Susan's Online Guide to Portland Oregon - The City of Roses

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Susan's Online Guide to Portland Let me Help You Find a Home and a Neighborhood
Welcome to my Web site about the Portland, Oregon, metropolitan area. It's my way of helping you become acquainted with the neighborhoods and communities of the Portland metro area and to inform you about the Portland area housing market. Your comments and suggestions about my Web site are always welcome. If you have questions or if you are interested in buying or selling a home in the Portland area, contact me online or call me at (503) 497-2984. Susan Marthens Principal Real Estate Broker/CRS GRI __________________________________________________________________________________________________

Real Estate Market

U.S. foreclosure inventory falls, but Oregon's unchanged August 29 − The number of completed U.S. foreclosures continued to drop in July, while the share of mortgaged homes in the foreclosure process also fell. Lenders foreclosed on 58,000 homes in July, California data firm CoreLogic said Tuesday. The nation's inventory of homes with a mortgage in foreclosure fell 0.2 percentage points to 3.2 percent. In Oregon, 3 percent of the state's mortgaged homes were in a stage of foreclosure in July, unchanged from a year earlier. CoreLogic said lenders completed 10,200 foreclosures in the 12-month period ending in July. The month's numbers are the first to reflect major changes in the way foreclosures proceed in Oregon. A new state mediation program brought out-of-state foreclosure filings to a halt midway through the month. Read more... Not your father's short sale August 31− Talking about short sales as a ‘new’ opportunity seems strange. However, we believe that today’s short sale process is so different than the process you have experienced over the last few years that it does qualify as a completely different opportunity. Let’s explain why. The housing crisis created a free fall in prices over the last five years. This collapse in housing values has created a situation where millions of homes today are actually worth less than the mortgage currently on the house (a situation known as being ‘underwater’). CoreLogic in their most recent Negative Equity Report explains that there are over eleven million houses currently underwater. Read more...
Homes & Health
Pefab home: Easy does it August 28 − The passers-by stopped to gawk. A few snapped photos. It’s not every day you see up to 60-foot-long, factory-built pieces of a home trucked, lifted and stacked over a course of two days. Nine pieces that make up a multimillion-dollar “green” project named Casabrava took shape on a prepped site in La Jolla on Thursday and Friday after a trip from a factory in Utah. Over the next two weeks, workers will “stitch” together the pieces to prepare for finishes. The project’s vision: Homes made on factory lines can look and feel as sophisticated as traditional homes built on site, said Heather Johnston, an architect and future occupant of Casabrava. Prefabricated construction is also more efficient and more environmentally friendly, Johnston said. “This is not a manufactured home, which are used for trailers and mobile homes,” said Johnston, who will live in the house with her husband, David Dickins. Read more... Tours Heritage Walking Tours From May through September The Architectural Heritage Center are offering a walking tour every Thursday evening in some portion of the city. Tours will not only be downtown, they’ll be in some of our fantastic historic neighborhoods as well. We hope you’ll join us for some architectural history mixed with a little exercise! Read more... Street of Dreams The NW Natural Street of Dreams is schedule for July 28-August 26, 2012 at The Vinyard in West Linn. From a classic Hamptons estate to an Oregon lodge tastefully built for superior energy efficiency, there is something at the show for everyone. Read more... Green homes starting to take root again August 28 − Earlier in the last decade, the real estate industry started on the path to understanding the importance many consumers put on ‘green’ building. Then we got caught up in the surge in business in the middle of the decade and of course the collapse of the market later. The industry became more concerned about the ‘green’ in the bank rather than the ‘green’ in housing. However, as the housing market is beginning to stabilize, we are again seeing a movement back to environmentally motivated buying decisions by many. Read more...
News
Oregon News from NW Portal It's Happening Tonight!(Blogtown, PDX, Portland ...) — GO-GO —This summer's Top Down series ends with The T.A.M.I. Show , the 1964 conce... Gov. John Kitzhaber endorses Portland's ...(OregonLive.com: Portland...) — "As a physician, he believes tooth decay is a serious problem and fluoridation is an eff... Stink bug appears on Oregon farms(Capital Press) — HERMISTON, Ore. -- An Oregon State University entomologist last week found the brown mar... Wine cellar at Mahonia Hall represents i...(StatesmanJournal.com - S...) — Bottles of Oregon wine are never too far away from influential guests at Mahonia Hall. Wh... Updated: Ducks Legal Department Nearly a...(Willamette Week Blogs - ...) — Anybody who thinks lawyers are boring should tune into the University of Oregon's legal ... Ron Wyden, Endangered Species(Willamette Week Blogs - ...) — The choice of Rep. Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney's running mate has been an uncomfortable dev... Rare West Coast mardon skipper butterfly doesn't get endangered species protection August 31 − Federal biologists have decided that a rare butterfly found in California, Oregon and Washington will not get Endangered Species Act protection. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Friday that it has found the mardon skipper in far more places than were known when the butterfly was first considered for protection. Regional Director Robyn Thorson says extensive surveys have turned up 165 places where the butterfly can be found, compared to just 14 in 1999. The mardon skipper is tawny orange, with a stout, hairy body less than an inch long. The caterpillars feed on grasses. It is found in the southern Puget Sound and southern Cascades of Washington, and the Cascades and Coast Range of Southern Oregon and Northern California. Conservation groups petitioned for protection in 2002. Read more... Superb Labor Day weekend forecast ahead for Portland-area and beyond August 31 − So many fine reasons to love the Pacific Northwest in general, and Portland in particular: Our microbrews. Our offbeat vibe. Our stunning natural beauty. And a Labor Day weekend forecast that will, no doubt, be the envy of folks from Mississippi to Montana. The National Weather Service basically calls the best weather for us, beginning with a Friday forecast that begins with clouds, gradually becomes sunny with a high near 76 degrees and ends with a sky clear enough to gaze at a blue moon. Overnight, the low dips to 52, and the north northwest winds of up to 9 miles per hour that have buffeted us all week calm. Read more... Blue moon to rise over Portland tonight. What's your favorite moon song? August 31 − Those of us in The Oregonian's features section who haven't taken Friday off for the Labor Day weekend are pondering whose version of "Blue Moon" is better. Nat King Cole or the Marcels? Skywatchers have likely already guessed why this song is an item of discussion. Tonight, the second full moon of the month will occur, making August a Blue Moon month. According to Mother Nature Network, "Blue moons come along once every 2.7 years on average, and sometimes much more frequently. In 1999, for example, blue moons occurred in both January and March." This blue moon will be the last one for three years. The last blue moon was on New Year's Eve 2009, and we won't see another until July 2015. Read more... Oregon has new wolf pack with five pups August 31 − Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife has discovered another wolf pack near Northeast Oregon’s Eagle Cap Wilderness. The agency has received “irregular wolf reports” from the area over the past several years. Officials started monitoring the area around Upper Minam River in June after a remote camera captured the image of a black lactating female wolf (above). Then, last week, they saw a pair of gray-colored adult wolves with five pups. They might not be related to the lactating female seeing as they’re a different color, and their home range is still unknown. ODFW spokeswoman Michelle Dennehy said if at least two of the pups make it to the end of the year, it could bring the total number of breeding wolf pairs to five. In order to start the process of removing wolves from the state Endangered Species List, the gray wolf population east of the Cascades needs to have four breeding pairs of wolves for three consecutive years. Read more... Scientists looking for ways to restore Northwest's sick forests August 31 − This week fire crews declared the Taylor Bridge fire 100 percent contained. Now that the massive blaze in central Washington is controlled forest scientists say Northwest residents should brace for more large fires like this. Munching insects, parasitic plants and global climate change are part of the problem. I’m up on Blewett Pass with Karen Ripley. We’ve trundled up a non-descript bumpy forest road in her aging sedan. Ripley wears a Washington State Department of Natural Resources polo shirt from her employer. She manages forest health for the department. And her clean-scrubbed face shows her eagerness to get out of the office, off the highway and into the trees. “If you read the journals of the early settlers, if you read the early explorers and pioneers this is really the forest they were most familiar with," Ripley says. "They could drive their wagons through this forest, they could ride a horse at a running speed.” Read more... Learning with less: Rising pension costs worry lawmakers, retirees August 31 − Oregon lawmakers learned this week they can budget for $80 million more than expected. But state budget costs are rising. At a meeting earlier this week, the Public Employee Retirement System announced hundreds of millions of dollars in higher pension costs for the budget cycle, starting next July. It was a reality check for PERS board chair, James Dalton. It is painful, but it is reality. We do have an obligation to protect the funded status," Dalton said. OPB's "Learning With Less" series has tracked the effects of budget cuts on schools, over the last year. Today, Rob Manning takes a closer look at a key cause of rising costs: teacher pensions. More than 100,000 Oregonians get pension payments from PERS. Many are retired teachers, like John and Cindy Hayden. Read more... Man sentenced for urinating in Portland reservoir August 31 − A 23-year-old man who urinated into Portland's water supply last year has pleaded guilty to misuse of a reservoir and been sentenced to community service. Joshua Seater must complete 24 hours of service at a food bank by Oct. 10. If he fails, he faces five days in jail. The Colton resident and his attorney declined comment after Thursday's brief hearing in a downtown Portland courtroom. A security camera caught Seater urinating into the Mount Tabor reservoir in June 2011. "Within a split second of me taking a urine in there, right afterwards, I felt guilty," he told KATU at the time. "I knew I did wrong when I did it." The incident led the Portland Water Bureau to drain the 7.5 million-gallon reservoir at a cost of about $36,000. The action helped swell the seemingly minor act into a national news story. "Josh Seater isn't necessarily a bad person, he just did a really stupid thing," said David Shaff, administrator for the Portland Water Bureau. Read more... Traffic! Where not to drive August 30 − Every weekday morning for the past nine months, Sara Flisram has approached the intersection at Northeast Sandy Boulevard and CÃ©sar ChÃ¡vez Boulevard with a little bit of optimism and a great deal of trepidation. “It can be a nightmare,” says Flisram, who drives from her Montavilla home to Southwest Portland via Interstate 84.The nightmares occur, Flisram says, when a driver comes to a complete stop in the middle of Sandy Boulevard because rush hour traffic isn’t flowing the way he or she wants it to. The intersection approach from CÃ©sar ChÃ¡vez has three lanes. The far left lane is supposed to turn left onto Sandy. The middle lane allows drivers to go straight or turn. The far right lane gives drivers the option of going straight or turning right.All of which forces drivers to take calculated risks just when rush-hour traffic is at its worst.Flisram says her strategy is to sit in the left lane and hope everyone in the center lane goes straight so she can turn and sneak back to the right lane on Sandy to enter the highway.Taking the proper middle lane turn, she acknowledges, sometimes means crawling through a backup that can stretch two blocks or more. So usually, she gambles. Read more...