If you think Bend has housing problems, look east to Prineville. The largest city in Crook County has a zero vacancy rate in its rental housing market. Bend’s single-digit vacancy rate looks good by comparison. Now Prineville city officials are working on plan to improve the situation, as they must.

Prineville suffered during the Great Recession. It’s now in a construction boom.

Apple is adding a third building to its data center complex. At 330,000 square feet, it’s as big as the original Apple building, and other, smaller structures will be built as well. At the same time, Facebook, owner of the city’s first data center, also is adding thousands of square feet to its Prineville holdings.

That means hundreds of construction workers and no place to put them. Local hotels and motels report that some 17 percent of their rooms have been snapped up for long-term rentals, a solution that is both expensive and not particularly satisfactory for the workers.

The city hopes to ease the situation by adding new language to its planning code. It will, says Phil Stenbeck, planning director, create a “temporary housing” section that will allow for 100-space RV-park-type developments on land zoned for industrial use. Each large project could have a site. The plan does not violate state land use laws, he says, because it can be justified in existing planning documents.

The parks won’t solve all of the city’s problems, Stenbeck acknowledges, but that’s not the city’s aim. It hopes to strike a balance between construction workers’ needs and the community’s own building industry, providing relief for the former without undercutting the latter. Too, he said, the parks will give local developers time to work to expand the city’s housing supply. He hopes to have final approval of the changes by next month.

They’ll come just in time. Some 100 electricians are expected to arrive in the next few weeks, and they’ll need places to live. The new parks will provide those spaces, at least for now.