Kelly Schlichting, with EC Electric, carries conduit across the deck of The Jackstraw mixed-use development near The Box Factory in Bend in December. 

If you build it, they might complain. If you subsidize it, they might complain more.

Bend needs housing. How is the city supposed to boost it?

There are two ways to solve housing affordability: Increase incomes or reduce housing costs.

Local government can’t really do much to increase people’s incomes. It can, of course, try to provide efficient services so it doesn’t need to tax and/or charge fees any more than necessary. It can hope that incomes will rise faster than housing costs. Incomes have not cooperated.

Local government can try to reduce housing costs. It can try to speed up permitting and make complying with necessary regulations as painless as possible. It can create incentives.

Bend’s incentives came up at a Tuesday meeting of a city committee looking at development of Bend’s core. The Bend City Council put a pause on the city’s incentives after complaints and to ensure they are doing what the city wants.

But even before the conversation starts about incentives, there’s a problem to overcome.

You can pick out any new development and it’s to be expected that people will raise questions. In Bend, there’s the add-on of continual churn and disruption. There are always new buildings going up, new streets being torn up, new things for people to complain about.

We may all know housing affordability is terrible and that it creates risks for the health of Bend. We may all know if teachers, nurses and almost any other profession you can name can’t afford to live here, Bend will face a deepening challenge to be a successful community. That can be forgotten or suppressed when the single-story house next door is torn down and replaced with multi-story apartments or the city provides millions to developers for upscale apartments.

A new development in a neighborhood is going to raise questions even for the most Yes-In-My-Backyardish person and certainly for those who tilt Not In My Backyard.

Neighbors on Awbrey Butte are concerned at the moment about an apartment building that may be built there. Is the housing needed? Certainly, we would say the answer is yes. Still, neighbors ask: Is that blocky building the right fit for the neighborhood? Will even its shadow be disruptive and prolong ice on a nearby road?

Hundreds of units of apartments and more are being built or planned for the area west of the Bend Parkway along Southwest Industrial Way. People are complaining — perhaps not so much about the housing —but the city’s millions in incentives to encourage it. Critics have singled out the broad absence of affordable housing in the units the city is incentivizing.

If you want to reduce housing costs, though, the overall supply of housing must be increased. That helps with overall affordability. There needs to be housing for people with low incomes. There needs to be housing for people with middle and high incomes. You don’t want high-income households in a bidding war with low- and middle-income over the same units or who do you think loses?

Building housing that is affordable for people on low incomes, at 80% of area median income or below, requires big subsidies. It can’t really be built without it.

Building what is sometimes called workforce housing, for people above that 80% and up to 120% of median income, is even more prohibitive because most government subsidies vanish. That’s why the Bend Chamber of Commerce has been championing the need for workforce housing. It’s trying to fill a hole government has left.

Yes the need for housing is greatest for people with lower incomes. And as the city takes a new look at its incentives, we are certain that will be a focus. But it is not wrong for the city’s incentives to also encourage workforce housing and on up the income scale. That’s needed, too.