FEATURE
A Place to Call Home Communal living project for veterans could serve as a model for solving the homeless crisis
WWW.BENDSOURCE.COM / FEBRUARY 18, 2021 / BEND’S INDEPENDENT VOICE
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By Eric Flowers
Courtesy Central Oregon Veterans Village
Above is a bird's eye view of what the Central Oregon Veterans Village will look like when completed.
B
end’s newest neighborhood won’t have a homeowners’ association or a lengthy list of bylaws. There won’t be any open houses or bidding wars among prospective homebuyers. What it will have is a collection of individuals who have served their country but have since fallen on challenging times. Central Oregon Veterans Village is a chance for them to make a fresh start while living in a community of individuals who are facing similar challenges. With any luck, their stay will be uneventful and short-lived as they transition into stable long-term housing, something that some of the residents haven’t had since they left their service careers. Located near the Deschutes County public safety campus, which includes the sheriff’s offices and county jail, the Veterans Village will feature 15 one-room homes, akin to the popular tiny homes that have cropped up around the Northwest. The project is the brainchild of the Bend Heroes Foundation, a nonprofit that previously focused on initiatives that paid tribute to local veterans, including the memorial near Newport Bridge. Foundation President Erik Tobiason said the idea of a housing project for homeless vets came about after the Heroes Foundation was concluding its Honor Flight program. That initiative funded and organized trips to Washington, D.C., for World War II veterans to visit the then-recently completed World War II memorial. As the foundation reached the end of the list of eligible veterans in the region, it found itself at a crossroads, Tobiason said. What else could we do to honor and support veterans, they wondered. A new path The Heroes Foundation considered providing mental health support for vets experiencing Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder and depression, but initial forays revealed that other agencies were better equipped for such a mission. It went back to the drawing board and emerged with the outline of a plan for a transitional housing project that would become Veterans Village. Two years later—in January—Tobiason’s group, in partnership with the Central Oregon Veterans Outreach, broke ground. The Veterans Village is expected to welcome its first residents in early March with full occupancy by April, Tobiason said. “We got up the learning curve fairly quickly,” Tobiason said. “Two years ago we didn’t know much about the issue of homelessness.” Since then it’s been a rapid-fire education that included navigating the process of land acquisition, learning the nuances of local zoning, the creation of public-private partnerships and ultimately
a change to state land-use laws that allowed the city to fast-track the project. There have been in-kind contributions from civil engineers and consultants like Parametrix and builders—namely Hayden Homes, which designed the template for the tiny houses. Deschutes County lent staff time to help identify potential sites in public ownership—key for a project that was long on ideas but short on cash. Ultimately, they zeroed in on the county’s own parcel near the sheriff’s office. The lot is slated for future expansion of the sheriff’s campus, but there was no plan for that to happen anytime soon. Tobiason sat down with Sheriff Shane Nelson, who he said was immediately supportive. In the end, the Heroes Foundation and the county inked a 10-year lease for the site—a major coup for the project and a no-turning-back point of sorts for the Heroes Foundation and its partners. Courtesy Central Oregon Veterans Village
A composite of what the final houses will look like in the Veterans Village.
“The county was super awesome,” Tobiason said. “We looked at all the available publicly owned property— county property, city property, school district, parks district, even irrigation districts. We made a list of criteria and properties and kind of landed on the space we ultimately got because it met all of our criteria.” That included easy access to public transportation and proximity to the other support services. Since breaking ground in January, the partnership has laid the groundwork for utilities, graded a service road and developed the building pads for the homes. Youth volunteers at J Bar J Ranch are putting together the bones of the homes including walls, roof trusses and so on, to be trucked onto the site for final construction. Tobiason sees the collaboration as a win-win. J Bar J youth, all of whom have had legal or behavioral issues, can participate in a worthy cause while learning a skill that they can take with them. The concept of independent transitional housing for homeless vets is fairly new. The inspiration for the Bend project came initially from a similar project in Kansas City run by a nonprofit. Closer to home, Clackamas County developed its own Veterans Village with small single-occupancy homes, which opened roughly two years ago to address the issue of homelessness among its veteran population. As is the case here, Clackamas County offered land for the project that provides housing for 15 veterans. To handle the day-to-day operations, Clackamas County partnered with the nonprofit Do Good Multnomah, whose mission is to provide housing support for veterans around the Portland area. Since opening, the Clackamas Veterans Village project has placed 29 veterans in permanent housing. At the same time, it has expanded its community from 15 veterans to 19 veterans, said Jonny
