Oregon’s campaign to push affordable housing from government balance sheets into actual neighborhoods produced another 45 apartments in Bend this month, completing a multimillion-dollar development designed for households increasingly priced beneath one of the state’s more expensive residential markets.
Nine Peaks opened Sept. 9 in northeast Bend, bringing one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments to the city’s medical district near St. Charles Medical Center. The development represents approximately $10 million in financing administered through Oregon Housing and Community Services, including $1 million connected to the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program, along with local financial participation assembled during years of planning.
Behind those numbers are 45 income-restricted apartments intended primarily for households earning no more than approximately 50 percent of Bend’s area median income. The development also includes housing serving people with disabilities, extending the project beyond the broader workforce pressures that have accompanied Central Oregon’s population growth and escalating housing costs.
Housing Works, the regional housing authority serving Central Oregon, developed the property. Cascade Management is handling its operation. City records show Bend also committed $900,000 through its Affordable Housing Fund when the development was moving through earlier planning under the name Connors Crossing.
The completed property places affordable housing within one of Bend’s major employment and health-care corridors. Nine Peaks sits along NE Connors Avenue near 27th Street, close to St. Charles and beside property associated with Mosaic Medical’s planned headquarters, clinic and pharmacy. Schools, shopping, public transportation and other services are also accessible from the surrounding area.
That geography carries economic weight in a city where housing costs have increasingly complicated the relationship between wages and the availability of workers. Hospitals, restaurants, schools, retailers, service companies and public agencies require employees across a broad wage spectrum, while the cost of living in Bend has placed conventional market housing beyond the financial reach of some of the people filling those jobs.
Nine Peaks does not operate as ordinary market-rate housing discounted during an introductory period. Its affordability requirements are attached to the financing structure that made construction possible, preserving the apartments for qualifying households rather than allowing them to immediately migrate into Bend’s unrestricted rental inventory.
The development also demonstrates how expensive that construction has become.
Building below-market housing does not eliminate the price of property, labor, materials, utilities, permitting or infrastructure. Governments instead use combinations of financing, tax incentives and affordability restrictions to close the gap between what a development costs to construct and what qualifying residents can afford to pay.
At Nine Peaks, Oregon’s contribution was paired with federal tax-credit financing and Bend’s locally funded housing program. The result took years to move from planning documents to occupancy. City records from 2024 already identified the proposed 45-unit development and its approximately 50-percent median-income target, with permitting and construction scheduled to follow.
The September opening consequently provides Oregon with something more concrete than another housing appropriation or announced development: the money has reached completion, apartments have been built and another piece of Bend property has been converted into permanently restricted affordable housing.
The scale remains modest against Oregon’s broader shortage. Forty-five apartments cannot materially erase Bend’s overall housing deficit, nor can a single development resolve the affordability pressures confronting households throughout Central Oregon. The project instead adds inventory at the portion of the market where conventional construction has struggled to produce rents accessible to lower-income residents.
Oregon is attempting the same conversion of public financing into housing elsewhere.
OHCS recently approved financing supporting nearly 300 additional affordable homes across Oregon, encompassing both rental housing and homeownership projects. Bend is scheduled for another 38 affordable homeownership opportunities through Woodhaven Community Housing, while projects farther south are directing substantial investment toward communities carrying housing pressures of their own.
Phoenix and Roseburg are expected to collectively receive 163 affordable rental homes through Bennu Heights and Green Family Housing. Those developments extend the housing investment into Southern Oregon, where Phoenix in particular continues rebuilding residential capacity lost during the 2020 Labor Day fires.
The statewide connection places Nine Peaks within a larger test of Oregon housing policy. State and local governments have committed substantial public resources to increasing residential construction, but the measure that ultimately reaches communities is not the size of an appropriation or the number of units announced for future development. It is how many homes survive financing, permitting and construction and eventually become available for occupancy.
In Bend, 45 of those homes have now crossed that threshold.
Nine Peaks enters the housing inventory after years of financing and development work, delivering apartments specifically positioned below the unrestricted rental market and placing them near one of Central Oregon’s principal employment centers. Similar projects are advancing in other regions, carrying the same financial equation into communities with very different housing markets.
For Bend, the immediate result is another 45 places to live. For Oregon, the project provides a completed example of what its increasingly expensive affordable-housing strategy produces once the appropriations, tax credits, local contributions and construction schedules finally end at a front door.