Life can be a little more extreme on the Oregon Coast, and with fewer resources, development is a challenge. Infrastructure needs there are great. Contractors have greater trouble finding skilled labor. And of course, the threat of a large seismic event is always close at hand.

Local economies on the coast are varied, which has led to different solutions for funding needed improvements.

“Cities are all fulfilling slightly different roles at the coast,” said Beth Goodman, a senior planner with consultancy ECONorthwest.

Student center

When Oregon State University sought to significantly expand its operations at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport two years ago, the school and the city faced a dilemma aside from whether to build a $50 million research project in a .

They needed to figure out how to provide affordable housing for 500 students without hurting Newport’s own affordable housing efforts.

Much of Newport’s workforce already commutes from bedroom communities like Waldport, Toledo and Lincoln City because they can’t afford the rents in Newport.

“We really don’t have the capacity to absorb that many students given our limited rental stock out here,” said Derrick Tokos, economic development director for Newport.

Coastal communities in Oregon generally have only a limited supply of workforce housing. Residential construction is predominantly seasonal or second houses.

OSU and the city of Newport have partnered with a private developer to build 130 units of housing intended for students. Construction is scheduled to begin in the fall – around when ground is expected to be broken on the 80,000 square feet of new Hatfield classrooms and research space.

As with a lot of coastal communities, parts of Newport lie on the Tsunami Inundation Map, which means restrictions on rebuilding or remodeling efforts. The university’s decision to invest so broadly in the inundation zone was from scientists and engineers, but the university responded by saying the location was carefully considered and presented a “teaching tool and design opportunity.” Piles are planned to be built 100 feet down to avoid liquefaction, along with other novel design techniques.

But the matter of student housing was considered different, said Emily Picha of ECONorthwest, which has performed work for several coastal communities. For this, the team had to build outside the inundation zone, eventually selecting a site near Oregon Coast Community College, 1.5 miles away.

Newport has a number of advantages over other coastal communities, including good geography and a relatively diverse economy, Picha said. It has ocean observation-based higher education and research, a robust commercial fishing industry and ocean-related tourism – much of it from Portland. And with lots of retail options, it functions as the commercial hub for its area. Newport is also unique in that much of it is located on bluffs, out of the inundation zone.

Geography matters

For other communities, the Tsunami Inundation Map poses more serious dilemmas, like whether to relocate essential services farther ashore. Yachats, for example, has had to relocate its fire station outside of town.

Basically all of Coos Bay is located in the tsunami zone or a floodplain with many parcels vacant or underutilized. The city has very old infrastructure (wooden pipes in places) and stormwater outfalls. Its leaders are facing a conundrum over whether to relocate its library outside the inundation zone.

But one of the largest tugboat operators on the West Coast is located on Coos Bay’s waterfront. And the city is still attracting new development to meet the economic opportunities it’s now seeing, Picha said.

“I think in a lot of these communities, success will be about balancing very active industrial uses with tourist forces,” she said.

Many coastal communities also get heavy pass-through traffic on highways, specifically U.S. Route 101. This takes a heavy toll on their roads and other infrastructure. Plus, even though many of these visitors are paying lodging taxes, Oregon has a requirement, passed in the early 2000s, that those revenues be spent on tourism-related purposes.

Coastal communities are rarely situated on flat terrain, like in Oregon’s valleys. This means additional costs for infrastructure such as pump stations.

Plus, geography can affect a coastal economy in other ways. Lincoln City’s housing crunch, for instance, is even starker than Newport’s because it has more seasonal housing in part due to greater proximity to Portland.

Tillamook, meanwhile, is located a few miles inland from the ocean, so it doesn’t have the same tourism opportunities as other communities along the coast. Its economy has historically been agrarian and based on the dairy market.

But now efforts are ramping up to combine tourism and dairy. The Tillamook County Creamery Association has gone public with plans for a major expansion of its cheese factory geared toward “maximizing the tourist experience.” The slick, 38,000-square-foot space designed by Seattle firm Olson Kundig will feature a dining hall heavy with reclaimed wood and instructional exhibits about dairy life. It’s scheduled to open next year.

Tourist attraction

As Portland adds more than one thousand residents a month, Oregon’s coastal communities know this will likely translate to dozens, and eventually hundreds, more visitors a year.

Portlanders making weekend trips to the coast is nothing new, but at a place like , the pace has gotten intense, according to Goodman and Picha. The cape, in unincorporated Tillamook County, is fairly small and close to Portland, with roads that lead right to it.

The inundation has escalated so much that leaders there are hoping to start charging visitors a toll for parking. This will help shift the cost of facility maintenance more onto users, said Rachel Hagerty, Tillamook County general services administrator.

Hagerty said the pay-to-park scheme isn’t about hitting an untapped revenue source – the area has been literally trashed by visitors for years, she noted. Work associated with the first phase of the plan – scheduled to begin this year – also includes trash compaction and a beefed-up recycling program, as well as new restroom facilities more “resilient to vandalism and heavy use.”

Part of the idea is waking up to the reality that the cape no longer is an off-the-beaten-track curiosity, said Steve Faust, principal at Cogan Owens Greene, which consulted on the master plan.

“A lot of this has been a long time coming,” he said.

As far as tourism goes, there’s lots of activity in Seaside and Cannon Beach, and some in Warrenton. Farther south, in Manzanita and Lincoln City, Portland’s impact is felt less, Picha said.

The opportunities for southern coastal cities, like Florence and Coos Bay, are much more tied to cities like Salem, Corvallis and Eugene. Farther south, in places like Gold Beach, Brookings and Bandon, more visitors come from California.

Bandon is regarded as more high end,” Picha said, with golf courses and a pricy second home market.

Catching up

Multifamily construction never fully rebounded after the recession. Officials in coastal cities are now looking at incentives like property tax exemptions to spur affordable development. The Newport City Council is also looking at a construction excise tax, in concert with reductions in system development charge amounts. That is because there aren’t many resources for providing housing, Tokos said.

“We’re working with the development community to control the push-point. We can’t control much of it,” he said.

Tokos and others in Newport are hoping the OSU student housing spurs other multifamily development. There are two additional projects, large for Newport, in the works – a fourplex and a 60-unit apartment building. One of the few Portland-area developers working on the coast is Landwaves, whose Wilder project involves green, affordable houses. The firm is in the process of developing more than 100 similar apartments.

“I think it’s a combination of what OSU’s doing and the market finally catching up that are going to play to our favor in the coming year,” he said. “We’ll see.”

The post An ocean of hurdles to overcome appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.