I think that people will pay it because there is a market for people out of state to move here with that kind of expandable or saved up cashflow. This makes it affordable and desirable. Wages don't have to double. The Portland of 10 years ago is not the Portland of today. This city is growing, changing, daily, and it's seeing a lot of very very rich out of state money.

Either we make housing reasonable for the working class or we going to be turning everything outside of downtown and the SE into vast blobs of suburban poverty.

The working class can rent houses/apartments, and scrape by. This will not be getting cheaper than it is today. Hundreds of thousands are moving to Portland in the next 20 years. This has played out pretty accurately by many in metro. You can't fill in small spaces with that many people without property rates shooting up.

If we force out the young working class out of Portland proper, it will be almost impossible to get them back without a massive investment in housing infrastructure. Rental and housing prices will keep rising and rising as speculators will move the market. I don't want to live in another San Francisco.

Then move, because we, and Seattle, are the next San Fransisco. It will take a long time, but we're headed that way, barring some natural disaster, oh, like say an Earthquake? Because we're due for that too anyday now, that will absolutely devastate this area, hot economy or not.

The great thing is you just have to move outside the city, and rental is easily affordable. I've said this 300 times in this thread. You give up the city you love, you get affordability back, and you visit when you can. Or, you make bank, because you have thousands of software and IT engineers hitting this city that can afford this stuff. (Sorry, I'm one of them! :( ) Don't worry, I'm getting out of your hair soon enough. Portland is great, but it's not my long-term plan. It's silly to ignore we live in the Pacific Northwest, the true gem of this country.