Prineville, the bustling little town about 20 miles east of Redmond known for its quaint downtown, lovely open greenspaces and giant data centers, vaulted into the top 10 on the list of the most economically dynamic towns in the country.
The list was published in a report issued by Heartland Forward, a nonprofit focused on improving economic performance, which placed Prineville as number nine on the list of the Most Dynamic Micropolitans for 2022.
A micropolitan area is a town of at least 10,000 but less than 50,000 people. The population of Prineville is currently a little more than 11,000 people.
Heartland Forward ranked micropolitan areas across the United States by studying changes in key economic conditions from 2015 through 2020. The change in employment from September 2020 through September 2021, reflecting the community’s ability to rebound from the early months of the pandemic, was also a factor in the ranking.
Prineville resident Shawna West wasn’t familiar with the micropolitan ranking, but the city’s place on the list didn’t surprise her. The 28-year-old West was born in Bend but has lived in Prineville for 11 years. She works at Crooked Roots Brewing on N. Main Street, and said the town’s vintage feel and small-town vibe are two reasons she loves the place.
“Once you come into Prineville, you get the cute little vintage looking courthouse. You have the little vintage looking houses,” she said. “You have the fun, different food and breweries here, and even the boutique shops are nothing you would see in Bend.”
West said Prineville is a place “where you know everybody.”
“It is a nice community where there are actually more activities out there than what other people realize and know, so really every day something is going on, and it is a lot of fun,” she said.
Kalsey Lucas, the Prineville and Crook County director of Economic Development for Central Oregon, said Prineville was number 28 the last time the list of most dynamic micropolitans was published, in 2019. This year, the list focused primarily on pandemic recovery, and Crook County was the first county out of the 36 in Oregon to fully recover job losses from the pandemic, she said.
Prineville has also gone through some dramatic economic changes over the past few years, with the construction of data centers by Meta — formerly known as Facebook — and Apple. The data center industry has brought in a lot of supporting industries since its arrival.
“They have built a whole new economy since then,” Lucas said. “And looking at that, the companies that are creating the middle wage jobs in Prineville have been opened or rebranded, acquired, etc. in the past 10 to 15 years, so it is a relatively new economy despite being an older city compared to some of the other cities in Central Oregon.”
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