PRINEVILLE — Central Oregon’s housing crunch has construction workers in Prineville living out of hotels for months at a time because there’s nowhere else to stay.

Of the 230 hotel rooms in Prineville, about 17 percent of them are booked for extended periods of time by workers who are building the two data centers here, according to an informal survey the city took of its six hotels. The rental vacancy rate in the city, which according to a Central Oregon Rental Owners Association’s 2016 survey hit zero percent for houses and duplexes this year, doesn’t leave people with many choices, Prineville Planning Director Phil Stenbeck said.

“It’s the data centers — for those two projects currently happening, there are 500 construction workers here, and we’re anticipating another 100 electricians showing up in the next couple weeks,” Stenbeck said, noting that along with hotels, workers also try to snag one of Prineville’s 81 RV spaces, or turn to living in Madras, Redmond and Bend and commuting 40 miles to work.

“So while trying to understand what our housing situation is, I called around to the hotels and asked about workers staying there. Turns out we’re really booked.”

According to DPR Fortis — a joint venture construction company that’s building data centers in different parts of the country, including in Prineville — construction workers are typically on a data center job site from two weeks to more than a year, with the average worker assigned to a job for about six months.

Historically, about 54 percent of the construction workers building Facebook’s data centers in Prineville have been from out of the area, according to Facebook.

These numbers are reflected at local hotels. Managers at four of the hotels in Prineville — Executive Inn, Best Western, Econo Lodge and Rustler’s Inn — all confirmed that they had out-of-town construction workers staying there, some of whom had been there for months.

“I’ve had guests — worker guests — who have stayed here for four or five months,” said Sunita Chand, manager at the Econo Lodge. “Right now we have one guy who arrived at the end of April and he’s still here. There just aren’t very many houses to stay in right now, so they’re staying in the hotels.”

“Normally we have a slow season in December and January and February, but lately there hasn’t been a slow season,” Best Western Manager Justine Enyart said. “And now that it’s getting into summer — let’s see, this week and last week, about 80 percent of my guests are construction workers.”

“I’ve been in business here for five years, and usually the winters are pretty slow,” said John Beach, manager at the Executive Inn. “But this year I didn’t even know winter had gotten here. At some points there are probably 350 electricians working here. I didn’t think there were that many electricians in all of Oregon. Probably 80 percent of my rooms were rented out by electricians and workers staying for weeks; it was unreal.”

Juan Beaucham, 34, and Lanny Bowen, 58, both came from Grants Pass to work on one of the data centers for Western Partitions, an interior-exterior contracting firm, at the beginning of March. Originally they looked for a room to rent, but with nothing available they started out in a hotel room in Redmond for that first night.

“Then we worked our way this way,” Beaucham said Tuesday.

They stayed at the Executive Inn for the first few months, taking advantage of the hotel’s weekly rates and kitchenettes. But when the room Beaucham was staying in got taken by someone else when he went home for the weekend, he had to move out to Ochoco Lake campground, outside of Prineville.

“(John Beach) said he didn’t have any weekly rooms available but he could put me up for three to four nights here and there and it’d be $400 for the nights rather than $250,” Beaucham said. “For that I could go buy a camp trailer. Camping wasn’t my first choice but it was the first thing that happened, so I went with it.”

There’s no electricity out at the campground, but Beaucham, who’s living out of three tents there, said life isn’t so bad.

“The restrooms could be cleaner,” he said, adding that three or four other men working on the data centers are camping at Lake Ochoco, too. “It’s as inconvenient or as convenient as you make it. I keep it simple.”

Beaucham comes to the Executive Inn every morning before 6 a.m. to eat breakfast with Bowen, who still lives in a weekly room with his girlfriend. Then the two carpool to the construction site, Bowen said.

“Every morning it’s ‘vroom, vroom, vroom.’ All the guys are leaving for work at the same time,” Bowen said, referring to the 10 or so construction workers living at the Executive Inn. “Then the parking lot’s empty all day until ‘vroom, vroom, vroom.’ Everyone comes home in the afternoon.”

Construction workers who are working for an extended period of time in Prineville but don’t live there permanently would ideally rent an apartment or mobile home that’s cheaper than staying in a hotel week after week, Beaucham said. Or perhaps there’s another potential option out there, he wondered aloud.

“Facebook and Apple are huge companies. How much could it cost them to build something to house 300 or so people, so everyone could have their own private living quarters?” he said. “There’s probably a number of different things these computer whizzes could come up with.”

For now, with hundreds of electricians working on the data centers, the senior project manager for Rosendin Electric, Jeff Kerr, said that so many additional people staying for months in a city with a population of less than 10,000 makes finding a place for everyone difficult.

“Generally there’s a shortage of housing — we know that in Prineville,” said Kerr, who lives in Bend. “We have 300 or 400 electricians working here, and they’re having difficulty finding places to stay. There’s the hotels, but then the hotels get backed up, too. But the county and the city have been very accommodating at helping look for options and looking for a means to supply a place.”

Stenbeck said Prineville is exploring new housing options through changes to zoning rules.

“There’s a range of needs — low-income housing and worker housing — so we’re looking at doing some code changes and opening up opportunities for more housing in different ways,” he said.

In May, Prineville city councilors discussed how shipping containers might be used as a living option and what code changes would need to take place to see that happen. Lance Romine, who owns Lineshack Log Structures in Prineville and whose wife is the manager of Stafford Inn there, is planning the construction of a 50-unit, shipping container-housed rental complex.

“You can’t find a house to rent,” Romine said. “Unfortunately for the renters, there isn’t the quantity of homes that’s needed, and the guys working here on the data centers are either in hotels or RV parks. All the hotels have their share of workers, and it’s only going to get worse.”

There’s also a project to convert the former Ochoco Elementary building — sold to regional housing authority Housing Works earlier this year for $600,000 — into a complex for low-income housing. Stenbeck said that a 26-unit Pacific Crest Affordable Housing project geared toward low-income seniors in Prineville filled up in one day when it opened May 2.

Also, Kerr said, private property owners have signaled there might be housing potential on private land.

“There’s a couple private property owners looking at doing some developing to provide places for people to bring campers and trailers,” he said. “Besides the hotels, that’s really common — bringing in RVs — if you’re going to stay for a few months. But you can’t rent a house; there’s nothing available.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7829,

awest@bendbulletin.com