Bend needs more housing, but for some it can’t come fast enough

Caldera High School in southeast Bend, Oregon, sits across the street from where a newly selected housing development is planned, Caldera Ranch.

Case Bateman teaches ninth-grade physics at the high school and he’s been trying to buy a home nearby since 2019, when he arrived in Bend. He said he quickly realized that as a single person with his salary, it might never happen.

“It has been a long, long process,” he said.

The 33-year-old has considered leaving Bend “as a result of not being able to, or not foreseeing the ability to buy property.”

He gave himself a five-year time limit before finding somewhere else to put down roots.

He said he’d be interested in owning a home across the street from his work. But Caldera Ranch won’t be ready before his deadline. Affordable homes there likely won’t even break ground for two to three more years, according to project officials.

Bateman is hoping a different example of Bend’s push to create more housing will come through first, and is in the process of closing on a home this month in Thistle and Nest, another city-backed affordable housing project.

Throughout Oregon there is a shortage of affordable housing, and in Bend, it is acutely felt.

The Bend City Council chose the Caldera Ranch site in December as part of an urgent push to take advantage of a recently enacted state law aimed at expanding urban growth boundaries for affordable housing.

City officials said they wanted to deploy SB 1537 before a new council is sworn in and while Bend still qualifies to participate.

The bill lets qualifying cities expedite expanding urban growth boundaries, bypassing the traditional UGB expansion process, which can take years to complete.

Cities that participate in SB 1537 are only allowed to add 100 residential acres and developers must sell or rent 30% of units at affordable rates.

Part of Caldera’s appeal to the Bend councilors was that its developer promised homes at deeper affordability rates, from moderate-income to extremely low-income.

“That 30% [of area median income] housing is probably among the hardest housing to provide in any city in any project,” said Joey Shearer, whose firm AKS Engineering & Forestry is part of the project.

Thirty percent of area median income in Bend means that someone who makes $22,000 annually would be able to rent or buy a home in Caldera Ranch.

The night of the vote to approve the site, the city council chambers were overflowing with opposition. Rows of seats were set up in the hallway outside.

Commenters in-person and online spoke out against selecting project sites located near their own neighborhoods, while many also agreed more affordable housing is needed.

The paradox touched on the crux of Bend’s plight, and the city’s struggle to maintain the bucolic, small-town quality that has inspired wave after wave of newcomers to relocate, while also making space for each new wave.

Unfortunately, said Shearer, “most of the easy land for these types of projects are gone.”

Despite attempts by Councilors Barb Campbell and Mike Riley to delay choosing a site, the vote carried 4-2.

“In the big picture, there’s a housing crisis. We’re looking at ways of providing as many homes for people as possible. And we’re really behind,” Councilor Ariel Mendéz said in an interview.

A recent Oregon housing report found that 500,000 homes need to be built in order to address the state’s needs.

When Shearer was reviewing the land requirements for SB 1537, the Caldera Ranch project seemed to “tick all the boxes,” he said.

The location is an old cinder pit mine, no longer in use.

Terri Holm remembers asking about the old mine when she and her husband bought their house 30 years ago. Now her backyard abuts the property line of the planned housing development.

When asked if she would have purchased her home if she knew a development was going to be built next to her backyard: “Absolutely not,” she said.

Holm, 67, said that ever since she was a young girl growing up in a big city, she dreamed of living on a plot of land with a horse.

“I could just picture the trees and the pasture and all that,” she said.

Holm ended up raising llamas instead of horses. Now, as Bend grows, she said she can’t recreate with her llamas the way she used to.

Living in the suburbs wasn’t what Holm signed up for. She said they chose their home because of the long country roads, proximity to the national forest and wide open spaces.

Now that Caldera Ranch has been selected, she’s considering her options. Like Bateman, one of them, she said, is moving.

Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the name of AKS Engineering & Forestry. OPB regrets the error.