Ever since finishing high school, and starting work, I noticed an issue with the housing market in Central Oregon. Central Oregon is one of the fastest growing areas in the state and US, and there is not enough housing supply to meet the demand of housing supply, or the needs of the communities in Central Oregon.

I first really started to notice this in 2016 when I was starting to seriously consider moving into a place of my own. Employers didn’t pay very much, and they did not work people full time. It has since gotten worse, due in part to the current ongoing inflation crisis. To make matters even worse, we suffer from a mass transplant issue from other states, but mainly California and Texas.

This essay will go into detail on the current housing crisis in Central Oregon, talk about the problem, and outline some solutions we might be able to put forth to help our citizens afford local housing in the cities they grew up in.

Employers are part of the issue

In Central Oregon, a lot of jobs we have are in people centric industries like tourism or customer service. There simply aren’t a lot of jobs in other industries like IT, manufacturing, or other skilled labors. We do have St. Charles here, but St. Charles is known for paying their doctors and nurses and technicians a significant cut below what you can make in other areas of the state, and in said other areas, you also enjoy a lower cost of living.

As an example, from personal experience, I had a co-worker who I worked with at McDonald’s. She was studying Health Information Technology at COCC. However, she was adamant that she was NOT going to work for St. Charles, because of how they treat their employees, and how they pay. She wound up graduating and moving to Eugene, buying a house, and enjoys a significantly lower cost of living while making more money than she would have staying in Central Oregon and working for St. Charles.

It was not always this way in Central Oregon. We used to have the mills in Central Oregon. The mills provided great jobs that paid fairly and allowed people to be able to afford houses or apartments or whatever. Unfortunately, due to environmental regulations, and demands from the people to do something about forestry, those have all shut down. When I worked at Bi-Mart, I had a co-worker who had worked at the mills in Bend for many years, but eventually lost her job after the mills shut down, which caused her to come to Bi-Mart.

Also speaking from personal experience, while yes, McDonald’s may advertise and does indeed pay its crew $17.50/hr, nobody who works for McDonald’s gets full time. The only people who get full time at McDonald’s are managers. This is the same for most other fast food jobs. There are many retail jobs out there that provide full time work year-round, but they do not pay enough to live on, unless you work your way into management, or you are working for a place like Costco, which is almost impossible to get into.

Locals are being outpriced by transplants from other states

Another issue that is well known and common is that people are migrating to Oregon (and other states) from big states, namely California and Texas. They bring their money with them and demand expensive houses that are not in the true Central Oregon style, and that causes a problem for the locals who have lived here all or most of their lives.

If you look on websites like Zillow, you will see that there are lots of houses for sale, but they are still selling at high prices of over $500,000. There is occasionally a house for sale for around $300,000 or less, but those houses are usually snapped up very quickly, and usually not by locals, but transplants. This creates a serious issue. There is simply not enough housing supply to keep up with the demand for it from both locals and transplants. And transplants are the ones who tend to get most of the housing around here.

In the last 2 years, people from other states have flooded to Central Oregon en masse, due to the uptick in working from home because of the coronavirus pandemic. They have bought up most of our houses, and due to the ongoing inflation crisis, and renovations they have done to the houses, they have outpriced the locals who might be trying to buy their own houses. Status from the Oregon Business Report in the last 2 years there has been about 20,000 Californians moving to Oregon, and about 23,000 moving from other states.

While the housing market in Oregon is projected to crash eventually, there is still the problem of inflated interest rates being charged by banks. Which means that while yes, you may get a house for $250k again in Central Oregon at some point in the future, with a mortgage APR of possibly as high as 10%, you may as well have just paid $1 million for that house in cash. Hopefully this will one day stagnate as well, but at this time, that is unknown.

The Supply does not meet the Demand

Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, and the uptick in people losing their jobs, there is a serious supply chain issue, including within the housing market. Drivers are unable to deliver materials to construction sites on time. Materials are unable to be produced on time. And due to the ongoing climate change crisis, it is getting harder to provide lumber for houses, due to the increased environmental regulations on forestry and lumber harvesting.

In addition, based on the immigration status above, the supply simply cannot match up with the demand. There currently is no easy way for supply to catch up with demand right now. We do not have a good labor force at the moment, so construction of new property has been slowing down significantly, and due to forestry and harvesting restrictions imposed by the various governments of the world, there is supply chain issues with providing lumber and other materials needed to build houses.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine further hinders issues with some supplies like oil, which has driven up the cost of gas, and given priority of construction to bigger cities over more rural areas like Central Oregon, where you have to drive for hours on end to get to it from anywhere civilized, like Portland, Seattle, or Los Angeles, the latter 2 being major port cities with the rest of the world, where many supplies come in to the western US by boat or plane.

What is the answer?

Unfortunately, there is no easy answer, but people are trying to come up with answers. There are numerous things we as people can do though. We can contact our state and federal representatives and senators. We can utilize our right to strike, like St. Charles staff did at the Bend Hospital in early 2021. We can utilize our right under the NLRA to form a labor union and negotiate better pay and benefits.

There are also initiatives from city governments to setup affordable workforce housing, where you would just have the basics. A kitchen, a bathroom, a bedroom, and a small living space. While it may not be ideal if you have a family, it is perfect for a single person. Currently, the City of Sisters in cooperation with Laird’s Superfoods, is setting up something like this on one of the Forest Service lands that was sold. The idea is that Laird’s employees will be able to live in these units and neighborhood, at a reduced cost compared to the average cost of an apartment or house in the area.

Other answers include tiny homes, utilizing units that have just the bare minimum for you to get by, such as simple built units that have a kitchenette, bathroom, and bedroom. They have built these before in Utah, and I see no reason why they could not be built in Central Oregon. The rent at the time of construction was only $300/mo.

Still other options for people who are really desperate to live on their own include living in an RV or renting an apartment with roommates. While neither of these are very ideal, sometimes it’s a better situation than living in a small tent in the woods. Of course, good roommates can be hard to find, and it can be even harder to find a good quality RV and RV park to make a home for yourself.

I believe that penultimately, things will balance themselves out. We’ve been through situations like this before as a nation, and we have managed to come out on top. We will be through these situations again in the future. In the end, things will work themselves out. The inflation crisis will come to an end, gas prices will stabilize and drop, materials will be available again, and we will be able to provide housing for all our citizens.