Page 10
Street Roots • April 13-19, 2018
Rural Housing
McConnell, Bend’s affordable housing
manager, said even in 2006 “it was getting
incredibly challenging to keep any form of
affordability in the market.”
“To some degree, it was like throwing
spaghetti at the wall,” McConnell said.
“What can we do as a city to help this?”
The tax has generated $7 million since its
creation, and helped fund the construction
of 770 units. According to the city, the funds
have leveraged more than $77 million in
state and federal funds, as well as $28
million in private equity.
More recently, as of Dec. 1, the city of
Bend is waiving all city system development
charges, or SDCs, for affordable housing
projects. SDCs, which can run up to
$22,000, are charged for each building built
in Bend and help pay for the added strain on
city utilities, including sewer, water, roads
and parks.
In 2015, Bend changed its zoning laws to
allow for the construction of cottage-cluster
style housing, single-family homes that
would be about 1,000 square feet in size,
with two bedrooms and one bathroom, with
a shared front yard and shared parking area.
Bend also changed its zoning laws so that
accessory dwelling units (ADUs) can be
built on lots that already contain single
family homes.
The city also has a density bonus in place
allowing developers to build one and a half
times more densely if half the housing built
is affordable to 80 percent of AMI for home
owners and 60 percent of AMI for renters.
Two years ago, the city of Sisters raised
its hotel tax by 1 percent and dedicates a
third of that percent to affordable housing.
“It’s not a ton of money,” Kucera said. But
every cent - and every unit - counts.
RURAL HOUSING, from page 9
Another woman, who had been a longtime
donor to FAN, came to Summerton recently.
She told Summerton she knew a woman
who was homeless, living in her car, had no
gas and could not drive to a job interview.
She asked Summerton for a gas card that
she could give to her friend.
Summerton soon found out that the
woman and the woman’s friend were the
same person. “She was reticent to tell even
me,” Summerton said. “She had no idea
where to go. She was completely shut down
as far as what to do.”
The housing crisis does not only affect
the most impoverished. People with full-time
jobs who could have afforded housing on
their wages a few years ago no longer can.
Mariah Tennison, 19, graduated from
Mountain View High School last June. Born
and raised in Bend, she knew she wanted to
continue living in her hometown. She is
studying criminal justice at Central Oregon
Community College and works part-time at
Goody’s, a family-owned chocolate and
fountain shop that has operated in
downtown Bend for decades, making
minimum wage, $10.25 an hour.
Ever since she turned 18, Tennison has
wanted to move out. She’s driven around
and looked online for apartments. She can’t
find anything affordable.
“For a studio apartment, it’s at least a
thousand dollars. It’s crazy,” she said.
She still lives with her parents, as do
most of her friends who have stayed in
Bend. Her parents “want me to move out,
to o /’ T e nni s on s aid. “B ut I can’t.
—
nowhere to move to.”
Chris Frye, 37, is the dock boss of Central
Oregon Irrigation and Feed, another
decades-old business that supplies the area’s
ranchers and farms with hay, feed and other
supplies. He makes $15 an hour and works
full-time but lives in an RV park in Crooked
River Ranch.
“Everything is so astronomically
expensive,” he said.
He rents a space in the RV park for $480
a month and also pays for electricity and
water. “I’m scraping by,” he said.
And people continue moving to Central
Oregon - despite the well-known
unavailability and high cost of housing.
“I’m just baffled,” Summerton said. “They
show up in the middle of a winter, in a fairly
harsh climate, with no jobs and no housing
plans - no plan at all. They assume that it’s
going to work out.”
“(Central Oregon) has great recreational
opportunities and it’s pretty and it’s small
and the schools are good. I see that,”
Summerton said. “(But) you can’t just move
here.”
The lack of affordable housing has begun
to create a domino effect of displacement.
People who lived, or wanted to live, in Bend
move to Redmond 16 miles away. People
who lived in Redmond move to Sisters, 20
miles to the west, or Prineville, 20 miles to
the east, or LaPine, 50 miles south.
That adds a roundtrip commute of at least
45 minutes. A bus ticket for a ride from
Prineville to Bend costs $10.
“That’s real money that hits (people) in
the pocket,” said Preston Callicott, the CEO
of Five Talent Software, a Bend-based
software development company.
PHO TO S BY A M A N D A W A LD R O U P E
A t top, Mariah Tennison, 19, goes to school and works part time. Her minimum wage doesn't
cover what it takes to move into her own apartment. Above, Chris Frye makes $15 an hour
working full time and says he's “scraping by, " living in an RV park near Bend.
n March 20, Housing Works, the
housing authority that provides
federally subsidized housing in Central
Oregon, broke ground on Village Meadow
Apartments, a 48-unit apartment complex
that will include 32 one-bedroom
apartments, eight two-bedroom apartments,
and eight three-bedroom apartments.
All the units will be affordable to people
who make 60 percent of the area median
income (AMI), or $38,400 a year for a family
of four.
The city of Sisters contributed $300,000
to the project, approximately 6 percent of
the city’s annual General Fund.
Kucera, Sister’s city manager, said the
expenditure is indicative of how serious an
issue Sisters considers affordable housing
development.
“How many cities of 2,500 in Oregon take
$300,000 out of their general fund to make
sure that affordable housing developments
get built?” he said.
In the last two years, an average of 120
residential building permits have been
issued each year in Sisters - a record
number.
The city has a policy akin to inclusionary
zoning, which requires developers to set
O
n 2006, Bend applied to the state’s
Department of Land Conservation and
Development to expand the city’s urban
growth boundary (UGB) by 8,800 acres.
After a protracted process of back and
aside 10 percent of development as
forth between the city and the state, the
affordable to people who earn 60 percent of
state approved a UGB expansion of 2,380
area median income.
acres. To prevent urban sprawl, the state
That means that, roughly, a dozen units of mandated that Bend build more densely,
affordable housing are being built each year
especially in nine
in Sisters. That does not
“opportunity areas” that
sound like much, but
have land for infill
Kucera said it’s
development.
"The highest h a ild la g la
“significant” for the
Those who hoped that
community of 2,573.
Bead is l l w stories, WeW
more land would allow for
“This is definitely
the fonrth largest city la
more housing and ease
going to be the most
Oreg©a, Whales wrong
Bend’s affordable housing
affordable housing we’ve
w ith h a lllla g s that are 10 crisis were crestfallen.
seen come online
But there are those who
probably in our history,” stories ta ll? "
- JIM LONG think that it is ridiculous
Kucera said.
B E N D 'S F O R M E R A F F O R D A B L E
for Bend to not be more
H O U S IN G M A N G E R .
Like Sisters, other
dense, given it’s size, and
cities have enacted
view denser construction
measures to incentivize
as an opportunity.
affordable housing
“The highest building
construction.
in Bend is five stories. We’re the fourth
In 2006, the city of Bend was the first
largest city in Oregon. What’s wrong with
city in Oregon to create a construction
buildings that are 10 stories tall?” said Long,
excise tax, which added a 1 percent tax on
Bend’s former affordable housing manger.
each city-issued building permit. The
Mixed-use buildings, which often include
revenue is dedicated to the city’s Affordable
retail businesses on the bottom floor and
Housing Fund, which helps fund housing
apartment units on the top floors, are still
projects affordable to people who make 80
relatively new phenomena in Central
percent of AMI or less.
Oregon. Many look to projects like Putnam
At the time the tax was created, Bend’s
housing market was white hot. Lynne
I
See RURAL HOUSING, page 11