. Urban areas tend to enjoy more in-migration, specifically people who are having higher education levels,” said Felicia Bechtoldt, the employment department economist who wrote the state’s latest job forecast.
The jobs disparity also represents demographics, she said: “In rural areas the population is older and there isn’t a lot of job opportunities for younger people.”
Rural Oregon has been facing these issues for years; now there’s a COVID-19 twist.
In contrast to past downturns, southern and eastern Oregon were hit less severely by the pandemic recession. That’s largely because those regions are less reliant on hospitality jobs, which were decimated when COVID-19 shuttered restaurants and hotels.
Because those regions didn’t fall as far, though, they don’t have as much room to bounce back.
State forecasters expect leisure and hospitality will be Oregon’s fastest-growing sector over the next decade as Oregon replaces the hotel, bar and restaurant jobs lost early in the pandemic.
And these are jobs concentrated in Bend and the Portland area, population centers with the most people patronizing bars and restaurants and the most tourists. So those areas will add the most jobs as those businesses recover.
Ultimately, though, it’s the state’s long-term economic trends that are bolstering growth in the metro areas as rural parts of the state lag.
Klamath and Lake counties, for example, never fully recovered from the Great Recession. Bechtoldt said they’re still 5% below their peak employment in 2006, and that’s a legacy of poor growth they have to overcome in the wake of the pandemic.
“It takes a longer time for areas with continued economic weakness to recover,” she said.
— Mike Rogoway | mrogoway@oregonian.com | twitter: @rogoway |
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