Earlier this week, we had the opportunity to provide a private tour of North Bend Family Housing to North Bend Mayor Jessica Engelke and her husband as construction activity continues to move forward on the former Bangor School site.
The tour provided a firsthand look at the scale and progress of what is becoming the South Coast’s first large-scale affordable housing development in more than 40 years.
When completed, North Bend Family Housing Phase I will bring 105 new affordable housing units to our community, including workforce housing, family housing, Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH), and Project-Based Voucher (PBV) units designed to serve households across a wide range of needs and income levels.
Walking the site today, the vision is no longer conceptual. Foundations are in place, framing is rising, infrastructure is being installed, and the future neighborhood is beginning to physically take shape.
This development represents years of planning, partnership building, funding coordination, and community collaboration between local, state, and regional partners. It is also a reflection of what can happen when rural communities lean into solutions instead of accepting housing scarcity as the status quo.
For many years, communities across the South Coast have struggled with a lack of housing production while simultaneously facing rising rents, workforce shortages, homelessness pressures, and displacement concerns. North Bend Family Housing is one piece of a much larger effort to rebuild the region’s housing continuum.
The project will ultimately provide stable housing opportunities for working families, seniors, individuals exiting homelessness, and households that have been priced out of the local market. Importantly, the development also creates long-term pathways by integrating housing with supportive services, regional partnerships, and coordinated housing systems through the SPARC framework.
We appreciate Mayor Engelke taking the time to tour the project and engage in conversations about the future of housing on the South Coast. These kinds of site visits matter because they allow community leaders to see the scale, complexity, and importance of the work underway.
Most importantly, this project represents progress that the community can physically see.
After decades without large-scale affordable housing development in North Bend, new homes are finally rising again.
By Matthew Vorderstrasse, M.A., PHM