Bend Oregon Leading the Nation on Top 10 Lists!

snow-capped Cascade Mountains

It seems hardly a month goes by that Central Oregon doesn't make it onto somebody's list of desirable places to live. This time it's Bend that's been named among Fortune Small Business magazine's Top 100 Places to Live and Launch a Business.


What Bend has in its favor, according to the article: It's "sunny and peaceful" with a "pro-business tax environment....The state aids startups by reducing property tax rates, worker compensation rates, income tax rates, and regulatory red tape. For green companies, there's also a business energy tax credit for 35% of eligible projects, aimed at encouraging conservation and recycling."(By the way, for the past decade, Central Oregon's Deschutes County has led Oregon in high-technology growth: over 270 percent. That and many more demographic details about the area can be found at Economic Development for Central Oregon's encyclopedic website.)  

 

So how did FSB arrive at its pick cities? First, they ranked 296 Census-designated metro areas according to business-friendliness and lifestyle offerings. Then, after interviewing local business experts, they chose the town within each of the Top 100 metropolitan areas that best blended business and leisure activities.

 

YEAR AROUND RECREATION IS AVAILABLE—when living there makes you feel blessed. In Bend, one of the country's fastest-growing cities, the showcase season happens to be, well, all of them. Take a midsummer night. It's light until nearly 9:30 p.m., plenty of time to cast a woolly buggers into crisp fishing holes on the Deschutes River after work or hop on a bike to catch Allison Krouse or Kep Moe at the amphitheater. You can ski through May (July with skins) and mountain-bike all year. Some 2.5 million acres of wilderness surround the city; 10,000-foot volcanoes dominate the skyline. Bend's heritage as a flannel-and-jeans lumber town is less in evidence these days.

 

The Old Mill District, a new beautiful development on the banks of the Deschutes River hosts exciting new national retail outlets, movie house, gourmet restaurants, shopping and sightseeing activities just minutes from the downtown with more galleries, restaurans and scenic beautiful Mirror and  Drake Park.


And there's a lot of activities for the 70,000  people, plus swanky restaurants, art walks, and film festivals. But the town still has its bowling leagues, muddy pickup trucks, and chatty barbers on Bond Street (who also serve you beer during your trim). Best of all, being on the dry side of the Cascades, where the evergreen forest bumps into high-desert sage, Benders have all the fun of the Pacific Northwest without the rain. No wonder someone moves here every two hours.

 

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