The Making of Tillamook County’s Housing Commission

The Story of Tillamook County’s Housing Journey

The story of Tillamook County’s housing journey is recounted here in the welcome remarks presented by Tillamook County Commissioner, Erin Skaar, at the 2022 North Coast Housing Summit held December 6, 2022 in Seaside, Oregon. Commissioner Skaar began her housing advocacy leadership in 2015 as the Executive Director of Tillamook County’s local community action agency, CARE, Inc.

The 2022 Housing Summit was sponsored by Columbia Pacific Coordinated Care Organization, Oregon Housing and Community Services, and the Department of Land Conservation and Development, as well as in-kind coordination by the Association of Oregon Counties. Some 200 participants in the Summit included representatives from four counties, major employers, cities and counties, state representatives, developers, and more.

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Many of you are not new to working on this housing crisis. As leaders we have all spent the last few years doing housing studies, housing needs assessments, and identifying the barriers to housing development. We have talked about the challenges at length and in depth. On the coast, in particular,

We know that land is limited and that both our geographies and Oregon’s land use program can cause challenges in allowing us to make more land available.
We know that the proliferation of vacation rentals and second homes have also impacted the availability and price of land.
We know that the programs of Oregon Housing and Community Services don’t have enough funding to help us all at the same time, which creates both local and statewide competition.
We know that we don’t have enough housing developers or sub-contractors on the coast to create a pipeline of projects with any certainty.
We know that building costs are higher on the coast, making our projects harder to get to “pencil out”.
We know that our very necessary but more intense building codes drive a higher cost of doing business as a developer. This higher cost intensifies the competition for State funding.
We know that our area median incomes are lower, making the operation of housing projects difficult to sustain.
We know that the infrastructure in our communities is old and needs to be replaced, leading to high service development charges.

The short story here is that we know that developing housing in our communities is not easy, but we are here today because we haven’t let that stop us!

Today’s agenda is a forward-looking agenda. It is an agenda based on solutions not problems. It is an agenda that shows how all levels of government, community organizations, business owners, developers, and individuals are getting involved in creating solutions.

This day is an opportunity for all of these organizations and people to celebrate their successes by sharing them with each other and with all of you. Today is a day for everyone in the room to listen for solutions or pieces of solutions that you think could help you move the development of housing forward in your communities. We are here to help one another be even more successful!

I want to start out today sharing with you the story of Tillamook County’s housing journey. I do this not to toot our horn or say this is the best way to go, but to hopefully share with you our actions and our successes in hopes that some of what I share will give you ideas as to things you might want to do in your communities. I will be listening to everyone’s stories today to do exactly the same thing myself.

I started this work as a local non-profit leader with no housing development knowledge. I had been told by a non-profit community development corporation that building affordable housing in Tillamook County was simply not possible due to our low area median income, high land prices, etc. I felt like that was defeatist thinking and that there had to be a way and as I often say, ignorance can be a good thing. I blindly went forward looking for a way.

I started working with other local leaders and found a kindred spirit in Melissa Carlson-Swanson at our local Oregon Food Bank branch. We started meeting regularly and trying to find a way to get started. We spent time thinking about how to implement the big change we needed and identified that community solutions come from an engaged and committed community. Not rocket science but a necessary thought process to set our course! We knew that just us working on just affordable housing wasn’t going to make the changes we needed.

We quickly recruited Bill Baertlein, who was a newly elected County Commissioner, into our work. He also had no experience in housing but we helped him see the need and he jumped in with both feet. This gave us one of the pieces that we saw as critical, political will. Mis, Bill and I became the champions for the work.

Our next step was an engaged and committed community. We worked in our own networks and with Commissioner Baertlein to create a County Housing Task Force. The county established an informal task force that included a broad representation of community members from all areas of the county, a variety of industries including realtors, builders, large and small employers, schools, non-profits, and interested individuals. I truly believe that without the backing of the county to create this task force we would not have been able to create the successes that we have.

With a challenge as large as housing another key piece was public/private partnership. That partnership was being formed through the work of the task force and through direct outreach to significant potential partners. Mis and I reached out to Tillamook County Creamery Association who became a key supporter of the effort with a large donation and employee participation. They were seeing the need for housing directly in their staff, as well as in other areas of the community they supported.

We then wrote a grant to Meyer Memorial Trust and matched it with funding we had secured from Tillamook County Creamery Association and we were able to conduct our first housing study. The task force helped to guide the work of the study and kept us grounded in the voice of the community.

This first study was not an on the ground nitty gritty numbers study, but rather a 10,000 foot view intended to answer the question of “Why isn’t the needed housing being built?” and “What can we do about it?” We specifically asked the consultants to not only study the problem, but to provide recommendations of what we could do to change it.

The final report found that the wages in the area didn’t match the housing costs, that we have two different and distinct housing markets, coastal and inland, and that inland market was a “stuck and unhealthy market” .

In our stuck market people were forced to take whatever housing became available when it became available, if they could even find it. This leads to low income people who are rent cost burdened and struggling because they are paying too much, higher income people who are stuck in less costly, or incorrectly sized housing with no options for moving, seniors who are stuck in housing larger than they need with no option for moving, and people who simply cannot get housing because nothing is available when they need it. A healthy housing market needs to have 6-7% vacancy across all types of housing. Our market has 0-1% vacancy and people are stuck.

This was good information to frame a common narrative. We then took the results of the study on a countywide tour, presenting to any group that would listen. This helped us move our community into the difficult conversation about affordable housing and work force housing and the need for all of it. It also gave us a path forward with a recommendation of hiring a housing coordinator and a number of possible next steps for that person. While we have not gotten everyone on the same page and there are still some contentious conversation around housing in our communities, our tour added to the number of engaged people we had as well as helping to share the community narrative we were looking for.

After we had completed the study and our county tour, we had a bit of a lag finding the money for the housing coordinator. In order to keep the momentum going and the community engaged while the commission formed, hired a coordinator and set its course, two projects were done with the support of the Community Development Department and the local community action. One was a detailed housing needs analysis and the was other a local housing summit.

Once again grants and local employer money funded the study. This Housing Needs Analysis was a true on-the-ground housing needs assessment for the entire county (obtain report here). This work looked at available buildable lands in our cities and in the county, looked at both our current underproduction number, and our 20 year projection number of needed housing. We know that these numbers are a moving target, but in 2019 the assessment gave us a need for 400 units of affordable housing immediately and a total need for 2730 units for all income levels over the next 20 years. This has added another key piece to our story, data on magnitude of the need.

The Housing Summit was held in November of 2019 and brought together 70+ people from broad backgrounds, think of the task force on steroids, to talk about what next step the community was in support of. Sarah Absher from community development presented several options and those present chose three areas they felt the Housing Commission should work toward. They selected using the newly passed HB 2377 which allowed local governments to provide up to a 10 year tax exemption for workforce housing, the creation of a short-term rental operator license fee to use for subsidizing housing, and an accessory dwelling unit ordinance for the unincorporated areas of the county. (With the passing of the ADU Ordinance for unincorporated communities in January 2023, Tillamook County has now accomplished each of these these three goals.)

2018 was also when political will paid off with the county making housing a priority in the community development department during the next budget cycle. A housing coordinator position was officially established in fiscal year 2018-2019. Additionally, the county took the step to formalize the housing task force as a Housing Commission with the first meeting taking place in January of 2019.

While we were working on these projects, others in our community had also picked up the mantle of housing and started their own work. Our local Tillamook Area Chamber had a RARE Student that did work on housing that resulted in a Main Street grant that is partially funding some 2^nd floor housing in downtown Tillamook. They also started working to bring private developers to town to encourage workforce and market rate apartments.

Not everything we have done has been successful, however, I will share that we have added 60 units of affordable housing, have 46 units of affordable and 25 units of work force under construction, and have awarded funding to 87 more units that will be built in the coming 1-3 years.

I have talked about a number of things that I believe have been key to moving the development of housing forward in Tillamook County: Champions, Political Will, an Engaged and Committed Community, Public Private Partnerships, Data, and finally the last piece I will talk about is what I call the magic!

As a non-profit leader we are tasked with doing the impossible on a daily basis. I have stayed in this career for nearly 30 years and couldn’t keep doing it without a belief in the magic! For me, that means repeatedly talking about what you want to have happen even when it looks like it can’t happen and when people tell you no. You just keep going and magic will happen. Here is one of my quick anecdotes of the magic.

In 2018 as we were doing all this work, a couple of developers came out to Tillamook County to see what we were up to. Unfortunately they basically looked around and said, when you have something to offer us such as land for some funding, call us back. We just keep on going.

One day one of the members of my board of directors at CARE was walking on the beach outside his home in Oceanside. He met another person walking on the beach and quickly realized it was a friend from more than 30 years ago who had worked with him as an accountant. They caught up on what they were each doing today and lo and behold, the friend had taken his accounting knowledge and used it to specialize in accounting for tax credit affordable housing projects and become a housing developer himself. He was in fact just preparing to retire from a housing authority where he had been developing affordable housing. Needless to say, my board member connected me and Tom Kemper as he shared my belief that of course it was possible. I’ll leave that story there as a teaser for the Holden Creek Village Project you will hear about in the developer panel this afternoon. But that is the magic. Had either of them been 5 minutes earlier or 5 minutes later who knows where our story would have gone.

This is Tillamook County’s journey and I will suggest that each city, county and community will have their own journey. Ours was not linear and not always moving at the speed we would like, but we just keep moving forward.

You will hear more about our story today as well as the stories of other counties, cities and even the State of Oregon. We have more people and resources focused on building housing now than we have ever had. I believe that we are in a space and time where new things are not only possible, but are certain to happen.

Housing Commission meetings are open to the public both in-person and online. Check notifications and resources on the Tillamook County Housing Commission website https://www.co.tillamook.or.us/bc-hc and Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100068795516992.