The city of Lake Oswego soon will begin the process for identifying holes in its housing stock and determining how to fill them.

As part of this endeavor, it is hoping to enlist a diverse group of community members — as well as housing developers and other stakeholders — to form a Housing Production Strategy Task Force, which will provide policy guidance to the Lake Oswego City Council and the Lake Oswego Planning Commission regarding a planned housing needs analysis and housing production strategy.

The task force is expected to meet regularly from this October through March 2024. Applications for joining the task force close at 5 p.m. Friday, Sept. 16.

The impetus for completing the needs analysis and production strategy derived from House Bill 2003 — a state bill passed in 2019 alongside legislation that liberalized the allowance of middle housing (like duplexes and triplexes) throughout much of the state. HB-2003 required that all cities with more than 10,000 residents conduct these processes. A D V E R T I S I N G | Continue reading below

"The purpose of the task force is to work to guide the city's work on both of those tasks, the housing needs analysis and the housing production strategy," Long-Range Planning Manager Erik Olson said. "They (task force members) would be helping to make sure we're targeting the right population to determine where the needs exist in the community and guide recommendations related to strategies in Lake Oswego that could help us address those needs."

Olson said the city last produced a housing needs analysis in 2013, and that process determined the city could accommodate housing needs through multifamily development in the town center areas.

"A lot of that multifamily housing has come to fruition," Olson said.

However, the middle housing legislation means that the city's outlook for meeting needs could be altered, he added.

"We're going to be reexamining the conclusions we made back in 2013 given that a lot more diversity of housing types can be constructed in the city," Olson said.

He acknowledged that Lake Oswego currently has expensive housing stock in comparison to other areas and that living in town is unaffordable for many. One challenge, Olson noted, will be how to make middle housing affordable in a market where prices may be too exorbitant for most people — saying that replacing a $1.2 million single-family home with duplexes that cost $800,000, for instance, isn't exactly providing broadly attainable housing. A D V E R T I S I N G | Continue reading below

"The market itself probably will produce units that are not accessible to most. A lot of the work with this task force will be how can we make it more accessible," he said.

Figuring out how to serve aging populations who maybe want to downsize and other groups that are considered federally protected classes will be a part of the process as well.

For community members who don't join the task force but want to voice their opinions, Olson added that the project will include ample community involvement.

"There will be lots of opportunities outside the task force itself to participate," he said.

For more information on the task force, visit www.ci.oswego.or.us/planning/pp-22-0005-housing-needs-and-production-strategies.

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