Bend workers having trouble finding housing

Published 12:00 am Sunday, January 18, 2015

New hires at St. Charles Medical Center are having a hard time finding a place to live in Bend.

“It’s definitely an issue, at all levels of hiring,” said St. Charles spokeswoman Lisa Goodman. “Prospective employees are finding housing in Bend more expensive than in Portland. If they’re coming from out of the area, a lot of people are renting sight unseen. If something is available and affordable, they are quick to jump on that.”

A dearth of housing at prices that many working people can afford, along with a rental vacancy rate in the cellar, means not only working-class people but also middle managers and executives, too, are finding Bend a tough place to both live and work, say people whose jobs include economic development and building and selling homes.

The reasons they give sound familiar: escalating home prices driven up by demand and a diminishing amount of land on which to build; too few affordable rental units available for students, young families and singles starting out in life; high fees and restrictive building codes; and market competition from retirees with the money to pay the price for Bend real estate.

The housing situation in Bend is in a crisis, said Kerri Standerwick, a real estate broker with Harcourts The Garner Group Real Estate, in Bend, and a former executive with Home Federal and Wells Fargo banks.

“Absolutely,” Standerwick said Wednesday. “When you have a rental vacancy of less than 1 percent, you’ll have a house come on the market and there will be 25 or 30 applicants for that house in one day. There are numerous stories of renters not being renewed at the tenants’ lease rates because rates have increased so high.”

Standerwick is set to appear as a panelist Feb. 3 at the next What’s Brewing, Bend’s Town Hall, sponsored by the Bend Chamber of Commerce at the Deschutes Brewery & Public House, 1044 NW Bond St. The topic will be affordable housing. Other panelists include Regional Economist Damon Runberg of the Oregon Employment Department; Jim Long, city of Bend affordable housing manager; Scott Ramsay, former Bend city councilor and local businessman; and Andy High, vice president of the Central Oregon Builders Association.

Instead of the term affordable housing, Standerwick prefers to use “housing options.” Bend, a city in which single-family homes dominate the real estate market, needs more options.

“We have a more diverse population of residents looking for a different style of housing,” she said.

She suggested that building more cottages, for example, would satisfy the 65-and-older market, freeing up single-family homes for younger families, who would then free up rental homes and apartments for lower wage earners.

High, chairman of the Bend Affordable Housing Advisory Committee, of which Standerwick is a member, said he hopes the panel discussion helps clarify the need for entry-level housing, homes that working people can afford. This is housing for first-year teachers, bank tellers and nurses, for example, he said.

“This is actually the housing you want in a neighborhood,” High said.

While Bend residents who responded to a fall survey by the nonprofit Bend 2030 agreed that affordable housing is a critical need, most indicated they would rather see it built in neighborhoods other than their own, High said.

“You’re not talking about putting slums up,” he said. The question, High said, comes down to: “Who are we leaving out as a community?”

Service economy

Runberg, who crunches data on employment in Central Oregon, said he’s combing through recently available wage data to compose a picture of the labor force in time for the February town hall. But the fact that Bend has a sizable service sector, consisting of relatively low-paying jobs, is well known. Most cities rely on a large service sector, Runberg said, but because Bend is a tourist destination, its service sector is larger than most cities its size.

Nearly two-thirds of service jobs in Deschutes County pay less than $15 an hour; nearly half of all jobs in the county pay $15 or less, Runberg said. On the other end of the scale, jobs in professional services, or traditional white-collar jobs, and in health care have grown steadily since 2007.

Workers on the low end of the wage spectrum may be priced entirely out of the housing market, but those on the higher end may be pinched, as well, he said.

Standerwick agreed. A family of four earning the county’s median income, $62,400 last year, may have trouble affording the median home price in Bend, Standerwick said. The median reached $325,000 in July before dipping to $290,000 in December, according to The Beacon Report.

Said Runberg: “The direction we’re going to find is housing is perhaps a greater share of an individual’s income (in Bend) than in other places.”

Potential solutions

Three proposals put before the Bend City Council last fall by the Affordable Housing Advisory Committee would ease city regulations on housing density and reduce system development charges — the fees paid by developers to offset the cost of infrastructure such as streets and parks — to encourage construction of affordable housing.

Proposed changes would introduce a cottage code that allows wider construction of clusters of small homes around a common area, and a higher density of homes on lots designated for affordable housing by qualified builders.

Those proposals are going through a planning review, said Long, the affordable housing manager. The council could take them up in April. The proposal to reduce SDCs is set for discussion by city officials and the Bend Park & Recreation District directors at a work session Feb. 17, Long said Thursday.

“I do hear from folks who are getting hired here and can’t find anyplace to live,” he said. “That’s not atypical. That’s pretty common.”

Ramsay, who lost his bid for re-election in November, said he knows firsthand the trouble some have finding a place to live. Six young employees of his family’s business, Sun Mountain Fun Center, in Bend, left town between July and December for lack of living space. Young people that move here become discouraged by the lack of housing or the fact that their earnings are gobbled up in rent, he said.

The same applies to higher-paying jobs. Prospective employees who want to live in Bend may think twice with real estate at a premium, Ramsay said.

“They would love to live in Bend, but what’s going to happen when (they) get here. If (they) have to live in Redmond to work in Bend, why move?”

Jordan Elliott — director of staff resources and development at Mt. Bachelor, which employs about 800 — said the ski area’s seasonal staff has developed a network and culture that helps them cope with housing demands. He hears little complaint about a lack of homes or apartments for the lift operators, ski instructors and others who flock to the mountain for ski season. They seem to cope somehow, he said.

The story is different, he said, when it comes to hiring for higher-paying, permanent administrative positions, however. He voiced the same concern that Goodman from St. Charles expressed.

“We were lucky this year that we didn’t have an open position,” Elliott said Thursday. “When you hire someone of that caliber, they’re bringing a family or they’re used to having their own home.”

Housing hurdles

Ramsay said he expects a fight at the city council over lowering SDCs. After taking up the density and cottage code questions, the city’s proposed expansion of its Urban Growth Boundary, which could make land available for development, is the next hurdle, and at least two years away. Another committee is studying vacation home rentals and their impact on livability.

Meanwhile, the city is bracing for an eventual influx of students, faculty, staff and administrators associated with the creation of a brand new west-side campus for Oregon State University-Cascades. The plan is stalled for now, under a challenge by opponents at the state Land Use Board of Appeals. Ramsay said that unless circumstances change, the campus will present significant housing problems.

“It’s going to be very difficult to accommodate those individuals,” Ramsay said.

He said his family, for example, withdrew plans to build a 40-unit studio apartment project near OSU-Cascades’ proposed campus site due to higher-than-expected costs. SDCs added $540,000 to the project, $230,000 of which went to the park district, he said.

“That put it out of the running,” Ramsay said. “It made a very risky project become an impossible project.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7815, jditzler@bendbulletin.com