Bend forum focuses on affordable housing issue

It wasn’t arts and crafts night at the Bend Senior Center, but you might have thought so on Thursday. Posters and markers, beans in jars and colorful flash cards were scattered across the hall for the Bend 2030 Forum on Affordable Housing.

The forum featured a series of games in which attendees would write out their housing issues on posters, and divvy up beans into jars to vote on varying solutions to those problems.

But a majority of the night was centered on the results from an online survey gathered over the past few months.

“We took the input from the survey and started asking ourselves, ‘What are the key issues, and how can we have a conversation around this?'” said ML Vidas, committee chair for the Bend 2030 Series.

As Vidas and other panel members pored over the results of the survey, attendees were given colored flash cards to raise as part of an audience survey on housing issues. Both results will be brought to the Bend City Council later on in the year.

However, some community leaders were able to see those results in person on Thursday night and commented on the unity in identifying the problems, and perhaps the lack of unity in identifying solutions.

“Well, there was certainly a consensus in identifying the problems with our current housing market,” said Deschutes County Commissioner Tammy Baney. “But there really wasn’t any consensus on finding solutions to those problems.”

More than a third of residents who took the online survey also submitted their comments and personal stories of struggling with the housing issue in Bend.

Forum leaders read a few of those comments throughout the audience survey, sparking further conversation by the dozens of residents in attendance.

“We have to look at a balance in density vs. the quality of the communities,” said 13-year Bend resident Ken Largent.

Meanwhile, others said they simply considered themselves lucky to find a home in a city where housing is hard to come by.

“(My house) had been on the market for four hours, had five offers, and ours was accepted,” said Katherine Austin, who moved to Bend this year.

“We’re just considering ourselves really blessed to make it in here,” she added.

The survey will remain online through Sunday. For more information, and to take the survey, visit Bend2030.org.