As Astoria booms, the city balances new development with its gritty-not-pretty history

In the 1980s, life in Astoria was pretty sleepy. The fish processing and logging industries that had fueled the city’s emergence as a northwestern hub during the 19th century were in steep decline.

“We were sort of a bathroom stop on the way to the beach,” says Paul Benoit, who was Astoria’s planning director in the ‘80s and ‘90s. “I remember when the high school band played at the ribbon cutting when McDonald’s opened. Today, they’d probably picket a corporate franchise development, but back then the city felt like, ‘Wow, we’re on the map; someone noticed us!’”

Combined with the fact that the city had already been built out during the late 19th century, there was very little demand for new housing construction in Astoria in those years. “We saw so little development we’d be lucky to see two new homes built in a year,” Benoit says. Astoria’s leaders were wary of doing anything to disincentivize any developers that wanted to build in town.

But the days of Astoria as a sleepy coastal hamlet are in the past. The city has seen an influx of new restaurants, businesses, and housing in recent years. It’s home to the so-called “Clatsop County fermentation cluster,” with major producers like Pilot House Distilling and Buoy Beer Company. Today, there are four new hotel projects concurrently considering development in the city. Now that the Astoria renaissance is underway, city leaders are working on plans to refurbish the 211-year-old city’s infrastructure; all that wastewater from the breweries and distilleries has to go somewhere, after all.