Last week the Lake Oswego Review ran a citizen editorial criticizing the city’s efforts to provide affordable housing, together with a rejoinder from someone involved with those efforts. The two articles ran directly above an advertisement for twelve fine homes in Lake Oswego and West Linn, which taken as a group sported prices averaging in the neighborhood (not the Laquedem neighborhood, to be sure) of $2 million.
It’s not easy to build affordable housing in Lake Oswego and environs; the schools and tree-lined lanes create demand that is manifested in the climbing house prices. The absence of a county income tax doesn’t hurt, either. The Portland metropolitan area — in fact, the City itself — has areas where it should be easy to provide affordable housing, for example, on flat industrial land in the flood plain sandwiched between a freeway and a polluted riverbank. Even with those drawbacks, heavy infrastructure subsidies from the City, and a tram and trolley to help the carless live there, from what I’ve read it appears that the most experienced builders who are operating there haven’t been able to figure out how to build units that would sell for less than $400,000 or so.