Mt. Tabor, as a local tells it.

Mount Tabor is an extinct volcano with a neighborhood on it, and once you have stood at the top on a clear evening you understand why people pay to live on its slopes. Portland is one of only a handful of American cities with an extinct volcano inside the city limits. This is that volcano, and you can walk up it after work.

You are buying a hill, and the hill decides a lot

The cinder cone rises 636 feet, and the park around it covers about 176 acres of trails, stairs, a playground and an off-leash area. The city built two open reservoirs into the slopes in 1894 and two more in 1911. They are on the National Register, they no longer supply drinking water, and they are the reason the park looks the way it does. Nowhere else in Portland has that particular combination of civic engineering and forest.

The hill also decides your house. Elevation changes what you see, what your driveway does in January, how much sun the back of the property gets, and how the basement behaves. Two houses three blocks apart can be very different purchases here, and that is not something a listing sheet will tell you. I walk the lot before I talk about the price.

The houses

The residential streets around the park are mostly early twentieth century: Craftsman bungalows with deep porches and built-in cabinetry, Old Portland foursquares, Tudors, and a scattering of mid-century homes on the outer edges. Lots are generous by inner-Portland standards and the tree canopy is genuinely old, which is a large part of what you are paying for.

South Tabor, down the hill toward Division, is the same neighborhood with a different price and a different feel: flatter, more mid-century, less of the postcard. I show clients both in one afternoon on purpose, because a lot of people who arrive certain they want the hill discover they actually want the ten minutes of flat walking.

What the hill does to a showing

Go twice, at different times. A west-facing house on the slope is a completely different room at 9am and 6pm, and the light is a real part of why people pay a premium here. Drive the approach in the rain if you can. And if there is a view, find out what protects it, because a view over someone else's trees is a view you do not own.

The corridors underneath, Hawthorne, Belmont and Division, are the everyday for most people here. They are close enough to walk to and far enough that you do not live in them, which is a specific thing people are buying and worth naming.

Who I point here

People who want an old house and will actually use the outdoors, and who are not fooling themselves about maintenance. Homes on the hill are beautiful and they are old, and a hillside lot adds drainage to the list of things that matter. If you want low upkeep, I will show you something else and say why.

If you want to compare the pace here against the rest of the city, the full 97215 report is underneath this page, and Sellwood is the closest thing to it in feel on the other side of the river.