Regional Planning efforts may have contributed to the pain felt in Clackamas County during the housing downturn, experts say.
Regional Planning efforts may have contributed to the pain felt in Clackamas County during the housing downturn, experts say.
Since the housing and financial collapse of 2008, Clackamas County homeowners have struggled with some of the highest foreclosure rates in Oregon, regularly outranking neighboring Multnomah and Washington counties.
“I think we made a bit of a policy mistake in not trying to allocate more of our growth to the west side,” said Gerard Mildner, director at the Center for Real Estate at Portland State University. “We’ve fixed some of our thinking about that, but in some ways, we’re living through some of the difficulties where we’ve tried to encourage homes to be built in the places in the region where growth would not normally happen.”
In trying to preserve prime farmland in Washington County, Mildner and others say Metro, the Portland area’s regional government, encouraged more growth in Clackamas County than jobs or transportation could support.
Read more at OregonLive.com.
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