FILE - City councilors attend a city council meeting in Bend, Ore. on July 17, 2024.
Kathryn Styer Martínez / OPB
The Bend City Council approved a $5 million grant for affordable housing at its meeting on Wednesday night. The city secured the grant through a competitive application process with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The council voted unanimously to accept the Pathways to Removing Obstacles to Housing grant, which was around half of what the city originally sought when the process began in October.
Mellissa Kamanya, affordable housing coordinator for the city, said because they received less money, proposed projects would need to be rescoped while still retaining the essence of the original application. The projected completion year is 2029.
The city, according to its summary documents, intends to fund land acquisition and construction, incentivize and subsidize affordable housing projects, and simplify housing production.
“Bend has an acute demand for affordable housing at every affordability level.” according to the city’s application. Due to underproduction of housing, low-income earners are losing out to higher earners and wealthy retirees when it comes to housing.
“At the same time, housing costs have risen dramatically, increasing cost burdens on the lowest-income earners. Many of these low-income households have exited the market altogether as living becomes unaffordable,” the application states. “An increase in crowding and homelessness suggests many have either moved in with others or transitioned into homelessness.”
Related: City of Bend receives $5M federal grant to continue affordable housing efforts
In a report released by Bend in late July, its urban renewal agency found the average annual salary needed to rent an apartment in Bend is $72,000.
The current area median income in Bend is $104,700 per year, yet half of the jobs in the Bend-Redmond area pay $43,000 or less.
The income amount needed to rent a house in Bend “floored me,” report author Jonathan Taylor told OPB. When it comes to buying a single-family home in the area, he said, “if you are a new home purchaser in today’s market — you couldn’t afford it at all.”
Few jobs in the Bend area can adequately service a home mortgage, according to Taylor’s report. A single person needs to make $200,000 to do that. The report also finds that 81% of jobs in the Bend-Redmond metropolitan area “cannot adequately support market rate rent on a single income.”
Taylor said the report’s goal is to inform policy decisions by the Bend Urban Renewal Agency as they plan for housing incentives.
Housing availability and the cost of living are constantly cited as top concerns for area residents and businesses. Some small businesses in Bend have reduced operating hours citing a lack of staffing spurred by housing costs.
Deschutes County’s hourly minimum wage increased to $14.70 in July. But that’s still not enough to meet market rate housing costs. A worker needs to earn $34.62 to afford a one-bedroom apartment without being rent burdened.
The three largest job sectors in the area: office and administrative support, sales and related, and food preparation and serving related, earn less than $24.00 an hour, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
To make ends meet, people in the region often work multiple jobs, share homes with multiple roommates, or live in their car.
Providing solutions to the housing crunch is relevant to other work currently before the Bend City Council. The council is weighing updates to its camping and parking codes.
They are considering asking people who live in their vehicles to move every 24 hours. Currently, people in Bend may park their car in the same spot for a maximum of three days in areas that don’t have stricter parking rules.
Related: Bend approves new housing development near removed homeless camp
City officials said any change to the code would aim to work with people reasonably, but the city also wants to be able to address health hazards like sewage leaking from vehicles or refuse piling up around them.
Members of Bend’s Human Rights and Equity Commission expressed concern at a recent meeting about asking people to move every 24 hours.
At this week’s city council meeting, Chuck Hemingway, a board member of Home More Network, expressed concern over the proposed move from three days to 24 hours. Right after Hemingway spoke, two residents living near to the informal encampment known as “Dirt World” delivered testimony, noting the fears and difficulties their families face living next to unhoused people.
The city will hear the first reading of proposed amendments to the camping code at the council’s Sept. 18 meeting.