A committee appointed to help spur Bend’s housing production has come up with a set of policy recommendations the Bend City Council will discuss this month — including whether to ask voters to help subsidize affordable housing through a tax measure.
The recommendations are intended to propel Bend toward lofty home building targets established by the state. That could mean expanding property tax and infrastructure fee exemptions for affordable housing while creating new loan and credit-backing programs to help finance developments.
“We’ve really been pushing housing for years now,” Bend Mayor Melanie Kebler told the Source. “Now we’re going, ‘OK, what else can we do? What other tools have we not tried yet that we should try?”
The Bend City Council in June 2025 finalized a resolution appointing the Housing Options Made for Everyone committee, or HOME. The committee members consisted of several nonprofit and for-profit affordable housing developers, two bankers and representatives from the Central Oregon Builders Association and Bend Chamber of Commerce. The committee met eight times to hash out the recommendations.
The potential for a taxpayer bond to support affordable housing will likely generate the thorniest discussion of the bunch.
The committee discussed the possibility of a bond in the range of $50 million to $100 million, which could support development of between 350 and 1,000 units through land acquisition, infrastructure funding, according to a memo.
“We spent the first six months coming up with all of these awesome incentives and ideas,” said Sarah Odendahl, CEO of the Bend Chamber of Commerce and chair of the committee. “And then we realized, OK, they all cost money. How are we going to fund this?”
Odendahl said the committee opted to recommend a taxpayer bond because it spreads costs across the entire community, calling it a “sustainable and kind of wide net for funding.”
Voters in several larger cities like Portland and San Francisco have supported taxpayer bonds for affordable housing.
In Bend, residents are still paying off a $190 million transportation bond voters approved in 2020. Kebler said the City Council will also have to consider potential taxpayer asks from other taxing districts and the City’s fire department levy, which expires after 2028.
“What might our community be willing to vote ‘yes’ on when it comes to housing? I think that’s what we’ve got to figure out,” Kebler said.
Other tools could be less politically risky but complex to implement. The committee recommends exploring the Moderate-Income Revolving Loan fund, a program authorized by the state legislature to support “workforce and middle-income” housing, according to the memo. But the memo notes that participation by local jurisdictions has been limited, and some committee members were concerned about financial risk for the City.
A 2025 housing report found that nearly half of all renters in Bend are “cost-burdened,” meaning they spend at least one-third of their income on rent. The same report found only 16% of Bend households could afford the average price of a home.
To meet the state’s recommendations, Bend will need to dwarf historic levels of home building, especially for lower-cost housing. The Oregon Housing Needs Analysis pegs the need for more than 33,000 new homes in Bend over the next 20 years. That includes 13,700 homes restricted to people earning less than 80% of the Area Median Income, which is about $91,100 for a household of four. To follow up, the City Council set a two-year goal of permitting 1,800 new units below that income level. One year later, the City is not even one-quarter of the way to its goal, having permitted 357.
That’s still a higher number of lower-cost units than were permitted in the previous two years, according to Jacob Larsen, a spokesperson for the City.
“Those are very lofty numbers,” Kebler said. “Especially at the affordability levels that they want, those require a lot of subsidy. I think part of putting it in the goals was to show how hard it might be to actually get to those numbers and find out what some of those barriers are to not building that much housing.”
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Gee, a committe of housing developers, bankers and representatives from the Central Oregon Builders Association and Bend Chamber of Commerce think that they should get a lot of taxpayer money. Check your tax bill and see how many levies and “fees” are stacked up there. It may be that a new housing report will find that nearly all property owners in Bend are “tax-burdened,”
Another bond? Look at the amounts quoted. That’s a lot of money per home !
There is never enough for this local government. No more.
This government acts as if state targets are mandates. They’re suggestions, and meeting the affordability crisis is a ruse when you look at how many of new builds are actually affordable.
It’s money in the pockets of developers, an unsustainable building industry (unless we want to look like a giant concrete jungle), and in the wildfire prone area of central Oregon with a continued drought for the foreseeable future, very bad governance.