Has Bend been ruined?

A lot of talk on the Facebook site, Bend Oldies, about how Bend has been "ruined."

It's funny how each progressive wave of newcomers comes to that conclusion. 

From my perspective, the change in Bend has been going on for a long time. It's not new, it's just a continuation. Once Bend set out to become a tourism and retirement mecca, what happened became inevitable. 

As I'm annoying fond of saying in my store, "I couldn't have had this store in the town I grew up in."

"Oh, what town is that?

"Bend, Oregon with a population of 13,500."

We didn't have bookstores back then, at least any that lasted more than a few minutes. No T.V. stations, no gourmet foods, very few specialty shops, few fine dining establishments, not a lot of sophistication of any kind. The 80's were a disaster zone--few new businesses for about a decade (after the brief surge in the late 70's with the coming of the two indoor malls--since torn down.) Downtown Bend emptied out.

The chainstores started arriving in the early 80's and Bend slowly but surely took off. Downtown Bend tried desperately to market itself and, loh and behold, it started working. Most of those who started the promotional efforts didn't last long enough to see it come to fruition. 

My own theory, based on nothing more than feeling, is that the first couple of waves--certainly the one in the 70's and probably the first wave in the 80's, tried to fit in. They didn't demand that Bend transform to what they wanted, but wanted Bend for what it was. Of course, behind the scenes the landowners were still going full steam ahead--Old Mill, Northwest Crossing, and so on.

Sometime in the 90's, the newcomers overwhelmed to small town ethos. You could tell they didn't give a damn about what Bend used to be--at least, how it really used to be. (Which, by the way, had all the drawbacks of being a small town, too.) 

I think the signal of that to me was when the newcomers absolutely welcomed the arrival of "Trader Joes."

"At last, we're a real town."

Huh? That made me realize that they'd welcome every other big town manifestation, as well as the gentrification of downtown, replacing the scrappy colonizers of downtown with people who had the money to fix it up--so again, good and bad--and making the rents shoot up. 

In other words, they seemed intent on turning Bend into what they'd escaped. 

There's another moment when I knew that things had changed permanently. The promotions that downtown Bend had done had worked. But instead of scaling back, or staying at where they were, they accelerated the process until it became a hindrance rather than a benefit. I've rather enjoyed the lack of downtown events since Covid. Turns out we're a business district after all. What do you know?

I moved to Redmond a couple of years ago, (my home, not my store) and the pace is definitely slower. The downtown has the same mix of funky charm and empty storefronts that I remember from the first few years I was in business.

Things have changed in Bend and they have changed because most of folk came from somewhere else. So it's weird to see most of the folk complaining about what its become. 

Frankly, most of the folk don't really know what Bend used to be. 

And a 90 year old out there is reading this and laughing at me. 

"You think Bend has changed, you whippersapper?"