Mill Pond Village has given the city a significant boost in its tax rolls, more importantly, it’s given the people there a sense of community pride.

Mill Pond Village offers a new way of environmentally aware living in Astoria, dubbed “little San Francisco” for its steep roads and Victorian homes.

Astoria, Oregon hardly seems like a good spot for an upscale housing development. The town of 10,000 where the Pacific Ocean meets the Columbia River had seen better days when the logging and fishing industries thrived. Mill Pond Village, an upscale mixed-use community, now stands at once was a contaminated sawmill site.

Redeveloping brownfields such as the Mill Pond Village site in Astoria, Oregon, can actually make these projects more doable and less expensive for local governments, all the while revitalizing neighborhoods through eliminating blighted properties.

Stroll along Northeast 23rd Street in Astoria, and you may feel like you stumbled across a fishing village at the turn of the 20th century. Some homes are built on pilings over a pond; others have views of the Columbia River that also include the Astoria Bridge and the Washington shore. But the scene wasn’t always so picturesque.

Astoria’s Mill Pond Village was once a vacant and contaminated mill site, now transformed into a 16-acre upscale master planned community.