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by ROBERT SCHOENBERG, VBJ Staff Reporter

If any place is going to have a population explosion in Clark County in the next few years, it will probably be Washougal, the little town along State Route 14 east of Camas on the way to the Gorge.
Chain stores are taking notice lately of the town in the eastern portion of Clark County. Grocery chain Safeway has built a new store there and so has Longs Drugs. The reason for the interest: the number of new rooftops, a demographer’s indication that a location needs more retail stores.
Conservatively, over 1,500 new single-family residential homes are planned to be built in the next two years. The only consideration holding back developers might be finding people to buy the new homes, and according to real estate agents in Washougal, that does not seem to be a problem.
“I think the developers timing could not be better,” said Joan Hayden, manager of Prudential Northwest Properties real estate offices in Camas.
In Vancouver, she said, housing has saturated the east end of town, along N.E. 164th Avenue corridor, and now the city has its traffic problems to deal with, sending new home buyers looking for alternatives.
“I know the business for this office in particular has been doing just great. We are having much better business than last year,” she said. “We are just getting so many more people. They are hearing about this area, the marketing that Camas and Washougal are doing, the marketing that we are doing. We have a constant traffic of walk-in people.”
It all seems to be coming together for Washougal, she said. The reason for the interest may be infrastructure.
According to city officials, in February of this year, the city finished an expansion of the sewer system increasing its capacity. With that increased capacity, developers are quickly hooking up their subdivisions. They are ready to build and sell houses.
Monte Anderson, the City of Washougal’s planning director, listed 26 subdivision projects in the works so far this year. One of the largest is Pacific Lifestyles Homes’ Sunset Ridge on the east side of Washougal.
Some of the lots in the Sunset Ridge subdivision run alongside the 16th fairway of the Orchard Hills Golf Club. Kevin Wann, owner of Pacific Lifestyles Homes of Vancouver, said he has sold 23 homes in three months.
By far the largest is Lookout Ridge, located on the hillside northwest of town above Shepherd Road, with 469 buildable lots available on 106 acres. DeCosta Properties, along with homebuilder Hayden Homes, is developing the site.
The road for the first phase of Lookout Ridge was finished recently, and model homes along with five others are under construction. The second part of the first phase is located higher up on the hillside. Michael Anders, owner of DeCosta, said he is submitting a home to be built there for the 2001 Parade of Homes.
McDonald Property’s Granite Highlands development, 425 lots on 112 acres just east of the Lookout Ridge development, starts construction as soon as an access road is finished. Others have plats recorded and the developers have been building homes over the last year, like Orchard Hills with 50 lots, and Rolling Meadows with 142 lots.