Bend woman caught in an affordable housing loophole

She is a student at Oregon State University — Cascades. The 34-year-old has numerous medical conditions that have rendered her disabled and unable to work.

Flaherty’s particular circumstances are the perfect storm of complications for qualifying for affordable housing and staying there.

“If I didn’t have to worry about my housing, I think I would be able to go through the school process very differently,” Flaherty said.

She’s lived in Bend since her parents moved here when she was a few months old. She remembers when most businesses would be closed on Sundays. She remembers a time before the Old Mill was a shopping center.

At 5 years old, doctors found a tumor in Flaherty’s brain. It required medical hardware that often needed alteration. When Flaherty was a teenager, she needed a surgery to revise that hardware.

During surgery she had a stroke.

“And ever since then, my health has just been really dicey,” she said.

What followed was a litany of medical conditions, including epilepsy.

She wasn’t able to attend school full time as a teenager. She was home-schooled half of the time and attended Summit High School the other half.

“When I finally graduated high school, I was so ill that going to college was not really an option,” she said.

It wasn’t until 2019 that her health stabilized, and she was able to attend college, Flaherty said. “It was one of those things I always wanted to do but never really had a chance,” she said.

She earned her associate’s degree from Central Oregon Community College roughly a year ago, and is now pursuing her bachelor’s.

Without her desired degree, Flaherty’s work options are limited. She can’t stand for hours on end, and she can’t lift heavy objects. So Flaherty’s income remains low — sometimes so low that she doesn’t qualify for some affordable housing programs.

“I just keep hitting wall after wall,” she said.

Flaherty lives in Low-Income Housing Tax Credit-funded housing, which is a federal program that helps local developers build affordable housing, and she uses a housing voucher to help pay her rent.

She first moved in four years ago. Her landlord let her take a quick peek at the unit before moving in, but it was largely sight unseen, Flaherty said. It was a huge, exciting step for Flaherty with it being her first apartment.

“Due to my health complications, my first priority for so long was just staying alive, so I hadn’t had a chance to move out on my own yet,” she said.

But the rules are stringent, and it’s tough to keep track of them all, Flaherty said.

To adapt, Flaherty flip-flops between taking her college classes full-time for a maximum of two terms and then stops taking classes for a few months at a time.

“I mean, I think one of the most important things in being a student is not worrying about your housing and being able to know you’ll have a safe place to put your head at night,” Flaherty said.

Once she earns her bachelor’s degree, Flaherty is set to enter a master’s program for counseling so she can work with and advocate for disabled individuals. However, graduate programs often require full-time student status, she said.

The thought of moving to Redmond has crossed Flaherty’s mind, but nowhere else quite compares to Bend, especially with her family and medical team here.

So, she will continue to adapt, she said.

“This is the place that I grew up, and I know that Bend has been discovered, so to speak, and become very popular, but I would love to be able to afford a home in the place that I grew up in,” Flaherty said.