New book ‘High Desert, Higher Costs’ examines Bend’s housing crisis

Bend serves as a gateway to natural wonder and recreation in Central Oregon. But, like many other places across the West, the city has too few homes. “High Desert, Higher Costs: Bend and the Housing Crisis in the American West” explores the housing issues that have been brewing for decades in Bend. We’ll hear more about the city from Jonathan Bach, author of the book and housing reporter for The Oregonian/OregonLive.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Geoff Norcross: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Geoff Norcross. In 2021, the journalist Jonathan Bach wrote a cover story for the Portland Business Journal about the high cost of living in Bend. He laid out all the forces that have pushed the average cost of a home in that city to over half a million dollars and the squeeze that puts on some of the people trying to make a living there. Jonathan Bach clearly had a lot more to say about this topic because he went on to write a whole book about it. His new book is called “High Desert, Higher Costs: Bend and the Housing Crisis in the American West.”

Jonathan Bach now reports on housing and real estate for The Oregonian/OregonLive, and he joins us now. Jonathan, welcome to Think Out Loud.

Jonathan Bach: Thanks so much for having me.

Norcross: One of the things you were able to include in the book that didn’t get into the article is you and your family’s personal connection to Bend. Can you talk about that?

Bach: I consider Bend my adopted hometown. My family, as I write in the book, is one that moved around a lot when I was a kid. We moved more than … well, I won’t include a number, but it was a whole bunch. We moved for work and then, after my mom was diagnosed with kidney failure when we lived in Montana, we moved to try to be closer to good medical care.

So we lived in Bend in the early 2000s, then we moved away for a little while, and we moved back around 2007. I went to Elk Meadow Elementary School in Bend for a little while. Then when we came back, I went to Bend Senior High School – go Lava Bears! My family stayed in Central Oregon and my family is still in Central Oregon.

Norcross: Why was your family so peripatetic?

Bach: You know, there was a whole bunch of reasons behind it. My mom worked as a call center director, call center manager, and my dad worked in grocery stores. He worked for Kroger. And in Bend, he worked at Fred Meyer. My mom worked at what was then called Bend Cable.

Part of it was that they told us they wanted us to see the whole country and then part of it was just that there was different jobs in different places that they were pursuing. My family is from Southern California originally. We were chasing different places. We were always renters until, as I write in the book, my parents were actually able to achieve their dream of home ownership in Terrebonne, which is a small community north of Bend, when my sister and I … long after we’d moved out.

Norcross: Out of all the places they lived in, why did they decide that Central Oregon was it?

Bach: I think it was a compromise place for my mom and dad. My dad really loved Arizona, which is one of the places we lived in. I say in the book that we carried around this million-pound tote of Arizona Highways, which is a periodical. We had decades of back issues of AZ Highways. And I remember lugging that to and from U-Haul trucks. He loved this desert. We lived in about several different towns in Arizona. I think Central Oregon approximated, to the highest degree possible in the drenched Pacific Northwest, the desert feeling of Arizona. And then my mom just really felt an affinity toward Oregon.

It’s funny for me, these two people – my mom was from Burbank, my dad was from Hollywood – we left Southern California when … I can still remember living in Antelope Valley, which is part of Los Angeles County, just very, very faint memories. But for them, they were always sort of chasing that perfect place. And I think that in a sense, they found it in Central Oregon.

Norcross: When people ask you where you’re from, do you tell them Central Oregon?

Bach: I do. I mean, it’s always with a little bit of an asterisk. [Laughter] People can be a little territorial about being from “Oregon.” But I like to think that I’m from Bend because it’s where I feel the most affinity. I was not born in Bend, but of all the places that we lived, I feel like Bend raised me.

Norcross: Bend has been drawing people for more than a century. Can you talk about some of the characters that you uncovered who were critical to the development of Bend as a destination?

Bach: One of the central theses of the book is that tourism and this idea of urban expats moving to Bend has really been with it for a long time, longer than just COVID-19, which was the one of the main pivot points of both the cover story that you mentioned for the Portland Business Journal and also for the book. So I wanted to dig into this idea of, is that something that is novel or is it something that’s been with communities like Bend for a while?

There was this really great line in a book by Raymond Hatton, who was a Central Oregon historian. He worked at Central Oregon Community College. And he was this really, really fascinating gentleman who used to explore all over the natural wonders of Central Oregon, from the mountains to the waterfalls. He was originally from England, but he had this really great line in one of his regional histories where he quotes somebody who – I think this was in 1910 – was a tradesman from Chicago, who was talking about moving out to Bend because the rents in Chicago are getting too high, so he wanted to go west.

There’s a lot caught up in that idea, but the theme there … Obviously, population has changed dramatically in Bend and we’re in a different era now, but thematically the idea that urban expats have been going to places like Bend for a long time, I think, sustains.

Norcross: And what were they drawn to?

Bach: I think they’re drawn to a lot of the natural amenities – the proximity of the mountain, the proximity to outdoor recreation – a lot of things that we still cherish about these communities today.

Norcross: I’m gonna ask you a simple question that has a complex answer: why is Bend so expensive?

Bach: Bend is so expensive for the same reason that a lot of communities are so expensive, and that’s because home building hasn’t kept up with those population increases that have really become so pronounced in the past decade-and-a-half since the Great Recession. I remember when I was in high school. I went to high school in the Great Recession. Sitting on the bleachers in the gym at Bend High, our gym teacher sat everybody down and he’s like, “hey, does anybody want to talk about what’s going on?” This was really in the depths of it. And one of the students was like, “my dad’s retirement savings has just been wiped out.”

Bend, particularly, had, according to one of these Associated Press indices, one of the worst recession pains in the country – Deschutes County did. So you saw a plummet, not just nationwide, but really in Bend, of home building. And I go into some of the pertinent data that reflects that in the book. But what you saw in the ensuing years, as Bend recovered from the Great Recession economically, was folks coming back into the city, coming back in the region, but home building did not rebound with that. And as two pivotal events happened – the 2008 financial crisis and then COVID-19, which reemphasized Bend’s importance as a telecommuting haven ...

Norcross: “Zoom Town” …

Bach: “Zoom Town,” exactly. You didn’t have home building keeping up with just these two big events that saw more population come in: the recovery from the 2008 financial crisis and then “Zoom towns.”

Norcross: You’re careful to say that this is a problem all over the American West, but why is it especially pronounced in Bend?

Bach: I want to get to a little bit of nuance here, because there’s a great book, for instance, about San Francisco and big, big cities, called “Golden Gates,” which I cite in this book. But the lane for this book is those mid-size U.S. West cities. And I wanted to get at this idea of more rural U.S. West cities like Bend and Boulder, Colorado, two cities that are similarly sized and also gateways to natural amenities, gateways to the mountains, known for their outdoor recreations, known for being close to … Boulder, you’re not that long of a drive to the Rocky Mountains.

I really wanted to get at this idea of what happens when you have, again, not enough housing in places where people really, really want to live, in an age when you can live anywhere, and the sociological clashes that happen when you’ve got folks who are new to town coming in and folks who cherish what’s long been there. And especially [as] somebody who has been new to town very many times over the course of my life [Laughter], I can see both sides of it.

Norcross: What you’re saying really resonates with me, because I moved to Portland in 2008 and before that I was in Flagstaff, Arizona for seven years. I know you know this place because you lived in Arizona, and a lot of people talk about Flagstaff and Bend as having a similar vibe ...

Bach: Very similar.

Norcross: High desert, similar sized …

Bach: Similar trees.

Norcross: Similar trees, very close to beautiful things and also a haven for city folk. In Flagstaff’s case, it’s Phoenix. But the thing that really hits me is that I was a hiring manager in Flagstaff and I actually had to try to lure people into town. But once they looked at what the housing costs were and what we were willing to pay them, it was a lot of thanks, but no thanks. Are you seeing that in Bend too?

Bach: I think that that’s one of the things the chamber of commerce is really grappling with, in trying to get more housing on line. Katy Brooks, who is the either soon-to-be or is the now CEO of the chamber of commerce, has been really instrumental in pushing for workforce housing initiatives because of exactly what you’re talking about. The wages are not keeping up with these increasingly escalating, some might say skyrocketing, housing prices.

Just for a little bit of context, there’s a Beacon Report that comes out every month and it’s basically a temperature check on the monthly home prices. The Beacon Report in April for Bend showed that the median home price was $832,000.

Norcross: OK, my numbers are out of date. More than three-quarters of a million dollars.

Bach: That was a record for the city. It cooled off to $772,000 this past month, but the question is, how are restaurant workers, how are folks who work at St. Charles, how are …

Norcross: Teachers …

Bach: How are teachers, how are firefighters, these commonly cited examples of folks. I mean, if you’re a hiring manager, how are you supposed to make the economic case to folks you’re trying to lure for non-tech or high net-worth positions to come to Bend? Maybe you can say, “hey, check out Redmond,” or “check out some other outlying communities.” But those are the kinds of conversations that I imagine are happening with a lot of recruiters or local employers. It’s also why you see a lot of local employers, both by themselves and also through groups like the chamber, saying we need more workforce housing.

Norcross: Let’s talk about some of the factors that are causing this strong upward pressure on housing prices in Bend. We talked about the demand. That’s there, that’s obvious. What else is at work here?

Bach: Well, I think population gain is one. I think that there’s been difficulty in getting things approved in the past. There’s a pro-housing movement called the YIMBY’s, the “Yes In My Backyard.” There’s a Bend YIMBY chapter, for instance. And there’s a quote in the book talking about how one of the germinating moments for the Bend YIMBY group, which was formed by a gentleman named David Welton, was he saw that there was a housing proposal – it was really like a zoning change – in 2016 that was over near Central Oregon Community College. And it would have eased the way for some dense housing. I can’t recall, but I think it was apartments.

But he told me basically this proposal got killed by some folks who were just really vehemently against the proposal. And I think that that idea of what one book has called “Neighborhood Defenders,” there’s a Cambridge Press book called “Neighborhood Defenders” ...

Norcross: We’re dancing around the term here.

Bach: But it is, in some cases, difficult to just get things built, because there are entrenched interests that oppose new housing.

Norcross: Oregon is famous for its land use laws, including things like an urban growth boundary that progressives love because it limits sprawl. Is there a UGB in Bend that’s causing upward pressure on prices too?

Bach: The urban growth boundary, yeah, it’s around all Oregon cities. I like to think of it … The Urban Growth Boundary, for folks who don’t know, they ring Oregon cities and they were instituted some 50 years ago under Oregon Governor Tom McCall. They really spearheaded our land use system. I like to think of urban growth boundaries as like Tom McCall’s big hug around cities. They can be tweaked every now and again, but sometimes those urban growth boundary expansions do face opposition for various reasons, whether it’s environmental concerns or other concerns.

So I, in the book, look at one example of a UGB expansion out actually not far from where I used to live, on the … it’s called the Stevens Road tract. It’s on the east side of town and it will theoretically ease the way for some 2,500 new homes. One of the interesting parts of that expansion though, is that in the vein of “hurry up and wait,” as they say, this expansion has gone through and it was passed as an “emergency measure” by state lawmakers. It bypassed the usual UGB expansion process, but it still could be 10-20 years before we actually see that housing built. And it just goes to how long these things take.

Norcross: Yeah, towns all over the Northwest also had to find their way after the timber wars of the ‘90s and the subsequent downturn in logging. Did that play out in Bend too?

Bach: Of course, absolutely. As you’ve seen a change from timber and the mills shutting down in Bend, you’ve seen the economic base of the city shift to things like tech, advanced manufacturing. You’ve got the Old Mill, which is quite literally now just a shopping center.

Norcross: And the main shop in the center is what?

Bach: It’s a Regal Cinema. [Laughs]

Norcross: But there’s also an REI.

Bach: There is an REI, yes, exactly. It tells you exactly what people value in Bend. [Laughter]

Norcross: But, tell me more about the history of the Old Mill.

Bach: Yeah, the Old Mill, it used to be the site of these two dueling mills, Brooks [Scanlon] and Shevlin-Hixon, and as you just pointed out, the mills’ fortunes shifted in the past 50 years. Those two mills consolidated and then they shut down. And while tourism has long been with Bend over the past century, as history shows, I think the decline of the mills just accelerated Bend’s emphasis on things like tourism, and then also embracing a broader, more diverse economic base. Which then brought in more population, more folks coming into town for those types of jobs, and you get more population which precipitates the need for more housing.

Norcross: Yeah, it’s a cycle.

Jonathan, you tell the stories of people who have to navigate this – the big difference between salaries and housing costs in town. Let’s focus on a couple. Could you tell me about Greg Delgado?

Bach: Well, a little bit of setup first. One of the things that I really wanted to do with this book, I’ve been covering housing for several years. And we hear about the housing crisis all the time, from Governor Brown, from Governor Kotek. You just did an awesome segment just before this one with Senator Jama. He was emphasizing the importance of housing and homelessness dollars, and how we have quite a tight economic forecast that lawmakers were served up in May, and how that’s gonna put a squeeze on the dollars that they can put into housing and homelessness this session.

So we hear about Oregon’s housing crisis, we have been for a decade. What I really wanted to do with this book was follow a few people over the course of a year, two years, and get a really good personal sense of how they navigate it. It’s something that I don’t always get to do as a newspaper reporter. And one of those folks was Greg Delgado. He was introduced to me by another source who’s in the book.

He was evicted from his downtown Bend apartment in July 2021 for leaving personal belongings in a common area of the apartment building, so it was a technical violation of his lease. I went back and did a public records request for audio of the trial, listened to the trial audio, it was less than an hour long. And that eviction basically ricocheted his life in a totally different direction in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. Greg welcomed me into his life for the next two years or so, while he navigated this very difficult situation.

He was in a bunch of rentals, he also had sort of a personal difficulty going on with some family down in Arizona. He was having to drive back and forth and help take care of his dad during that time, adding yet another complication to his navigating these housing challenges. So, as a reporter, not publishing along that way, and just sitting and talking with Greg over the course of that time, I wanted to make sure that I did right by his story.

Norcross: And how’s he doing?

Bach: He’s housed. We still text quite a bit, but he’s in a duplex, I want to say, in Bend. And he was in a … I don’t want to spoil the book, but he was in a different housing situation at the end of the book, and then after publication, he showed me his newest place and it looks really cool.

Norcross: Did he take advantage of the COVID era renter protections that were available at the time?

Bach: Well, that’s a great question. The COVID-19 era renter protections – which for many people did save them from eviction, I don’t want to get it twisted – those covered folks who would have been evicted if they were not paying their rent. But because his lease violation was leaving personal belongings in a common area, the renter protections passed by lawmakers did not cover him and that’s why it was legal for him to be evicted.

Norcross: How did that eviction affect him?

Bach: He told me when he actually was staying with a friend in Terrebonne, he had to move from downtown Bend up to Terrebonne, a friend kindly offered to let him stay for free with her for several months. But he basically told me he was commuting in from Terrebonne, back and forth, and it didn’t leave a lot of time for him to keep up with his social relationships which he really valued. And he basically just said like, moving out to Terrebonne just severed all that.

Norcross: You also profile a woman named Colleen Sinski, who works for a nonprofit that actually helps homeless people get into housing. What is her story?

Bach: Colleen was the one who gave me Greg’s contact info, but Colleen was somebody that I profiled for the PBJ cover story. She’d come to my attention because of the fact that she wrote an op-ed in The Bulletin in, I want to say, 2020 or 2021, where she described … Basically, she said up front, like three years from now, I don’t plan on living in Bend because I’m getting priced out and here’s why it’s important for people like me to be able to live in Bend.

She is one of these folks who is a cornerstone employee for the economy. She helps folks who are experiencing homelessness. She is a worker, she’s now the executive director of that nonprofit. But she, herself, didn’t make enough, she felt, in a rapidly escalating market, to afford to live in Bend. She basically felt like the train was going and she was not able to keep running, to keep up, so she didn’t expect to be able to live in the city three years hence.

Norcross: And where is she now?

Bach: She was able to stay in Bend and ...

Norcross: … but only because her salary increased?

Bach: Her salary increased. She was able to get her master’s degree in social work. She wasn’t in the executive director position at the nonprofit, but then they hired her on for that role. And also, she didn’t know at the time that her dad was putting away money to help her and her partner buy a home. So she basically said with this increase in salary, after she got her master’s degree, she was able to qualify for the job. She got help from her parents to buy a house and I think her partner also had gotten a raise at work. So they were able to cobble this together through hard work, but also through what she totally acknowledged was generational help. And then [with] just the luck of they were able to find a place, she was able to stay in Bend.

Norcross: So it worked out, but she did say something to you that really resonated with me. She said, “I feel cut off from the future of my community.” And I’m sure that has everything to do with the threat of having to go, that many people in Bend feel all the time. Is that kind of what she was getting at?

Bach: I think her and Greg both … Greg, when he said moving to Terrebonne basically just severed all that, when he was talking about his social ties, and Colleen saying, “I feel cut off from the future of my community,” there’s this psychic damage that’s done to folks when they feel this crushing pressure of housing costs. How am I going to pay my next rent payment or my next mortgage payment? We’re told that rent or mortgages should only take up 30% of your monthly income. For so many people, that’s just such a joke.

Norcross: Yeah, I can hear a lot of people in Bend laughing at that right now.

Bach: I mean, across Oregon. And it is so demoralizing when renters, home buyers and homeowners look at these numbers. If they’ve got a budget spreadsheet or if they’re balancing their checkbooks, they’re trying to figure out, how am I gonna pay this without going into more credit card debt? How am I supposed to do this without taking out another consumer loan? Do I just need to move?

Norcross: We’ve been focusing on Bend, but I’m wondering how the high cost of living in that town is affecting property values in neighboring towns like Redmond or Prineville?

Bach: I think you’re going to see more folks moving to those outlying communities like Redmond, Prineville, La Pine, and there will be a spillover effect. Redmond has actually been building a lot of housing. My sister and dad live out in Redmond. They’ve been doing a ton of building over there.

Norcross: Is it easier to build in those cities than it is in Bend?

Bach: I don’t know that it’s easier to build. I actually don’t know. I haven’t done the reporting, I think, to answer that question, but that is a really good question.

Norcross: But it is happening. Is it expensive to live in those places too?

Bach: It’s not as expensive.

Norcross: OK, but you’re seeing that.

What kinds of solutions are you hearing to the problem and are any of them working?

Bach: Part of this book is about what we call in the biz, “solutions journalism,” which is not advocacy, it’s not about cheerleading certain policies, but it’s about investigating. Here’s what people are doing. Is it working? What parts of it are working? What parts are not working?

So there’s a few different solutions that I tried to really dig into. One of them is the “Missing Middle” housing legislation that was passed in 2019 in Oregon, spearheaded by then House Speaker Tina Kotek, our governor. And I really tried not only to get to the history of that – here’s why middle housing is missing, but also why it really caught on in Oregon, why it caught the fascination of lawmakers in 2019, and here’s where we go from here.

We also had a piece in The Oregonian a couple of months ago drawing on some sightline data that showed that middle housing has been really, really strong in some communities, the construction of middle housing – these are townhomes, duplexes and the like – but then it’s kind of falling flat in other communities in Oregon.

So I looked at missing middle housing, I also looked at the idea of community land trusts, which, in brief, they cut the cost of home ownership by a nonprofit owning the land underneath the home. One of the most expensive parts of owning a home is the land underneath it. And if you just own the sticks and bricks and somebody else owns the land underneath, for example, a nonprofit, that can be a stepping stone, the argument goes, into homeownership, into building equity. And then some studies show that, within a few years, like five years, I want to say, those new homeowners will actually take the equity they’ve earned and then flip that into a market-rate purchase. Then they’re off and running.

Norcross: Are there any community land trusts actually operating inside the city limits of Bend?

Bach: There are a few, but the one that I profile is called RootedHomes and they were on track, last I checked … I was talking with their deputy executive director and I think he is now their acting executive director, earlier this year. They said that they were on track for their, I want to say 80th home in Deschutes County by the end of this year. One of the things I found with community land trust is that it’s a really great model to get that stepping stone into income-restricted, affordable home ownership. But scaling it up is difficult, getting a ton of those income-restricted homes is difficult.

Then, I end one of the chapters with … they opened the applications for, I think it was seven of the homes. And 300 people had applied for them, which just speaks to that overwhelming demand for this affordable home ownership.

Norcross: Well, that gets at another problem. There could be creative solutions to the housing issue, but anytime you open up any kind of new housing, there is a deep list of people who’d be interested. How do you get around that problem?

Bach: I don’t think you get around it. I mean, I think you have to meet the demand that’s there.

Norcross: You still come off as pretty optimistic. Why is that?

Bach: We reporters are pretty skeptical and I’m in that school. But I also love Bend. I see a lot of ingenuity in communities like Bend. I have hope for the future, that there are creative, viable solutions that we, as journalists, can investigate and bring to the attention of people in power.

Norcross: You clearly have a soft spot in your heart for Bend, but you don’t live there. You live in Portland.

Bach: I do.

Norcross: Why not?

Bach: Because it’s too expensive. [Laughter] And also because I work here. My family’s in Bend and I’m very fortunate that my job at The Oregonian lets me range broadly across the state. But at the end of the day, I do live here.

Norcross: You think you might end up there eventually?

Bach: I don’t know that I could afford it.

Norcross: Yeah, yeah. What was it like for you to write this book?

Bach: You know, when my mom died, at the funeral, the pastor’s wife, who’s a close family friend, told me something about when a family member of hers died. She said, “you don’t know how you’re going to process this.” And I think that was true. She died in 2017 and it wasn’t until I was writing the chapter about the preface and her death that I really tried to leave it all on the page. And it was very cathartic.

Norcross: Jonathan Bach, it was great to talk to you. Thank you so much.

Bach: Thank you.

Norcross: Jonathan Bach is the author of “High Desert, Higher Costs: Bend and the Housing Crisis in the American West.”

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