Portland’s Public Image Isn’t Making It Any Cheaper to Buy a Home There

Despite the Oregon city’s struggles with crime, drugs and homelessness, the area’s housing market remains on steady ground

Portland, Ore., is Cathryn Epley’s hometown and where the 67-year-old retiree lived most of her life. “I meant to stay,” she said. But after 2020, things changed: There were 17 break-ins in her building, her wallet was stolen at Trader Joe’s, and “strung out drug addicts” were always hanging around the pharmacies, she said. Last year, Epley sold her condo in Northwest Portland at a loss and moved to Idaho, despite having no family or close friends nearby.

After searching for a year for the right city, Rachal Cronin and Thomas Schweinfurth moved in September from Chicago to Portland, where they bought a new house in the Southeast neighborhood of Sellwood. Cronin, 28, who works for Meta, and Schweinfurth, 32, who is in cybersecurity, are excited to live somewhere where they can walk to restaurants and shops but still have a backyard. “It’s downtown, but green,” said Cronin.

Depending on who you ask, or even on what day you ask them, Portland has either deteriorated into a mess, struggling with high rates of homelessness, street camping, drug addiction, trash, graffiti, taxes and crime—or it’s a charming, safe metropolis with great food, eclectic happenings and myriad outdoor options. Or it’s both at the same time.

Portland was once hailed as a bastion of good living, but its public image has taken a beating. At 35%, it’s first-quarter office vacancy rate was the highest among the 25 largest central business districts in the U.S., according to real-estate firm Colliers. In 2017, Portland was ranked as the country’s third most-favored location in an Emerging Trends in Real Estate report from PwC and the Urban Land Institute. In 2024 its rank was 80th, with only Hartford, Conn., coming in lower.

“Portland has a stigma associated with it,” said Mike Wilkerson, director of economic research at real-estate consultancy ECOnorthwest.

Yet through all this, the overall housing market in the greater Portland metro area has held steady. In April, the median sale price for single-family homes there was $550,000, up from $543,000 in April of last year and significantly higher than the national median of $420,000, according to Portland’s Regional Multiple Listing Service, or RMLS.

The number of closed sales was up around 4.7% in the first four months of 2025 from the same period of last year, almost back to prepandemic levels. In April, there were 3.1 months of inventory in the greater Portland area, compared with 4.4 months nationwide, according to RMLS. Apartment rents are rising amid falling vacancy rates.

“The numbers show that there are enough people who can afford and want to live in [the Portland area] and are ready to buy despite all the bad news coming out of the city,” said Molly Boesel, a senior principal economist at the real-estate data provider Cotality. In part, the area’s price growth is just a reflection of what’s happening nationally—a dip in interest rates this past quarter pushed up median prices across the country—but she said it’s notable that Portland-area prices keep moving higher despite the region’s lack of affordability.

The real-estate market is suffering, however, in downtown Portland. From January to May, the number of condos sold in downtown Portland fell 12.4% from the same period of last year, while the median price dropped 7.6% to $357,000, according to RMLS.

Part of the disconnect in perception has to do with the area’s somewhat-confusing boundaries, real-estate agents said. Technically the City of Portland includes downtown, where most of the tall office buildings are, and about 80% of Multnomah County and small parts of Washington and Clackamas Counties.

Residents, meanwhile, tend to refer to a much larger area—including suburbs like Beaverton, Lake Oswego, Tigard and even Vancouver, Wash.,—as “Portland,” since they are all part of the Portland Metro Area. My family has owned a home in Multnomah County, just outside the City of Portland limits, for 27 years.

It is mostly the City of Portland’s struggles that have ballooned in recent years. The incidence of homelessness there is four times the U.S. average, according to a January report by a tax advisory group, charged by the Gov. Tina Kotek with assessing the impact of recent tax measures. The report also found that the city has the second-highest top marginal income-tax rate in the U.S., behind only New York City. Its police response times to high-priority calls are around three times longer than in 2019, open cases per prosecutor are at a record high, and about 40% of Portland Bureau of Transportation’s assets are in poor or very poor condition, the report said. The city’s biggest office building, the U.S. Bancorp Tower, is more than half empty and up for sale, and a $600 million development with a Ritz-Carlton hotel that opened in 2023 is facing default.

Against this backdrop, the population of the City of Portland fell by 17,417 residents between July 2020 and July 2024, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The population of the Portland Metro area, however, added 20,162 residents during that same period.

Donnie Oliveira, the City of Portland’s deputy city administrator for community and economic development, said the city is improving coordination to tackle issues like homelessness and cleanliness, and taking steps to facilitate building more housing, including improving the permitting process. Violent crime is down, and the City of Portland’s population is starting to grow again: It added 1,435 people between 2023 and 2024. There has also been more building of emergency shelters to house people. “We are making progress,” Oliveira said.

But many residents are selling homes or condos inside the city limits and moving to other parts of the metro area, where tax and crime rates are lower and the schools mostly have better reputations, said Andrew Berlinberg, a real-estate agent with Keller Williams Realty Professionals in Portland.

Multnomah County levies a pre-K tax that is an indication of the exodus of the wealthier homeowners from the city: The number of people who paid the tax dropped 19% to 4,919 in tax year 2022 from 6,063 in 2021.

Tim McMann didn’t want to leave the greater Portland area, but he also didn’t want to live downtown anymore. McMann, 70, who sold his glove company in 2017, listed his 1,600-square-foot, renovated condo in a luxury building about two years ago and relocated to Vancouver, Wash., just across the Columbia River in Clark County. He loved living in the condo for almost all of the 27 years he owned it, but it was a few blocks from the Multnomah County Justice Center, the epicenter of the protests that turned violent in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd. “It all went to hell in a handbasket,” he said. It took McMann 18 months to find a buyer, and he had to lower his $760,000 price tag. A sale is now pending at $599,000, he said.

Others are leaving Portland altogether. In the fall of 2023, Epley spent some time in Boise, Idaho, and realized that the tension and “constant threat” she had felt in Portland were gone. She sold the condo she lived in, and another one she rented out, for lower prices than she had paid. Including the money she had put in renovating the units, she calculates she lost around $300,000 total. She then built a new home in Eagle, Idaho, for around $1 million. “There is a feeling of optimism and excitement here,” she said.

Many recent buyers in the Portland metro area, meanwhile, are moving from cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, which have comparable social issues but more expensive real estate, according to Brad Thurman and Kathy MacNaughton, real-estate agents with Windermere Realty Trust in Portland.

“The homelessness isn’t unusual to them,” said Thurman. People who didn’t know Portland before Covid aren’t as quick to make a comparison to how things used to be, he said; it’s the people who have lived in Portland the longest who see the difference.

For Laura Mittelstadt, a fifth-generation Oregonian, the changes that occurred in Portland were painful. “The agony and the loss came in the difference I saw in the environment,” she said.

Mittelstadt, 58, lived in Lake Oswego and owns a commercial building in Portland’s inner Southeast neighborhood. After a 2020 measure in Portland decriminalized drugs like heroin, Mittelstadt said, she witnessed drug use and deals right outside her Southeast building. Her property became covered with used needles, excrement, trash and graffiti, and she felt that the understaffed police force left business owners to handle things on their own. “I was angry all the time and I felt hopeless,” she said.

In 2021, she and her husband bought a 1,400-square-foot condo as a vacation home in Scottsdale, Ariz., for around $450,000. The more time she spent there, the happier she became, and in 2024 they sold their 3,400-square-foot house in Lake Oswego for $1.57 million, about breaking even given the some $200,000 they had put into renovations. She still owns the commercial building. The decriminalization measure was overturned in 2024, but Mittelstadt says there are still problems with drug usage in front of the building.

She doesn’t see returning to Portland anytime soon: “I don’t see anything breaking the cycle of insanity,” she says.

Newcomers Cronin and Schweinfurth knew that Portland had been struggling in recent years. The couple left Chicago, where they couldn’t afford a single-family home downtown with a backyard, and spent a year trying out Portland, Las Vegas and Seattle. They have found Portland to be a charming, livable city.

Finding a place to buy was rougher than they thought it would be. After getting outbid several times, the couple paid $767,000 in March for a newly renovated, three-bedroom house.

Since moving there, they have only seen improvement in the city’s management of homelessness, Schweinfurth said, and they don’t have the same concerns about gun violence that they did in Chicago. “We always feel safe here,” said Schweinfurth.

Writer Margi Saraco, 66, and Alex Polner, 67, an artist, moved to Portland last year from Montclair, N.J., to be near their daughter, who was living in Washington state. They took three trips exploring possible places to live nearby, settling on Portland in April 2024 and renting an apartment. They loved how it was possible to get around easily without a car due to the city’s public transportation system of buses, light rail and trolleys, they said. They also enjoy the music and food scenes, all the hiking possibilities and seeing a good mix of ages when they go out. “It has great energy,” says Saraco.

Saraco and Polner sold their 2,500-square-foot house in Montclair for around $1 million. In June, they paid $688,500 for a 2,700-square-foot Craftsman with a backyard in the Southeast section of Portland’s Kerns neighborhood.

Many people have asked them why they would pick Portland, Polner said, but in his opinion, the perception is far worse than the reality. “They’ve just read about it—they haven’t been here,” he said. While they have encountered drug addicts and seen a lot of people living in tents, “it doesn’t feel dangerous to us at all,” said Polner. “We are street savvy—we understand what cities are like.”

https://www.wsj.com/real-estate/luxury-homes/portland-oregon-housing-market-cabecb9c

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5734425&forum_id=2...id.#48993674)