SHERWOOD, Oregon — The air was thick with silence as the fog drifted across the Tualatin River.
Only a few early risers walked the paths at the Tualatin National Wildlife Refuge, five minutes outside the city.
A Sherwood resident stood on an observation platform, gazing across the field at a mountain.
We struck up a conversation, and I told him I was visiting Sherwood to learn how Intel affected the community. He agreed I could interview him but declined to give his name or let me take his picture.
He said to refer to him as Old Guy.
“Those houses weren’t there 10 years ago,” Old Guy said, pointing toward the slope covered in houses. “In another 10 years, they’ll cover that field.”
He said Intel is the driver, and the impact is ongoing.
“It’s a David and Goliath thing, and I don’t know if you can be successful in stopping it. You might be able to control it a little bit with better land use planning.”
Sherwood resident visiting Tualatin National Wildlife Refuge
Old Guy used to hire out his tractor, running a disc and harrow around Hillsboro on what is now part of the Intel campus.
The Intel effect, he said, is “just incredible.”
“Because of our proximity, the housing here has gotten a lot more expensive, and there’s a lot more of it,” he said. “So what used to be this wonderful little town of about 1,000 people where everybody knew about everybody now is unrecognizable. It’s been obliterated.
“This wonderful little town just outside of Portland where you could go in and have dinner and maybe theater is now part of that whole urban sprawl.”
Old Guy said he did not mind growth, but the growth exploded from about 1990 to 2000.
“It took a breath and now it’s just going to keep going,” he said. “So that’s the Intel effect, because they keep growing. They need housing for people who work there.”
Skyrocketing housing costs
Old Guy said that it’s not just housing for Intel employees. It’s housing for jobs Intel creates through its supply chain and service industries to accommodate those employees.
“We’ve owned our place forever, and we can’t believe what they’re valuing in housing,” he said. “I think somebody must be drunk.”
Skyrocketing housing costs was a common theme with those we talked with during our visit.
Andy Duyck is a farm bureau member and former Washington County commissioner. He also owns an Intel-supplier company that ships products to 15 countries.
He credits the high housing costs to Oregon’s restrictive land use laws.
“The urban growth boundary is held very, very tight and it never expands as much as what the demand is,” he said. “And as you know, under supply and demand, that means prices are going to go up because the demand is far greater than the supply.”
Farm Bureau member Brigetta Martell agreed.
“My kids live all around here. My older kids bought houses. My younger ones cannot afford to buy a house here,” she said. “There’s no income level, even when there’s two of them working, that can pay on the house prices.”
Unintended consequences to agriculture
Duyck said that while Intel adds about 20% to the economy, the flip side is the loss of farmland. He said many Intel employees make six figures, and getting a house in town is difficult.
“So you go out and you buy a farm. You have no intent to farm, but you can afford to buy a farm where another farmer may not. That’s happening, and it’s driving up the cost of farms as well,” he explained.
“If they want to buy a place, it’s sometimes cheaper to buy 50 acres than it is to buy a house in town on half an acre or smaller.”
Andy Duyck, Washington County Farm Bureau member, farmer, and former county commissioner
Martell cited Washington County’s North Plains, whose residents voted down council’s request to expand the growth boundary.
Now, the council says the law requires it to expand whether or not residents want to.
“It never stays where it’s put,” she said of the growth boundary.
Duyck noted that Oregon Metro has never expanded the growth boundaries to the full extent, but growth would occur even faster if it did.
“That’s the dilemma that we find ourselves in is because if you’re a farmer, you don’t want it to grow any faster. If you’re somebody who needs a house, you’re desperate for a little bit more,” he said.
Future relief?
One impact of housing in rural areas caught the attention of the Oregon Legislature. Potential legislation would put the burden of providing a buffer between houses and farmland on the residential side.
“What you see is farmland where housing is built right up to it. Now you’ve got a 200- or 500-foot setback where you can’t spray that close to homes,” Duyck said.
“The burden always falls on the agricultural side, and we were talking about legislation that would change that. If it was zoned for housing, they would have to create the buffer on their side.”
However, he said that proposing something and getting it through the legislature are two different things.
“Because as your population increases, then the voters are mostly urban, so ag has a smaller and smaller voice,” he said.
A different perspective
Marty Cropp owns 10 acres in North Plains and runs a grass seed farm. He said everybody wants to shut the door behind them and leave things as they were when they bought their property.
“You have to understand you don’t get to shut the gate. Let’s grow responsibly, whatever that looks like.”
Marty Cropp, grass seed farmer and washington county farm bureau member
Cropp said the United States needs to provide chips for vehicles, the military, and other uses. That requires some growth.
“When you let a group like North Plains say we like the way we live, we don’t want to see anything else, but you’re also buying cars and you’re going shopping in other places and depending on everybody else to provide what you want in your little town, but you don’t want to see your little town change, to me, there should be a shift in that,” he said.
“You’ve got to expand a little bit.”
Cropp said the North Plains council went through years of planning, and Oregon Metro should have approved expansion based on that process. However, a rural group became involved at the last minute and got the issue on the ballot.
“[The rural folks] did some things which were appropriate for them, good for them,” Cropp said. “But they came in strong and stopped an entire process for 10 years. They could have spoken every month … but came in at the last minute and spoke up and made something happen.”
North Plains does not have expansion room for a grocery store or pharmacy.
“So they’re all waiting for that little potential growth. And this group came in and said, no, we’re going to leave everything the way it is,” Cropp said.
“To me, that was inappropriate after 10 years of planning and grand bargaining and all of the other things that happened.”
‘Can’t stop progress’
From Duyck’s standpoint, you really cannot stop progress.
“It’s going to come in one form or another, whether it’s Intel or somebody else. You just have to choose how fast you want it to grow,” he said.
Cropp said you must have common-sense conversations about how progress affects the tax base, schools, and the surrounding communities.
“You need some people at that roundtable who are far future thinkers, because if you don’t look very far in the future, if you’re just looking like in the next five years, you’re going to be so surprised,” Martell said.
“In the beginning, I think everybody thought it was wonderful that Intel was coming in here. I don’t think most people realized the support systems that have to come in with that wonderful piece of development,” she said.
Washington County Commissioner Roy Rogers said the county discusses maintaining its agricultural character. He also acknowledged that it is an economic issue involving property rights.
“It became very much of a balkanization in terms of who was making money and who wasn’t,” he said.
“This has gotten to be a land speculation for many developers because they’re looking and saying where is the next growth boundary going to go? They will buy parcels of land at today’s prices, which might be 100,000 acres in farmland, and they’ll say I’m going to make money if it comes [into the urban boundary].”
Although Intel, in conjunction with Oregon’s land use policies, has adversely affected agriculture through housing, David Tetrick of Oregon Metro is grateful for the boundary system.
Oregon Metro is a tri-county regional government that oversees land use and other areas.
“When you drive around here, my gosh, you can see the mountains everywhere, and it’s just an incredibly beautiful place,” Tetrick said.
“We would likely have a lot fewer farm opportunities, and we’d have a less robust agricultural economy, including all of our food and beverage economy.”
