Who Works Here, Who Can Afford to Live Here?

Commuter Flows Across the Columbia River Gorge 2012 - 2022

Thousands of people commute across county lines to get to work in the Gorge. This tool lets you look at those flows directly, using federal employment data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Pick any two counties and it shows you how many workers live in one and work in the other, and how that number has shifted over the past decade.

How to use it

Choose a home county and a work county from the dropdowns. The tool shows the flow in both directions, across 2012, 2019, and 2022. The swap button (⇄) flips the view. Start with Wasco as home and Hood River as work — that's the Gorge's clearest on-the-ground displacement pattern. Then try anything with Skamania to see a different and starker problem.

What the numbers mean

Each figure is a count of workers — people whose jobs are on one side of a county line and whose homes are on the other. When that count grows year over year, it usually means one of two things: job growth in the destination county, or housing pressure in the home county pushing workers out while they hold onto local jobs. In the Gorge, the job base has been relatively stable. The housing market has not.

A note on the data

Source is the Census Bureau's LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES8), built from unemployment insurance records. It counts jobs rather than people, so someone working two jobs appears twice. Self-employed workers, most farmworkers, and gig workers aren't well captured — worth keeping in mind in a rural economy where those categories matter. Direct flows between Oregon and Washington Gorge counties show as zero; this reflects a disclosure threshold in the federal data for small cross-state flows, not an absence of cross-river commuting. Years shown are 2012, 2019, and 2022. Published by Open Gorge. Methodology at github.com/kate-rose/gorge-flow-explorer.