Washingtonated?

Beware the bubble. Most of us know how Coloradoans historically despise Texans on their ski lifts: friendly, dumb, rich...how on earth did they get that money? We also know about Californication: regular Californian sells house for $1M and comes to Oregon or Santa Fe, bringing a fat/happy mentality with no jobs, just dividend income and house equity. The mountain towns hate the new cultural dimension, don't like regular joe's showing up with so much coin, and blame them for running up values without creating jobs.

Below is an article from today's NYTimes on Bend, OR, and the bust following the boom. It relates the woes of a "new west" lifestyle town's booming and then busting due to a lack of underlying economic strength. My ex-in-laws live there and I love the town. I've watched it evolve from half it's present size of 80,000. I remember getting a tour of a mountain-top subdivision and being told that the Californians lived on the side with mountain views and the rest lived on the side with city views. That made sense. They were here for the aesthetic and had seen their share of cityscapes.

The relevance here is the prospect of Davis being Washingtonated. How real is that prospect? I think it is real. But let's get back to Bend, Oregon. There is more to that boom than house equity transplanted. My father in law had built a logistics software and consulting business that sold to Fortune 100 firms operating worldwide. He had long appreciated Bend's lifestyle and decided to move the company's headquarters to Bend. He built a business condo and rented out space while using the rest for his business. He employed Phd's located across the US and a couple moved to Bend to work in his office. His user meetings and various other events took place in Bend. He hired admins, accountants, lawyers etc. His economic power to relocate his own business and in turn generate incomes in Bend was far from Californication. It was Washingtonation. Intellectual capital. Not house equity. Yes it was driven by a love of the mountain lifestyle and enough personal capital to pursue a dream, but that's about where the comparison ends. What the Bend article sees is Californians. What it misses are the many businesses that started or moved to Bend because of the lifestyle, and they are the real economic story.

I believe that we will see people like my ex-father in-law decide to start or move businesses that are not necessarily retail/hospitality oriented. Businesses that are geographically independent and located in Davis because of the lifestyle. Those kinds of businesses will give us the diversification to see our way through the ups and downs.

Slump Dashes Oregon Dreams of Californians

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/us/18oregon.html?_r=1&sq=slump%20dashes%20oregon%20dreams&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=all