February 2007: Regional report for Central Oregon
Bend in the Road
Fast-growing Redmond doesn’t want to become another
expensive city that drives out its workforce. At a critical
juncture in its history, it searches for the right identity.
By Abraham Hyatt
On a cold, early-winter afternoon, about 25 of Redmond’s
economic players are gathered in a tiny downtown church hoping
for a glimpse of their future. The first major storm of the
winter blew through Central Oregon a few days before. They hold
jackets under their arms as they, along with Mayor Alan Unger
and other city staff, cluster around a half-dozen easels where
maps show a potential downtown revitalization plan.
Photo by Simone Paddock
Redmond Mayor Alan Unger
makes a stand on traffic-heavy Sixth Street. Both Fifth and
Sixth streets will become city property when Highway 97 is
diverted around Redmond, and the community is trying to
figure out how to turn the current highway business
district into a real downtown.
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Colors and lines fill city blocks. Blue is a new city hall with
an accompanying park or plaza. Orange is an entertainment
complex next to a big park. Red turns several blocks of one
major street, currently the southbound arm of Highway 97, into
what’s called a festival street: wide sidewalks, narrow
driving lanes, water fountains, trees, public art.
A Redmond native, Unger is a convivial man with a wry grin.
He’s spent the last five years as mayor grappling with
the beginnings of an economic boom spurred by growth in Bend,
15 miles to the south.
That growth has been an alarm clock of sorts for Redmond. In
the last few years, the city has undergone a fairy tale-like
change — a sleepy town awakened by Central Oregon’s
economic expansion. Like Rip Van Winkle himself, Redmond
— which now bills itself as the state’s
fastest-growing city — seems alternately amazed and
concerned about what the future has to offer.
But unlike with fairly tale characters, waking up is only the
beginning of Redmond’s story. The city must deal with a
host of growth-related issues: housing, schools, traffic.
It’s also been pushed into the tricky realm of creating
an identity for a place that has never had one. The biggest
influence is Bend, the glamorous big sister that Redmond will
either follow or leave behind as it forges its own path.
TO CREATE THAT POTENTIAL DOWNTOWN PLAN, engineers from Sera
Architects, a Portland firm hired by the city, have taken over
the interior of a 95-year-old church. The building usually
serves as a community center; its folding chairs have been
stacked against walls to make room for tables covered with
laptops, paper and maps.
The engineers have been there for a day and a half.
There’s a slight feeling of urgency in the air, and for
good reason: By late 2008, the Oregon Department of
Transportation hopes to be finished with an estimated $88
million bypass project that will divert Highway 97 around
Redmond. When it opens, Fifth and Sixth streets, the
city-bisecting, two-lane roads the highway currently occupies,
suddenly will become city property. By that time, officials
must be ready to jump on their once-in-a-city-lifetime
opportunity to turn a highway business district into a
downtown.
Matthew Arnold, an associate with Sera, challenges the group
of business owners, developers and city staff to ask themselves
what the purpose of their new downtown should be. “Is
moving traffic your goal or creating a pedestrian- and
retail-friendly place?” he asks. They pepper him with
questions: But how will people get from the north end of the
town to the south? What side streets will be forced to take
that increase in traffic? At one point, Unger jumps in. Not so
much addressing the engineer as the crowd, he agrees that the
city needs to look at bold ideas. “And then we need to
look at what’s realistic,” he says.
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AFTER THE MEETING, UNGER WALKS two short blocks to City Hall to
check his mail. His breath frosts in the cold air. He seems
unfazed by the critical response to the Sixth Street
redevelopment idea. This is the third project the city and Sera
Architects have collaborated on. Unger says any problems will
be worked out in the next month.
Sitting in his own office in the cramped City Hall, city
manager Michael Patterson says one problem with the Sixth
Street concept is that it’s too much like Bend.
That’s an accusation made by several people concerned
about the plan. What do they define as “Bend”? Some
point to a high cost of living or an abundance of high-end
boutiques and condos. Sometimes Bend is explained simply with a
dismissive wave to the south. For Patterson, Bend represents an
economic climate in which working-class families can’t
survive.
But not everyone hates the idea of Bend. A few blocks away on
Sixth Street — and at the heart of the redevelopment plan
— sits Santiago’s Mate Company. “I’d
wish they’d Bend-ify a little,” owner Nathaniel
Winkler says of Redmond. “You can’t have a
walking-friendly downtown with all this traffic.”
The café sells yerba mate, a specialty tea familiar to
many in places such as Bend, but not as popular in Redmond.
Winkler says only 20% of his business is retail based; his
primary focus is online wholesale. On the afternoon the
downtown plan is presented, the brightly lighted café is
empty. Containers of the aromatic herb line the walls. A steady
stream of the estimated 33,000 cars and trucks that currently
use Sixth Street each day roar and bang past outside.
Despite what he hopes downtown will become, Winkler chose his
location because it wasn’t Bend. In other words, it was
affordable. Bud Prince, manager of Redmond Economic
Development, says the city’s boom is due in part to that
very thing. It helps, he says, that the city is home to the
regional airport, and is a center point for Central
Oregon’s three major counties (and five resorts being
built in the region). But more than anything, it has cheap land
and a low cost of living.
DRIVING THROUGH REDMOND’S NEIGHBORHOODS yields no
surprises about the small city. There’s a high-desert
sparseness here. Simple, sometimes run-down working class homes
line streets near the railroads on the east side of town. On
the west side, land that sold for $30,000 an acre 10 years ago
now sells for $300,000 an acre. New homes look like
they’ve popped up through the soil.
Patterson says one of the biggest problems the city faces is
affordable housing, a dilemma tied to its exponential
population growth. Fifteen years ago, 7,200 people lived in the
city. Today newcomers outnumber old-timers — those who
lived in Redmond before 2000 — two to one. And the
marketing group Economic Development for Central Oregon thinks
the city’s current population, 21,000, will grow to
47,200 by 2025 — a 125% jump.
A lack of affordable housing will drive Redmond’s
workforce into even smaller towns such as Prineville or Madras,
new satellite cities around a new economic supernova. That may
already be happening. But Patterson said the city can keep
future housing costs down by avoiding a Bend-like atmosphere
where there’s a lot of downtown condos, which can have a
ripple effect on property values through the city. “If we
have too many high-end condos, we’re lost,” he
says.
An equally pressing problem is the city’s school
shortage. Nearly 2,100 students pack into the city’s only
high school every day. This year voters approved a bond that
would pay for a new elementary and junior high school. However,
voters shot down a previous high school building bond, and city
officials are unsure if another attempt would be successful.
Unger shakes his head as he talks about the money the school
district will have to raise in the next 50 years. His eyes are
serious behind his glasses when asked for a figure. “$300
million,” he says, his voice rising as if he’s
asking a question.
A FEW HOURS AFTER THE ENGINEER’S MEETING with economic
leaders, the sun sets on a 61-acre lot about two miles east of
the church. Rabbits scurry in the twilight through brittle,
thigh-high weeds. The land is currently home to a few pine
trees, two junked cars and a gutted ambulance. It’s also
one more component in Redmond’s jigsaw-puzzle economic
future. By this summer, Bend-based Edge Development Group hopes
to have city approval for a $15 million, 28-lot industrial
complex.
Redmond is trying to keep up with its growth. Last year it
expanded its urban growth boundary by 2,200 acres, and made
plans to expand by another 5,600 acres within 50 years.
There’s a new community center in the works. The city
council plans to make a final decision on what the downtown
redevelopment plan will look like sometime this month. Pending
that decision, the city hopes to break ground on a new city
hall and parking project before the end of the year.
As Unger says, “If you grow fast, you have to react
fast.”
But can the city avoid becoming what it fears? Economists say
that for every destination town such as Bend there is often a
Redmond — a nearby city where land and housing are
cheaper, where industrial parks far outnumber the few, if any,
boutique retail stores. They dot the western United States,
these cities caught up in the gale-force economic growth fueled
by their booming neighbors.
Ask Redmond’s business owners, developers and civic
leaders about how to steer that growth and their conversations
are infused with excitement and uncertainty. They use the
phrase “vibrant downtown” often. But no one has
concrete answers as to how to create the identity that they say
the growth must be built on.
There is only an energy in their voices that reveals they know
how urgent it is for them to find an answer, how urgent it is
for them to determine, right now, what comes next for the city
of Redmond.
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