Above: St. Charles caregiver Jake Fries stands in front of his new home in Bend.
In March 2023, Jake Fries was reading the news when he spotted an advertisement for a new housing community in Bend called Rooted at Poplar. The concept: Seven 1,300-square-foot homes on the south end of town, with four of them prioritized for local workers thanks to partnerships between a developer, Rooted Homes, and local employers and organizations.
A year later, nearly half of the Rooted at Poplar’s residents are St. Charles caregivers, including Fries, a 29-year-old surgical tech in the Bend operating room.
“I can finally afford to live in my own place,” Fries says. “It’s changed everything.”
Like many local workers, Fries had trouble finding affordable housing in Bend, where the median price of a single-family home reached $800,000 last summer. It’s an issue that has contributed to workforce shortages at St. Charles, which is why the health system partnered last year with Rooted Homes, a nonprofit whose mission is to make buying a home more affordable.
“At St. Charles, we not only care about our people, we also depend on them to care for the communities we serve. We need great people to be able to live and work in Central Oregon,” said Rebecca Berry, vice president and chief Human Resources officer for St. Charles. “We knew we had to find creative ways to help attract and retain great caregivers.”
Rooted Homes works with a consortium of partners to build high-quality, affordable housing and pay part of the cost for homebuyers. To fund its Poplar project, Rooted Homes tapped a number of local and state organizations, banks, charitable foundations, the City of Bend and the Bend Chamber of Commerce, which secured financial support from some of its members. St. Charles Foundation provided $7,500 to cover closing costs for the three caregivers now living in the community.
“It really was a team effort,” said Berry. “Everyone knows how important it is that Central Oregon remains a place where people can afford to live, and we appreciate the partnership of the Bend Chamber, Rooted Homes and all the other entities involved in making this happen.”
The process starts with an application that places potential buyers in a lottery system, where essential workers and employees of partner organizations (such as St. Charles) are given additional weight made possible through private funds raised by the Bend Chamber. From a pool of around 300 applicants, Fries ended up fifth on the waitlist for a home, eventually landing a spot after another applicant dropped out. From there, the process was similar to buying any other house: loans, escrow, keys, furniture shopping. Fries moved into his new home in February.
“Now I feel like I’m able to build myself and my future family a better future,” he said.
The typical monthly mortgage for the Poplar homes is around $1,650, about 40% lower than average rent prices in the area. And it’s not just the mortgage that’s low — monthly utilities hover around $12. Rooted Homes communities are built with sustainability in mind, featuring solar panels and a net-zero design, said Jackie Keogh, vice president of the company. Residents also receive a free electric bike.
“The goal was that these folks become more long-term residents and, therefore, longer-term employees because they are not impacted by the cost of housing,” Keogh said.
Thanks to continued community support, more homes are on the horizon, including 40 new houses on Bend’s west side.
“It's been a great partnership,” Keogh said, “and we hope to continue it with St. Charles.”
