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The Pacific Northwest is home to a number of compelling mid-tier cities. Many visitors are captivated by Victoria, BC, while outdoors publications praise Bellingham, WA.
So which mid-tier PNW city wins in terms of livability, culture, and beauty?
Victoria really has the nicest urban environment and setting of those cities. Yes, it's a tourist town, but it's go a beautiful downtown around the Inner Harbor and a lot of the outer neighborhoods are very well situated, some very nice places up around the hills near the provincial governors mansion.
Eugene is just a nice college town, I've never found it to be as exciting as people make it out to be. They need a better downtown. Bellingham has a great location, but it feels like three different towns sorts of combined into an unconnected small city; Some nice areas and some other areas are fairly bland.
Bend is basically the closest place the Northwest has to a big Colorado or Southwestern town--it's a great place if your an Oregonian for ski vacations, though the livability factor gets cut down if you count find a job in the weak economy there--though there's a lot of cool places around there if you like the outdoors.
Never spent much time in Kamloops. Kelowna is a pleasant enough tourist resort type town... When I lived in Edmonton all my classmates famiy would take vacations to the Kelowna/Okanogan area. I haven't been there in some time though...
There are so many great towns missing. Leavenworth, WA; Newport, OR; Port Townsend, WA; Coeur d'alene, ID just to name a few
None of those could reasonably be called mid-tier cities; most of them have around 10,000-20,000 people. I'd say having a metro population of 100,000-300,000 counts and not being part of another metro(though maybe on the edge of another major city). So, perhaps
Oregon:
Salem
Eugene (Springfield counts as part)
Medford (Ashfield could be included)
Washington:
Bellingham
Olympia
Tacoma
Everett
Spokane
British Columbia:
Victoria
Not sure about the rest, but ones outside of SW BC feel like they're too far to be part of the Pacific NW
^^ I left out Everett and Tacoma because they serve to some degree as suburbs of Seattle. That's the same reason I didn't include Surrey, BC or Vancouver, Washington.
Olympia would probably have been a good choice to include, in retrospect, on this survey.
On the other hand, Spokane with a metro population of 500k+ is almost too big to include with these other cities.
Interesting to see Victoria, BC running away with this. It really is a remarkable city for its size.
Victoria is a very pretty town. However, I would not want to live there. It's just too isolated for me. I'd hate having to deal with the ferry situation to get off the island.
There are plenty of examples at CityData of Canadian cities being included in city vs city comparisons in the U.S. thread. Comparing cities like Victoria and Kelowna to nearby Bellingham is appropriate, unless the mods argue otherwise.
The Pacific Northwest is home to a number of compelling mid-tier cities. Many visitors are captivated by Victoria, BC, while outdoors publications praise Bellingham, WA.
So which mid-tier PNW city wins in terms of livability, culture, and beauty?
Kelowna and Bend.
Kelowna and the Okanagan Valley are beautiful. From ski slopes to vineyards.
Bend gets 300 plus day so of sunshine a year. Really pleasant place to live.
Victoria has some advantages over the other "mid-tier" metro areas. Not only is it the provincial capital of BC, but Statistics Canada puts the urban area at 363,000 people, and it's the center of commerce for most of Vancouver island, which makes the city feel a bit more important that it would be if it were somewhere off to the east of Vancouver itself, for example.
Victoria International Airport handles around 1.5 million passengers per year, which is hundreds of thousands more than - for example - Eugene's 680,000. So it has more "big city" services than most other mid-tiers. And that's all in addition to the fact that it is a really nice-looking city in many areas, with the waterfront and the turn-of-the-century baroque revival architecture. Beacon Hill Park reminds me of a smaller Point Defiance Park (in Tacoma).
If we're including areas the size of Kamloops (around 90,000 or so), we'd add in Medford, Roseburg, Salem, and Corvallis-Albany (Oregon), Yakima, Wenatchee, and the Tri-Cities in Washington, and Kelso-Longview on the WA-OR border.
Victoria would still win, though.
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