for the Mail Tribune

ASHLAND — Fearing this town will lose its middle and working class and slide into a retirement community, city leaders are exploring ways to step up affordable housing development, helping essential workers such as police, firefighters and teachers find ways to live here.

Among ideas being floated by City Council members is using the city's nine-hole Oak Knoll Golf Course for affordable housing and a park — and selling off part for market-rate housing to pay for the project.

Other suggestions are to build affordable housing, especially for teachers, in large schoolyards owned by the school district, or to use city land or sell some off to raise funds for centrally located affordable housing.

The city in the next few months will sell a high-end, 2.5-acre parcel at the top of Strawberry Lane to raise money for building affordable housing, said city housing program specialist Brandon Goldman. With a budget of more than $1 million, the city has put out requests for proposals from nonprofit agencies in the field and private developers, and has a real estate agent looking for land, he said.

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The city has sold "air rights" to a small parking lot on Lithia Way, on condition the builder put in 15 affordable studio and one-bedroom units atop a commercial first floor. It also is requiring substantial portions of developments in newly annexed or rezoned land to be affordable, including 10 acres recently annexed on lower Clay Street (which will have 17 affordable homes out of 113) and a green energy housing project at Oak and Nevada streets, which will have three, said Councilman David Chapman.

Anticipating an outcry over the potential loss of the city's only golf course, Chapman is suggesting the city could help enable annexation and development of the 130-acre John Billings ranch into an 18-hole golf course — a project stymied for years. The city could also bring in water and sewer service, he said.

In return for helping make the course a reality, the city would want course fees for local residents to be in the same reasonable range as Oak Knoll, Chapman said, and the city would like to trade water rights with Billings so the city's wastewater treatment plant could put some of its treated effluent on the golf course as a solution to costly treatment to release the wastewater into Bear Creek.

Neither the city nor the Billings family have the funds to build the course, said operations manager Mary James, Billings' daughter. So the project, estimated at $15 million to $20 million, would require additional private investment.

James said her family, which has owned the land since 1856, "doesn't have anything specific in mind" for it at this time and such proposals are "always a possibility." She said it would "defeat the purpose" of a golf course to have "resort rates" for golfing and "that was never our intent."

Council member Alice Hardesty said she would like to see Oak Knoll golf course put into mixed use — affordable and market rate housing with a big park, perhaps called "Lithia Park East," as a buffer between the present Oak Knoll subdivision and new housing, all built with sustainable energy.

"It just makes so much sense. The park would be a great place for picnics, putting green and community garden," Hardesty said, adding that the city could keep the land or deed it to a nonprofit affordable housing agency, that would oversee construction and management of apartments, condos and single-family homes.

The Billings proposal is "worth exploring," Hardesty said, but added that with so many courses in the north part of the Rogue Valley, losing Oak Knoll is "a trade-off that's worth the price to give up golf." Hardesty stressed the Oak Knoll project is not going to happen in the next couple years — "affordable housing is achieved with little stuff, here and there." Chapman added that, "mostly, we don't know what we can do about it. The city is not out to start a big program."

However, the city must realize that affordable housing is critical for first-time buyers and young families — and for keeping young people and viable schools, said Diana Shavey, former member of the Ashland Housing Commission and ex-director of housing for the federal Housing and Urban Development Department in the Pacific Northwest.

"You don't want to have a town without children. You want interesting schools, high school football, a continuity of generations," said Shavey. "When they're older, people like to go back to where they grew up. That won't happen. It will be a transient town of senior citizens and tourists, very different from what it is now. Ashland's vitality is because of its history, and it will lose that."

Ashland is "not alone" in facing these issues, but is behind a lot of cities that have been working on it for a decade, Shavey said.

Ashland is "getting gentrified and we're losing families," Hardesty noted. "It's not many years before we become a sterile community. It's not good for the university to have a community of rich, old folks — and a consultant told us we've got 20 years to prevent it. A lot of institutions will be hurt, including the hospital, which can't survive on Medicare payments. And we've got a retirement bubble coming with school and city employees." Federal Community Development Block Grants, given out by the city, have helped make some progress, creating homes in the low $100,000s recently at Faith and Siskiyou, with another six homes coming next year at Park and Siskiyou, said Ron Demele, executive director of Rogue Valley Community Development — a nonprofit builder of affordable housing.

Prompted by the real estate lobby, the state Legislature in the 1990s blocked cities from imposing a real estate transfer tax — a favored funding source for affordable housing and legal in 38 states, said Hardesty.

"Communities should be free to make up their minds on this," said Hardesty. "We need a stream of income and the Legislature tied our hands. With a Democratic legislature now, maybe that could be reversed."

One way the city is trying to hold on to what it's got is to consider restrictions on converting apartments to condos, a recent trend in town. The council will hear a proposal this month already OK'd by the city's housing and planning commissions. The new rules would require a percent of condos to be affordable — or kept as apartments, said Goldman.

Chapman said the city has spoken with the school district about converting its land, but no movement has yet been made on the idea.

To get a leg up on affordable housing, the city in the near term needs to inventory all its lands and prioritize which can be sold, with an eye to those closest to shopping and main roads. Then the city needs to do the difficult part: develop a funding mechanism, said Demele.

"The city has to find a source of money to fund it independently or with the state," Demele said, noting that the city could look at issuing bonds for construction.

"I do think the political will is there, because it's not going to get any easier for people who work here to find homes here," said Demele. "The city has taken steps and needs to take more."

Said Shavey, "It's daunting, but anything worthwhile is. It's a matter of educating people and getting them to understand the consequences for them personally if the community is not balanced. Ashland people are very intelligent and thoughtful. They supported the school levies. Once they understand it, they will support it."

John Darling is a freelance writer living in Ashland. E-mail him at jdarling@jeffnet.org.