Posted by Leanne Finlay at 6/27/08 1:49 p.m.

Pay attention to Centralia, and Chehalis. Two small, but growing towns on the I-5 corridor. Back in the 1970's they told us that I-5 from Vancouver, BC to California would be one long "city", and it's certainly getting to be quite true.

Kalama, Kelso, Longview are also growing well.

Posted by Leanne Finlay at 6/27/08 2:05 p.m.

Check this for more information along these same lines:
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/realestatenews/archives/142042.asp

Posted by redmondjp at 6/27/08 3:31 p.m.

I'm well familiar with the area, as three generations of my family lived there. Two potential natural disaster situations to consider: flooding and the 'big one' (earthquake). One-hundred year old houses, no matter how nice they look, will not respond well to a major earthquake (which we haven't seen in the PNW since 1700, we've only had moderate ones since then).

There have been three '100-year' floods in the past 20 years in that area. The vintage house that my dad grew up in was just bulldozed a couple of months ago due to the water coming up high enough to fill the kitchen drawers.

And no matter how you want to look at it, most of the area is in a floodplain and always will be. No amount of funding will ever completely remedy that. One has to seriously consider this when computing the real value of a property.

Posted by unregistered user at 6/28/08 8:16 a.m.

Are you kidding? There also are a lot of places that never have flooded. And, a huge eathquake of the magnitude of one 300 years ago: would you rather be in a home built in 1912, or a skyrise condo swaying many stories above the concrete ground?

Posted by CasisJustin at 7/7/08 9:01 a.m.

i been restoring old houses since the early 1990s and i'll tell you that they were built to last better than a lot of modern "stick" homes. there is just not the architectural integrity anymore, despite the advances in technology.