When the Holiday Farm Fire roared through the McKenzie River corridor five years ago, it destroyed at least 500 homes and most of the community of Blue River. In the aftermath, many former homeowners sold their property rather than rebuilding. Property values went up, and housing — especially affordable or mid-range housing — became very hard to find. In response, some community members founded the nonprofit McKenzie Community Land Trust. One of the only rural land trusts in the country, the trust is nearing completion on six new homes for residents who make below 80% of the area median income for Lane County. Tabitha Eck, executive director of the McKenzie Community Land Trust, joins us to explain the model.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. When the Holiday Farm Fire roared through the McKenzie River corridor five years ago, it destroyed hundreds of homes and most of the community of Blue River. In the aftermath, many former homeowners sold their property rather than rebuild. Property values went up and housing, especially affordable or mid-range housing, became very hard to find. The McKenzie Community Land Trust was created in response. Tabitha Eck is its executive director, and she joins us now. Thanks very much for joining us.
Tabitha Eck: Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate the guests I’ve been listening to thus far and how very much in the same world we all are.
Miller: Well, I’m glad you brought up those conversations. Earlier this hour we heard about the devastation in Phoenix and Talent. Earlier this week, we heard about the horror that communities in Santiam Valley dealt with. I have to say it seems like those areas got more attention five years ago and maybe to this day than your communities along the McKenzie River. Does that seem accurate to you?
Eck: I think so. I, of course, am in it, living and breathing in it, and so I maybe have a different perspective being on the inside, but we also have a very unique characteristic in that the Holiday Farm Fire tore through the McKenzie River valley, a 50-mile stretch of rural and unincorporated towns. So we don’t have a strong city voice advocating for us at those large boardroom tables. We’re dispersed, we’re small. Without that incorporation, it’s a lot of voices coming together, so I think it’s the lack of a strong voice at the table. We’re really insular here. We take care of each other, but we’re spread out at the same time. So that might have changed the outside world’s view of us. They may not have seen the struggles and the triumphs that we’ve had.
Miller: Did that also make it harder to get money or to rebuild, the fact that it’s both so spread out and there isn’t a municipality that can organize things?
Eck: Very, very much so. I mean, the county would be our ruling body and Lane County is huge, as you can imagine. And these little towns are all spread out, so it was very hard to find the monies, to have that unified voice even in asking for those monies. But I think it was Mr. Rogers that talked about looking for the helpers that follow tragedy, and we saw that up the wazoo in the McKenzie River valley. As so many other folks of communities that have experienced fire, it draws the community together. Sometimes just out of survival, you have each other’s back and you show up for each other. Even if you’re rebuilding your own home, you’re showing up for someone else when they need some help. And that’s what happened in our community. The helpers came together and they began to rebuild without maybe some of the supports that our larger communities have. Blue River itself, its library, its clinic, its fire department, those were incredible volunteer efforts to bring those back to the community. But where we have suffered, as others have said before, is the housing, especially that affordable housing and middle income housing that not only disappeared with the fire, [but] has not been rebuilt.
Miller: And so can you describe the model that you’ve been working on to tackle that?
Eck: Absolutely. So we are a community land trust. We came about in 2022 as community leaders struggling to rebuild, supporting families, looked around for a solution. What tool could we use that could help us, us community members, rebuild? And it was a community land trust. And that is simply a nonprofit that buys and develops land for the good of the community. We don’t sell that land. We either develop or allow others to develop on that land. We retain the land, separating the price of that land from the price of the housing, making the houses more affordable to folks.
Miller: How much land were you able to buy?
Eck: We have six houses going up right now, six lots in the middle of Blue River. It was our very first project. So the very first piece of land was six little lots in the middle of Blue River. We hope to have families in those homes by the end of the year. The holidays are our goal. We have two more parcels of land in Blue River that we’ve been able to buy, and all of these lands we’ve been able to buy from locals, keeping that land as part of the community, not just now. And we talked about the vacation home, second home being really a ton of that is what’s been rebuilt. That affordable housing, that working class workforce housing, that’s not what’s been rebuilt, but that’s what we’re going to be able to rebuild with these donations of land grants, and because we’re a nonprofit, we can access funding. So for our first project, we didn’t wait for the federal money. We went after affordable housing money. The LIFT (Local Innovation and Fast Track) grant from the Oregon Housing and Community Services, a partner, DevNW, helped us write the grant before we were even an official nonprofit to get our first housing opportunity off the ground. Those are the houses that are finished right now. We hope to leverage the affordable housing and accessible housing dollars, the federal money to build two, if not more projects in the next two years.
Miller: So for that, the first one, it’s six units and this is called Rose Street Cottages.
Eck: Yeah, it’s Rose Street Neighborhood.
Miller: My guess is that demand for these affordable new homes outstrips supply so far.
Eck: Very much so. I echo my compatriots on this call that five years after a fire, we have lost many, many community members. The folks that are still with us are trying to continue to work in the community, but we don’t have housing for employees. The school district, the ranger station, they are struggling mightily, kids in the school, because there isn’t family housing, so the demand far exceeds what we can build on this first round, that’s for sure. But I will say that it has brought such hope to community members, especially in the town of Blue River, that was completely leveled by the fire, not a single standing building left in the community. These six homes right there on the edge coming up nice and tall and beautifully colored are really bringing a spark of hope we haven’t had in a while.
Miller: How have you been navigating that mismatch between supply and demand? How are you deciding who’s eligible?
Eck: Well, this particular round of housing, because of the funding source, is an 80% AMI, so that’s a specific group based on income.
Miller: That average median income?
Eck: Yes
Miller: OK. Did I mess up that acronym somehow?
Eck: Area median income.
Miller: Those mean sort of the same thing [laughter]. Right. Okay.
Eck: And there’s specific. We said you need to either be a fire survivor or you need to be trying to work in this area. You’ve got a job here and you can’t find housing, so if you can meet one of those two criteria and the income levels, you are eligible for these homes.
Miller: Hm. Talking to you, I’m reminded of what seems like a pretty similar dynamic in the Santiam Valley, where what’s come back is people’s second homes or vacation homes. What has that meant in terms of the feel of the community? And I guess what I’m really wondering is if that’s led to tensions where you live?
Eck: Hm, that is a very good question. I would say depending on who you are in the valley, you definitely have different feelings about that. There is… Tourism along beautiful areas has always kind of displaced local workforces. We see this in Hawaii following their fires, the need to secure land for locals, regardless of how beautiful the industry around you is. You want tourism, but you still need to have housing for your locals. And we are at a crisis point in our valley in terms of being able to support tourism (yay!), but we also need to have homes for locals to support the businesses that support tourism. So there’s different rubs depending on which seat you’re in necessarily, but ultimately we all want to be successful and we’re so interconnected in that success. We have found great hope in coming together for these initiatives.
Miller: Is rebuilding homes the same as rebuilding community? Does it naturally and necessarily follow, or do you have to work on that separately?
Eck: You have to do both simultaneously, and I would add a third leg, which my compatriots have echoed as well, which is that commercial side of things. You need to have homes, you need to have businesses and you need to have that community, the intersection of people coming together, that sense of belonging and connection of locking arms together. So you cannot build one and not build the other two. Hopefully they’re happening simultaneously, but great intent needs to go into not just housing, but the big growth of business and then that sense of community, bringing people back, finding that healing after disaster. It’s all three together, and sometimes it feels like a chicken and an egg and you’re maybe chasing the dollar or the opportunity in front of you, but all three need to happen to successfully heal from a tragedy.
Miller: Will there be some kind of official memorial or event to mark the five-year anniversary?
Eck: There is. That second Saturday in September ‒ we’ve separated it from Labor Day weekend ‒ we have a local group, locals helping locals, literally the hands and feet of our local community. They’re pulling community members together for an event. We’re staying away from the word celebration, but it is an honoring of that time period, but more than that, an honoring of the rebuilding of community and an invitation to come back together. We will have folks interacting that may not have seen each other in a year, or years, or more.
Miller: Tabitha Eck, thanks very much for joining us. Best of luck to you.
Eck: Thank you.
Miller: That’s Tabitha Eck. She is the executive director of the McKenzie Community Land Trust.
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