Solving Oregon’s Housing Shortage with Nathan Wildfire of Missing Middle Innovations

Kim Allchurch Flick: Hello everyone and welcome to the podcast. I am so excited to have Nathan Wildfire with us today. Nathan has worked in community and economic development for over 20 years in Pittsburgh, Vermont, and Oregon. He’s passionate about the grassroots and personal connections of community building and the macro challenges possible through.

And the macro changes possible through creative data-driven public policy. Nathan is privileged to have learned from incredible mentors through every stage of his career. He has been a choir leader, outdoor explorer, and I love this one, occasionally, unretired volleyball player. Today we’re gonna talk about why we have a housing shortage and what we can do about it.

Nathan, welcome to the podcast on the stage. 

Nathan Wildfire: Thanks Kim. It’s a real pleasure to be here. I appreciate being on. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: I appreciate the work you’ve done. We met because of Oregon Entrepreneur Network and the more I learned about the missing Middle housing fund, the more I learned, first of all, how amazing how many layers it takes to do what you’re doing.

The people involved and I really wanted to capture. All of that today. So what is your journey and inspirations and values that got you to this point? 

Nathan Wildfire: I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And for those of you listeners that don’t know Pittsburgh is very proudly in the Rust Belt of America. And before I was around really during World War ii, in the years that followed, Pittsburgh was the center of.

Steel for the entire country and its economy was booming Close to a million people. Lived in the city of Pittsburgh by the time I came along in the 1980s. Half of those people had left steel mills were mostly all closed. And the city was a radically different place. Its bones as those of us in community development would say were still very, very good, but it was missing a lot of the lifeblood that had sustained it for decades.

And that’s where I grew up. So whenever I would take the trolley to whatever internship I had downtown. I would go through many neighborhoods and each neighborhood looked so radically different than the rest, like block by block, right? Like why did these 10 blocks have so much vitality and activity and wealth?

And then the next 12 blocks, it was vacant homes and things didn’t look so positive. And then the next 12 blocks something totally different. And my brain. Really wanted to figure that out. And then the other part of this story is that my grandmother worked full-time for HUD until she was 80 years old and then kept working for another three building housing for seniors in rural Pennsylvania.

And so every family reunion I’ve ever been a part of, more or less part of it happened in a building grandma built. Maybe we were Christmas caroling for the residents, or we were having a pizza party and playing cards. So I have these two pieces of my journey. One was this curiosity for why do different neighborhoods and places to live end up so different?

And then, wow, I have this hero, my grandma, who had 12 children, by the way, who was building housing in rural Pennsylvania for those that needed it. Most. So I guess you could say curiosity about housing is a bit in my DNA. So that’s how things started. Then I went away to school and learned, take the personal and put it over on this part.

It’s still part of my foundation, but now I was learning. The why, right? The why are there’s such great needs in rural America for those with less means or seniors. And why would six neighborhoods in Pittsburgh look so radically different on a relatively short train ride? And so I started to learn about how these larger policy levels, levers start to affect why our built environment and our communities are the way.

They are, I was really lucky. After I graduated college I got an internship at east Liberty Development Incorporated in Pittsburgh, and it was this powerhouse of thinking and doing. Around community development, and I was there for eight and a half years, and I like to say I was a, I became an expert of nothing but a dabbler in everything, community development, right?

Whether that was affordable housing or market rate rehabs, or building bike lanes, or running a community plan process. I had so, so many meetings in church basements with angry people and bad cookies. Till like midnight, and so I, that’s where I really started to put into practice how housing and other parts of our built environment impact people’s lives directly, but also the place, not just the people, the place.

And then the economy, right? And so I started to gain this belief that h enough housing, the right kind of housing and housing choice is what enables people, places, and economies to thrive. It’s the, it’s literally the thing most of us spend the most every month, like the biggest check we write is usually our mortgage or our rent.

It’s foundational to like how we thrive. And so now I, now I’m starting to do this professionally. I eventually moved to Vermont and instead of working for a nimble nonprofit with all these giants where risk was encouraged and thinking outside the box was the norm. Now I worked for city government where I had more.

Control, but all of a sudden risk was a four letter word and thinking outside the box N not so great, if you’re reporting to elected officials. And so it was interesting. It was a very interesting move. I went from a neighborhood that was predominantly African American below the poverty line.

Lot of vacancy to one that was predominantly white, older, and wealthier. And so it was a kind of a rude awakening. And how community development happens in different places. And then, more recent part of my journey is I moved to Oregon and my bureaucratic journey continued and I started working for the state of Oregon and my role at the state was with the innovation team for the state.

And that’s what really got me exposed to how entrepreneurs and innovators are. Changing the world and how they’re funded or not, and how they are constantly pushing at the edge of technology or good policy, or how you fund things. I, first, I was so close to the neighborhood I served, then I was in a city and I learned a lot about government.

Now here I was working directly for entrepreneurs and the people that funded them actually. And in the midst of that, I left that job and I started thinking about housing with a few other smart folks. Why does it take so long? It costs so much to build housing because we’re, depending on who’s counting about 140,000 units short in Oregon, this, the country’s five to 6 million units short, and the consequence of having not enough housing supply.

Especially for those middle income earners which my nonprofit is named after the missing middle housing fund. The consequence of not having enough housing is that the cost for everyone goes up. The cost of housing, no matter where you’re at right now, continues to rise, and part of that’s tied to it taking so long and costing so much to build a single unit.

Of housing. So after speaking with a series of developers, architects, financiers, governments me and a few others launched the missing middle housing fund to try to get to the bottom of that question, why is it cost so much take so long? And what we’re trying to achieve is doubling our housing production for half the cost and half the time.

And we believe that the way to do that is by working with innovators and policy. How our workforce is trained, how we fund things, and what we build our housing out of and how, so that’s I guess how I got here. If you don’t mind I’ll say one other thing. Please do and then we can get into it.

But on the side, I’m also a choir director. I’m the co-founder of a choir in Portland and was the music director for many years. And as you might imagine people that sing in choirs come from all walks of life. They work in retail, they work in the service industry, they’re in manufacturing.

They’re college professors, they’re computer coders. They work in a bank. They do everything. You don’t really get to pick who falls in love with singing, right? Based on. You know what they do for a living. And so when you have a choir, your most important thing is to be in harmony. But when the pandemic struck, and I think we had 22 folks we went really quickly down to eight people in our choir.

And it wasn’t ’cause they got COVID, it’s because they had a housing disruption in their life. The economic consequence of the pandemic was a lot of folks lost their job or were underemployed. And so they moved they moved back home, wherever that was. Maybe they went back to school. They moved out of the Portland Metro.

And so the consequence is that my choir family, literally our harmony was broken. So I got to see in real time how housing instability can affect a community like mine. So while I think today we’re probably gonna talk about a lot of really. Interesting policy or financial tools or really cool innovation at its heart.

Housing is personal. It’s our sense of home, it’s our sense of stability and economic vitality. And without it, those people, places and economies suffer. And it’s important to me just like it was to my grandmother to be a part of that solution. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Thank you for that. Being in harmony and then noticing these people that have been hit harder by a pandemic than others and how it affects their housing.

And it, it also strikes me that you’re very intentional about naming your organization. So if you could tell us more about that and what is it? What does it take to be noticed as the missing middle housing fund? How many doors do you have to knock on? How many unanswered emails, how many, what does it take to move this forward?

Nathan Wildfire: So let’s talk about the name first and then we’ll talk about that grind that you just described. The housing that’s built, leased in America is the housing that is serving those making between 80 and 120% of area median income. Area Median income is if you lined up everybody in a city by income, it’s the middle person.

It’s what does that person earn? And so 80% of that dollar figure, up to 120% of that dollar figure is what we call the middle. Okay. In kind of real terms that middle changes, depending on where you are in Oregon or beyond. But a lot of the time it looks like teachers, it looks like the folks that work in our banks or drive our buses.

It looks like entry level computer programmers. It looks like people that work in retail. The truth of the matter is that those folks make too much money. To qualify for anything that we would call affordable housing or subsidized housing, but they don’t make enough money to spend less than 30% of their income on their housing if they want to live near where their, where they wanna be.

Opportunity friends, great quality of life, whatever their reason is. And so if you spend more than 30% of your income on housing, you are what the federal government would call cost burdened by your housing. And the consequence of that is maybe you don’t send your kids to the daycare that you want, or you don’t go back to school, or you don’t go on the vacation that you wanted, or you don’t.

Upgrade your living situation. And the missing middle refers to the fact that we don’t build housing for that income earner. Thank goodness we have all these subsidies for folks making less than 80% of a ami. We don’t have enough, but thank goodness we have some. And the folks making over 120% of a MI generally the market.

Response to their spending power. And so that housing is built as well. So when we launched our nonprofit, we wanted to be clear that that was the income segment we were. Targeting. We are also a little bit strategic, right? There are a lot of people working on affordable housing, but they don’t generally work in that middle space because the economics are poor, right?

You, if you think about it, it costs roughly the same to make a unit of housing no matter how much the person that’s gonna live in it. Makes right. Walls are walls. Electricity is electricity. Roofs are roofs. Foundations are foundations. The fin interior finishes might change, but at the end of the day, a lot of housing costs are the same.

And if you are making it for those with less means, you generally have a subsidy that then accounts for the fact that you are going to get paid less in rent. Or in a for sale price. And if you’re building a market rate, the other end of the spectrum, you just don’t build anything unless someone’s gonna pay you for it.

The market demand takes care of it, but in the middle the cost is the same, but there’s no subsidy and the people aren’t making as much, so they can’t pay as much in rent or mortgage. So that’s where we’re at. There’s also just, frankly, a whole lot less cooks in that kitchen. So we thought that if we could figure out how to solve that problem it would be really, really beneficial and we would attract a lot of partners to the, cause.

A lot of cities desperately want more workers in that middle income range but it’s hard to do if you don’t have the homes for them to land in. So I think that’s the first part of your question. The second part of your question is like, how do you get. Noticed. How do you, how many, I think you said, how many doors do you have to knock on?

Anytime you start something new, whether it’s a company or a nonprofit, any kind of organization, the first, thousand times you write an email or say hello, make a phone call. They say, who? Who are you? They might know me the human, but they certainly don’t know the missing middle housing fund, which, is the most ridiculously long email address of all time.

But that’s, that. It takes a while. It takes a while and you have to, you have to hustle. You have to build connections and ask for help. The other reality is like we had good thesis, we had some really interesting innovations to highlight. We had some good ideas, but at the end of the day the only way that we’re gonna solve our housing crisis is through the power of many.

You want to go fast, go alone, you wanna go far, go with many, right? You’ve heard that before. It’s true with housing. So you really have to build the coalition of the enthusiastic, right? The folks who are just relentlessly showing up for this cause, for this mission. And it’s a mission that also has to.

Makes sense, like in a capitalist sense, right? Nobody’s gonna, nobody’s gonna join your cause if everybody’s losing money. So it can be the greatest. I just talked to you for 10 minutes already about how passionate I am about this mission, but partners come because they see economic upside. Whether you’re an innovator or whether you’re a funder, or whether you’re a city desperate for a certain type of person, it has to make financial sense. And that’s where it gets hard. That’s where it gets really, really hard. Yeah. Is that, I hope that’s answering your question. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Yeah. In some ways I’m also thinking about these statistics and.

Think about with housing prices that vary wild widely between different cities. But for someone in that income bracket to afford a house, how far do they have to commute to the place of work? And sometimes that’s a rate limiting step. And I’ve had an active real estate license for a while and there have been times when.

Just based on someone’s affordability. Sometimes we’ve searched 90 minutes, two hours out of the, the city center or whatever might be the most prosperous place to work to find something that, that their income can pay for. And I know that varies wildly, but for years I, I knew of people who lived in like Davis, California to work in Sacramento.

Or no, not Sacramento. That’s close. But Sacramento is getting more expensive, but San Francisco, right? And that, that can be according to the traffic, a 90 minute plus commute. And it seemed to be coming. Portland didn’t seem to be that bad a while back, but now it’s seems that the commute gets longer because the traffic gets more and people can’t find the work that’ll pay for the house where they can live.

So they’re commuting and I was wondering if you could speak to that. Sure. And what about those employers too? 

Nathan Wildfire: So we work all over Oregon. So while this is really true in Portland, I actually want to use some examples from outside the Portland Metro. So we work a lot with the city of Newburgh, which is in Yamhill County, part of wine country.

And Newburgh has some pretty significant employers. There’s a senior care facility, there’s hospital system. There’s a university, George Fox University. There’s big manufacturer. One of the largest dental equipment manufacturers in the world is actually in Newburgh, Oregon. And all of them. Are struggling to hire and retain employees.

They’re the economic development agency that works down there is called SEDCOR, strategic Economic development Corporation partner of ours. And they were responding to their, the people they serve, which is the employers. And they said, geez, we can’t hire, we can’t retain. A few of them did a study and saw that their employees were coming from as far away as Gresham Wilsonville Salem, and further to work in Newburgh because they couldn’t afford to live in wine country.

They also knew that, over a period of months, or a little bit more than a year, if you were driving more than 45 minutes, you were highly likely to quit. So it was very it affected their bottom line, right? But also their sense of community. I heard a great quote today. I want to attribute it to Julia Metz of Sightline who told me, this is actually Michael Anderson’s quote, but, the whole point of a lot of what we do is how do we allow people to live close to where they want to live? Or how do we allow people to live close to each other if they want to? Like that, that, that really struck me. And we work a lot in Boardman, Oregon. Boardman is down the Columbia River or up the Columbia River, I should say.

In desert, Oregon. It’s the source of a lot of our food that we eat. A lot of Tillamook Creamery products come from there. It’s where a bunch of Amazon servers are today, and the city of Boardman has been one of the fastest growing cities in all of Oregon. But more people now work in Boardman than live.

Which is wild. And they drive from as far away as the Tri-Cities in Washington, Hermiston, Umatilla, Southern Morrow County. Their commutes are sometimes over an hour, and those employers that are in Boardman understand that if they can’t figure out a housing solution that’s better, they’ll lose those employees.

So this is a pretty. Big deal. The commute piece of this quality of life kind of stinks when you’re sitting in a car for two hours of your day versus being able to walk to work or have a short drive or a bike ride or whatever. Yeah. It’s pretty meaningful, Kim. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Indeed, it’s So who do you work with? What, who are the players 

Nathan Wildfire: Yeah.

That, 

Kim Allchurch Flick: that have to come into play to make this happen? 

Nathan Wildfire: It’s a cast of thousands, so yes. Yeah, so the Missing Middle Housing fund predominantly works with people who have an innovation on one side of the equation, and then the people who need housing. On the other side of the equation, let’s part, let’s start with the people who have need first.

A lot of times we just think of the human that’s living in that house, right? Or that apartment. But really it’s like the people that are obsessed with that are the employers. Or a government, right? A city, a county. It might be a collection of employers. It might be the economic development nonprofit for our region.

But these are entities that say we have a housing crisis, people are moving away, or the, our kids move away and they don’t come back. It’s too expensive. We can’t have, the folks that work in our economy live here anymore. We’re not growing our tax base. What do we do? So these are the entities with need, right?

So those end up being our clients a lot of the time, and we’ll come back to like how we help them. But then on the other side of the equation are the people that are. Innovators and these innovators take the flavor of companies. Sometimes nonprofits, sometimes it’s other governments, sometimes it’s researchers, but they tend to innovate in four key areas.

That are really important to the people I mentioned before with housing need, and those four areas are, and for those of you that are a visual learner, maybe think about four corners of a screen or a pie chart, it’s cut into four quadrants. Those four areas are finance. So how do we actually. Fund housing to get it built, to change how it’s in, innovate, right?

It’s the money part. That’s one. The next part, the next quadrant would be policy. So it’s like the rules, the regulations, the red tape. How can that be used to either make it harder, fast, slower, more expensive, or easier? Faster, less expensive, more certainty. So that policy is big quadrant number two, big quadrant.

Number three is the workforce. It’s the labor, the people that are actually building the homes, right? How are they trained? Where do they come from? Do we have enough of them? Is their job changing as we produce more? Offsite housing, factory based housing artificial intelligence, robotics, whatever, right?

How do we get more women into the workforce? These are just very real problems that come with accelerating your, the number of units you build. If you don’t have enough people to do it you’re outta luck. And then the fourth is the piece that I think most people like to talk about.

It’s the design, the materials, and the assembly. So what are we actually. Making these homes out of, right? How are they designed? Where are they constructed, and how can we have efficiencies of scale? So I’m here to tell you that there’s no silver bullet. You can’t just change a bunch of policy and all of a sudden how housing will get built.

You can’t just create a new funding stream and housing will be built. You have to work in all four. Of those quadrants. So here we are, the missing middle housing fund, where a young nonprofit, we’re still young, but when we first were starting, we see on one side of the equation all these places and people that need housing but don’t necessarily know how to get it.

And then on the other side of the equation, we see all these brilliant. Innovators trying to change how it’s regulated, how it’s funded, what it’s built out of, how we train the next generation of workers. And where we sit is right in the middle. We go find all those innovation companies and people and policies and governments, and we connect them to those employers or regional nonprofits or cities or counties, and we help them change their funding policy.

Workforce and design materials, environments, we’re essentially a giant connector. And part of the way that we do that connection is by raising funds and putting money into innovation or actual housing creation. But at the end of the day, Kim, it’s quite frankly a lot of piecing the puzzle together.

That’s what we do. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: And how’s it working? 

Nathan Wildfire: It’s really flu, but it’s real slow. I’ll give you some examples. So we met a company called Urban Form. Urban Form, digitizes zoning codes. And then there’s an online platform. You could just type it into Google right now and it would take you there. And like Google Maps, you can zoom in on any parcel in your city and you can.

Very quickly understand what you can and cannot do. On that parcel of land, you can understand its zoning code. In a really quick, easy way. Now this is true if you’re Bob who’s gonna put a deck on the back of his house, or you are Cheryl and you’re gonna do a 30 unit development in a city in Oregon, or you’re the city planner and you have an inquiry from someone on the phone, or maybe it’s a zoning application, and very quickly you have to figure out.

How to tell that person what they can and cannot do based on a zoning code that can be hundreds of pages long and hard to understand. And if you’re Bob the deck builder, this might be the one time you’re ever gonna touch the zoning code. But even though it’s your first and only time, you are clogging up that planner’s time and work just as though you were.

Cheryl building 30 units of housing. So what urban form does is it makes it super clear to anyone in the cities they work in what you can and cannot build. And it reduces huge amounts of time for sometimes very limited planning staff in our cities across Oregon. So once we learned about urban form. We are pretty excited.

It’s just an example of a innovation startup that impacts that policy part of the equation, right? So then our job was then to go connect this innovation to funding. And then the cities that might actually want to implement urban form through a partnership with SEDCOR. I mentioned them earlier. They represent the mid Willamette Valley in Oregon.

We got funding to make Yamhill County in the middle of wine country, the first county in America that has had all of its zoning codes digitized. That’s a real thing and now people are using it. So did that happen fast? Not really. Each city has a different code. There are different concerns, but we had a great partner in urban form who is able to actually meet the concerns of all of those different cities and now there’s a great tool to simplify the housing process in Yamhill County.

Nobody thinks about the zoning code, not really, unless you’re a builder or a developer. But it’s so core to getting things done and to actually building housing in Oregon. Another example would be in Boardman. I mentioned them earlier. Boardman is desperate to get more housing.

And by working with us, they launched a fund. They launched an actual housing fund that is managed by a housing advisory committee, which we provide assistance to. And that committee then makes recommendations to their city council like. How should we spend this million bucks? And they use that capital to actually now go do things like implement urban form.

That’s one of the things they did. Access better state programs for funding, be a pilot for the state for different funding programs, create a master plan for different assemblages of property. And eventually they’re gonna actually make probably loans to different companies to actually build housing of the type they want.

In Boardman. So that’s another example. You, there’s a funding innovation, right? That you then connect to these folks that, that want housing in their community. We’re, a third example would be we work with a bunch of communities on the southern coast of Oregon Southern Oregon coast Regional Housing is our nonprofit.

Partner down there, they get funding from a group called CCD which stands for COOs Curry Douglas Counties, the counties that they serve. And one of the things that we’ve been doing with them is standing up all these different working groups. They have many, many cities that they’re working on behalf, right?

And it tends to be like the same 4, 5, 6 people that do everything across a giant region. And what they really needed. Was help. They needed more brains, more doers, more horsepower. So we have helped them stand up all these different working groups. One’s trying to launch a fund like I just described in Boardman.

One of ’em is trying to do pilot. Projects. One of them is trying to cut red tape, right? So like you don’t really always know what each community needs. You gotta ask them and then you start connecting them to the different innovations that, that we see have promise or are actually getting the job done.

Yeah. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: That’s so fascinating. What other innovations. Like materials building designed. Oh yeah. What kind of innovations are you seeing? 

Nathan Wildfire: It’s always fun to talk about like the stuff housing is made out of. So I have a colleague Ryan Olson. Ryan has helped conceive and is running a project in Newburgh, Oregon.

I’ve mentioned them several times, but it’s a cottage cluster development we call hive. The Housing Innovation Village experience, we had a groundbreaking in December. Hive is 10 cottages built with six different builders using different building technologies. I’ll tell you about those in a moment.

Some funky financing mechanisms that, again, through the help of SEDCOR and Rep. Anna Scharf, we have some funding to actually do this experiment to deliver 10 for sale homes at middle income prices with very different building. Materials. So I’ll list them ’cause I think they’re pretty cool.

MOD’s, PDX is a partner of ours working with Hone. Those are two partners together who are building homes in our Hive project that uses Mass Timber and also different penalized construction. They do it all modular in a factory in North Portland. And then it comes down to Newburgh and Boop goes up in a period of a week or two.

The next one is Ryan has his own company called Elemental. Elemental is all steel frame modular same kind of principle flat packed or shipped as a modular unit. So this is built off site and then comes in boop, goes up pretty quick. Cedar Stone. Builds out of cross laminated timber and so does un brick.

Those are two separate companies who are building cottage in in hive. Out of cross laminated timber humankind homes is actually going to be building the community space. And then another home they use geopolymer. Concrete and their vision is to use robotics to actually build on site.

Geopolymer concrete is like what the Roman aqueducts were made out of, if you’re tracking that. And then Mahoney in Northwest has a vision to build penalized housing across the mid valley. So there are sixth builders. So it’s wild. And we are going to have a home show for all of these building technologies in the early fall.

So they’re all gonna get constructed over the summer. And then we will have a home show. Everybody can come and check ’em out, kick the tires, so to speak. And in the parking lot ’cause there’s a little parking lot we will have a whole bunch of other technologies that we’re gonna show off and an exhibition at the same time.

Check that out. We have a links to it on our website, missing middle housing.fund. You can go see what Hive is all about. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: That sounds fascinating. And it also. I may be wrong with this, but as I was listening to this the wood, the cost laminated, the other innovations, it sounds like these buildings are also potentially not only greener, but cleaner in terms of toxins and things like that, that Oh yeah.

Have been consistently within home design and building that sometimes we don’t realize how. Toxic a home can be when it’s brand new

Nathan Wildfire: and that’s a comis consistent commitment from these builders. First off, like I should point out you’re not gonna hand build your way out of our housing crisis.

It’s just impossible. So we have to have more innovative solutions. We still are gonna build tons of housing by hand, but we have to have these sort of offsite. Solutions. It’s not like when we started building millions of cars in America, it was always just a couple people coming out to build each car by hand.

That’s why we created the assembly line, right? So same principle is true with housing, but we’re not. There yet, while you do that, of course you can be sourcing local materials that, whether that’s timber, which has drive driven the Oregon economy for years. Steel, which we know has fireproofing properties geopolymer concrete, which uses the material that is all around us all the time.

These houses want to be net zero energy or hyper efficient. A bunch of them want to incorporate solar panels, but all of them are, with the exception of maybe MOD’s, PDS, a lot of PDX, a lot of them are newer. To the marketplace. So what Hive does is it gives them a platform to show off their stuff get to house one or house 10, and then people and builders actually and planners can actually come and touch it and go inside and build familiarity with the product and process and trust in those products and processes, right?

So it’s really hard. What we’re trying to do is, showcase this innovation and at the same time hit these middle price points. It’s really, really hard. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: And it sounds like instead of street of Dreams, it’s a street of possibilities. 

Nathan Wildfire: Ooh, I like that. Kim 

Kim Allchurch Flick: just came to my head. It’s it’s encouraging. What are you seeing?

Around you and who’s paying attention? Not names necessarily, but what types of people are paying attention and saying maybe we could do this in our area. 

Nathan Wildfire: I can tell you a really fun one. Typically my, myself and my colleague Amy, we run these really big workshops, these huge events, they’re happen all over the state.

We call them Let’s Build events. And the purpose is to introduce a region and the civic, infrastructure of that region to these innovations, right? Whether the materials or the funding or the policy or the workforce. And so once you do that, all kinds of people start asking. About one innovation or another, right?

Whether it’s a builder that wants to understand how a kit of parts works or it’s a financial institution that wants to understand how these lending funds work, that’s what comes out of the woodwork. But the fun one was last week I was in two day long workshops that I did not have to run. I was just a participant, and it was the Government Accountability Office, which actually reports to our federal.

Congress and our Congress and the GAO is very interested and curious about innovations in housing. Housing productions. So myself and a whole bunch of other folks who think big thoughts and do big things about housing nationally for two days, got to essentially answer questions and have debates in front of the government accountability office, which they will then take as a report to our Congress.

I think our Congress understands that one of the biggest challenges of our times. It’s housing affordability. And so that was a fun one, Kim. That was I didn’t have to run anything. I just got to participate with a bunch of other people that are as passionate as me in housing and quite frankly, so much smarter in so many other ways and pieces.

The housing puzzle I know so little about like insurance or, structure, insulated paneling or, there’s all these different think tanks on the call. It was truly really, really fun. Very encouraging 

Kim Allchurch Flick: it. It is. And it seems like there’s some innovations in commercial. 

Real estate as well, and buildings to make them greener, more affordable, accessible, all of those things. And that to have residential, are you seeing any crossover of ideas between. Commercial and residential at all. 

Nathan Wildfire: Yes. So a lot of these modular approaches in particular work for commercial spaces as well, right?

So if you, because you’re basically building boxes, you’re building a box and you’re trying to optimize that as best as you can for both quality and then repeatability. So how can we create this thing? And you can make the outsides look very different, but in the guts, how do we make this like kit of parts, so to speak again and again and again.

Hotels are actually an industry that, that figured this out a long time ago. But now commercial properties and housing properties alike. Are trying to solve this challenge through automation, through replicability, through offsite creation. A lot of the times too, you’re using multiple suppliers.

You don’t necessarily have to have everything in one factory. You’re outsourcing the different parts of the home to different builders and different suppliers, which is. Cool and interesting. And then there’s entire industries, mass timber would be an example of one where the commercial applications actually came first and housing is coming later.

So in Portland, the one that we all know is the roof of the airport, right? And so that’s meant to be a showcase of local expertise and a local material. For kind of some. Engineering reasons. A lot of the first applications of mass timber were things that were big, big, big, big slabs and beams and floor plates.

And so now as the technology evolves, we’re seeing more and more effort go into how you create residential. So that would be a big point of crossover between the two? Yes. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Wow. What makes you optimistic and what are some future goals? 

Nathan Wildfire: When we first started we thought we, there was gonna be a secret sauce, right?

We thought there was gonna be some sort of, oh man, we figured it out. This is how you make housing go faster and for less. And it turns out there is no secret sauce, but there’s thousands, and I really mean it. Thousands of people trying to solve this. Problem. There was innovation everywhere we looked, and some of it again was like.

That really dogged planning director in some city who just figured out that housing was a challenge and they were gonna work as hard as they could to update their zoning code, their permitting process their, system development, charge process. They were gonna take it upon themselves to make housing easier.

And that’s an innovator, right? That’s someone that really, really. Cares. It might not be as sexy as like the roof of the Portland airport, but it’s just as important. And then figuring out, like with a bank, how you actually create the right way to finance these innovative homes or these innovative companies.

It’s just as important as the really interesting robotic technology because the money is what makes the world go round the most excited I ever saw. One of our partners, his name’s also Nathan, Nathan Young, Nathan Young Run runs Mods PDX. And he can, I think, accurately be described as a person who is passionate about precision and excellence.

And he’s can be a little gruff. And he’s, he’s hands are probably the strongest hands I’ve ever shaken ’cause they’ve wielded so many hammers and screwdrivers, but he turns into the most. Effusive smiling person when he talks about training the next generation to work in construction and to do offsite modular technologies.

He is so passionate about taking his hard-earned knowledge in bringing that to other people, particularly young folks. So you know what makes me optimistic? Nathan’s smile when he talks about the people he’s training. You know that planner who’s like, well, it’s taken three years, but I finally updated the zoning code.

Good for you. Now let’s go do it again. Let’s go take it to the next place. Everywhere I look, Kim, I’m surrounded by innovators. It’s truly inspiring. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: I love that. And also the thought of hard earned knowledge and sharing it. Because knowledge sometimes is hard earned. It’s making mistakes, or not even making mistakes, but just running up against obstacles and finding workarounds while still keeping values and keeping the end goal in mind, which is, the stability of a project the necessity of strong building doing things the right way and to teach others to do that.

Nathan Wildfire: At the end of the day, real estate development’s a risk. You gotta be slightly crazy and have passion to do it. And I get to meet so many people that are doing it. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Yeah. And it’s a long game. You’re looking deep into the future, but more and more. And then how are the employees, employers responding?

And as this is a nonprofit, how is it funded? 

Nathan Wildfire: Employers, they, I would say they don’t know what they don’t know. They know they have a problem, but maybe they make widgets or they serve drinks, or they teach our kids or they heal our sick. So they know housing is an existential crisis to their bottom line and to their viability, but they don’t necessarily always know what to do about it.

So it takes time. It takes time to guide them to the levers that. They can pull, right? Sometimes they have land, sometimes they have political clout. Sometimes they can pre-lease units. Sometimes they can just tell their employees about a, an opportunity, whatever it is. You do have to guide them to it.

But their commitment to this is really critical. ’cause at the end of the day, it’s their people who are gonna live in these homes. So that’s what you said about employers. What was the second part? 

Kim Allchurch Flick: How is it funded? 

Nathan Wildfire: Oh, how In 

Kim Allchurch Flick: the housing fund, 

Nathan Wildfire: We were very fortunate to have an initial seed grant.

This was five years ago from what was then Umpqua Bank. After that, almost all of our funding. Has come from contracts that we get with these different cities and regions. I’ll call two of them out or three of ’em out. ’cause they’re foundational. The one was with SEDCOR, who I spoke to you about earlier.

They went out and raised money on behalf of the employers in Newburgh. And that capital is what’s enabling our project. The Hive Project in Newburgh to move forward. The, we work with the city of Boardman. That’s why I keep. Talking about them. They raised capital for their housing fund and then we helped them manage it.

And then on the South coast we work directly with CCD and Southern Oregon Coast Regional Housing to be at the service of all those cities and towns along our southern coast. Those types of contracts help us keep the lights on, quite frankly. So we’re always on the hunt for what city or region needs our help.

What is the employer base that needs our help and who are the innovators that are seeking funding and customers? That’s typically what they want most, right? 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Indeed. Any thoughts of expansion? 

Nathan Wildfire: Oh, yeah. So to date we’ve worked across Oregon. We are increasingly being asked to go beyond organs.

Borders. And I think that is a thing that we are strongly taking a look at the board of directors is because these lessons shouldn’t just be limited to a single state, right? So how do we take our hard earned lessons and capabilities to other places that need housing help? Yeah. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: I really look forward to that.

And what else would you like to share with people? And for those interested, how can they reach you, which will also be in the show notes, but it’s a chance 

Nathan Wildfire: to hear. It’s easier to find us. Go to our website www dot missing Middle Housing. Do Fund. You can also check out more about Hive at Let’s build hive.com.

You can also email me that’s that same missing middle housing fund, but my name is Nathan Wildfire. You can just send me a note. That would be the easiest way to get in touch with us. Then I think what I would want to leave you with. Is I’ll go back to like, why do we do what we do?

My, my family I told you already my grandmother had 12 kids. My family reunions are like 70 to 90 people, right? And when you have a family as large as mine, people have pretty much every housing situation you can think of across all the age spectrum and income spectrum. We all have people in our network that have challenges with housing, right?

Whether it’s your friend or your family or a colleague. We’ve seen it. We had employers in Newburgh who were shocked that when the pandemic began and they were running a food pantry, their own employees were the folks using the pantry the most. Like housing is a burden for too many. And so I would urge your listeners that like all of this policy change or technology or innovative funding streams or training programs.

They are awesome. They give me so much optimism and frankly joy. But at its heart, this is about a home. This is about shelter. It’s about a place to feel confident and safe and you reaching your potential. Whenever you think about housing policy or change in your community, think about how that impacts your choir.

Your family, your harmony. Because it does, it just does. It it’s a fascinating subject to learn and innovative about, innovate around, but it’s personal. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: That makes so much sense. That’s very touching. Thank you so much. I love the Harmony Choir analogy to it as well, because that also makes sense.

So for the last question, what if you could have dinner with up to three people living or deceased, 

Nathan Wildfire: who 

Kim Allchurch Flick: would they be and why? 

Nathan Wildfire: This is such an awesome question. I love lists. I would rather it be 10 people long, but that’s okay. I will limit myself. So I’m gonna I’m gonna make this a little bit seasonal.

Actually, no, forget that. I love Teddy Roosevelt. I would love to have dinner with Teddy Roosevelt. He is a fascinating person of his time and outside of his time, and I wish that I could get as much done in a year as he seemed to get done. In a day. He’s one of our country’s first foremost naturalists.

He was president of the Audon Society, more or less, invented our national parks created national forestry practices. He was a rancher. He was in the military. He was a police chief president. Pretty wild dude. So that’s one. Second there’s an author right now active named Heather Cox Richardson, who is a historian.

She lives in Maine and I. I just think what she does on a day-to-day basis, connecting present day events to history predominantly of our country is fascinating. It’s so much of what happens in our world has happened before and she’s so good at connecting those. Dots in a way that’s pretty easy to understand and frankly is dispassionate, which I appreciate.

I love history. You should be able to tell that from my love of Teddy Roosevelt. And I consider her one of the foremost historians of our time right now. So that’s the second one. And then I think my third is my grandma. I’d love to be able to, she passed away but I’d love to be able to tell her.

What we’re up to and pick her brain about how we could do it better. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: What a beautiful list. My, my husband has a not so secret crush on Heather Cox Richardson. 

Nathan Wildfire: Gosh. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Let me join that club as ma as many people do. We had a chance to see her when I think it was the Oregon Historical Society that brought Heather Cox Richardson to the Schnitt in Portland.

And we were there. 

Nathan Wildfire: She’s awesome. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: And is Art. Reading her, she knows her history. She is such a good researcher and really talks about how history matters. And it helps us anticipate, it helps us learn. And the way she disseminates her wisdom across history is just I’m with you there. That’s what an amazing list.

Nathan Wildfire: Can I wait, can I have an honor roll mention? 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Sure. Of course, 

Nathan Wildfire: It is spring training and I am obsessed with baseball and I would love, love, love to be able to have dinner with Jackie Robinson, who broke the color barrier for Major League baseball and is just a one of the strongest people I think that ever played the sport.

He’s also amazing at baseball and I would love to pick his brain about. Modern day, his journey, and I’m just a huge fan, so I’d want to go watch a baseball game with him. I dinner would be ballpark hotdog.

Kim Allchurch Flick: Oh, what a great note to end on. That’s lovely. Thank you so much everyone. Thank you for listening. What a fascinating conversation we’ve had with Nathan Wildfire of Missing Middle Housing Fund. Take care. Have a great day.