Loeb

It will require collaboration to fix Oregon’s housing crunch, especially in the state’s rural areas, which face unique challenges in constructing the thousands of units needed to house the state’s workforce.

And the effort will force some of the stakeholders in that effort into somewhat unfamiliar territory.

That was the word last week from Lisa Mensah, the new president and CEO of the Oregon Community Foundation, who traveled to Wallowa County for meetings with county organizations. One of those meetings was with Nils Christoffersen, the executive director of Wallowa Resources, the Enterprise-based nonprofit organization that works to build stronger economies and healthier landscapes throughout the region.

This past weekend, Mensah and Christoffersen met on a Zoom call to discuss their partnership and their roles in working to solve the state’s housing shortage. Also on the call was Megan Loeb, the foundation’s senior program officer for economic vitality and housing.

Loeb noted that Oregon needs to build 29,000 to 32,000 housing units every year for the next decade to dig out of its housing deficit — and all types of housing are needed. “We need affordable housing, we need subsidized housing,” Loeb said. “We need market-rate housing.”

And the state’s shortage of housing increasingly is serving as a drag on the state’s economy, she said.

“We recognize that the lack of housing in our state is hampering our economic vitality, our social safety nets, hampering our ability to have a vibrant and well-functioning state,” she said. “So it is a priority for us to do what we can as a foundation to serve as a catalyst for the development of housing of all types around our state.”

Rural areas such as Wallowa County face unique challenges in developing housing, Loeb noted, including a lack of access to financial resources and workforce shortages, not just in construction but also in local governments charged with permitting and building infrastructure.

Mensah, an Oregon native who worked in the U.S. Department of Agriculture as an undersecretary for rural development, believes the Oregon Community Foundation can work with local partners such as Wallowa Resources to help solve some of those challenges.

“Clearly, when we’re tackling housing, this is a challenge that’s going to be an all-in requirement,” Mensah said. “It’s going to take government, private markets, nonprofit players, so many. This is really a challenge that’s going to call out many, many actors. And I think where our foundation is skilled is when many actors that are on the ground need to take on new work.”

Christoffersen’s Wallowa Resources, which recently marked its 25th anniversary, is one of those actors taking on new work. The housing shortage is a relatively new development in rural areas, he said, “and it certainly is for Eastern Oregon.”

Christoffersen recalled conversations he held with his board members in 2021, about priorities for the organization going forward. A top priority was job creation, he said — and a big part of that was workforce housing. The lack of housing has hobbled businesses that are facing workforce shortages, in part because workers can’t find a place to live: “They weren’t able to take advantage of the opportunities they had to grow their businesses or to serve their customers, clients, patients.”

But, he added, organizations like Wallowa Resources — and even local governments — “haven’t built up the capacity or the expertise to handle this, so we’re on a steep learning curve.”

That’s where organizations such as the Oregon Community Foundation can be useful, he said — to help local stakeholders gain the capacity and knowledge to understand housing needs and develop plans to meet those needs.

Christoffersen said Wallowa Resources has been meeting with county officials and the Northeast Oregon Economic Development District and has supported a broader regional discussion through Eastern Oregon University. Also, Wallowa Resources has been learning about alternative housing strategies such as developments where nonprofit organizations own the land that housing units are built on, to help reduce housing costs.

For its part, the foundation has experience with alternative solutions for housing, such as Project Turnkey, which allocated money to local communities to refurbish hotels to be used to shelter people who are homeless. It can help local organizations connect with others around the state that are grappling with similar challenges. The foundation also can provide key early support for local initiatives, Mensah said.

“We’re often the money that can come early to the table and can help institutions set new tables and embrace new lines of work,” she said. “What I love about leading a foundation is that we can often be the glue that bridges some of the larger forces.”