I have a friend who invented a new technique in a housing production (I won't say what, cause you might figure out who it is.)
Anyway, when I first met him, he was installing the product himself. But he wanted to jump to production and selling the material and technique to others, so he got himself a big warehouse.
Yesterday he was in the store and saying he was moving to Southern California.
"I just can't ship from here," he said. "It's inconvenient."
That, folks, in a nutshell is why is will always be difficult to lure any major production to Bend.
He also mentioned that "Let's Make a Space" was leaving.
I always wince when someone comes to Bend and goes all Hollywood on us. A local T.V. show, complete with host with foreign accent, big trucks and billboards and fancy store and ubiquitous logo's and the whole, "we're going to show you how it's done."
First of all, there is almost bound to be a backlash.
Secondly, it isn't that we all don't want nicer spaces. But we can't afford to hire someone to tell us what a nicer space should look like! That takes stupid money, extra money you can just throw away to let someone else tell us how to do the job, (much less actually do that job) and very few of afford to do that, and those of us who can, probably want to do it ourselves, thank you very much.
If I had any advice to give to people who move to Bend to open a business, it would be ---tone it down. Settle in. Show us your stuff. After a decent space of time, then you can start to brag.
Anyway, that plus the nearly empty streets made me wonder again: are people leaving?
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"That, folks, in a nutshell is why is will always be difficult to lure any major production to Bend."
One of a number of reasons, others being lack of a sufficiently well-educated and skilled workforce and the fact that, aside from the outdoor fanatics, this area isn't all that appealing to people with smarts and ambition.
If you're an up-and-coming young professional or scientific or technical worker, are you going to want to live here in the middle of nowhere or are you going to want to live where there are good schools for your kids, opportunities to further your own education, urban amenities (including things to do for recreation besides riding bikes and climbing rocks) and, of course, the chance to make some serious money?
I know of people who have tried to launch high-tech businesses here and had to give up because they just couldn't get the kind of employees they needed, and others who have actually launched such businesses but had to leave after a few years because their employees didn't like it and moved to greener pastures.
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