Five years after the Holiday Farm fire, Blue River has a new neighborhood. On Wednesday, the McKenzie Community Land Trust cut the ribbon on six freshly built homes now available for ownership by fire survivors.
The event drew a surprise guest: Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek told an excited crowd the new Rose Street Neighborhood is a “blueprint” for disaster recovery.
“You’re teaching us all a critical lesson,” she said from a podium in front of one of the new homes. “I couldn’t be more happy to know that this is just the beginning of your housing development that you’re working on. We’re gonna bring jobs back to the community as well, because at the end of the day this is about economic development writ large. And to have the community land trust available—that’s a game changer.”
The six new, fire-resistant homes are 1,300 square feet with three bedrooms apiece, and are located in the heart of Blue River. They are each priced between $250,000 and $275,000 and prioritized for fire survivors and the local workforce earning 80% or less of area median income. With the community land trust model, homeowners purchase the house and lease the land for 99 years.
McKenzie Community Land Trust Executive Director Tabitha Eck explained the land trust model.
“The community was looking for a tool to rebuild itself. And that’s what a community land trust can do. It’s the community owning its own land,” she said. “As a nonprofit, we purchase and develop and hold that land as affordable and then sell that home separate from the property price. And we keep that home affordable for generations.”
Eck said the word “affordable” doesn’t always mean the same thing for everybody. She said the reality is that “affordable housing” needs to be available to everyone.
“The price of these homes is currently unheard of in this valley,” she said.
The six homes were built with a grant from Oregon Housing and Community Services, alongside a construction loan with Summit Bank and support from Lane County for the property acquisition. Walker Macy, a landscape design firm from Portland, offered Firewise landscape design pro bono.
MCLT’s project area is the full McKenzie River Valley and already owns more properties to build two more community land trust neighborhoods in the Blue River area. Eck said one of the properties is on Main Street and zoned for commercial use.
She echoed what the governor noted about the importance of economic development in the unincorporated town and said that will be a driving factor when deciding what to do with that property.
Eck explained the new homes are “firewise,” meaning they are fire resilient homes with metal roofs, defensible perimeters and green infrastructure going into all the common areas.
Since it started three years ago, Eck said MCLT had one goal: to bring back the families that lost their homes. “Our first priority group to live here is fire survivors and the workforce,” she said. “Our two biggest employers in the area, the school district and the Forest Service, each had a dozen employees who lost their homes in the fire here. So, if you’re still trying to work upriver, we wanted to be able to provide housing for them.”
Eck said the mortgage process can be strenuous, especially for people who’ve lived through a traumatic experience such as a wildfire. She said case management is available with help from the development partner DEV Northwest. So far, 33 “applications of interest” have been submitted.
While touring the two-story homes, Kotek looked out the windows. Some of the houses offer sights of the town of Blue River, its new library, fire house and mountains behind. Others have spectacular views of the confluence of the Blue River pouring into the McKenzie River.
Kotek said she “got a little teary-eyed” listening to everyone speak at the ribbon cutting.
“Real recovery means partnerships. It means local leaders, community-driven solutions and partnership—lots of it. Especially when money is tight,” she said. “No one does this alone.”
