Yesterday, it was Pronghorn.
Today it's Fuqua Homes. "Bend Homebuilder Faces Suit Over Payments." Bulletin, 12/15/1.
One of the things about booms and busts, is you can get in the bad habit of constantly trying to see the end of them.
I've always maintained that isn't until about the time you give up looking for an end, that it actually starts coming around.
False dawns aplenty. Lots of boosterism. Wishful thinking.
Anyway, I see no real signs that things have improved substantially around here. Tourism has come to the fore, and that's what is keeping our economy from collapsing completely. That and retirement. Those were always going to be our main industries, and unfortunately, they don't pay all that well.
A lot of us Bubble bloggers were predicting a range of 7 years for the length of the downturn. That seemed to be about an average for regional housing busts. If that were to be borne out, we still have about 3 years of downturn to go. Got to remember, though, that Bend wasn't the average and this bust isn't the average.
I go back to the '80's and how we had to wait a good 6 to 8 years for the economy just to get back to close to normal. Bend's situation was actually worse back then, but the national economy was much better.
So I'm planning for us to just keep on bumping along the bottom, with casualties on a regular basis as it finally catches up to them.
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2 comments:
All these claims of the economy improving is just an effort to make another Bend bubble. Gotta love the bubbles!
The only thing Bend has to sell to the outside world anymore is real estate. Thus the only times the local economy is (somewhat) prosperous are when real estate bubbles are being inflated. This is the way the Builder-Developer-Realtor Axis likes it, and the locals seem content to let the Axis run things, so don't expect any real efforts to create a more sustainable and broad-based prosperity. Every time ideas for doing it are proposed the politicians and the members of the Axis listen politely, pretend to be interested, and then quietly ignore them.
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