TIGARD HOUSE HUNTER REVIEW

Before Tigard house hunting began, one big question came up too often.

Why Tigard?

The view I had from downtown Portland included every direction out of the city.

My unmarried self would never leave NW Portland where I paid $155/mo for a studio in 1980 before I moved to the end of the Lovejoy block.

With an insider deal for locals only, I moved from a no-bedroom to a one-bedroom half a block away and paid $150/mo. The silverfish were free, but their roaming days were over.

My roaming days ended in that apartment, too.

My unmarried self had taken an urban view of life for a few years, from a place in Philadelphia near the Rocky Steps, another in Brooklyn on 33rd and 4th, to NW Lovejoy and 21st.

I liked the excitement of walking out the door into a world in motion. Call me simple. Sometimes I didn’t have to walk out the door. A guy across the street had his hotrod Camero on a bumper jack while he laid underneath on a blanket full of tools on a rainy day.

Auto shop started late. His girlfriend knelt beside his feet sticking out in the road.

Then the jack slipped and the police, firemen, and ambulances flooded the street. Uniformed people circled the car as the day turned dim, their flashlights reflecting off the wet pavement.

It was awful.

Not Tigard House, Not Yet

My married self moved to inner SE on 11th and Lincoln when real house hunting began.

A move to Gresham included the Banfield; a move to Beaverton meant the Sunset Hwy.

Why not a house in SE Portland? Because it wasn’t the right timing in 1989. The money move would have been a house in NW, but who had that kind of money?

And SE had an LA feel, the kind you get from living in a barely marked inner-city suburb near the Fabulous Forum and go to school under an LAX flight path.

So we started looking in Multnomah Village, progressed through SW Portland near the Beaverton city limits, and Metzger. But not Tigard.

My inner-Portland self saw Tigard closer to McMinnville. I needed a better map, right? Once I got that straightened out, Tigard came into focus.

It’s on I-5, and it’s on Barbur Blvd to Pacific Hwy, so it has a varied access, which means you can get stuck in traffic on more than one road.

After further map inspection, Tigard was near Lake Oswego, Tualatin, and Sherwood, not McMinnville. And it shared a border with Portland. In an odd postal service quirk, mail addressed to a Tigard address with Portland printed instead, still shows up.

What kind of house was the right house? Call me simple again. Three bedroom ranch with a single garage was the call. Not a cottage, a cabin, or A-Frame, just the basic abode.

At the right time and place it showed up, we moved in, and the Tigard House Story began. It’s a story repeated in every community across the country, yet unique every time.

The deer still roam, looking for antelope.