337 NW Columbia Street

River West sits on the west bank of the Deschutes River, directly across from downtown Bend, in the grid of streets between NW Newport Avenue and the river trail. Ponderosa pines shade most blocks, and the streets are narrow enough that traffic moves slowly even before you reach a stop sign. A resident can walk to a full grocery store, a dozen restaurants, and the river within the same ten minutes it takes to drive to the far side of town. That combination of river frontage and a walkable commercial strip is the reason people choose this neighborhood over Bend's newer subdivisions on the edges of the city, and it comes with a real cost, described below.

The neighborhood's history is tied to Bend's lumber-mill economy. The Shevlin-Hixon Lumber Company built a mill on the Deschutes River in 1916, one of two mills, with Brooks-Scanlon on the opposite bank, that helped drive Bend's population from 536 in the 1910 census to 5,415 in 1920 and 8,848 in 1930. Shevlin-Hixon sold its operation to Brooks-Scanlon in 1950 as the old-growth pine ran out, and the combined mills shut down in the early 1950s. Much of River West's original housing, small Craftsman bungalows and cottages on narrow lots, dates to that boom period. Oregon's 2019 middle housing law, House Bill 2001, now requires cities including Bend to allow duplexes through quadplexes on residential lots, which is part of why the original bungalow stock now sits next to newer duplexes and other infill construction.