Pendleton Planning Commission talks over housing strategy

“The state has asked cities with populations over 10,000 to come up with strategies to encourage more housing development, and they are most interested in affordable housing,” Chase said. “The city of Pendleton is focused mostly on just getting affordable housing.”

She explained how to do that.

“There’s the smaller lots because if you have less charge for the land, it makes it more affordable, and then there is the smaller house,” she said.

A third option is financially supplemented housing, but Pendleton does not have that program.

“When Pendleton was developed and the zones were chosen, I believe in the 1970s, the citizens or governing body chose to put all of our high-density residential land on our most severely sloped land or land that was constrained in some manner, whether it be by road, by river, or by floodplain,” she told the commission.

That reduced the ability for Pendleton to build apartment complexes, she said.

The city then chose to use low density, she said, “to have the biggest and nicest views and most land area,” which can hamper development. She said other cities have probably done the same thing and that’s what is driving the problem of affordable housing.

“When you have a restriction on where you can build your apartment complexes, that means you can’t get the elbow room of higher density expanding out,” Chase said. “So everyone is now left with single family homes, which are more expensive to own, to operate, to maintain, to continue.”

She asked the commission what if Pendleton “did a blanket rezone” of all its residential land? Some residents, for example, are living in single-family residential zones that really are low-density residential zones, Chase said.

Hull said he “liked everything about this kind of housing because it gives us an ability to create incentives.”

He also said Pendleton needed to get rid of deed restrictions, such as insisting a property made available for reduced tax rates could not be sold to a buyer who would use the same property for anything greater than affordable housing for a minimum number of years.

“I don’t see anybody benefiting from a deed restriction because the intent is not necessarily to take a house and adapt it,” Hull said. “I would just like to get rid of the deed restriction on here unless you can give us a really good reason why that would need to be there.”