KLAMATH FALLS, OR— Klamath Falls in dire need of new housing
Klamath Falls is in a housing crunch that will only get worse if three major projects come to fruition in the next few years, according to observers.
What the region needs are an investment in new housing, rental units, and subdivisions — yesterday.
Part of the cause is that interest rates are creeping up and may be keeping lower-income people out of the market. The prime interest rate is about 5.25 percent. A year or so ago, it was 4 percent and for quite a while “we were cruising under 4 percent”.
The list of obstacles contributing to a housing crunch in Southern Oregon — and most parts of the country — won’t magically disappear in 2019.
It might even be worse with interest rates rising.
There’s no escaping it, even with new single-family residences on the market, more home sellers, and new multifamily projects opening in the year to come, housing supply won’t keep pace with demand.
“Financing is starting to become an issue,” said Andrew Owen, principal architect and project manager at OWR Architects in Medford.
“In our area, the rents that can be asked are starting to make it pretty difficult to pencil out a project unless you have a sizable amount of cash on hand. The idea for most developers is to work with financed money, so that can be a problem.”
Unlike in Portland and other West Coast cities, homeless people rarely panhandle in downtown Redmond; instead, they are mostly dispersed to the outskirts and often invisible. Nor is their lack of housing mostly linked to mental health conditions, addiction or both.
In federally mandated surveys, more than 50 percent of unhoused Portlanders say they contend with those challenges. But here in rural Oregon, most adults who lack permanent housing don’t. Many work, raise children and live peacefully with close-by neighbors. Advocates vouch that the people camped outside the Redmond city limits could be successful in ordinary housing, if only they could afford it.
But as in most of rural and small-town Oregon, Redmond offers few shelter beds, low-cost apartments, or cheap mobile homes as a potential refuge for the burgeoning homeless population. What food and advice is available is provided by a small network of nonprofits and volunteers, who bring big hearts to the work. But they find themselves swamped by the growing scale of the problem.
Send sources on local and national news:
Email: tulelakenews@yahoo.com
Cell # (530) 708-7852
Last Chance Hotel Facebook Page ---> Here
Last Chance Hotel YouTube Channel ---> Here
TheRealRocks4me YouTube Channel ---> Here
James Charles Garlan@JamesCGarland Twitter ---> Here
Comments
Post a Comment