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
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M
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O
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P
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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