NeahCasa

The Need

• Could you afford to buy your home in the Nehalem Bay Area today or anywhere else in Tillamook County? 

Over 70% of the people living in the Nehalem Bay community could not.  Homes for families making less than $75,000 a year are almost unavailable.   Check out more details on the numbers,  especially the ones from the Oregon Housing Alliance.

How about your kids?

Many of our young people want to stay in the community. Part of the economic conditions needed to make this possible is availability of affordable housing.

How about your employees?

Have you seen the help wanted ads? Employers are telling us that  potential employees often can’t find a place to live.  Those potential employees are telling us the same thing.  Working folks deserve a chance to live where they work.

How about your caregivers? Your police force? Your City Manager? Your banker?

A nurse can’t afford to buy a home.  A home health aide cannot afford to rent a two-bedroom apartment.  Retired individuals and others with limited incomes have trouble  affording the cost of housing here. 

The Clatsop County Housing Solutions Conference put together some great posters addressing this workforce issue.

 

• Want to put some real local faces on the issue?

• Nan Nelson wrote a great series of articles about the need for affordable housing in the North Coast Citizen. Here they are in Downloadable PDF's: 3/6/08, 3/20/08, 4/3/08

• Want to learn about emergency housing needs and programs?

• Why do we have an especially challenging housing affordability problem at the Coast?  We call it The Coastal Gap.

The central issue is that median incomes are lower in coastal resort areas than in urban areas or other rural areas, but cost of land and housing is higher (often significantly). 

 

• What can we learn from the 2007 Buildable Lands Study about availability vs. affordability of land in the Nehalem Bay area?