If housing values are so high, and demand is so high, why isn't the housing stock nicer? Why were many people not maintaining their yards, keeping the paint up or doing the little things you'd expect to see in a place where modest homes were selling for prices well into six figures?

I think one possible answer to these questions gives a clue to the unaffordable housing problem facing Portland and a number of other cities. Before we get into that, however, I'd like to take some time to review -- and question -- the four standard reasons given for why housing in Portland is so expensive.

1. So many people want to live here and they'll pay anything because Portland is so nice.

I'm always reflexively skeptical of this kind of thinking. I want to live here and am wiling to pay high prices to do so and thus others must be making a similar decision. This reasoning can give us blinders that keeps us from realizing that different people do different things for different reasons, especially those not in our own economic strata.

Case in point, there was nothing really nice about Gresham. Why are all these people willing to pay inflated prices to live in Gresham? I don't think it is because they love living 35 minutes by train from Portland. It's not like the people I saw there were living in small, overpriced apartments because they valued the opportunity to ride the MAX into downtown, sip a local latte and eat at a food truck.

Put another way, Portland may be nice and the culture may be great for some, but there are a large number of people who are paying really high prices for sub-par housing and an experience they could get far more affordably somewhere else. While it is a happy notion for people in Portland to believe that they're so wonderful -- and I don't ridicule because, as a Minnesotan, I know everyone living here is well above average -- it doesn't make any sense as the influence of a broad economic trend.