Life In The Silicon Rain Forest

Oregon has always been a great place to fish or raise a family. Lately it has become one of the hottest places around to start a company.

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Back in the early 1970s, former Oregon Governor Tom McCall ran around the country telling out-of-staters that they were welcome to visit Oregon, but he would rather they didn't stay. Ever since then, Oregonians have nursed a complex about their state's image. McCall's remarks didn't keep anyone away -- the state's population increased at a rate of 2.2% annually, faster than that of California or Washington, during his eight years in office. Nor were immigrants deterred by the "ungreeting cards" containing invitations like "Tom Lawson McCall, Governor, on behalf of the citizens of the Great State of Oregon, cordially invites you to visit Washington or California or Idaho or Nevada or Afghanistan," and jokes about the rain. The whole pitch seemed to be facetiously antigrowth.

Besides, it wasn't just a joke. A lot of Oregonians had come to the state to get away from places like California, or to carry on a less frenzied way of life among the tall trees and rolling farmland, and they didn't want to see their state turned into another southern, or even northern, California. People hadn't come to Oregon for the weather or to get rich or from a vague sense that this was where something was happening. They came because people seemed nicer there, because Oregon was still small enough to get your arms around, and it had some of the last unspoiled countryside in the nation. It was a great place to fish and to raise a family.

Nonetheless, the economy in Oregon had boomed during the '60s and, at least by Oregon standards, there was quite a bit of urban sprawl. People got upset when legendary strawberry fields started disappearing under shopping mall parking lots. Oregonians depended on natural resources for their biggest industries -- timber, agriculture, and tourism -- and McCall helped mobilize the state to preserve or, in some cases, reclaim them. Oregonians passed the country's first bottle bill, spent the money to clean up their rivers and air, and required industries to establish environmental controls.

For the most part, they supported McCall's cuts in the budget for promoting tourism and his elimination of the Oregon Industrial Development Commission's budget. They even backed his appointment of a Conservation and Development Commission to oversee a statewide, comprehensive land-use plan. Every city and county in Oregon was supposed to come up with a plan that complied with such state planning goals as preservation of open spaces and scenic, historic, and natural resources; protection against urban sprawl; and planning the housing, streets, sewers, and water for future growth. It was, and still is, the most ambitious land-use planning anywhere in the world.

Until the late 1970s, Oregonians weren't particularly concerned about catering to industry, or even to putting out a welcome mat to growth. Industry there -- timber, agriculture and electronics (primarily Tektronix Inc., a large electrical-instrument maker) -- provided enough jobs to keep all but 6% of the state's workers employed. And it seemed to operate profitably enough in spite of a personal income tax structure that some claimed was horrendously progressive, as well as environmental impact permit processes that sometimes delayed the building of a corporate facility for a couple of years, and a noticeable lack of incentives from local and state governments to induce any company to stay there. Portland had remained a comfortably small city (population under 400,000; tallest building, 39 stories), with the view of Mt. Hood unobscured by smog, the highways relatively free of congestion, the corporate buildings landscaped among the trees. And people had still managed to build successful companies and get rich.

The recession of 1979-82 changed all that. One hundred and fifty three thousand people, or 11.5% of the work force, found themselves without jobs in 1982. Georgia-Pacific Corp., one of the country's largest timber companies and a major Oregon employer, moved its headquarters to Atlanta. And Tektronix, a company many people had looked to as a buffer against the ups and downs of timber-related industries, was forced to cut back its staff by about 6%.

Oregonians began to look a little harder at the four-color magazine advertisements luring industry to South Carolina. They worried about the tax structure. They remembered Intel Corp.'s complaints about the land-use-permit process.

By early 1984 they had, on the one hand, such companies as Tektronix, Nike, Floating Point Systems, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel, and a whole raft of start-ups that seemed to indicate a healthy business climate. On the other hand, however, they were reading about Hyster Co., a forklift manufacturer that was consolidating its manufacturing in Illinois and Kentucky at the expense of a plant in Portland; about Mitsubishi Corp. turning down an Oregon site in favor of one in North Carolina; and about Star Technologies Inc., a Floating Point Systems Inc. spin-off that had decided to locate its manufacturing facilities in Sterling, Va., 3,000 miles from corporate headquarters.

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