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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 1, 2017)
Roots • Dec 1-7, 2017 RURAL, from page 4 communities are feeling the crunch of not having enough housing to support service industry workers, as well as the higher-paying positions. “Compared to the metro area, folks in rural areas are more impacted because wages and housing costs are even more out of balance. There is a lack of public transportation options, and in many communities, there simply is no housing that’s affordable and close to a job,” said Alison McIntosh, deputy director of policy and communications with Neighborhood Partnerships and spokesperson for the Oregon Housing Alliance. “We have communities across our state where the people who work in those communities can no longer afford to live there, or can’t find a place to live there and it is absolutely impacting many different sectors of the economy,” McIntosh said. She listed just a few of the reports her organization has received. Reports like the one from Marzano’s and other restaurants along the coast unable to hold on to staff. Stories from Hood River and Southern Oregon of teachers sleeping in vans for months at the beginning of the school year because of a lack of housing options. In Central Oregon come reports of construction workers filling hotel rooms in lieu of finding real housing. In some communities, she said, city managers and other highly skilled professionals are turning down jobs because they can’t find housing close to employment. “In all of these communities, it is a struggle to build more housing,” she said. “There are many reasons - a lack of funding to build affordable housing, constraints on land supply, banks not being willing to finance housing in rural areas, and fewer developers to build more housing, to name just a few.” According to the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis, all of Oregon’s coastal counties are among the 10 percent least affordable counties in the nation, with the exception of Lane County. The same goes for many other rural counties in the state, including Hood River, Lake, Klamath, Wasco, Crook, Grant, Wallowa and Union. (The affordability rate is measured using the price to income ratio.) In Douglas County, there are so few places to house people coming out of homelessness that there are waiting lists to get into motels with emergency rental assistance - to the point where some motel owners in Roseburg have said they are no longer going to rent to local residents. Oregon has one of the highest rates of unsheltered homeless families with children in the nation - nearly 60 percent - second to California. Down south, in Jackson and Josephine counties, there is one emergency shelter for the entire region, and what homeless shelters exist are limited and faith-based. The housing vacancy rate hovers around or below 1 percent - statistically nonexistent. And no one is building to fill the need. Last month, the city of Grants Pass in Josephine County declared a housing emergency, joining metropolitan hubs such as Portland, Seattle and San Francisco. “There is literally no available housing, let alone affordable housing,” said Mary Ferrell, executive director of The Maslow Project in Medford, which works with homeless youths. “So now we’re in a situation that the housing situation is causing and perpetuating Page 5 News homelessness for people who actually have paying jobs. They have money; if they could find affordable housing, they would not be homeless, but because we’ve got no housing, they are continuing to be homeless.” The Great Recession has been over for years. Oregon’s economic future promises continued momentum. Cranes are in the sky over Portland. And rural Oregon is in the throes of one of the worst housing crises of our lifetime. recent years in Lincoln City and Gearhart, where ballot measures on regulating vacation rental dwellings, or VRDs, have been - and will likely continue to be - hotly contested. Ballot measures pit VRD groups against local residents who want protections on the proliferation of vacation rentals. Both cities have voted to retain the regulations enacted by local government, but opponents have indicated future battles lie ahead. Reyes has been an ardent observer of the discussions around VRD policy in Lincoln City. She has watched as the VRD groups have pushed to remove zoning barriers, reduce fine levels and raise capacity caps to expand the number of VRDs in the community. And there have been other movements to criminalize panhandling because it threatens the biggest industry in Lincoln County: tourism. But Reyes has no real say on the city’s Tb© h o u sin g sitnatlosi is future. Because ca u s in g a n il p e rp e tra tin g unlike some of the Californians, hom elessness fo r p eo p le w ho Seattleites and a c tu a lly h a w p a y in g johs^ Portlanders who T h e y bane moneys If they c o n l i register their fin d a S lo ria b le h o u sin g , they address as their Lincoln City vacation w o u ld not he hom eless, h o t rental, she can’t vote because w®?w get no in Lincoln City h e n sin g , they are e o n tln n la g elections. She can’t to be hom eless afford to live within city boundaries. - MARY FERRELL T H E M A S L O W P R O JE C T , M E D F O R D “As passionate as I am, and committed as I am to my community, I lost my vote.” arlier this month, the Oregon Department of Education released a sobering figure: For the 2016-17 school year, 22,541 students “lacked a fixed, regular and adequate nighttime residence.” That’s nearly a 20 percent increase since 2014. The first instinct is to look to Portland and its surrounding metropolitan school districts that traditionally top the list. But a new pattern has emerged over the years; smaller, more rural communities are seeing more students without adequate housing. Nine out of 10 districts with the highest rates of homeless students have enrollments less than 250 students, according to O D E. Places like Lincoln County, where 12 percent of the student population was identified as homeless - nearly 650 students this past year, and more than 400 more students are considered “doubled up,” in a shared housing situation. In Jackson County, roughly 1 in 10 students is homeless. O DE places the blame squarely on the lack of affordable housing and family-wage jobs. Ferrell founded The Maslow Project 20 years ago to serve homeless youths - this at a time when she said the community was in denial that a homeless population even existed beyond the occasional passing travelers. The issue was overlooked by n Central Oregon, Keith Wooden has design: The city had an array of laws to keep watched the housing market’s roller coaster anyone from lingering publicly to the point of ride from recession onward. Wooden is the notice, much' less suspicion. real estate facilities director with Housing But as an outreach worker, Ferrell knew Works, the housing authority for low-income where to find them. residents in Central Oregon, based in Bend. Over the past decade, the environment has He moved there in 2006, just as the recession changed, Ferrell said. Today, the Maslow was starting to take hold. By 2010, the Project serves about 2,400 unduplicated market collapse had decimated construction individuals each year: 70 percent of them crews, who migrated to other industries and youths, the average age being 10. states, and brought new building to a halt. “Ten years ago - shortly after the housing “There were 20 percent vacancies across crash that really affected Southern Oregon in the market,” Wooden recalled. a very profound way - we saw a whole new Those days are gone. Even during the round of homelessnesss that we had never recession, Deschutes County continued to seen before, and those are people who had draw new residents, and rents rebounded. been stock brokers, real estate agents, Bend, more than any other city in the state, property investors. When the housing market swung deep into the depths of the recession, crashed, we had gobs of people who have only to slingshot its way back to the top, in never been homeless lose their housing, lose terms of high occupancy rates and rent their job, experiencing homelessness for the prices. first time.” “Now rents have doubled from what they And in that time, the response from the were in 2006 at the last peak,” said Wooden, community has gone from denial to who works with low- or no-income individuals acceptance, to political and somewhat and families who receive subsidized housing polarizing, Ferrell said. vouchers. “I would say, after 20 years, I have The gap across the state is growing: probably never felt more than now the Between 2008 and 2015, family median intense urgency,” Ferrell said. “I think we’re incomes in Oregon decreased nearly 2 in more of a crisis situation than we ever have percent while median rents increased nearly been. I’m also seeing locally, really 10 percent (adjusted for inflation). concerning trends in tolerance or inclusivity Many decades ago, the federal government that are concerning to me and that I have not led the way in creating housing for people in seen in 20 years, until now. I think there’s an poverty by building public, government-owned undercurrent, politically and socially right projects. Public-private endeavors became the now, that is adding an element of strain to an already tense situation.” See RURAL, page 7 That political tension has boiled over in E I
