Residents of the City of Bend understand the need for affordable housing in our community.  But with large apartment buildings and micro-housing rapidly filling in the remaining vacant lots, and parking space requirements for those developments being minimized or eliminated altogether, our residential neighborhoods are becoming uncomfortably congested with people and motorized vehicles.

The Bend City Council is quick to issue building permits for these affordable housing infills while continuing to permit vacation rentals for homeowners who turn their community residences into profit-making tourism businesses.  With some one thousand such tourism businesses (houses) being permitted in Bend, the City Council's message to the community is that the tourism industry and the permitting and tax revenue which the city collects from these businesses outweigh the degradation of our neighborhoods through more crowding and much higher home prices; or in other words, tourism dollars are more important than residents' comfort.  We residents feel that the livability of our residential neighborhoods outweighs the financial well-being of the tourism industry and the ill-gotten revenue which the City of Bend collects by keeping this housing inaccessible to desperate residents.

We request the Bend City Council to phase out and end the city's vacation rental permitting program by issuing no new permits or permit renewals, and we request that no new affordable housing infills be permitted until these tourism businesses are eliminated from our residential neighborhoods.  If an affordable housing building proposal is expected to house one hundred residents in a neighborhood, then the City Council should first free up vacation rental space for one hundred residents in that neighborhood before it issues a building permit for that proposal.