Post Column 2: The Escalating Price of Entry
This post appears in the June issue of the Multnomah Village Post, on stands now:
I’ve been involved in several conversations lately about the sky-high price of real estate in Portland these days. We’ve lived in the Village a long time now, and when we moved in, there were plenty of choices under $200,000. Our big struggle was finding something we could live in for around $150,000. Man, those were the days!
I guess the days of being able to start off your life by buying a house in the Village, unless you happen to be pulling down a major salary, are pretty much at an end. Lately it seems that there has been a dramatic rise in weird house/lot layouts (flag lots anyone?) that allow builders to jam as much house as possible onto what once would have been a pretty standard single lot. The unusual thing about this is that many of these houses are selling for half a million bucks!
The thing that made this topic really lucent, to me lately, is the new house on the corner of SW Vermont and SW 35th. Those of you that have been around for a while will remember that ONE house once occupied that lot, which is now divided into two. The first house that was built sold for over $400,00, but there was this odd space between it and SW 35th. It didn’t seem big enough for a second house…. However, soon enough construction began and now the first house is sandwiched between a property on the left, and this rather large new house between it and 35th. In fact, the two houses share a driveway! How’d you like to live in someone else’s driveway for over $550,000? ‘Cause that’s what it will cost you. I’m pretty sure the owner of the first property is none too happy about this arrangement. It will take the place a while to sell, but it will sell.
Have you spent any time on Portland Maps? (http://www.portlandmaps.com). It’s an instructive site. My own property history on there shows a jump from 70,000 (in 1989) to 160,000 when we bought it, and when we sell the price will be well in excess of $300,000 to be sure. If we didn’t own already, the sheer amount of $500,000 properties immediately surrounding our house might put me off from looking for housing in the Village, or trigger a diatribe against the proverbial Californians who are driving our property values up, but now it just triggers a feeling of relief that we got in while we could. Even so – it’s a little unnerving to realize that the only single family home we can really afford in the Village is the one we’re already in.
I suppose that I have come to accept that $500,000 is a pretty standard price for a newly-constructed house near the Village. Occasionally we’ll come across a real eye-popper at $700,000 or thereabouts. Granted 500-700K isn’t “as much as it used to be”, but those figures still set me back a little. I mean, I’ve got what I consider to be a well-paying job, and I cannot imagine having to come up with the amount of money that the combination of a mortgage payment and the property taxes would equal, on a monthly basis. What are these folks doing for a living, and where did I go wrong?
The fact of the matter is, I’m pretty satisfied with our little house. Sure. It’d be nice to have a driveway and a garage, and traffic gets a little busy sometimes here on 35th, but on the bright side, I’ll probably never be able to say again that our house has doubled in value, when we finally do move someday. Mrs. V is constantly tempted by new houses, and I agree that “they” are building some pretty nice places these days, but being within 2 blocks of the Village main drag is worth a lot of money to me. And apparently, a lot more money to more and more people.