Editorial: An ‘Abundance’ of thoughts on improving housing
Published 9:26 am Friday, August 29, 2025
Bend provides a bonus with every paycheck.
The mountains are near. The forests are near. The river goes right through town. Sunny days are the rule. Downtown is thriving and Bend kind of has two.
The primary deduction from that bonus is arguably the cost of housing.
You can see that in what everyone sees with rents and home prices. Poorer people are being priced out. The middle class struggle. At least since 2019, households with more income, those making 120% of average median income, have been moving into Bend. And households with less income, those making 80% of average median income, are becoming a smaller fraction of the community.
It’s a societal rupture. It’s a wound we believe is going to get worse. We would prefer a different future.
We read “Abundance” by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein this week. Frankly, we got tired of hearing/reading liberals and conservatives referencing it and not knowing what they were talking about. And from what we did know, we knew it had something to say about housing.
The book is a primer for growth-oriented liberalism, a “liberalism that builds,” as they write. Many arguments in it would not be out of place coming from a conservative. For instance, the questions asked about environmental regulations are as welcomed by the right as they have drawn criticism from the left.
Housing is not the focus of “Abundance.” It is loaded, though, with juicy examples about the difficulty of getting housing built. People who work in housing in Bend might feel like they read an advance copy.
One anecdote: Using private money to build housing avoids “the pile of rules and regulations that taking government money triggers.” We recall sitting in a nonprofit developer’s office in Bend years ago, hearing the same thing.
A second anecdote: Permits to build take too long to get. Not a meeting goes by in Bend, well almost not a meeting goes by, of the city’s Economic Development Advisory Board where the length of time it takes to get a permit is not discussed. The city tracks the metrics. The Oregon Legislature passed a bill this year aimed at speeding up engineering permits. All of which is not to imply that Bend has this solved, yet.
A third anecdote: Everybody says they want more housing or want to help the homeless. Try to put the building somewhere in Bend and the response will almost always be: No, not here. The vetocracy is loud, too loud.
A fourth anecdote: The prevailing wage, a requirement to basically pay union wages on projects that include public money, drives up costs.
Put those four anecdotes together, and to paraphrase Thompson and Klein, they are rooted in worthy goals, but so is building more housing.
The best book about Bend’s housing challenges we have read is “High Desert, Higher Cost” by Jonathan Bach. “Abundance” is more an effort to shift the agenda of liberals. We’d recommend it to liberals and conservatives who wonder where government should think about doing more and where it should do better at getting out of the way.
The book is available at the Deschutes Public Library, if you want to save some money for housing.
