Bend is once again the boomtown of the West.
The Deschutes county seat was the nation’s sixth-fastest-growing city with a population of more than 50,000, according to new estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, and it was the fastest growing outside the of the South.
Bend had a population of 91,122 as of July 1, an increase of 4.9 percent from a year earlier. The explosive growth hearkens back to the 1990s, a decade in which Bend more than doubled its population.
Those years led Bend straight into the teeth of the mid-2000s housing crash. As the housing bubble burst, property values fell nearly in half.
Today, the city faces a housing crisis of another kind. The cost of housing has rebounded, and homes for sale and rent are increasingly unaffordable to the city’s low- and middle-income residents.
The rest of Oregon’s major cities are growing, too.
Hillsboro was Oregon’s second fastest-growing city. Its 2,400 new residents represent a 2.4 percent increase from 2015. The city’s population was estimated at 105,000 in July.
Portland leads the way in absolute numbers, with a population of 643,863. That’s another 9,200 residents, or 1.5 percent, over the 2015 total. It remains the nation’s 26th largest city.
The city’s estimated population growth slowed from last year, when the Census Bureau said it climbed by 1.8 percent, or 11,000 residents.
But that finding conflicts with recent estimates from the Population Research Center at Portland State University, which found that Portland grew faster in 2016. The two population trackers use slightly different methodologies.
No Oregon city with at least 50,000 residents lost population, according to the Census Bureau.
Seattle was the fastest-growing among the nation’s 50 largest cities, with 3.1 percent annual growth. It also reached a milestone, topping 700,000 residents.
