Oregon City Explores New Ways to Develop Senior Housing

Lacey Beaty, the mayor of Beaverton, Ore., is hoping to try something new.

Since taking office as mayor in 2021 after serving six years on the City Council, Beaty has been focused on affordable housing. Like lots of other U.S. cities, particularly those in the west, Beaverton has seen housing costs grow out of reach for more of its residents in recent years. Average home sale prices doubled between 2015 and 2022, according to one report. Almost half of renters are paying more than 30 percent of their income on their apartments. Beaty helped open the city’s first emergency homeless shelter in 2023, using only federal and state funds. Over the last few years, her office has brought on a series of graduate student fellows to research housing issues, focusing particularly on “middle housing” — the kind of modest, relatively low-cost homes that were typical for previous generations of buyers.

Now, Beaverton is looking to run with one of the ideas that came out of the fellows program. The idea, borrowed from a German practice called baugemeinschaft or building groups, involves a team of households pooling their own resources to develop multifamily projects for their own use. There are some related examples in the U.S., including an apartment complex in Seattle built by a group of friends that also includes about two dozen units rented out to other tenants. Co-op housing, collectively owned and managed by tenants, is also relatively common in New York and some other East Coast cities, and cooperative or crowd-funded real estate development is on the rise. But projects designed and built by and for a specific group of tenants are not common.

Beaty thinks the model could help solve some challenges specific to Beaverton — namely, the need for senior residents to downsize. She says many seniors remain in large, family-oriented single-family homes long after they make use of all the space, because maintaining ownership is a much safer bet than entering the volatile rental market. There’s little condo development in the area. Beaverton is exploring using public land and waiving certain fees and charges to promote a project that would house seniors, without actually getting the city involved in developing it.

“Government tends to make things more expensive when we’re involved in the building of things,” Beaty says. “If this is done by a different group, can we actually bring the cost down reasonably to build it? Because what it costs us to build affordable housing is astronomical.”

Beaverton was recently named among 50 finalists in the Bloomberg Mayors Challenge, a competition encouraging government innovation. The city has received $50,000 to refine the proposal, described in a press release as “a new path to affordable middle housing ownership by streamlining permitting processes for groups of future homeowners who then will work together to design and build homes simultaneously to bring down costs.” A team from Beaverton, including staff in the mayor’s office, will travel to Bogotá, Colombia, for Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Ideas Camp this month to work on the proposal and learn from other finalist cities. The 25 winning cities will receive $1 million each and staffing support to help implement the proposal.

James Anderson, who leads the Government Innovation program at Bloomberg Philanthropies, said in an email that housing is “issue No. 1 for America’s mayors.”

“What [Beaverton] is proposing is a bold new business model to address the issue head-on, and at scale, with a cooperative housing solution,” Anderson said. “We look forward to working with their team to pilot and test the concept, and see its potential.”

Beaty says Beaverton is hoping to help seniors develop housing at the site of an existing senior center. Not only could it help seniors age in place in new, manageable units, but it could also help open up larger family-oriented homes to new residents. There are still a lot of questions about how it could work, what role the city would have and how exactly the eventual residents would be chosen. For the city’s goals, it would make the most sense to convene seniors who already live in Beaverton, Beaty says. The city’s legal department is currently reviewing the idea to make sure it would comply with fair housing laws and other regulations. Beaty’s office is also working with credit unions on potential financing options, along with area community college programs that work with seniors.

She says she’s eager to push the idea forward, even if it wouldn’t solve all the city’s housing challenges at once.

“Government isn’t allowed to fail. We never get to do ideas because failure means the end of someone’s political career,” Beaty says. “What I like about this is the ability to try something new with an outside organization helping us. Innovation happens in the private sector all the time. People want government to be innovative but they don’t want government to fail, so what government ends up doing is playing it safe.”