Poverty with a view, redux.

It's been interesting to watch everyone around me go through an economic relapse -- which is something I've been through many times before.

I never believed it at the time, but having my sales drop in half overnight, from the burst bubbles of pogs, beanie babies, sports cards, comics, Pokemon, etc. etc. was pretty good training for what's happening now.

But I have always felt that, except for the extraordinary last five years of boom, that the Bend economy almost always gave marginal returns to investment. (Of time, energy, and money.)

I believe that the same investment in a larger metro area would bring greater returns almost every time.

There are a few exceptions, but mostly, we natives came up with a phrase to explain it, to excuse it, to rationalize why we stayed.

"Poverty with a View."

I still think that way. I think Bend is a great place to live. Personally, I like almost everything about it, except the asinine growth (McMansions on small lots/Hummers/ and seeming enough retail to satisfy a town twice our size) over the last five years.

And frankly, I can mostly ignore that.

We've got good bones. We may have added a few layers of fat, but underneath, we're still beautiful.

I'm sorry that so many have lost faith in Bend. Some are leaving in disillusionment (and necessity, of course.) Others are staying, stuck in their jobs, but complaining.

But, I think we're just reverting to the Old Bend. The Bend that I lived in most of my life, the Bend that existed in the first 20 years of my business.

For the first ten years, it was a struggle to keep a business alive in downtown Bend, and then, just as normally we might have started to thrive, we had huge amounts of retail come to town over the next ten years. Look around you, almost all the retail centers and big boxes came to Bend in the '90's.

Only in the 00's did we start to outperform the historical norm.

And as I've said many times before, I think this was mostly illusion. A bubble waiting to pop.

I believe the quicker we adjust to the Poverty with a View outlook, the quicker we're on our way to dealing with this. I'm not advocating giving up, but just being realistic in expectations.

I think not only are we not yet near the bottom, but we still have growth going on that is based almost solely on the illusion of the boom years.

Which will only extend the length of the painful adjustment.