Drive along Highway 101 through Seaside this fall and you'll pass framing going up on the old North 40 parcel, the two-acre lot the city received from Clatsop County back in 2022, sitting between N. Holladay Drive and the highway near where Seaside High School used to stand. Three three-story buildings are rising there. By any normal read of a market, 69 new homes landing in a town of roughly 7,100 residents should register as a supply story, the kind that eventually shows up as more choice and softer competition for anyone house hunting nearby.
It won't. Not for a buyer comparing Seaside to Gearhart or Cannon Beach on price, and not for a seller wondering if new construction down the road will pull comparable sales down. The Pacifica Apartments are real, they're being built now, and they are structurally sealed off from the for-sale market a home shopper actually competes in. Understanding why is a better lesson in reading coastal housing news than most headlines about "new supply" ever give you.
What's Actually Going Up on the North 40
The developer is Related Northwest, a Portland firm working in partnership with Centro Cultural and the City of Seaside. The project is led by Stefanie Kondor, who grew up in Seaside and graduated from the high school that once stood a few blocks from this site. The 69 units break down as 15 studios, 18 one-bedrooms, 24 two-bedrooms, and 12 three-bedrooms, with about three units, or 5 percent, set aside for individuals with disabilities. The three-bedroom units come with two bathrooms and in-unit washers and dryers. Everything smaller shares laundry facilities on-site. Ten other developments across Oregon received funding through the same pool, and Pacifica's share came to $14.6 million from the Oregon Housing and Community Services General Housing Account Program.
Kondor has talked about the project in personal terms. At the council hearing that approved it, she told councilors:
"I see this as a project to bring back housing that's critically needed."
At the groundbreaking last November, she put it more plainly still: this is a workforce housing place.
Why It Never Becomes a Comp
Here's the mechanism that matters if you're pricing a home in Seaside or trying to read the town's supply picture from outside. Pacifica's units are deed-restricted at 60 percent of area median income for 60 years. That's not a marketing term, it's a covenant recorded against the property that fixes who can rent there, what they can be charged, and for how long. Rent priority goes to people who already live or work in Seaside, or who used to and got priced out. None of these units will ever be listed for sale. None of them will ever close as a transaction that shows up in a comparable sales report. A 69-unit project landing in a town this size sounds like it should move the needle on inventory. It moves a different needle entirely.
The clearest way to see the split is side by side.
| Pacifica Apartments | Typical Market-Rate Construction | |
|---|---|---|
| Tenure | Rental only | Owned or rented at owner's discretion |
| Price set by | Capped at 60% AMI, income-qualified | Market, set at sale |
| Eligibility | Income-qualified, local-worker priority | Open to any qualified buyer |
| Deed restriction | 60-year affordability covenant | None |
| Shows up in resale comps | No | Yes |
Every row in that right column is where a home search actually happens. Pacifica sits entirely in the left column.
The Pressure Valve It Might Actually Open
None of this means the project is irrelevant to the housing conversation, only that it's relevant to a different half of it. Coastal market watchers have pointed to near-zero rental vacancy as one of the forces keeping pressure on for-sale prices up and down the Oregon Coast, on the logic that renters who can't find an apartment start shopping for a mortgage instead, whether or not they were ready to buy. When that happens enough times, it adds bidders to a for-sale pool that was already tight.
Seaside has a specific version of this problem. Andy Kipp, president of the Astoria Housing Alliance, cited a study during the council process showing more than half of Seaside's renters are cost-burdened, and testimony at that same hearing put the number of Seaside workers commuting in from elsewhere at 38 percent of the city's workforce. That's not a town where the rental math is broken at the margins. One city official framed the practical upside this way when the project broke ground: increasing the supply is going to take some of the pressure off of the housing market in general.
If that plays out, the effect will show up as slightly less rental-driven urgency pushing people into for-sale offers, not as more inventory on the MLS. It's a valve on the demand side of the purchase market, not an addition to the supply side.
The Timeline, and Why the Access Fight Matters
The path to groundbreaking wasn't simple, and the friction is worth knowing if you're watching how the North Coast handles new housing generally. The North 40 site is zoned industrial, and the project only qualified for a highway overlay zone review under a specific state allowance for affordable housing. When the Planning Commission approved that review in April 2025, some neighbors appealed, and the City Council spent a May 2025 hearing weighing the objections against the site before unanimously upholding the approval. The council added its own condition on top of that approval, directing the developer to pursue a right-in, right-out access permit from the Oregon Department of Transportation, since ODOT controls anything touching Highway 101 directly. City staff noted a full traffic impact analysis would only be triggered if the project generated more than 600 daily trips under standard traffic engineering methodology, which it does not.
Construction broke ground that November, with the timeline set at roughly 16 and a half months and a target completion of April 2027. As of late September 2026, that timeline is still holding. In a candidate questionnaire published by The Astorian ahead of this fall's Clatsop County elections, one Seaside city council candidate confirmed the 60% AMI Pacifica development of 69 units will be open in the first half of 2027, which puts real occupancy still six to nine months out from today.
What This Means If You're Comparing Seaside to Somewhere Else
If you're using housing supply as a signal for where prices might soften next, Pacifica is the wrong data point to lean on for Seaside. The for-sale market has already been cooling on its own terms. Redfin's numbers for the three months ending in May 2026 showed a median sale price of $525,000 in Seaside, down 3.0 percent from the same period a year earlier, with homes taking 21 days to sell on average compared to 16 days the year before. That softening is coming from ordinary turnover of owner-occupied and second homes, the actual inventory a buyer competes for. Pacifica adds nothing to that pool and will add nothing to it in 2027 either.
What it does add is scale relative to the town itself. Seaside's housing stock stood at 4,818 units in the 2020 Census. Sixty-nine new units, even ones that will never trade hands on the open market, work out to roughly 1.4 percent of everything the city has. For a town this size, that's a meaningful shift in who lives here and where, even if it never shows up as a comparable sale.
The honest way to read a project like this is to hold both facts at once. Seaside is adding housing. Seaside's for-sale market is not getting more supply because of it. Both are true, and they'll stay true past April 2027, because the covenant that makes Pacifica affordable is the same one that keeps it out of your search results.
If you're trying to make sense of what a piece of local housing news actually means for a purchase or a listing here on the North Coast, that's the kind of read Cindy Hawkins Colley works through with clients every week. Let's Connect if you want a second set of eyes on what a headline like this does, and doesn't, mean for your search.
