It’s easy to forget how recent the rules are that prevent us from building new projects. The cottages, courts, and small mixed-use blocks that define Oregon’s beach towns were built before the zoning codes that now make them illegal. The cumulative effect of those codes, written and enforced over four decades, is a country where the younger generations of families and potential small business owners are locked out. Refusal to respond to change is causing harm across all sectors of our economy. Fifty-one percent of household wealth is now held by people aged sixty and older, who make up about a fifth of the population. None of that is the natural order of things; it’s the product of decisions made. In Tillamook County, twenty percent of the workforce drives fifty miles each way to get to work. We need jobs in Wheeler. The project in front of the Wheeler council is the most contextual form of new construction this town has; resort cottages have defined Pacific Northwest beach towns for a century. The council’s reluctance to approve new building permits will not preserve Wheeler but will freeze Wheeler in a state where businesses on the bay struggle through the shoulder seasons, storefronts thin out, and people who would like to develop the local economy have to move to Tillamook or inland to find work. The north coast runs on kayak rentals, cafés, guide services, shops, and restaurants. Wheeler already has tourism. The question for the council is what shape it takes here. When a town refuses purpose-built lodging, visitor demand does not disappear; it spills into other markets. Foot traffic near the few blocks of central Wheeler will keep this place alive. Overnight guests will walk to coffee, to the bay, to a restaurant for dinner, and spend money in town.
Every permit Wheeler council refuses is a signal to younger generations of families and potential small business owners who might have moved here. The reason a place feels like a place, to the people who live there and the tourists who come to visit, is that something is still happening in it. Council can keep saying no; that is a choice with a future attached to it. That future is a Wheeler where businesses that need year-round customers close, investment shifts to Manzanita and Cannon Beach, and visitors who came for a living town find nothing but a row of dark storefronts. We have another choice: rewrite zoning to fit the town’s character and let projects that meet it move forward as soon as possible.