One of my ways of practicing retirement is to go along with Linda on her little errands, which generally turn into much longer errands. Sat at Costco waiting for a pizza and chatting with an old couple. Old couples seem to have a club of some kind. Linda said the lady said a prayer for Trump, so I'm glad I wasn't sitting at the time and overtly leaving out the "Amen."
Earlier in the day, we checked out the Backporch here in Redmond which seemed in a very out of the way place but was obviously getting business from the neighborhood. So while we're sitting there we're talking about how big Redmond has gotten.
So I decided once and for all to check the populations of Bend and Redmond in 1970, 1980, and 1990.
So 1970 was exactly the way I remembered it my entire time of growing up. In other words, the 13K in population hadn't changed much in 15 years.
The 1980 population was a bit of a surprise; lower than I expected: about 17K. This despite having two new big malls built. (One of the reasons neither one of them ever became very profitable.) It did have the effect of emptying out downtown Bend, which allowed Pegasus to find a location for an affordable price.
1990: Here's what I want people to pay attention to. The population of Bend only grew about 3K people, in a full decade, to a total of 20K. We had gotten a little ahead of ourselves and the Reagan recession hit hard. That's not much growth, and it was a real struggle not only for downtown but also for the two malls. What I remember is almost nothing being built in that decade. Instead, things seemed to get run down.
Flash forward and I'm thinking we're probably 120K by now, more or less, counting some of the suburbs. So Bend has grown by five times. Redmond has grown even faster: from around 4K in 1970, and 6.5K in 1980, to about 42K today.
That's the history of Bend that I think people should know. People need to realize how small and struggling Bend was back then. We tend to see it with rose colored glasses, but believe you me, it was hard to earn a living back then.
As I tend to say now: Central Oregon has not only grown, we're a whole different animal.
