Erin Smith came to Central Oregon in 2001 to escape California’s high cost of living.

She and her partner were paying nearly $1,800 per month for a two-bedroom apartment in San Jose. They found a place in Redmond for $425 a month and moved to Central Oregon. Smith saved enough money working at Home Depot to buy a three-bedroom house in northeast Bend in 2004. She bought a new car. A few years later the couple sold the house and bought another one. Smith picked out the countertops, blinds, paint and kitchen setup.

The bright spots in her life have been followed by setbacks. She earned her bachelor’s degree in drug and alcohol counseling but battled with her own substance use. She raised a daughter, but couldn’t be there for her during her own addiction. Her relationship faltered. The housing market crashed. She sold her home. She lost jobs — and worse, friends and family to suicide.

Smith began living in a trailer in 2020. First, she parked in her parents’ driveway, but addiction drove her to park for two years on the streets of Bend, where she had closer access to methamphetamine and fentanyl. Finally, she moved her trailer for another two years to a swath of juniper forest north of Bend.

“I lost hope,” she said. “Who’s going to want to help me?”

As Central Oregon’s population has surged in the past two decades, so has the number of people in the region living without homes, turning homelessness from an out-of-sight public concern to a full-blown crisis demanding attention from leaders across all levels of government.

Homelessness continues to rise every year. But solutions and attitudes have also changed as the crisis has grown, giving leaders hope that soon, more people will be on the path out of homelessness than heading into it.

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For Smith, now 53, the path out of homelessness started with a seven-day detox in her trailer in February. She entered a drug treatment program. Now she’s in treatment beside people who used to be her clients as a counselor.

“I knew that I had more inside my heart. I got things I’ve got to get done in life. I need to help people,” said Smith, who wants to work in homeless outreach.

Smith is one of 22 residents at a temporary outdoor shelter cluster called Central Oregon Villages in east Bend. The walls of her 8-by-12 foot insulated shelter are filled with flat-billed baseball caps of Bay Area sports teams hanging on hooks and photos of her daughter, Ava, who serves in the Air Force.

The shelter is high-barrier, meaning residents must pass a background check and engage with services to move in. Along with receiving support with food, water and other basic needs, residents meet weekly with case managers who help them navigate housing and other systems necessary to get back on their feet.

The village has sheltered 48 households and moved 17 of them into stable housing since opening in June 2023, according to Donna Burklo, interim manager of the shelter.

Burklo recalled a memory from five years ago when shelter providers were scrambling to piece together an emergency shelter as cold weather set in. The landscape for unhoused accommodations has changed dramatically since then, with hundreds of shelter beds in myriad forms coming online across Bend and Central Oregon as a reaction to spikes in homelessness numbers.

Bend has 527 shelter beds, 216 of which are low-barrier, according to city of Bend data. Bend’s first year-round low-barrier shelter, the 100-bed Lighthouse Navigation Center run by Shepherd’s House, began operations in 2022.

Service providers counted 959 people as unhoused in Bend in January 2024 during the annual Point-in-Time Count, a survey required by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The count showed 1,800 people were unhoused across Deschutes, Jefferson and Crook counties.

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That’s the highest homelessness count since the Great Recession in 2008, when more than 2,000 people were counted as houseless, though due to methodology changes, early survey years generally produced higher numbers than more recent counts.

The count showed about 500 unhoused people in 2005, the first year the annual Point-in-Time Count was conducted in Central Oregon. Numbers have been rising since roughly 2014.

The 2024 number is more than double the number of unhoused people counted in 2019. Homelessness numbers took back-to-back 20% jumps during the COVID-19 pandemic and another 10% increase from 2023 to 2024.

According to the count, half of unhoused people in 2024 have lived in Central Oregon for more than 10 years, and another 15% have lived in the region for more than five years.

The region’s population as a whole has also grown quickly, with Deschutes County being the fastest-growing area of Central Oregon in the past several years. The county grew by 5.2% during the COVID era, according to U.S. Census data. The population has doubled since 2000, now at more than 210,000.

Point-in-Time Count numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, said Molly Heiss, deputy executive director of community services with NeighborImpact, a basic needs nonprofit that oversees homelessness data collection in Central Oregon. Heiss doesn’t believe homelessness has actually grown at a much faster rate than the overall population in the last few years. Rather, homelessness agencies are getting better at taking a more accurate count each year.

Many homelessness leaders agree the actual homeless population is undercounted each year.

“I’m not saying homelessness is not increasing,” Heiss said. “I think it’s a creeping increase alongside the population.”

A mounting crisis

That creeping increase began decades ago.

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In the second half of the 20th century, the nation began a movement toward deinstitutionalization — moving patients out of state mental health hospitals and into treatment in their own communities, a shift away from decades of poor treatment and stigmatization.

But many people with significant mental health issues were left without access to treatment, leaving the most vulnerable to homelessness, early death and incarceration.

“I think that’s where we saw an explosion in unsheltered homelessness,” Heiss said.

Meanwhile, housing production lagged behind population growth. In the mid-2010s, the number of new Oregon residents outpaced the number of new units by 3-to-1, according to a new report on the housing crisis from Oregon Housing and Community Services.

Two thirds of renters in Bend and half of Oregon renters are cost-burdened, meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on rent. Market-rate rent is now $1,800 while median home prices have soared to $800,000.

Oregon ranks third among states with the highest rates of homelessness in the country, behind New York and Vermont, according to the report, which pegs homelessness as a natural symptom of high housing costs.

Redmond resident Kevin Wilson spent several years “scrounging around for housing.” He lived paycheck-to-paycheck while paying $700 per month to sleep on the couch in the living room of his brother’s one-bedroom apartment in Bend.

When his brother moved on, Wilson, 30, was faced with sleeping on the streets. He had $1,800 to find a new place to live — housing was off the table. His best option was to buy a shabby RV.

He and his partner parked on the streets of Redmond. Neighbors complained to police, and threats of theft made him wary to leave the vehicle unattended.

“It was a constant state of fear,” he said. “I didn’t want to lose what little I already had.”

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He found safety at one of the region’s newest homelessness solutions: giving people a safe place to park. Wilson parked at the Mountain View Community Development safe parking area in Redmond for a year. He began working at BasX, an HVAC manufacturing company in Redmond. Wilson, who saved enough money to move into a market-rate apartment in Redmond, is one of dozens of people who have found housing through the safe parking program.

Others are still seeking housing. John Stoneman, 68, has lived in safe parking for two years. Debilitating injuries have limited his ability to work. He got work as a live-in caregiver, but ended up in an RV when his client died.

He collects $949 per month in Social Security.

Older adults are especially vulnerable to homelessness. Nearly 1 in 4 unhoused people in the U.S. are over the age of 55, and that number is expected to grow as the population continues to age.

Stoneman recalled that housing was difficult to find for low-income people when he first moved to Central Oregon in the 1970s.

“Since then it’s been a steady tide of homelessness that hasn’t even begun to crest yet,” he said. “This is just the first floodwater.”

Past plans failed

Though homelessness increased last year across Central Oregon, according to the count, it decreased slightly in Bend and Redmond, which some elected leaders and officials have attributed to the bump in shelters in those areas.

According to Heiss, the Central Oregon agencies working on homelessness exceeded the state’s goals in 2023 for preventing people from becoming homeless and for getting people into housing. Nonprofit providers put 234 people into housing and prevented homelessness for another 366, according to The Bulletin’s previous reports. They are now on track to meet similar goals for 2024.

Those efforts are tied to millions of dollars for homelessness included in state legislation in the last several years and two executive orders declared by Gov. Tina Kotek. Since 2023, Kotek has secured $37.5 million for Central Oregon to fight homelessness, according to a spokesperson with the governor’s office.

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The Central Oregon Intergovernmental Council is the lead agency for directing homelessness funds sent to the region. While the agency runs a variety of regional planning efforts from transportation to economic development, its director, Tammy Baney, estimates she now spends about half her professional time working on committees, strategies or in meetings related to homelessness.

A handful of different agencies house at least a dozen committees related to the homelessness crisis — many consisting of overlapping members.

“You can’t possibly actually get your day-to-day work done, because you’re constantly trying to figure out what is going on: Where are the grant funds? Who’s talking about what?” Baney said.

Baney served on the Deschutes County Commission from 2007 to 2019. In 2007, the county purchased a hotel and began leasing it to a nonprofit provider, creating the region’s first homeless shelter, the Bethlehem Inn. In 2011, the county signed on to the state’s 10-year plan to end homelessness, directing more money to nonprofits.

The region’s population grew so quickly that the services and supports to prevent and solve homelessness never got set up, Baney said.

“We’re doing that now at a time where we have a really significant crisis,” she said.

The plan failed in part because it lacked relevancy, Baney said. That’s different today. What’s still lacking is regional coordination between groups and committees working on homelessness, and full support for the network of nonprofits providing services, Baney said.

With more people than ever working on the crisis and a keen interest from local, state and federal politicians, Baney is hopeful for the fight against homelessness.

“We are in the best position to get the best outcomes and actually create the system and a continuum of services that a region of our size should have,” she said.

Living in the forest

Residents and service providers said hope is missing from Central Oregon’s largest homeless encampments on public lands.

Just north of Bend across 1,500 acres of juniper forest owned by Deschutes County and the city of Bend, a network of dusty roads connects dozens of RVs, tents, trailers and other makeshift shelters — an area formally as Juniper Ridge.

Both Bend and Deschutes County have adopted rules limiting when, where and how people are allowed to sleep on public lands inside and outside the city, limiting stays to 24 hours.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson, ruling that ordinances restricting homeless camping are not unconstitutional. For the second time in two years, the city and county have formed plans to add services and slowly reduce camping at Juniper Ridge.

Since 2016, the area has grown from a few scattered camps to a home for about 200 people, according to city estimates.

Another 150 to 200 people, according to service provider estimates, live in similar circumstances in south Deschutes County on U.S. Forest Service land along China Hat Road.

Jessica Gamble used to frequent the area as a professional dog hiker, exploring the trails and nearby Bessie Butte. Five years ago there were very few, if any people living there, she said.

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After a divorce left her homeless that year, Gamble drove to the forest and slept in her car at China Hat, a place she felt familiar and comfortable. Rental assistance helped her get housing, but she lost it again after the pandemic hit. By that time, many more people had moved to China Hat, and Gamble felt it was no longer safe.

“It was very scary, and way more difficult than it needed to be to get help,” she said.

Her experience living at China Hat and navigating the complex system of services inspired Gamble to start a nonprofit, the Home More Network, which provides outreach and services like bill payments, help with vehicle maintenance and personal development programs.

“When I had to rebuild from China Hat, I fell through the cracks many times,” Gamble said. “When the pandemic hit, those cracks were blown wide open. People started pouring through the cracks rather than falling through the cracks.”

People living outside in survival mode often don’t have the capacity to access society’s support system, said Heiss, of NeighborImpact. Some portion of people without shelter don’t want to come inside, she said.

Smith, the Central Oregon Villages resident who used to live in Juniper Ridge, wants to use her counseling skills to help her former neighbors.

“My goal is to be an advocate for people that are still in the situation I used to be in and try to bring hope to them,” she said. “That’s the biggest thing that lacks out in places like that, is hope.”

Growth in Central Oregon: a yearlong series

This is the final story in The Bulletin’s yearlong series centered on growth in Central Oregon.

Reporters examined growth issues in four categories: environment, infrastructure, economics and housing. Using The Bulletin’s historical archives, reporters compared today’s growth matters in Central Oregon to the challenges voiced 20-plus years ago to find the successes and failures of previous solutions and explain current approaches. Reporters also found new concerns, such as a surge in homelessness and a regional health care system adjusting to care for Central Oregon’s aging population.

We hope you enjoyed each monthly installment. If you missed any of them, you can read the full collection of The Bulletin’s Central Oregon Growth Series at bendbulletin.com/localstate/growth.