ORIG./ The Bulletin employee in The Bulletin studio in Bend Wednesday morning 10-30-13. Andy Tullis/The Bulletin ORIG./ The Bulletin employee in The Bulletin studio in Bend Wednesday morning 10-30-13. Andy Tullis/The Bulletin

Only one city in Oregon has built more affordable housing than Bend in the last 10 years, and it’s more than seven times larger than Bend. That said, both Bend and Portland continue to have some of the least affordable housing in Oregon.

Jim Long, the city’s affordable housing manager, knows that Bend’s shortage won’t end anytime soon. Meanwhile, the city continues to work to improve the situation, and with good reason.

Bend needs the economic diversity that comes with enough housing for all income levels. Communities that only the rich can afford lose contact with the real world, I believe. Already in Bend the price of housing makes it difficult for the city to find as many would-be police officers as it needs, and other employers face similar struggles.

There are all sorts of reasons that, together, either created the shortage or have served to make it worse.

Lack of land is part of the problem, though there’s more available than might be apparent. Rents have gone up since the Great Recession, and they weren’t particularly low to begin with.

The current median — half above and half below — rental price in Bend is some $1,796, and with almost no vacancies, even something at that price is hard to find. If there’s good news in that, it’s that nearly 2,000 multifamily units were under construction this spring. Meanwhile, last year there were more than 1,300 single-family homes either being built or planned.

High rent is one problem, but there’s also this: Bend has never been a particularly high-wage community, and things haven’t improved much. Thus, according to 2015 figures from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, most workers in the community can expect to earn less than they would elsewhere. Compared with national averages, architects, computer folks, journalists, even lawyers can expect to make substantially less because they live in Bend, while medical professionals and those in agriculture make above-average wages.

Facts like those keep people like Long awake at night, I suspect. He and others say it will take years to get Bend’s housing situation in order, and while we wait, demand at the low end of the rental scale drives prices up all along the line.

We do have some things going for us, however, Long says. The Bend City Council is ready and willing to allow Long to experiment with new ways to address the housing shortage.

Exploring new means of financing is an important part of that effort. Banks are understandably reluctant to issue typical loans because low-income-housing developers make less on their projects than average and take longer to do even that. Meanwhile, much of what is available requires that such projects remain in the low-income pool for 60 years — during which time owners must maintain what’s there.

With no quick solutions in sight, there’s some comfort in knowing just how many groups are working on the problem. There’s HousingWorks, of course, which builds and manages low-income housing and oversees the region’s Section 8 voucher program, used to help cover rent on any sort of housing. And there’s Habitat for Humanity, responsible for 113 houses in Bend since it started work on its first home here in 1989.

Perhaps less well-known, the Central Oregon Builders Association group, Building Partners for Affordable Housing, has put up 24 units and is working on 14 more. And COVO, Central Oregon Veterans Outreach, is responsible for 30 units across Central Oregon. COVO also hopes to build the West Coast’s first shelter for female veterans with post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Long knows he cannot solve Bend’s housing problems, but he’ll keep trying, despite the occasional pushback from people who think affordable housing belongs anywhere but “here.”

After all, he says, every family helped by new affordable housing in the city is a Bend family that needed help solving a problem it didn’t make.

— Janet Stevens is deputy editor of The Bulletin. Contact: 541-617-7821, jstevens@bendbulletin.com.