Mitigating Clatsop County’s housing crisis is complicated by another looming emergency: the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami
In a recent conversation with a rural Clatsop County woman, she spoke of her housing options for retirement between Astoria and Warrenton.
“Well, I’d love to live in town, but it is too expensive,” she said about Astoria. “We looked at housing in Warrenton, but then what about the tidal wave?”
This is a familiar question for many Clatsop County residents, as they wrestle with the issues of where they can manage to rent, buy and retire based on both economics and environment.
Astoria and Warrenton are the two north Clatsop County jurisdictions with the most potential for buildable land and best poised to address the county’s housing crisis, according to a recent housing study compiled for the county commission.
Astoria has historically been considered a working-class town, deriving a large part of its identity from the narrative of Scandinavian immigration fueling the fishing and logging industries during the late 19th century and early 20th century. Today, salmon runs are no longer booming, the canneries are mostly gone, and timber is a corporate rather than local industry.
The Astoria of today – a hilly, forested peninsula – often gets called mini-San Francisco, as much because of its geography and river-bay location as for its hilltop houses with epic views and culture of urban elitism. In the modern Astoria, intergenerational logging and fishing wealth meets second-home wealth meets Portland outgrowth.
All of this is a recipe for pushing out the working-class sector, which Astoria still boasts as central to its identity. In town, bars are named Worker’s Tavern and The Labor Temple, and museums and business brands extol a picture of Astorians as a forever industrious people.
However, the modern working class, while still made up in part of those in fishing and logging, is also increasingly made up of service-sector workers, who are largely being priced out of Astoria or live in conditions that are less than ideal for feasibly staying “in town.”
More so, it is neighboring Warrenton, a low-lying forest and wetland peninsula where land is still available for building and property taxes are significantly lower, that contains the modern working-class heartbeat between the two towns. Warrenton is viewed as offering more options for first-time homeownership, and somewhat lower rental prices.
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If current trends continue, Astoria may become less and less affordable to lower- and middle-income residents while Warrenton will continue to develop housing across its buildable forestland for the working class who can afford market rents.
Both towns’ leadership are putting energy into addressing the housing crisis, although solutions are not quick or simple.
In Warrenton, Mayor Henry Balensifer is thinking about creative housing models and modest homes for first-time homebuyers who are middle-income earners.
Recently, the Warrenton Planning Commission hosted a presentation on tiny smart homes to see how they could fit into the Warrenton housing landscape. Balensifer said the city is looking at what code amendments would support the development of tiny homes as well as other town homes and cottage cluster housing.
The current development in Warrenton preceded Balensifer’s time as mayor, and he views some of it as poorly planned.
He cited Forest Rim, a recently opened 34-unit multifamily complex.
“Forest Rim is an example of a failure that doesn’t set up for very good communities,” he said. “You end up with very cramped, congested areas, and it doesn’t even have a park out there.”
Working with the Warrenton Planning Commission to develop city code that will support alternative-housing models will take both time and some perspective shift – away from the post-World War II standards of housing and a recalibration of expectations over housing size and amenities for first-time homebuyers.
“We’re starting with a community conversation, then it will start chewing through the planning commission,” he said. “We’ve started the process, but it is a long slog to do anything.”
The Astoria City Council is also looking at ordinances to keep houses from being vacant for most of the year, which could help put some rentals back on the market, City Councilor Jessamyn Grace West said. The city has already begun regulating short-term rentals, as has Warrenton.
The Astoria City Council also recently approve a $130,000, low-interest loan to a developer to build 120 units near Tongue Point on Highway 30. West said it isn’t entirely clear what kind of housing is going to be developed and who it will serve, but it won’t be affordable or low-income.
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The developers went to the city for a loan because of the need to develop infrastructure, namely a sewer line, that could support additional building over time.
In the bigger picture, West said, “we have to prioritize infrastructure, in particular for populations in the lower socioeconomic bracket. And that can be done with exploring land trusts and restricting short-term rentals, both in commercial and residential zones.”
West said the city can also partner with entities and institutions that are looking at offsetting building low-income housing.
This partnering is already occurring in one case. The Portland-based nonprofit Innovative Housing Solutions Inc. recently secured the funding needed to renovate the Merwyn, an old hotel in downtown Astoria, into a 40-unit low-income and workforce housing building. The renovation will begin in the fall, and the work is a partnership among the city of Astoria, Innovative Housing Solutions, the Lower Columbia Hispanic Council, Clatsop Community Action and Clatsop Economic Development Resources.
The site is an impressive repurposing of a historic building that was once possibly going to be torn down and is also vulnerably located in the inundation zone along with the rest of Astoria and Warrenton’s downtowns.
About that tsunami …
Usually referred to across the Northwest as “The Big One,” the more accurate name is the Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake. The subduction zone itself lies 70 miles offshore of the north coast, and geologic history tells us we are within the realm of the next event. A magnitude 8- or 9-scale earthquake and tsunami will drastically affect both old and new housing and infrastructure in Astoria and Warrenton, as well as across the region.
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Over the past couple of decades, as these communities learn more about what to expect from an earthquake and tsunami, preparations have been made. Signs are posted on highways and around towns throughout the county, making residents and travelers aware of when they are in the inundation zones and which direction to head for safety. Inundation zone maps for towns and the county make clear which areas are the most vulnerable.
However, keeping the question of the Cascadia earthquake front and center while addressing immediate social and economic needs, such as housing, remains a challenge.
Warrenton, with its low-lying geography and proximity to the ocean, is largely made up of land in a tsunami inundation zone. Astoria is likely to be affected most by the earthquake and landslides, although its downtown core, port and main highway lie within the inundation zone as well.
Patrick Corcoran is the OSU Extension hazard specialist in Clatsop County who is raising awareness around the earthquake and tsunami. In his estimation, the county is still critically behind in terms engaging properly with this issue.
He recognizes an unavoidable ignorance preventing adequate preparation, calling this part of the West Coast one of the only places in the world with no collective memory for how to navigate its greatest natural disaster. Hurricanes, tornadoes and floods happen more frequently and are therefore experienced many times within a generation, allowing the regions experiencing these disasters to adapt. Subduction zone earthquakes occur on a larger timeline hundreds of years apart, and a population must be old enough to contain the memory of the subduction zone event in order to have a precedent for preparedness.
Due to the erasure of Indigenous knowledge with European settlement of the West Coast, the collective understanding of our geologic events will have to be relearned in its aftermath.
Regardless, Corcoran said we haven’t done enough with the information we do have about the impending disaster, and will implicate ourselves afterward for how little we did with how much we knew.
When it comes to real estate in danger zones, Corcoran said, the attitude is simply “buyer beware.”
In terms of creating affordable housing and mitigating the housing crisis, Corcoran is concerned that the need for housing will outweigh risk factors and that this will disproportionately affect the poor.
“Available property goes hand in hand with level of risk,” he said. “People who require affordable units have fewer choices about where they can live.”
Corcoran, who is also on the Astoria Planning Commission, said there have already been advancements of vulnerable populations in tsunami zones in recent years. An example he cites is the relocation of Shooting Stars Child Development Center, which moved to Port of Astoria in 2017, and into the inundation zone.
Alongside housing, child care is also in critical shortage in Clatsop County. At the time of the move, finding a place to house the learning center was essential, despite the fact that the police department had vacated the same building specifically to get out of the inundation zone.
Astoria Mayor Bruce Jones, then a city councilor, said Shooting Stars simply wasn’t able to find another location. To him, the decision to keep the center’s programming was of greater importance than the inundation risk.
“The lack of child care options may prevent a young parent from being able to work and stay in their housing,” Jones said.
In regard to locating the learning center and other businesses or homes in disaster zones, he wants people to be able to make decisions with awareness of risk factors.
For Corcoran, putting people in vulnerable environments with an “awareness” disclaimer is not enough because low-income and working families’ choices are limited. Just as many families will feel forced into choosing a child care option that puts their children at risk based on economics – Shooting Stars is the most affordable service of its kinds in Astoria – Corcoran is concerned that moves to address affordable housing will force low-income citizens into risky housing environments.
“If you are building low-income housing, you are already building for people whose choices are restricted,” he said. “We’re well-poised to locate low- and moderate- income people into hazard zones, given the economics of land and the lack of apparent concern by people who would build there.”
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