When Gov. Tina Kotek took office in 2023, she said one of her primary goals was to help Oregon dig out of its housing shortage.

And she set an ambitious goal: She said Oregon needed to build 36,000 housing units every year for the next decade.

That’s a big number — especially considering the state has averaged 18,000 to 20,000 housing starts annually during the last few years, according to a recent report in The Oregonian newspaper.

It’s a particularly audacious goal considering that the forces aligned against that kind of production — high interest rates, the booming costs of construction, a labor shortage, a lack of infrastructure, a lack of planning resources in some local governments and so on — still are mostly in place.

So it’s not surprising Oregon didn’t come close to reaching that 36,000 goal in 2023 — and isn’t on track to reach it in 2024. The Oregonian, citing preliminary numbers from a federal database, reported local governments in Oregon issued about 17,700 housing permits last year.

And, through June of this year, only about 7,300 housing permits had been issued.

None of this means Kotek’s efforts to fire up housing production have failed. She understands, as do most experts, that the housing shortage in Oregon didn’t occur overnight. And it’s not going to be fixed overnight.

To her credit, Kotek has remained focused on housing issues and pushed through proposals in this year’s short legislative session to break down some of those barriers in the long run. She told EO Media Group reporters and editors that she planned to return to the 2025 Legislature with additional proposals.

But Oregon’s housing crisis is not something that will be solved with one solution or a single program. Rather, it will take a suite of solutions — and not all of those will come from Salem.

In that light, consider two recent ideas coming out of Eastern Oregon.

In Union County, commissioners have approved an ordinance establishing a process in which landowners in the county’s rural residential zones can build accessory dwelling units. (An accessory dwelling unit is a small, self-contained residence on the same property as a primary residence.)

The Union County process doesn’t sound particularly easy: Landowners would need to apply to the county planning commission to get approval, and will have to go through a public hearing. And accessory dwelling units will not single-handedly solve Oregon’s housing crisis — but they likely are part of the answer.

On a similar note, a nonprofit organization called Working Homes (a subsidiary of Wallowa Resources) recently closed a deal in Enterprise to buy a downtown building with 27 apartments. The fear was that another developer could have purchased the building for high-end second residences or vacation rentals, forcing the current occupants of the apartments out of their homes. You’ve heard the maxim about how the first thing you do to climb out of a hole is to stop digging. This purchase, in a small but significant way, ensures that our housing hole doesn’t get deeper.

On Aug. 15, people working to create affordable workforce housing will gather in La Grande for the annual Eastern Oregon Housing Summit. The event already has been moved to a larger site to accommodate more attendees. That’s a good sign. The summit should be a great opportunity for attendees to see what’s going on elsewhere, to make new contacts, to toss out new ideas.

Momentum is building to solve our housing crisis, but it’ll take a lot of good ideas and a sustained focus to get those housing numbers where they need to be. The hole is deep.