The Granillos are one of many families that know firsthand about Bend’s affordable housing problem.

In their $300-a-month apartment at the St. Vincent de Paul Society’s short-term rental units, parents Joe and Shauna Granillo sleep in the living room. Their clothes are stored in a dresser and some shelves at the end of the couch.

The three Granillo boys, Micheal, 8, Ricky, 5 and Gregory, 4, share one of the two bedrooms and Michelle, 10, gets the other bedroom to herself.

The number of households whose rent or mortgage costs more than 30 percent of the household income – the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s definition of unaffordable housing – is growing.

A decade ago, 30 percent of households in Bend lived in unaffordable housing.

That has grown to 33 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

In Deschutes County, households living in unaffordable housing climbed from 27 percent to 31 percent.

As Bend’s land costs have been skyrocketing, city officials have wrestled with how to keep its low-wage workers with roofs over their heads.

The city in 2001 created a task force that has recommended ways to create affordable housing. The recommendations range from creating incentives for developers to build affordable housing to creating a land trust that would keep land costs protected from market forces.

The task force wanted to reach the various levels of people in need of affordable housing. That includes the homeless, families working for minimum wage and in need of rental housing, like the Granillos, and families earning about $40,000 per year that wish to own a house.

While the city tries to figure out the best way to address the problem, families like the Granillos find ways to get by.

For awhile, the Granillos lived in motels. There, a renter doesn’t have to come up with first- and last-month’s rent plus a deposit to get in. While motels are cheaper on the front end to move into, they can burn through paychecks pretty fast.

The motels were costing $227 a week or $52 a night, said Joe Granillo.

He was earning $9 an hour, including tips, as a prep cook at the Outback Steakhouse. In a 40-hour week, $9 an hour would earn $360, before taxes.

Plus, the motels don’t have kitchens, so the family spent more money on food than was necessary to eat out.

”You’re paying out so much,” he said. ”We can’t save.”

Joe Granillo lost his job after getting sick and missing too much work, he said. Shauna, his wife, has a full-time job earning the $6.90 an hour Oregon’s minimum wage, in housekeeping at the Holiday Express Inn.

One full-time, minimum wage job brings in about $276 a week, before taxes.

Joe just recently started working a couple of days a week there, doing the same, but hopes to get into a training program at Central Oregon Intergovernmental Council so he can make better wages at a year-round job.

Now that they have found some affordable housing at the St. Vincent shelter, things are looking up.

”This helps us stay on our feet,” he said.

Joe really wants a three- or four-bedroom house. He’s worried about his kids having some time and space to themselves. He said they argue more now that they’re crammed into two bedrooms.

But ”you have to make so much to even take an apartment – they hit you with a deposit, rent, utilities. Even phones have to have a deposit,” he said.

In Central Oregon and across the state, housing costs have increased at more than twice the rate of incomes during the past decade, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

In Bend, median home values rose 66 percent; from $87,901 in 1990 to $145,500 in 2000, according to census data. Median family income, on the other hand, grew 24 percent, from $39,943 to $49,387. The numbers have been adjusted for inflation.

Bend City Councilor Bruce Abernethy, who led the city’s affordable housing task force and is also the Bend advocate for the Central Oregon Partnership, a group trying to fight poverty, said wages and housing affordability are intricately entwined.

”On the housing versus wages front, we’re losing ground,” he said.

Abernethy says he thinks jobs with low wages end up costing the community, because those workers will likely need some sort of subsidized service, whether it’s public health services or transportation.

Nancy Knoble, the executive director of the Central Oregon Partnership, said at a recent meeting that the affordable housing issue is just part of a systemic problem that is tied into wages, education and transportation.

Transportation issues at one time bogged Joe Granillo down.

Before his family had a car, on more than one occasion, a prospective employer had called Granillo in the evening to come to an interview the next morning. But, to use the city’s transportation system, riders must call 24 hours in advance.

Sometimes he wasn’t able to make arrangements to use the bus in time to get to an interview, so he paid $10 for a taxi ride one way and would walk home.

Two months ago, his in-laws gave the family a car.

Even without a car, he could walk to job interviews if he planned far enough in advance.

That’s not something Deana Carpenter can do, as she’s staying with a friend in Terrebonne to keep a roof over her head.

Carpenter is currently homeless, jobless and carless. Money is her biggest hurdle to getting a home. She can’t find a job in Bend or Redmond without having a car or some kind of transportation. Sometimes she’s able to get a ride from a friend, but Terrebonne is a long drive for her friends in Bend.

Carpenter and her 3-year-old daughter, Raven Cooper, returned to Central Oregon last August with only the clothes on their backs after escaping what she called an abusive relationship in Hood River. Her friend has provided a short-term roof over their heads, and occasional childcare for Raven – like when Carpenter had a couple days of work in the garlic fields north of Terrebonne.

She wants to get a job and save enough to get into a two-bedroom house by March, she said. Coming up with a deposit to get into a place seems overwhelming to Carpenter. She can’t even pay the non-refundable fee for credit checks, required for many rental applications.

”Since I’ve been back, I’ve been in a rut and I can’t get out of it,” she said.

On the other end of the continuum of people in need of affordable housing are some professionals. They have jobs that pay at or above median income, but still cannot buy homes in Bend. Councilor Abernethy said he believes home ownership is becoming unattainable for many nurses and teachers, for instance.

City of Bend employee Deb Walker, the community development department director’s assistant, is a single woman at the what she calls the peak of her career. She has gotten so frustrated in her quest to buy a house in Bend that she has at times given up.

”I’ve been thinking maybe I need to buy in Redmond,” she said.

But Walker doesn’t want to join the growing number of people who choose to commute from Redmond.

Walker earns $45,000 a year, about the median income in Deschutes County for a family of four. She has been saving for years and started looking to buy last summer.

She figures she can afford a house for about $150,000 and keep her housing costs affordable. The mortgage would probably be a couple hundred dollars more than she pays now in her $700-a-month apartment.

”But it quickly came to my attention that that doesn’t get you much,” she said.

Some of the houses in her price range need costly investments – new carpets, siding, roofs, paint jobs, heating systems, etc. She doesn’t have the skills to do the labor herself, so she’ll be paying for someone else to do those jobs.

For a house that costs about $150,000, she might pay monthly mortgage payments of about $1,000. That plus utilities and other housing expenses would cost about one-third of her monthly net income.

In Bend, the definition of affordable housing is that which, including utilities, costs no more than 30 percent of the income for a household that earns up to 100 percent of the median income.

Adding any expensive home improvement projects would kick Walker’s housing costs over the affordability threshold, she said.

Plus, she said, she needs a new car, is helping her 18-year-old with college costs and her 16-year-old with car insurance. Never mind an occasional vacation or saving for retirement.

”Sometimes I think I’m just too choosy, just like the rest of America,” Walker said. ”But then I look and it’s just not pencilling out. I feel guilty, I should be able to make do.”

She wants to live in the northeast park of town so her 16-year-old son, Sam, can attend Mountain View High School when he comes back from boarding school next year. He went to Mountain View before he tried a year at the boarding school.

She wants a three-bedroom, two-bath house so she and Sam can each have their own space. And there would also be room left in case one of her other two grown sons come home to visit.

Walker knows she has a great job and said she lives more comfortably now than ever.

”I make enough to feel comfortable, I just don’t make enough to buy a home in this town,” she said.

She corrected herself.

”I can own a house, just not the house I think I want.”

Anne Aurand can be reached at 541-383-0323 or aaurand@bendbulletin.com.