Monday Mailing - October 4, 2021

RARE Monday Mailing Year 28 | Issue 04 04 October 2021 1.

Quote of the Week:

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“If you think you’re too small to be effective, you’ve never been in the dark with a mosquito.”

- Betty Reese

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Oregon Fast Fact Oregon residents own one-fourth of the country’s total llama population.

Mapping Rural America’s Diversity and Demographic Change (Alison Smith) Battling Rural Myths The Unequal Impacts of Wildfire Nobody Really Knows How the Economy Works. A Fed Paper is the Latest Sign.

Where Do Public Lands Factor into the Homelessness Crisis?

Residents Seek More Transparency from Google in Water Deal with The Dalles “Farming Is So Much More Than Food” Emergency Preparedness and the Importance of Tracking Heritage Resources Oregon Economists Say Prepare for ‘Headwinds’ Incentives Coming for Energy Efficiency with Fire Resiliency RESOURCE: Oregon Agriculture, Food and Fiber: An Economic Analysis

Mapping Rural America’s Diversity and Demographic Change

The Brookings Institute The release of 2020 Census population data provided muchanticipated insight into the demographic trends reshaping our nation, but it also unleashed a wave of predictable headlines touting the demise of “shrinking rural America.” The familiar narrative of “two Americas”—one diverse, metropolitan, and successful and one white, rural, and declining—cropped up once more, often explicitly equating “rural” with “white” or, even more simplistically, with white Trump voters.

While this narrative provides an easy way to think about America in binary terms, it obscures the far more complicated trends shaping rural America: most notably, its growing demographic diversity over the last decade. While it is true that the population of nonmetropolitan[1] America fell by about half a percentage point between 2010 and 2020, the future of rural America is increasingly marked by growing RARE AmeriCorps Program Monday Mailing | Page 1 of 6

diversity and expanding inequity within and across regions—creating an intricate picture that binary thinking can’t capture.

Here, we present three demographic trends from the 2020 Census that upend outdated assumptions about nonmetropolitan America and conclude with a call to embrace a more inclusive future for increasingly diverse and dynamic rural towns and regions.

Read the full story.

2. Battling Rural Myths Business Oregon For more than 20 years, Heidi Khokhar has worked for an organization that partners with communities to grow businesses, revitalize downtowns and boost entrepreneurial skills of local people. In this interview, Khokhar discusses how urban bias continues to stop rural communities from progressing economically, and how the new wave of remote workers could stem the brain drain that has afflicted rural towns for decades.

Read the full story.

3. The Unequal Impacts of Wildfire

Headwaters Economics People’s susceptibility to wildfire is based on their exposure to flames and fuel, but also on their ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from a wildfire. Shortsighted and unjust policies have shaped people’s abilities to cope with disasters, making some populations disproportionately vulnerable. Variables such as income, age, mobility, and other socioeconomic factors can influence vulnerability to wildfire impacts.

For example, the elderly, disabled, and people of color are more likely to have medical conditions exacerbated by wildfire smoke. A lack of transportation or language barriers can complicate evacuation, relocation, and access to aid. Families living in poverty and people living in mobile or manufactured homes may not have the agency and resources to prepare in advance of a wildfire event. Any single characteristic—let alone multiple overlapping characteristics—can result in disproportionate exposure to catastrophic loss.

Read the full story.

4. Nobody Really Knows How the Economy Works. A Fed Paper is the Latest Sign.

The New York Times It has long been a central tenet of mainstream economic theory that public fears of inflation tend to be self-fulfilling.

Now though, a cheeky and even gleeful takedown of this idea has emerged from an unlikely source, a senior adviser at the Federal Reserve named Jeremy B. Rudd. His 27-page paper,

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published as part of the Fed’s Finance and Economics Discussion Series, has become what passes for a viral sensation among economists.

The paper disputes the idea that people’s expectations for future inflation matter much for the level of inflation experienced today. That is especially important right now, in trying to figure out whether the current inflation surge is temporary or not.

But the Rudd paper is part of something bigger still. It reflects a broader rethinking of core ideas about how the economy works and how policymakers, especially at central banks, try to manage things. This shift has also included debates about the relationship between unemployment and inflation, how deficit spending affects the economy, and much more.

Read the full story.

5. Where Do Public Lands Factor Into the Homelessness Crisis?

High Country News Kunisha Fernandez, her husband, Steven Fitch, and their four children had spent five years in Las Vegas when, last spring, Fernandez saw a YouTube video of a family camping fulltime: “A day in our life! Family living in a tent.” Fernandez found it captivating — four girls and their dad walking on the beach; dinner cooked on a campfire overlooking the ocean; life under starry skies.

Fernandez watched another video like it and then another, over and over again, like a playlist, and she thought about how her family had never gone camping together. That night, she shared it with Fitch. “Wouldn’t it be cool if we did this?” she asked.

Fitch agreed. The two met in San Diego, where they both grew up. Fernandez, 31, worked remotely for a company that retrieved medical records, while Fitch, 33, worked as a mover, but they struggled to find a two-bedroom apartment for less than $2,000 a month. In 2016, they moved to Las Vegas because they heard housing was cheaper there, but after a few years, rents started going up in Las Vegas, too, and Fernandez found the heat excruciating.

Read the full story.

6. Residents Seek More Transparency from Google in Water Deal with The Dalles

Oregon Public Broadcasting Residents of an Oregon city in the Columbia River Gorge are uneasy with tech giant Google’s latest plan to expand in the region.

The company aims to build a new data center on the site of a former aluminum smelter in The Dalles, a port city of about 15,000 people in north-central Oregon. Google built its first-ever data center there in 2006.

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The company has negotiated a pair of agreements with The Dalles city officials that would significantly reduce property taxes Google must pay on the new development and secure for the company the water it needs for its expanded operations.

The deal to deliver groundwater to Google has drawn skepticism from members of the public who’ve grown wary of Oregon’s water stability in a changing climate, and that suspicion was on full display at a recent City Council meeting.

Read the full story.

7. “Farming Is So Much More Than Food”

Oregon Humanities In 2020 and 2021 we have glimpsed the challenges Oregon’s food system will face over the next fifty years.

Wildfires, heatwaves, and a severe drought point to harsher conditions that, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent report, will worsen and further impact food systems. Farms are facing a labor shortage. Large corporations continue to buy up agricultural land, pushing out generational farmers. And the theft of land from Native Americans in the 1800s, a wrong never rectified, continues to raise landownership debates around the state.

According to Megan Horst, an associate professor at Portland State University whose research focuses on the relationship between food systems and planning, meeting these challenges will be difficult. But with education, community engagement, and the right policies, she says, Oregon could build a robust and equitable food system over the next fifty years that justly compensates farmers and farm workers, embraces climate initiatives, addresses inequities, and feeds every Oregonian.

Read the full story.

8. Emergency Preparedness and the Importance of Tracking Heritage Resources

Oregon Heritage Exchange Last year the Community of Cottage Grove, a designated Oregon Heritage All- Star Community, participated in a Oregon Heritage pilot project to develop a Disaster Resilience Plan For Heritage Resources (DRHR). Four heritage organizations, the City of Cottage Grove, and emergency response teams came together with the goal to increase community-level decision making related to disaster resiliency. The result was a plan for the community with recommendations and action steps in addition to a guidebook to help other communities to create a similar plan based on their unique heritage resources. The project and the resulting guidebook has won a state award and a national award.

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One of the action steps that came out of this process was recently completed. Oregon Heritage hired a consultant to research and prepare a spreadsheet and maps for cultural agencies in Cottage Grove to track their organizational assets and heritage collections. The asset inventory collections were appraised for asset type volume or number, location, materials, and risk factors. That data was then inputted into each organizations master inventory matrix and will be used by these organizations and emergency response teams to prioritize relocation, protection, and recovery efforts in case of an emergency or disaster.

Read the full story.

9. Oregon Economists Say Prepare for ‘Headwinds’

The Bend Bulletin To say it’s been a tough year to be a business owner would be an understatement.

The rise and fall of COVID-19 cases, risk levels that opened and closed businesses, new safety protocols and a severe labor shortage have forced many business owners to rethink and retool their operations. Some industries — health care and leisure and hospitality — have been hit hard by the pandemic and a labor shortage. Others, like professionals, haven’t felt a thing, economists say.

In response, small businesses have raised wages, bumped up benefits and raised prices to offset these new costs. A job that paid a minimum wage of $9.25 an hour in 2016 now pays $12.75 an hour, according to the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries.

The Oregon Employment Department reported that the state regained nearly two out of three jobs lost in spring 2020, when government mandates restricted or closed business operations. A record level of job openings were reported in April and June in Oregon and across the country. Businesses reported 98,000 job vacancies at any given time between April and June.

Read the full story.

10. Incentives Coming for Energy Efficiency with Fire Resiliency

The Mail Tribune An upcoming Energy Trust of Oregon program will give cash incentives for new homes built to exceed current state energy efficiency standards which also add increased fire resiliency.

The trust is already working with the city of Talent to offer incentives for owners who are rebuilding older homes destroyed by the Almeda fire.

“Because of the fires, we were really motivated to see what the cross section is between energy efficient measures and measures that also add fire resiliency to a building,” said RARE AmeriCorps Program Monday Mailing | Page 5 of 6

Karen Chase, trust outreach manager for Southern Oregon. “I continue to hear people talk about fire resiliency ... but most people don’t have a definition of what would be fire resilient in construction.”

Read the full story.

11. RESOURCE: Oregon Agriculture, Food and Fiber: An Economic Analysis

Oregon State University College of Agricultural Sciences More than 2,000 new farms were established in Oregon in recent years, and the total value of state’s agriculture, food and fiber sector exceeds $42 billion, according to a new economic analysis report by Oregon State University researchers.

Researchers in the OSU College of Agricultural Sciences and Extension Service have prepared the report every five to six years in partnership with the Oregon Department of Agriculture. The latest report provides a broad economic overview of the agriculture, food and fiber industry, and also a look at new developments, including the hemp and recreational marijuana industries and the impact of wildfire and COVID-19.

“The report provides a snapshot of where the Oregon agriculture, food and fiber sector stands,” said Jeff Reimer, a professor of applied economics and one of the authors of the report. “We’re able to do this analysis that shows linkages that wouldn’t be apparent if you were just looking at statistics about the economy.”

Read the full story.

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