Bend, Oregon, holds worlds of contradictions. Both forested and volcanic, it’s a town where locals float the Deschutes like a lazy river in the summertime and hit the slopes during winter. Tourists come for the resort-like down-to-earth atmosphere, and yet Bend has also been described as “poverty with a view.” As a Zoom town with remote workers and a competitive real estate market, it is becoming increasingly difficult to make a home in this city. 

Jonathan Bach knows this tension well — he spent his high school years near Bend and the University of Oregon grad is now a reporter at The Oregonian on a housing beat. 

Pulling back the curtain on issues real people are facing as they try to build a home of this Patagonia-clad city, his book, High Desert, Higher Costs: Bend and the Housing Crisis in the American West, was shortlisted for the Association of Business Journalists 2025 Best in Business Book Awards.

As a lifelong Oregonian myself, I come from generations of people who have followed the West Coast’s call. I caught Bach via Zoom while he was on his lunch break at The O. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

There are so many layers to affordable housing, and you’re working through a lot of layers through the storytelling itself. What was your initial thread you pulled at that piqued your interest in writing this story, and how did you keep everything organized while you were writing it?

I was encouraged by Peter Laufer, one of my professors, to thread some personal narratives through the book. I was initially a little resistant to that, because you know, as journalists, we are taught to write in the third person, not to insert ourselves into the story. And yet, I had sort of a wealth of experience, moving from Montana to Mississippi to Arizona and California, before [my family] settled in the Central Oregon area. And so I did a lot of filing through the archives of my brain to pull out some narrative strings that would be not just interesting, but were germane to the story I was trying to tell, which is about housing. And then much of the rest of the book is more traditional interviews, records, and investigative techniques that bolster the reporting. 

How did your time studying journalism at UO help prepare you to write this book?

The one class I really thought about was Brent Walth’s Investigative Reporting Workshop that I went through as a senior. Brent taught us that in any investigative story, there’s a gap between how things should be and how things are. The wider that gap is, the larger your story. 

Were there any housing solutions you came across that seemed especially promising to you? 

I think the idea of the book was to interrogate what people are trying to do to fix our housing crunch, and there were a few solutions I wanted to delve into — from the idea that we need to build more townhomes and duplexes, to other ideas that folks don’t often think of, like community land trusts. In the school of solutions journalism, this is not an advocacy book. I’m not advocating for any of these policies. It’s about investigating what parts of them work, and what parts of them don’t.

You structure this story around different people’s experiences living in Bend, and I found myself invested in their stories, especially Greg Delgado’s, a community organizer who was evicted during the pandemic. How did you build trust with your subjects? 

This is a book about housing, that’s not about housing. It’s about haves and have-nots. One of the chapters is all about who can afford to stay in a place versus who can’t. I got people to open up to me by spending time with them. In Delgado’s case, I didn’t publish anything about our interviews for years. I first met him in 2021, and this book didn’t come out until 2025. One of the joys for me of this book was that there was no daily deadline or pressure to file a story, and that’s a really big reason I wanted to write this book. To have time to tell a long story. These people stuck with it for years and allowed me into their lives and showed immense patience as I asked a lot of questions. 

Would you say writing this book further complicated or simplified your definition of “home?” 

My instincts say that it simplifies my definition of home. I moved more than a dozen times before I was an adult, and many of those moves were before I was in high school. I have a very complicated relationship with the idea of home, and yet, writing this book and talking with folks who equally just want that sense of community… That’s what home boils down to is a sense of community. I think that’s how I would define it today. 

 High Desert, Higher Costs: Bend and the Housing Crisis in the American West, Oregon State University Press, $24.95. Maya McLeroy is a fourth-year journalism major at the University of Oregon’s Clark Honors College, where she is writing her thesis on root systems and growing up.