By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com
YACHATS – The Yachats Planning Commission on Tuesday unanimously approved a proposal by the owners of the Fireside and Overleaf motels to put four “park model” homes on its property to house employees.
The four homes – about 450 square feet each – would sit at the southeast corner of the Fireside property adjacent to U.S. Highway 101. They are, in essence, an extension of a five-space recreational vehicle park the commission approved in June 2021 but that have yet to fully developed and used.
In the application for a conditional use permit and in testimony Tuesday, motel managing partner Drew Roslund stressed the four homes are to be used exclusively by full-time employees of the motels.
While the commission added several conditions to the permit, several members wanted to give Roslund the flexibility to house other Yachats workers if he was unable to fill the homes with employees. A motion to allow others to live there failed on a 3-3 vote, so three commissioners changed their votes to allow the application to be approved. Commission chair Lance Bloch was absent.
The commission attached several of the conditions similar to those it put on the small RV park, including: a limit of four homes; screening with a fence along the property line with Coolidge Lane neighbors and plantings along Highway 101; plantings around the homes’ foundations; and, approval for two years followed by a possible series of three, one-year renewals.
The proposal drew opposition from one couple who have a second home on Coolidge, questions from a landlord on the same street, and support from one Yachats residents.
As they did on the RV park application, Norm and Shelley Cimon of LaGrande again expressed concern about cutting more trees to make way for the homes, saying it would affect drainage on the property and a spruce bog to the west of the site. Shelley Cimon also said she disliked the “piecemeal approach” to first the RV park and now the park model home proposal, asking if the motel owners could come back with a more comprehensive housing plan.
Avery Herrick of Hillsboro, who has a rental on Coolidge, asked the commission what would stop the motel owners from developing a full mobile home park.
Commission members immediately responded that the city would have to approve such a use; Roslund countered that such an idea “is not the best use of this real estate.”
Yachats resident Tracy Crews, and later several commission members, said they supported the attempt to address the lack of worker housing in the area.
“I’ve seen how the lack of affordable housing has impacted local businesses,” Crews said. “…this is the first time I’ve seen a business owner step up to try to address this problem.”
Temporary or permanent?
The proposal is not cheap. Roslund estimates the park model project would cost $320,000 to $440,000.
The homes – 12 feet wide by 32 feet long – are larger than tiny homes but smaller than manufactured homes, hauled to the site and put on foundations.
Roslund told the commission Tuesday that they would do everything possible to add features to the homes and landscaping to make the homes “interesting” and the area “looking nice.”
Roslund has also applied to the city to adjust a property line on a Fireside Motel flag lot immediately south of the proposed site to allow more flexibility on the homes’ location and to minimize the loss of trees. City planner Katherine Guenther said her decision on that request may be two months away.
In answer to a question from planning commission member Loren Dickinson, Roslund said he was unsure if the proposed home would be temporary or permanent.
“Three years ago employee housing at the property wasn’t even on the radar,” he said. “I’m reluctant to do something permanent because things change. …. five or 10 years from now these can be moved or removed.” But Roslund said if the application is approved “we will not be looking at building a permanent apartment complex.”
Workforce housing issues
The request came as the Planning Commission is getting detailed help from a consultant on Yachats’ housing situation – which already shows it needs more low- and moderate priced income for workers and low-income residents. The housing plan is intended to guide the city if or when it considers changing housing regulations or if or how to subsidize housing developments.
Roslund has been searching to find ways to provide housing to help attract and retain employees since the coronavirus pandemic decimated the hospitality workforce two years ago. The two motels have a total of 97 rooms, 30 full-time year-round employees and another 30 part-time or seasonal workers.
“We get contacted all the time by people who want to come to the coast to work,” Roslund told YachatsNews last week. “We tell them ‘Find a place to live first and then give us a call’.”
Motel employees have also been forced to leave when they lost their housing.
The Fireside and Overleaf complex already has two apartments on site for employees and last year converted one Fireside room into an apartment.
Once the park model homes are moved into the property, the wheels are taken off, attached to a concrete pad or foundation and then a “skirt” built around the exterior. The area would be landscaped with motel crews providing maintenance.
Roslund said the motels have 1-2 employees currently living “in absolutely horrible conditions” and he would move them into the new homes as soon as they are available. The rest would be for newly hired workers. Rent would be “close” to market rates, he said. Like the RV area, people in the park model homes would be required to work at the Fireside or Overleaf.
Commission members briefly debated whether to require the homes be only for Fireside/Overleaf employees, but backed off that to give Roslund flexibility to rent to others if there were vacancies.
“It’s a good thing for our community and our workers, but don’t put unnecessary conditions on it,” said commission member Christine Orchard.
Commission vice chair John Theilacker commended Roslund and the motel owners for taking steps to address workforce housing. “We do have a housing problem in our community,” he said.
This is a fantastic idea, I hope it goes through!
I’m glad someone in the community is realizing the need for housing and stepping up to help. This is great. They are a great company to work for.
Motel management is part of my past and I understand the worker problem. This seems like a very good idea. Housing is a real problem for working folk that do not make a lot of money. This should go forward. We are a tourist city and we should take care of our resources which workers are.
The need for housing is understandable and this makes a lot more sense than the absurd idea that travelers in expensive RVs are going want to spend two weeks working at the Fireside and then move down to a State park for a while before returning. That was the premise of the original ask for the development of an onsite RV park for workers. That said, there are other issues, and as is often the case here, they have to do with water.
There is an intact remnant of the spruce bog that edged much of this part of the Oregon Coast immediately to the South. Removing trees and providing hardscaping – either in the form of gravel pads or blacktop parking areas – will mean substantial runoff downslope. That slope includes the swale that runs through that spruce bog. We have a home well down Coolidge Lane and we’ve seen that swale fill with water a foot deep, slowly absorbing it. That moderates the flow enough that the damage to the 804 trail is kept somewhat manageable. As more and more of this area is developed, the town will have to consider what those changes mean for the forest stand, for the hydrology, and for the trail which it is responsible for maintaining.
We need to understand that a changing climate cuts many different ways. There will be a lot more variability including episodes of extreme rainfall. Yachats needs to prepare for that by following its own stated management principles.
I for one am not in favor of this kind of housing. It is not a new idea – it has been used before, most notably in the the textile towns of New England circa 1880-1920 or so. Presently this kind of scheme is used to house migrant farm workers who harvest fruits and vegetables on farmland in California and Florida and I’ve seen it used on the Mexican-US border in the maquiladora zones.
Another solution is to create a van service that would pick up employees where they live (Waldport for example) and ferry them to and from work. All of the hotels and restaurants in the area could pool their resources and create such a service for their workers. That way they could live where it is affordable and have steady transportation to and from work. This kind of method is used in Silicon Valley and has proven very effective. As I posted to a previous article about Fireside/Overleaf’s idea:
“It seems to me that a much more economical and better solution would be for the hotel owners to create a shuttle service that would shuttle folks wanting jobs to and from existing RV parks in other coastal towns to the north. Shuttle services have been used by Silicon Valley employers for years. In 2017 these shuttles were estimated to provide transportation to and from work for 34,000 Silicon Valley employees.”
Why was this shuttle service initiated? Because workers could not afford to live near the corporate campuses where they worked.
Labor is a cost of doing business, and labor responds to higher wages or benefits such as free transportation to and from work.