Rising housing costs pushing people from Bend

The median sale price of a home in Bend is $435,000. That’s a price tag not everyone can afford, and that has more people commuting dozens of miles each workday.

Alex Durham works in Bend but moved to La Pine seven months ago because it’s so much more affordable than Bend.

But he’s said Thursday it’s frustrating because people making average salaries can’t make ends meets.

“We’re the workforce. We have to be able to live here,” Dunham said. “We have to be able to provide ourselves housing. So living inside the city limits for folks my age is kind of difficult.”.

“By any means, I’m not poor. But it’s very difficult to afford housing in Central Oregon,” he added.

Nathan Wissing, a real estate broker at Keller Williams, said he’s worried about the future of Bend with the cost of living so high.

“It’s good people are moving here, but I think we need to be a city together that has a plan,” Wissing said.

“Do we want to make it a bigger city? Do we want to expand Bend to be 150,000 people, or do we want it to be another Boulder, another Tahoe, and a working-class person is working at a restaurant in order to make any money, in order to be able to afford rent?” he said.

Wissing said he sees clients who grew up on Bend’s Westside but can no longer afford to live there.

And he sees lots of people choosing to work in Bend but move to La Pine, Redmond or Prineville because of the lower cost of housing there.

“Someone that’s been living here 10-15 years, they can’t afford anything $450,000, they have to go work in Redmond,” Wissing said. “People work in Bend and they travel from Redmond, or they travel from La Pine, even Prineville, just to work here.”

For Durham, renting in Bend wasn’t an option because of the high move-in costs and strict income requirements — and actually buying a house in Bend was virtually impossible

“We’ve looked into purchasing homes in Bend, and we don’t have the $50,000 for deposit,” he said. “And it’s folks my age in the working class that serve the people on Mt. Washington and Aubrey Butte.”

“We don’t have that kind of income. We’re not making minimum wage these days. Bend’s a good community, they pay us well here — but even with our incomes, it’s tough, it really is,” Durham said.

The median home sale price in La Pine is $262,000.