KOBI Spirit of Community Moment: Housing Stability

Oregon Community Foundation's Project Turnkey has created hundreds of new shelters and other transitional housing across the state. And Project Turnkey is quickly evolving into dozens of innovative projects that will dramatically increase Oregon's sheltering facilities. Here's another Spirit of Community Moment.

Megan Loeb: Project Turnkey is a solution born out of a triple crises, a broken housing market, worsened by the pandemic and gutted by the fires of 2020.

KOBI: Megan Loeb is the Senior Program Officer for Housing and Economic Vitality for Oregon Community Foundation.

ML: Project Turnkey helped stand up 19 different sites around the state. From Ashland to Klamath Falls to Pendleton, it represents a total of 867 new units of shelter, and that's a 20% increase in our state's shelter capacity.

KOBI: Oregon Community Foundation and its local partners bought old hotels and other commercial buildings that could quickly be converted to transitional housing.

Pam Marsh: With the help of Oregon Community Foundation, local communities were able to buy 19 of these facilities and increase the state shelter beds by 900 to 1000 beds over a very short period of time.

KOBI: Oregon State Representative Pam Marsh represents much of Jackson County. She helped create shelters in Southern Oregon. Pam Marsh: I think we were lucky to get two projects. I mean, our intent was to really spread those projects across the state. The fact that Jackson County got two facilities is terrific, and the work is not done.

ML: Project Turnkey is one piece of the needed housing and a continuum of solutions that our state needs to explore. We need to produce upwards of 140,000 units of housing in our state in order to have an abundant and adequate stock of housing for everybody in Oregon. At Oregon Community Foundation we like to say that community is our middle name and this is a great example of that.

This from KOBI TV's "Oregon Community Foundation: Spirit of Community" series.