Housing prices

“Paying too damn much” is the family budgeting strategy for living in Bend.

Most homes in Bend are not in the neighborhood of affordability. The median home price is $747,000 or thereabouts.

That’s no Aspen, Colorado where median home prices hit $3.4 million. But Bend is trending Aspeny.

The data, lagging and incomplete as it is, suggests it. Lower-income people are exiting. You can see that in the numbers showing fewer people in Bend are burdened by housing costs.

Housing data combined with income data shows “a 28 percent decrease in the total number of households experiencing cost burden over time. Specifically, there is a 53 percent decrease of households with cost burden less than 30 percent, but only a 14 percent increase in households with cost burden less than 50 percent.”

It’s not like everybody in Bend got big pay raises. It’s a signal that the income demographics of the community are changing.

The “… decrease in the number of cost burdened households over time is most likely due to the influx of educated middle-income earners combined with lower-income earners leaving the area, choosing alternative living arrangements, or entering houselessness,” a city report concluded.

Mellissa Kamanya, Bend’s affordable housing coordinator, took a dive into the data comparing housing affordability in Bend with the rest of the state.

“Bend continues to have, in general, more high-income and less low-income persons than the state as a whole,” she told us in an email. The “largest disparities are seen in the rental area. Bend has significantly more high-income renters than the state as a whole, and less low-income renters than Oregon as a whole. In tandem with the Consolidated Plan’s analysis, this may suggest that we have lower rent-burden, statistically, because the market is heavy in wealth and the poorest are no longer in the market.”

For solutions, there is no moonshot to transform the dynamic. If we truly do want to do something, we would see the community uniting behind more apartments, stretching up high. That includes in neighborhoods where there was no such thing. It is what the state and the city allows. It is met with organized “yuck” campaigns from neighbors.

Without community support, the stage in Bend is set to become more of a community where people cannot come, where people cannot stay and where Bend is curated to be for the wealthy or the lucky to have come before.