Rising gas prices to hit rural poor the hardest
April 19th, 2008 by Jim JustThe L.A. Times has an article that caught my attention, about how high gas prices are affecting the poor rural community of Coy, Alabama. I think the situation isn’t so different from what we’ll soon be seeing in rural Linn County where I live, and throughout rural Oregon.
Cars and cheap gas gave Americans the freedom of mobility. As the article points out, that freedom is particularly vital to rural communities, delivering people out of rural isolation and into decent, if far-flung, employment.This description of Wilcox County, Alabama sounds like it could be east Linn County:
“. . . gas money and a functioning car are still vital for workers who wish to leave this stretch of pastureland, low-slung houses and tumbledown trailers. The only public transportation is a regional van service that mostly shuttles the elderly to doctor’s appointments. There are only a few local farmhand [or timber industry] jobs.”
With only a little tweaking, the article could about Linn County.
Jobs . . . tend to be spread around the state. The people [around Lebanon] gas up their cars and drive to them. They drive 13 miles on the two-lane highway to [Albany], the county seat, or they ventured farther afield, to the bigger cities of [Corvallis, Salem, Eugene, even Portland], where they work at [Wal-Mart, Costco, and Home Depot], at [Hewlitt Packard, hospitals, and schools], take handyman gigs and do government desk work.
Rising gas prices could mean that it no longer makes financial sense to drive to work.
There’s a big urban-rural divide in Oregon when it comes to income. According to the Oregon Employment Department, the average pay for a full-time worker in rural Oregon fell to $27,600 in 2005 from $34,200 in 1976. Over the same period, average pay in urban counties in Oregon climbed to $37,800, putting the rural-urban gap at $10,200 and rising.
Higher gas prices are only going to make that inequality worse. Not only do rural residents make less money, they have to spend more on gas to escape the trap of their little piece of the American dream.
In Wilcox County the median household income is $17,500, and residents spend more than 13% of their monthly income on gas – the highest ratio in the nation. In Los Angeles County, for comparison, the average household spends only 3.9% of its monthly income on gas.
Encouraging rural sprawl – one of the unfortunate consequences of Measures 37 and 49 – could have the unintended consequence of trapping tens of thousands of people in isolated rural poverty.