Sunday, May 27, 2007

Best Article Ever.

The chart, in today's Bulletin, listing the phases of an Amenity Migrant town. Having lived through those phases, I can tell you it is bang on. About the only thing I could add would be that Bend had perhaps even more of a "laissez faire, "growth is Good" attitude" than normal because of the horrible recession we went through in the early 80's.

Too bad this study wasn't available 20 years ago.
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4 comments:

IHateToBurstYourBubble said...

What exactly is the article about?

May 27, 2007 at 10:34:00 AM PDT
Duncan McGeary said...

"Moving to Bend for a quality of life; Acedemics tail people to find the real reasons behind the migration."

...."They're called amenity migrants. Social scientists in the 1980s coined the term to describe people who relocate not for work, but for that other goal of capitalism: quality of life...."

The graph shows 5 phases. Emerging. Developing. Mature. Sustaining. Declining.

in 4 categories, with examples:

Socio-cultural. Economic. Political. Land us pattern, and environmental.

The Bulletin situates Bend as being in the Mature Phase.

May 27, 2007 at 10:47:00 AM PDT
Bend Economy Man said...

It's perhaps a sign of our town's sunny optimism, perhaps just human nature, but it's a bit disappointing that our local paper is only now printing stories like this that really explore #1, why people really are moving here and #2, what it means now and in the future.

But it's a good thing all the same. Better late than never. If you Google the term "amenity migrants," though, you can see that community leaders all over the West have been using the concept in their planning for at least a few years now. Bend, needless to say, has not been part of the symposia and planning conferences that discussed the impact of amenity migrants.

Note that the life cycle after "Mature" is "Sustaining," not "growing at a breakneck pace into the foreseeable future."

Perhaps if Bend's planners had been aware of this concept a few years ago we would have seen fewer of the graphs showing Bend with a straight-up population growth curve into the future and a 120,000-person population by 2015. Does anyone still think that's going to happen?

May 27, 2007 at 2:41:00 PM PDT
Duncan McGeary said...

BEM,

I read the chart as saying EITHER "sustaining" or "declining."

We'll be lucky if we do the former, rather than the later.

May 27, 2007 at 2:48:00 PM PDT

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