In terms of world history, 26 years is not very long, but long enough to see plenty of change for Clark County’s economy. In late 1983 when I joined The Columbian, Interstate 205 had only recently opened east Vancouver and Camas to development. Cascade Park was not yet part of the city and Southwest 164th Avenue was just coming off the drawing boards. Old line manufacturing — paper, aluminum, lumber, chemicals — was king along the Columbia River waterfront from Washougal west to the Vancouver Lake Lowlands. Hewlett-Packard’s Vancouver engineering think-tank had not perfected its breakthrough inkjet printer technology. And Japanese semiconductor businesses were just beginning to discover Clark County.
So how would we sum up the economic changes wrought here since then? More people, for sure. But if anything, we’ve become more like the rest of the suburban Portland metro area with less manufacturing — HP’s printer enterprise has come and gone, aluminum, lumber and paper production is gone or diminished. Those jobs have been replaced by more office workers, more housing and retail nodes, more commuters who spend an hour going to and from jobs across the two bridges. We look like everybody else. But are we?
A few years back, a marketing firm came up with a profile of the average Clark County resident. To sum it up, we’re not like everybody else. Clark County residents, said the report, are more adventurous and more entrepreneurial than the average Portland city-dweller. Maybe it’s that undefined “pioneer spirit” that causes certain people to pull up stakes and put down new roots in a new community as some 200,000 people did in Clark County these past 20 years.
Residents here have a can-do spirit, are proud of their communities, their schools, their roads and their parks. They vote for libraries, support a range of charities and generally care about stuff.
