High Desert, Higher Costs

Nestled against the Cascade Mountains, former lumber town Bend, Oregon, entices residents who long to live in a wonderland of sagebrush and forests. But like so many other communities across the West, Bend has too few homes for everyone clambering for access. In High Desert, Higher Costs, Jonathan Bach takes a closer look at the housing crisis in this mid-sized city that is both the population center for rural Central Oregon and a major recreation area. Bach uses Bend as a lens into the growing housing crisis in the region, where residents and tourists alike prize access to outdoor recreation, and housing issues have been brewing for decades.

Like other cities in Montana, Idaho, and Colorado, Bend serves as a gateway to popular natural areas while also experiencing a limited amount of new housing, increasing populations, amenity migrants in the age of remote work, depressed or stagnating wages, and a widening gulf between homeowners and renters. High Desert, Higher Costs introduces us to regular people—from the former political candidate evicted during COVID-19 to the nonprofit worker hoping to build apartments for the houseless—who struggle to call Bend home. Bach explores the causes of these issues and the political, legal, economic, and cultural factors influencing them, and also offers potential solutions for current and future residents to build their lives now, and in the years to come, in Bend and throughout the American West.

“The horizon of the American West has always promised a landscape so vast that it could never be contained. But today this same topography is lined by invisible fences of exclusivity. In High Desert, Higher Costs, Jonathan Bach investigates how the infusion of affluence and a widening wealth gap has transformed Bend, Oregon, where many people who built this community—and still keep it running—can no longer afford to live there. With expertise and sensitivity, Bach unspools a story that is at once intensely personal and as sweeping as the Oregon sky—stark, unforgettable, and yet relentlessly hopeful.” —Brent Walth, author of Fire at Eden’s Gate: Tom McCall and the Oregon Story

“Set against the backdrop of the housing crisis in Bend, Oregon, Jonathan Bach’s book invites us into the lives of everyday people to understand what it takes to find, keep, and afford a place to call home. Meticulously detailed, High Desert, Higher Costs offers an account of the Byzantine layers of local, state, and federal policies that have led us to this crisis and examines which ones might move us out of it. Moving from discussions of urban-growth boundaries and short-term rentals to lending programs and YIMBY density proposals, this should be required reading for anyone trying to understand the many nuances of the housing crisis, how we got here, and what steps we can take to imagine a different future of housing in our communities.” —Ryanne Pilgeram, author of Pushed Out: Contested Development and Rural Gentrification in the US West