By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews
Linda Hetzler is the well-known owner and operator of a popular restaurant, a small hardware store and a boutique hotel in Yachats and knows the struggles many of her 80 employees have finding places to live.
“All of the businesses in Yachats are just screaming for help,” she says. “We have people in cars, in tents, sleeping in storage businesses.”
But Hetzler’s latest attempt at a solution to her workforce housing issues has run afoul of state and county land-use regulations and will likely land her in court.
Two years ago Hetzler and her husband, Tom Smith, paid $550,000 for two parcels covering 35 acres on East Line Road, off Starr Creek Road just north of Yachats in unincorporated Lincoln County. The largest parcel – 20 acres – sits near the top of the hill.
Both parcels were logged in the early 1990s and now consist dense stands of overgrown alder trees mixed with some larger coastal spruce or hemlock spared 30 years ago.
Smith, who does much of the construction for their various companies, demolished a rotting manufactured home on the hilltop site and is converting its garage into a small home.
To house employees, Hetzler erected four yurts on the site and hooked them and a travel trailer to the home’s existing septic system. Eight people live in three yurts and trailer while a smaller yurt houses laundry and shower facilities.
But Lincoln County says the property’s zoning – for timber conservation — doesn’t allow any of that.
Hetzler has been fighting with the county planning department since early this year over whether the yurts and trailer are legal and if they can be connected to the house’s septic system.
The county’s patience has run out. On July 14 it notified Hetzler and Smith they had 30 days — until Monday — to disconnect the three yurts and a travel trailer from the septic system or face “enforcement action.”
Hetzler said she won’t do that.
“No,” she told YachatsNews during a tour of the property last week. “Take me to court.”
That’s what Lincoln County will do if Hetzler doesn’t comply.
“In this situation, it will be a lawsuit asking to disconnect the yurts and RV from the system and not bring them back,” assistant county counsel Douglas Holbrook told YachatsNews.
Land-use rules
The Hetzler-Smith properties are just to the east and above the Starr Creek neighborhood, which was zoned for residential use in the 1970s and has single-family homes scattered along eight roads.
The hilltop property at the center of the dispute is zoned as “timber conservation,” meaning it is set aside for forest use and to protect it from the encroachment of development. It can have just one residential dwelling on it.
That zoning designation is part of Oregon’s 50-year-old land-use planning system designed to put most housing in cities and protect farm and timberlands from over-development. That system is coming under greater scrutiny as the state and local governments strain to help find ways to build more – and more types of – housing in what many government officials call an emergency.
But the focus and effort by the 2023 Legislature, Gov. Tina Kotek and state agencies has been on changing housing standards in cities and allowing easier expansion of their urban growth boundaries to create more room for single-family homes, duplexes and apartments.
Their focus has not been on housing issues in unincorporated rural areas. That’s an especially knotty issue in Lincoln County where 85 percent of its land is covered by federal, state or privately-owned forests and where cities are squeezed between those forests to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west.
That’s acerbated on the coast where the need for workforce housing is critical because of the dominance of tourism-related businesses and their generally lower-paying, seasonal jobs.
The struggle for housing
Hetzler is not a newcomer to trying to solve her employee’s housing issues. At one time she had five houses around Yachats that she rented to her workers and she has allowed others to stay at her home overlooking Yachats River Road. After selling two houses during the pandemic and removing a manufactured home to create more parking near the Drift Inn, she’s down to two rentals, which she is in the process of selling to employees.
Hetzler and Smith are building a structure that could house a central kitchen, shower and laundry that could eventually service a cluster of dwellings on the 15-acre parcel that sits below the property now in dispute with the county. It too is zoned for timber conservation.
For now, the dispute is over the dwellings on the upper, 20-acre parcel.
Hetzler said she went ahead with placing the yurts and travel trailer on the property last year when she grew impatient with getting answers from the county planning department, wanted to provide housing for her workers, and after conflicts with planning department director Onno Husing, who she believes has the discretion to OK her project.
“When I started asking the county to allow me to put up yurts I was asking to put in many yurts, not just the three that I have up as we have a serious problem with the unhoused,” Hetzler said in an email to her attorney in April. “All of the businesses in our area can’t get enough workers because there is no housing, so I was envisioning 25 yurts at least as a temporary measure until either I was able to change the zoning on this piece of property or other options came up …”
The county — in letters to Hetzler and her attorney, Jennifer Bragar of Portland in April and May — makes it clear that neither Husing nor the county has that discretion, citing state regulations for septic systems and a county ordinance limiting her property to one dwelling.
Hetzler and her attorney have also tried to make the case that her employees living on the property will also be performing timber-related work during their off-hours or during the slow tourist time during the winter. Their interpretation of state rules say that forest work can allow her to create a temporary camp.
She points to email exchanges with the Oregon Department of Forestry’s stewardship forester in Toledo as evidence that such work could allow the creation of a temporary forest camp.
“They’ve done a lot of work,” she told YachatsNews. “There’s a lot more to do.”
That includes thinning smaller, crowded trees, cleaning up the land, and cutting away limbs on the lower 12 feet of other trees to help with fire prevention.
“For the most part the folks that I have in these yurts have been working on the property in the arena of timber management,” Hetzler said in an email to her attorney. “A couple of the people have multiple jobs … actually most people in town work for at least two businesses. That’s the nature of living on the coast with the fluctuation in the tourist business.”
The county is not convinced.
In a May 12 letter to Bragar, Holbrook said Hetzler had provided no evidence she was complying with state regulations to conduct forestry work.
“An email with an employee of that department does not qualify as meeting the regulations prior to undertaking forestry operations,” Holbrook wrote.
“… you argue that because your clients have legal forestry operations, the several dwellings which are contended by the county to be illegal, are simply a temporary forest camp,” Holbrook wrote. “You may not have been told that Ms. Hetzler previously argued these were workforce housing, necessary for her restaurant and inn. Prior to that she argued her property should be rezoned to allow subdivision.
“Unless Ms. Hetzler and/or Mr. Smith provide evidence from the applicable agencies that they have complied with the regulations, or proof that they are exempt, I am not persuaded by their contentions,” Holdbrook wrote.
Rieghly Sitton, the ODF staffer in Toledo who had been exchanging emails with Hetzler on types of work needing notice under the Oregon’s forest practice act, told YachatsNews that he was advising Hetzler on what constituted forest work and that the agency “does not have anything to do with housing.”
Headed to court?
More recently, Hetzler applied to the county to expand the property’s septic system to give it enough capacity to handle the yurts and trailer connected to it. That was denied, Holbrook said, because the yurts and their residents are not permitted to be there.
“Legally speaking, she can’t have other residents on the property,” he said. “That’s the law. … she can’t have those extra dwellings there under any circumstances.”
Hetzler says she will fight the county in the court of public opinion, before county commissioners and – after the county files its lawsuit – in Lincoln County circuit court.
“It’s dire; we need housing for hospitality people,” she said. “All of these guys – if they had some other options they’d be jumping at it.”
- Quinton Smith is the editor of YachatsNews.com and can be reached at YachatsNews@gmail.com
We can see from the pictures the type of forest work that is being done. If left on her own, the hills above East Line Road will all be clear cut so this business woman has housing for her underpaid workers. If housing is such an issue, then buy the 6 acres just outside of Yachats and put up housing, or turn the remaining houses into long-term apartment rentals. Better yet, house them in the Drift Inn’s motel and your problems are solved. Why should our neighborhood and protected forest lands be sacrificed for cheap housing for Drift Inn workers?
I agree. Drift Inn already has worker housing at its establishment in town that is a bit kinder than glorified tents on a hilltop. They would have to restructure their current income from the rented rooms to accommodate their workers’ salaries. What a concept. Clear-cutting in that area of the Starr Creek neighborhood changes wind patterns and has the potential for creating wind tunnels, increasing the wind speed, causing problems and damage to existing houses and structures.
Leave protected areas alone. There’s a reason they’re protected … often because abusers want to abuse.
It seems like you are assuming by just a few photos what the entire plan is for the property. Perhaps if you were better informed, you might agree that fire mitigation on this parcel would be well worth the extra neighbors. The land is choked with fuel.
You’re being extreme in your assumptions of clearcutting 35 acres for 25 yurts. Yurt life is pods of movable housing generally situated so that each unit has private living space while sharing water, septic, and electricity.
How the heck does one change land use zoning? Unless she’s owned that prior to 1993 I’m not sure she can do anythng. I want to know how to sidestep the rules.
Obnoxious behavior at public expense. Hope the county nails her good. If she’s hoping to win in the court of public opinion, fat chance. I wish the story would have identified all of her businesses so we know which ones to boycott. It’s bad enough that we have a bunch of out of county investors operating short-term vacation rentals in residential neighborhoods and polluting with too many people using inadequate septic systems. Now we have a business owner wanting the county to allow septic systems and buildings where they do not belong by law? Ha!
Mostly I’m sorry for the workers. They deserve better than some yurt on an old clearcut. Maybe a living wage which would allow them to have an opportunity to live the same future as the tourists they serve. A person who has five businesses should recognize the responsibility they have to our community over their bottom line.
Remember that camel’s nose under the tent? Destruction of timberland and agricultural zoning will allow just that.
No matter where you are on your opinions the bottom line is Yachats has seen a significant increase of housing and increase of tourism. How will Yachats serve the increased need? Instead of being judgmental be active in figuring it out. Then when you figure it out please let the rest of us know as many of us are very educated and active but haven’t been able to.
It’s not a good solution to sacrifice forest, precious habitat and watershed for the tourist industry or any industry.
Rules for thee but not for me.
The people commenting negatively on this post must “have theirs”, and obviously don’t care about others. Available housing is non existent on the coast. Where are tourism employees supposed to live? One of the families on this property has two young school age children, another is a couple with a baby on the way. The lack of care and concern for fellow humans in these comments is appalling. Kudos to Linda and Tom for housing employees and trying to do their part to improve this terrible housing situation that exists on the entire coast.
Without rules and regulations to protect forestland the greedy grabbers would develop every single inch of the little habitat that is left. I agree that at least Tom and Linda are trying to do something to help their employees. Too bad most home owners would rather make a buck than help out the community with long term housing. The rich just keep getting richer and the average person and the poor get pushed out. It’s not unique to the coast, unfortunately.
Housing is important. Respecting the neighborhood you are pushing to expand is important as well. We have seen a huge increase in road traffic, speeding and dust because of people driving to and from this property. It’s disrespectful and dangerous to everyone else who lives here, most of whom are older and walk pets along the road. Maybe the owner could comply with the one house rule (one for each property) and build two houses big enough for several employees and their families and use the Drift Inn for some as well? Change and development is inevitable, but hopefully it can be done in a way that doesn’t negatively impact the rest of the community.
Buy a lot zoned for housing and build low-income apartments if a business wants housing for employees. This is a land grab, starting out under the noble guise as “employee housing”. This property owner wants more assets, get zoning changed, additional septic approval, eventual yurt removal, then short-term tiny house use for eventual short term rental use. Even the short term use prior to full property conversion will be put to use with employees clearing land, living there. They will (and do) gate-keep the property. The neighbors here are in the dark for the most part, and if they’re in the know, they’re against this. Build them apartments.
If a town cannot support the workers needed to run its businesses then perhaps those businesses should consider going elsewhere. Would it be so bad if Yachats had fewer restaurants or motels or gift shops? Less traffic, less litter, less wear and tear on limited resources. What if Yachats became, once again, a small and sleepy town that did not chase the tourist dollars and instead returned to being a quiet and lovely place to live? Our housing “crisis” would vanish, along with the parking “problems” and who needs a skate park, a boardwalk and a trolley anyway? Is there anyone else out there who has considered these things?
Wholeheartedly agree with Jean’s reply. How do we unite to return Yachats to “… a small and sleepy town that did not chase the tourist dollars.”? Change (seeking more tourism) is not necessarily progress when it stresses water, sewage other utilities. It’s time to unite in order to preserve what made Yachats so desirable.