Golfers surreptitiously kicked balls back onto fairways at Eagle Crest’s Resort course. Skiers curved perfectly shaped turns down Mount Bachelor’s Outback then pounded divots into the snow with their faces. Climbers clipped carabiners on the chin of Smith Rock’s Monkey Face and flailed on the last move. Anglers cast flies into the sunny spots of the Deschutes River as trout watched them from the cool shadows. Regardless of how they faired, they all came to Deschutes County to live, work and play.

Over the course of the decade, Deschutes County’s population grew at the strongest pace in the state. In that 10-year span, the county’s population soared 54 percent to 115,367, as the insatiable young and the active elderly ends of the spectrum poured in seeking the outdoor life.

The younger crowd stalked challenge and adventure in the mountains while the baby boomers sought quality of life and championship golf courses. Together these groups built an economy around tourism and services, with its center in Bend.

Since 1990, Bend has sped through a massive cycle of population growth, which led to a surge in construction, a pop in realty, a spike in commercial and industrial building and a swarming circle of banks and financial advisers.

Bend’s transformation into a destination teeming with outdoor enthusiasts came as sawmills in the area closed their doors at the beginning of the ’90s. In 1990, Bend was still a lumber town of 20,469. In fact, more than one out of 10 people in the labor force was involved with lumber and wood products. In downtown Bend, retail shops were just beginning to sprout anew after a prolonged consumer drought.

The ’90s proved to be a decade of metamorphosis for Deschutes County. In that span, payroll for wood and lumber products declined by a third; manufacturing grew at a sluggish 9 percent, while construction and services grew 96 percent and 78 percent, respectively.

The mountains, the rivers and the sunshine were drawing visitors to Bend from across the Northwest. Tourism was gaining momentum with almost 13 percent of the labor force tied into the business. Deschutes County added 935 new hotel rooms to accommodate the growing crowd. ”In the early ’90s, the tourism industry was second to wood products,” said Alana Audette, executive director of the Central Oregon Visitor’s Association (COVA). ”By 2000 tourism had surpassed it. People came here just for the quality of life. The 20-somethings can indulge their outdoor passions 12 months a year and baby boomers have golf and sunshine.”

In the short span of 10 years, Bend residents would witness a lifetime of change. National media outlets identified these trends and syndicated them to their readers. In 2000, Money magazine called Bend one of the top five places to retire in America. The same year, Golf Digest recognized Bend as being among the top 50 golf destinations in the world. In 2000, Outside magazine profiled Bend as a winter-sport paradise.

As tourism precedes increased development, tourists could play 18 holes, ski the Cascades, shop national chains or small boutiques and hear the Central Oregon Symphony in the same day. Tourism became Central Oregon’s largest industry with an estimated impact of $500 million in 2000, according to a study by Dean Runyan Associates, a tourism research firm.

Jackie French, director of the Bend Visitor and Convention Bureau, has seen the evolution of Bend over the last decade. ”During that period, Bend has become much more sophisticated in our tourism product,” she said. ”Our shopping in boutiques downtown to bigger chains in the Old Mill District. Look at downtown Bend then and today. It’s hard to name a business in Bend that isn’t affected by tourism – from laundry to hospitals.”

From a statistical perspective, Bend’s growth is stunning.

In the 1989-90 season, Deschutes County collected about $2 million in transient room taxes. By the 2000-01 season, the county took in $2.97 million in room taxes, nearly 50 percent more. Today a glut of hotels are being built, which will decrease occupancy rates, put pressure on existing hotels and bring the total number of rooms to around 3,200.

Through the roof

As population swelled and new money came to the area, residential housing and construction boomed. In the 10-year span, the price of the average home rose 120 percent to $197,687, according to the Multiple Listing Service. And the urban growth boundary pushed out to accommodate more houses and more people.

In the late ’80s, Brooks Resources residential broker Sue Bussard believed there was a market for high-end condominiums on the bluff high above the Deschutes, where the company already owned the land. Her idea was met with some skepticism and delay. But by the end of 1989, she said, ”they were asking me how quickly we could start digging.”

The new three-bedroom units, in what would become River Ridge in Mount Bachelor Village, were priced at $235,000 in 1990 and by the year 2000 were re-selling for around $400,000.

Over that decade, Brooks Resources embarked on massive housing projects like Awbrey Butte, Awbrey Glen and NorthWest Crossing, a joint venture with Tennant Developments, LLC. Large houses, encircling Awbrey Glen’s 18-hole championship golf course, became a symbol of the new money moving to the area and signaled an end to the era of homes with large urban plots.

In 1993, the Bend City Council enacted a law that would mandate smaller plots as an anti-sprawl measure. The new zoning law said new residential housing would be built on the scale of 7.3 lots per acre.

”In the beginning of the decade, when you filed a master plan, you wanted to put in as much (densely-packed housing) as possible because (the city) would always let you build less,” said Bussard. ”The old rule was we like things bigger with more space. Now if you put density standards in a plan, you’d better meet them.”

As its growth continues to encroach upon natural and governmental boundaries, Bend’s property is becoming rare and expensive. ”From a Brooks’ standpoint, we’re running out of land. We’ve always had our own,” Bussard said. In 1968, Brooks Resources became the realty/developer arm of the large tracts of land owned by its parent company, Brooks-Scanlon, a regional timber company. ”Now we’re in the land acquisition mode,” she said.

Climbing commercial real estate

People weren’t coming to the Cascades just to play but to work here, too. One study from Central Oregon Community College said that 80 percent of new businesses started here are from people who first came as tourists. But in the early ’90s the landscape of commercial and industrial business was soft and rocky.

”In 1990, it was a completely different world. I was asking myself, can anyone make a living in commercial property?’ ” said Steve Toomey, then a residential Realtor in Bend. Nevertheless, Toomey was willing to give it a shot. The following year, Toomey began to focus on commercial real estate and by 1993 had founded Compass Commercial.

Erich Shultz moved to Bend from Los Angeles for the quality of life and to join Toomey in his experiment with commercial real estate in a town of about 25,000. ”If someone would have told us then that half of this development would happen, I would have said no way,” Schultz said.

Compass Commercial opened for business in 1996, with five people and grossed around $2 million in sales that year. Today, Compass Commercial has 25 employees, an additional office in Portland and grossed $76 million in sales last year.

”We’ve gone through a 10-year period that just absolutely boggles the mind,” Toomey said. ”Before you’d talk to retailers and they would say, Bend? Show me the demographics.’ ” The population characteristics behind the numbers were so compelling that office space more than tripled between ’90 and 2000 and industrial space doubled in the same period.

For illustration, Colorado Avenue had sparse development in 1990, with Shevlin Park and some older offices along the river. But the redevelopment of Mill A as Honkers Restaurant in 1994, opened Realtors’ minds to the possibilities. ”Honkers opened and people were saying that’s far out of town and people aren’t going to come there,” said Toomey.

Today, Colorado Avenue is a strip of tech and financial companies and the prime location for riverside office space.

Golf, High Desert style

Build a field and they will come. Put 18 holes on it and they will bring a lot of money.

Perhaps one of the most important measures of a retiree utopia is the number and quality of golf courses. For many seniors, golf is a magical elixir of medicine, sport and escape. A recent Golf Digest study said that there are 26 million to 30 million golfers in the United States, with many of them entering retirement.

In Bend’s tourism infancy, Mount Bachelor was the dominant attraction but could support only a few months of tourism and employment. As developers seized on the sunny and dry climate of the High Desert, they built golf courses and extended tourism across two more seasons. Awbrey Glen, Aspen Lakes, Broken Top, Crooked River Ranch, Eagle Crest, Greens at Redmond, High Desert Golf, Lost Tracks, Meadow Lakes, Quail Run, Crosswater, Sunriver Resort Meadows and Widgi Creek were the courses added in the decade.

Deschutes County’s median age also grew. Over the last decade, the county’s median age rose 6.6 percent to 38.3 and is considerably higher than the state median of 36.3.

With the ”gray-ing” of the county’s population came the ”green-ing” of its commercial offerings. Starbucks usually arrives with the first sprouts of young wealth and gentrification. Banks and financial services close in on older wealth. Bend has four Starbucks, a fifth planned, and countless banks and brokerage houses.

In 1990, smaller regional banks like Juniper Banking Co., Far West Federal, Pacific First Federal were eventually crowded out by larger chains like Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Washington Mutual. Only three of the nine banks here in 1990 survived the decade of bank growth and consolidation: Bank of the Cascades, U.S. Bancorp and Western Bank.

In came the financial services. By the end of the decade, nearly every major investment firm had an office in Bend: JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, AG Edwards, Edward Jones, Raymond James, Ragen MacKenzie, Merrill Lynch, UBS Paine Webber, Piper-Jaffray, Dain Rauscher, Olde Discount, Charles Schwab and Dean Witter.

The market research is simple addition: golf courses, retirees with savings, a burgeoning population, booming home construction, home prices, commercial construction, commercial prices, a median family income higher than most of Oregon’s non-Portland counties and a high quality of life.

With a city rebuilt around tourists and wealthy retirees, retail stores filled in the downtown vacancies left from the sluggish ’80s, spread south to the Old Mill and east to Third Street.

Perhaps there is no single stronger symbol for Bend’s economic metamorphosis than the Old Mill District.

Once a hub of pine-processing sawmills, it became an upscale retail center with pine-scented bath soaps and spruce-colored turtlenecks. Tourists came, the population grew and in 2000 Deschutes County had the state’s second highest retail sales per capita. A study from the Bend Visitor and Convention Bureau estimates that tourists spent $361.8 million in Deschutes County in 2000.

”This (Old Mill) project has been an all-day lollipop,” said Bill Smith, the developer of the former sawmill. Smith began the project in 1995. More than seven years and $60 million later, Smith is not yet half done. There is still about $100 million in investment to follow.

Smith moved to Bend in 1964 from California to work in the home construction market for Brooks-Scanlon. His premonition for the Old Mill District came to him in Texas. ”In San Antonio, there was a muddy ditch with a development called River Walk where rents were $2.50 a square foot,” he recalled. ”I wanted to be able to get that on the Deschutes.”

Over the decade, he said the character of the population has changed from people who enjoy a small town and wanted the amenities of a larger city to people who came from those larger cities. Even though the social profile of Bend’s population was ripe for high-end retailers, city’s planners were not.

”This took longer than I ever thought it would because Oregon land use is not kind to development,” said Smith, who has continuously fought the city for development rights. Rapid growth in the ’90s found a backlash in anti-growth measures. But this sentiment was nothing new to Bend. Anti-growth started in 1946 when soldiers came back to Central Oregon, said Smith.

Smith recalls the story of Mike Mahoney, who opened an office products store before the Depression. The size of the town afforded him a lifestyle where he could go to work at 10 a.m., call everyone who needed office supplies, leave at 2 p.m. and catch 20 fish (the limit) by dinner time. But in 1972, as the town was growing and encroaching upon his routine, he walked into a town meeting and reportedly said, ”All you b…..s that came here after 1946, go home!” Smith adds that, ”this was before it was OK to cuss in front of women.”

More than 55 years later, when fast food and box stores were sprawling up and down Third Street and east on Highway 20, the Old Mill District was a tasteful alternative that also boosted the employment base. ”When it closed, the mill employed about 200 people,” Smith said. Now the Old Mill District employs about 400 retail workers and will climb to about 800 upon completion. Throughout the county, wholesale and retail trade added 5,840 new jobs over the decade, growing 68 percent, according to the Oregon Employment Department.

”If all the kids in town have to leave to find jobs, is that quality of life?” he asked rhetorically. ”Does having your family close matter? Now kids can find jobs close to home.”

Tourism’s twist

An unintended but inevitable effect of the influx of tourism’s service jobs is that Deschutes County had one of the state’s lowest increases in per capita income from 1989 to 1999. At the same time rental and real estate prices were climbing vigorously, creating an intimidating cost of living for those in the service and recreation industry.

A common boast, for example, is that Bend has one of the nation’s highest ratios of restaurants to people. While this may be an attractive statistic for brochures, the economic reality is not as pretty. Wait-staff and food preparation workers earned about $16,000 annually for a 40-hour week in 2001, according to the Oregon Employment Department. Of course, this figure doesn’t approximate unclaimed tips, which can be substantial. Even so, service workers on the whole are near the bottom of the pay scale, and Bend’s rising cost of living is making it their cost of leaving.

For example, a cost-of-living calculator available through the Oregon Labor Management Information System (OLMIS) Web site calculates that someone who earns $100,000 in Portland would need to make just slightly less ($98,154) to maintain that lifestyle in Bend. This year, The American Chamber of Commerce named Bend as Oregon’s most expensive city, a distinction that is disputed by local business officials. Irrespective of the chamber’s method for calculating this, Bend is still consumed by the ongoing dilemma of finding and retaining tourism’s seasonal work force in an increasingly expensive area.

The seasonal aspect of tourism, creates a community of migrant workers, who are forced to seek work elsewhere and return for the next season. Businesses and local representatives have recognized this trend and have taken strides to address it. The first step was to create a viable all-seasons industry, with no major lulls, or so-called shoulder seasons, to displace workers.

”The tourism industry diversified significantly and filled the shoulder seasons,” Audette said, referring to the quiet months between the winter ski crowd and the summer golfing groups. Mountain biking, fishing, kayaking and cultural events helped fill that gap. ”That led to less turnover in the tourism business and that was particularly helpful to the local economy.”

The next step was communication. The tourist-related businesses in the area began an informal network of human resources departments. For example, Mount Bachelor and Sunriver Resort share employees to help create continuity for the employees and their businesses.

With the second highest rate of job growth in the state from 1990 to 2000 of 22.5 percent (most of them in tourism and services), there is evidence that their plan is working. Redmond’s population soaring 88 percent in the ’90 suggests some of these people are moving outside Bend.