Why Coos Bay? Four Reasons...

December 2014. When my wife Kasey and I went searching for the best place to live we cast our net wide. We didn't want to struggle with shifting our furniture to the other side of the globe, but everything else was on the table. We evaluated places by four factors that mean a lot to us: weather, beautiful scenery, urbanity, and reasonable cost of living. Hot weather, snow, high costs, high taxes, too rural, too suburban — one by one, locations got knocked off the list. Ultimately it wasn't even close. Coos Bay, Oregon was the winner, and there was no runner-up.

Reason One: The Land of Perpetual Autumn 

The Oregon Coast has two seasons: Glorious and Rain. Glorious lasts for six months, from mid-April to mid-October—cool temperatures, clear skies, bracing air, nearly no rain, just what Easterners expect for a few weeks in autumn. Summer temperatures nearly always max out in the mid-seventies, while winters stay in the forties and it can go for years without a snow.

About those winters... Somewhere in October, clouds will start drifting in and out, and it drizzles a little bit. Then the clouds don't drift out, and the drizzles alternate with rain, pretty much all the time. And this winter weather doesn't break up until sometime in April, or even May some years. After three months of this you start to wonder why you don't have a vacation home in Southern California, and then you realize that you have three more months of this to go.

But when the weather shifts to Glorious, it goes on and on, completely perfect, and October seems a long way away.

Reason Two: Not Too Small ... Not Too Big

It takes more than bunches of people to give a place an urban character. You need good places to eat, nice shops, a handsome downtown, an attractive waterfront, interesting parks, and an atmosphere that working artists find nourishing. We lived for four years in the vast subtopia that surrounds Washington DC, and trust me when I tell you that Coos Bay is 'way more urbane than that endless stretch of franchises and planned developments. When a small city serves as the center of a large, lightly populated area — the way Coos Bay does — it will have a surprising sophistication, far in excess of its size.

Mind you, Coos Bay is no playground for the one percent. It's a working town with a large, active port. Several ships a day stop at the various docks to load raw timber, stacked high on deck. One of the docks is right in the center of North Bend, a happy throwback to the days when towns once gathered around their ports. There are two commercial fishing docks as well, one in downtown Coos Bay and the other on the far side of the penisula, at Charleston, with fresh catch for sale at both. This is a different type of urban-ness, the sort that comes from being a place where ordinary families settle to earn a living. 

How big, then, is Coos Bay? The incorporated city of that name occupies the southern part of the peninsula that separates the bay from the ocean, and had about 16,000 people in 2010. The incorporated town of North Bend takes up the northern half (including the airport and the weather station, so it gets the weather forecasts), and had nearly 13,000 people. The 2010 Census counted another 9,000 people in the unincorporated areas immediately surrounding these towns. All in all, the Coos Bay urban area had about 38,000 people in 2010. That's a good size, not too small and not too big.

Reason Three: Natural Beauty and Outdoor Recreation

The massive Oregon Dunes sweep southward for forty miles to the mouth of Coos Bay, a National Recreation Area spacious enough to absorb ORV and nature lovers alike. Its 500 foot dunes shelter campgrounds, picnic areas, beaches, boat ramps, and both hiking and horseback trails. Behind the dunes, streams blocked by the drifting sands have pooled up into large freshwater lakes. South of the bay, the cliffs of Cape Arago shelter sea lions and seals and host three state parks, a county park, and a lighthouse. Further south, beaches and cliffs meet at Bandon, with impressive hoodoos, protected by a state park, a county park, and a national wildlife refuge.

Mountains rise straight up from the sea. By western standards these are small mountains, about the size of the Pennsylvania or Virginia linear ridges with 1,500 feet of local relief. They are quite a jumble, and discerning any pattern or trend is pretty tricky. They are owned by large timber operations — private companies, the Bureau of Land Management, and Elliott State Forest — and lack the paths and backcounty you'd expect to find in a multiple use area. There are nevertheless waterfalls to explore, backroads with deep forests and dramatic views, and some lovely river valleys. Ninety minutes south of Coos Bay lies the Rogue River Valley, one of the coast's premier wilderness and whitewater destinations.

Reason Four: Affordable Cost of Living 

This is pretty straightforward. Places that offer access to power and prestige — rich cities, successful resorts — charge a premium for it, and you have to pay that premium whether or not you care. Coos Bay, in contrast, is a working class town, and amenities are simple. Of course, we give up the possibility of ever attending an opening night at the Kennedy Center ... not that we'd go if we had a chance.

Bonus Reason: Nostalgia

If you are over sixty you may dimly remember a time where cities were compactly built and linked together with two-lane highways that ran from one town center to the next. If you do you may also remember people strolling downtown to do their shopping.

And if you've lived your entire life in Coos Bay you are probably thinking I am nuts. Remember what? That's the way things are now. This is a place where the suburbs never happened.