Right around the Bend: Trip out of California is an eye-opener
In this era of exodus, if you want to see the future of California, you have to leave the state.
I got an unexpected glimpse of that future recently in Bend, a small city in east-central Oregon.
I spent most of my time in Bend at the new high school on the city’s southeastern edge. Caldera High School, and its two pristine baseball fields, hosted the regional tournament for the best 14-years-and-under all-star baseball teams in the West.
My hometown team, from South Pasadena, had won the Southern California championship for the first time our Little League’s history. In Bend, our children’s friends would compete against the champions of Northern California and nine other states — Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Montana, Idaho, Utah, Alaska and Hawaii.
That might sound like a diverse Western gathering. But the families of the other teams included so many former Californians that the whole thing resembled a Golden State reunion. That was no surprise. In recent years, departures from California have accelerated — contributing to a historic population decline, and historic growth for neighboring states and their communities.
Bend itself is a remarkable example. The city has nearly doubled its population since 2000, topping 100,000 during a pandemic surge. And Bend has made plans to accommodate even faster growth, with projections suggesting 300,000 people could live there by mid-century.
Many new arrivals in Bend, a local restauranteur explained, come from two groups of pilgrims: Californians and Mormons. (Bend once ranked No. 4 on a Deseret News list of best places to raise an LDS family outside Utah.) They are looking for cheaper houses (median house price: $462,000), good schools, and outdoor lifestyles with great weather, hiking in the Cascades, kayaking on the Deschutes River, and skiing on Mount Batchelor.
Caldera High, the baseball tournament site, is a $140 million demonstration of Bend’s ambition. It’s a self-proclaimed “school of the future” with a glassy, open-concept design, every kind of program (from engineering to language immersion); 60-some classrooms and “collaboration spaces”; and a stunning central library that ties the whole structure together.
This father of three schoolchildren wishes California communities could build schools like this. But such campuses would be too expensive given our land and construction costs — and unnecessary, given the drop in the numbers of school-age children around the state.
As we watched the baseball games, construction crews were building new homes beyond the outfield fences. I marveled openly at the growth. Parents from other teams in the tournament seemed less impressed. Many had previously lived in California, but now live in fast-growing places in the West that, like Bend, invest in children and their pastimes.
South Pasadena opened the tournament against the Nevada champion from Summerlin, a prosperous master-planned community in Las Vegas that has been among the fastest-growing places in the United States over the past 30 years. Next up was the Idaho champion, from Coeur d’Alene, the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the fastest-growing state in the nation.
Other teams came from the Tucson metro region, which just surpassed one million in population, and Washington County, Utah, which has seen recent annual population increases of 5%. Our team suffered its first loss to Mercer Island, Washington, a highly prosperous community in metropolitan Seattle, the most common destination for people leaving California’s Bay Area.
Even the Northern California champion, from Dublin — the East Bay exurb that was California’s fastest growing city between 2010 and 2020 — fit this pattern.
Leaving Caldera High to drive home, we drove south toward Crater Lake — a body of water that formed in a caldera, as signs in the national park explained
A caldera is the depression that forms when a volcano collapses after erupting powerfully and emptying out the magma chamber that had supported its weight.
It sounded much like California — a human volcano that is now spent, after spitting out people and their ambitions to neighboring states.
Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Right around the Bend: Trip out of California is an eye-opener
