If you'd been away from downtown Redmond for a year and came back expecting the usual story, you'd expect it to look like every other fast-growing Central Oregon town: outside money moving in, familiar buildings gutted for something shinier, longtime owners priced out by newcomers with deeper pockets. That's not what's happening on Sixth Street this year. The businesses reshaping downtown right now are the same names that have been there for years, and they're not leaving. They're building up, adding on, and in a couple of cases taking their model to other towns while keeping their roots exactly where they started.
The Theater That Keeps Adding Rooms
Ted Eady bought the old Odem Theater building in 2001 and spent the next two decades turning it into something new without ever leaving it. He ran it as a gift shop first, then began the long renovation that reopened it as a two-screen movie pub in 2018. This summer the building added two more theaters, bringing the total to four, including one built with a stage so the space can host live music or comedy instead of only film. Eady told the Redmond Spokesman he wanted the flexibility to do something "outside of the Hollywood deal."
The work isn't finished. Eady is now expanding the dining and bar space into what used to be the patio seating area, with a new restaurant expected to open by fall, a second-floor bar targeted for winter, and a rooftop patio planned for next summer. Through all of it, the existing bar, restaurant, and two original theaters have stayed open. Nobody had to find a new place to catch a movie or grab a beer while a building built in 1937 keeps finding new ways to earn its keep.
A Coffee Shop That Took the Neighborhood With It
Junction Roastery & Social Club opened in Redmond's historic Patrick building in February 2022 and became, in owner Bo Olson's words, the town's "living room," a spot where community and civic leaders, law enforcement, and educators show up regularly alongside everyone else. When the shop expanded in November 2025, it didn't abandon Redmond for a bigger market. It opened a second location inside Bend's Work-Collective Midway campus, an office-heavy, walkable pocket near Wilson Avenue and Ninth Street, and brought the same atmosphere south with it.
Olson is candid about why the company grows at all. "We don't believe in expansion, we believe in growth," he said. "So, one of the only reasons we grow is to maintain our team. We pay our team really well, and we take really good care of them." A third Redmond location, this one on the northwest side of town, is planned for the first quarter of 2027 in another historic renovation. The direction of travel here matters: Redmond isn't importing someone else's coffee shop concept. It exported its own.
The Family Quarter Nobody Planned
A few doors up Sixth Street, Little Bug Play Hub is anchoring what owner Cortney Falappino calls downtown's family quarter almost by accident. The play space now shares a wall with Juniper & Sprouts, a secondhand children's clothing shop, sits across from Sweet Oasis Sweet Shoppe & Gifts, and stands next door to Silvies River Charter School. Falappino recently added a coffee shop inside the play hub for parents and caregivers, and she's already planning a next expansion aimed at older kids.
"I don't see myself as a business woman. I'm just a mom who had a dream and made it happen."
That's the whole origin story. Falappino moved to Oregon five years ago with no indoor place to bring her kids in winter, so she built one. The businesses around her didn't relocate to be near a proven concept. They were already there, and the cluster formed because each one kept investing in the same three-block stretch instead of looking elsewhere.
The Number That Explains What's Happening
None of this is an accident of small-business optimism. Steve Curley, director of Redmond Economic Development Inc., has a front-row seat from his office on the second floor of city hall, looking east over downtown. He told the Redmond Spokesman that the phone rings less often than it used to from companies in the Willamette Valley, California, or Portland looking to relocate to Redmond. Four years ago, those calls were more frequent. What's replaced them is growth from businesses already here.
The clearest example is BASX Inc., an industrial and manufacturing employer that had between 250 and 300 employees when Curley started at REDI in 2022. It now employs close to 1,200 people, a number Curley confirmed directly. That's job growth generated almost entirely by an existing employer expanding in place, not by a new company arriving from outside.
Downtown's own numbers tell a similar, smaller-scale version of the story. Occupancy across roughly 100 ground-floor commercial spaces hit a record 95 percent as of December 2024. A year later, the city's Urban Renewal Agency reported occupancy at 91 percent, still marking the third straight year above 90 percent even after cooling off its peak. The dollars behind that occupancy also shifted. In 2024, about $200,000 in Urban Renewal grants and loans helped unlock $3.8 million in private investment, roughly nineteen private dollars for every public one. In 2025, a smaller $110,000 in public resources leveraged closer to $1 million, about nine to one. The public seed money got smaller and so did the multiplier, but existing business owners kept reinvesting either way.
| Year | Downtown Occupancy | Public Investment | Private Investment Unlocked |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 95% (Dec 2024) | $200,000 | $3.8 million |
| 2025 | 91% (Dec 2025) | $110,000 | ~$1 million |
What's Finishing Around Them This Fall
A few civic projects are catching up to this pattern of local reinvestment. The Central Dry Canyon Improvement Project, which had closed sections of the trail between 15th Street and Rimrock Way for over a year, finished its main construction phase by summer 2026, including a new lighted crosswalk that connects Weigand Family Dog Park to Sam Johnson Park more safely for pedestrians and cyclists. Sam Johnson's pavilion and Kiwanis Field stayed closed to private event reservations through late summer while that work wrapped up, so if you've been waiting to book the pavilion for a fall gathering, it's worth checking with the city on current availability.
Separately, REDI's economic development push has helped secure Natural Grocers to move into the old JoAnn Fabrics and Crafts building on Sixth Street, and the city's Urban Renewal agency is working to bring back a downtown ice rink as a year-round family draw. Neither project is a new arrival from outside so much as downtown filling in a gap with the kind of everyday use its own residents have been asking for.
None of this required a wave of transplants or a new anchor tenant recruited from three states away. It required Ted Eady deciding a 1937 theater still had rooms left to add, Bo Olson deciding growth meant keeping his team rather than chasing a bigger market, and Cortney Falappino turning a personal problem into a business that pulled three more storefronts in behind it. Redmond's downtown isn't being built by people who just got here. It's being rebuilt by the people who never left.
If you're watching downtown Redmond change and wondering what it means for property nearby, or if you're weighing whether this stretch of Central Oregon fits how you want to live, Heather Osgood can walk you through what's actually happening on the ground. Let's Connect.
