The Creekside Meadows apartments at 1755 S.E. Geary St., on Saturday, Sept. 27, 2025.
Three years ago, the Albany community development director approved a site plan for a 107-unit apartment complex between Geary Street on one side and Periwinkle Creek on the other. Now, the Creekside Meadows apartments are built, and tenants have moved in.
A bike ride Saturday took me there, and I briefly toured the parking areas. It’s a nice-looking complex of three 3-story buildings and a total of 107 one- and two-bedroom apartments.
The place has more than 150 parking spaces, most of them covered. There’s a children’s playground and a small dog park. The landscaping is extensive. Across the creek, the view is of the Periwinkle Bikepath and the former Mega Foods supermarket that’s been converted to a self-storage business.
As I understand from someone who works at Creekside, the last of the three buildings was completed in June, and more than 50 percent of the units have been leased.
The apartments range from 615 to 1,114 square feet, according to an online description. The rent starts at $1,400 for the smallest units and goes to $2,147 for the largest.
This is only one of the apartment projects built in Albany over the last few years. But as near as I can tell from statistics available online, the proportion of rentals to owner-occupied dwellings in Albany has hardly changed at all in the last quarter-century.
The city had about 16,100 occupied housing units in 2000, and just under 40 percent of them were rentals. The latest estimate from 2024 puts the number of housing units at about 22,000, and rentals account for 40.6 percent of those.
That suggests that growth in the number of owner-occupied houses has more or less kept pace with the increase in units available for rent. (hh)
The dog area and the children’s playground at Creekside Meadows on Saturday afternoon.
It’s disheartening to see Albany becoming overrun with unreasonably priced apartments & townhouses, storage units & senior citizen community living centers.
Sorry Matt-
They’re “unrensonably priced” only if they do not rent or sell…the prices will come down.
Housing isn’t an elastic good. I sure hope the current City Council members don’t think the market works like that, especially in a town like Albany.
$1400–$2147 …..RENT…OH MY..
The city is overrun by low paying jobs that used to pay for the bare necessities. Now two people working at the weed shops, gaming bars, restaurants and stores cannot afford even a studio apartment. My kiddos know if they lived in Albany they would be working 40 hours per week and be living in the shelter or living with multiple roommates if they did not have us to help them. Independence costs money. Being hard working and responsible does not guarantee a livable wage anymore. Even after college, living here would be difficult when there are no jobs or enough income for those who are self employed. There is a shortage of reasonable paying jobs and reasonably priced housing.
I do keep wondering what everyone defines as “affordable”. The rents are outrageous and yet all disguised as “we must build more affordable housing”.
Yes, they’ll get rented but at what cost? What is the cost to the family? Both parents working full-time plus extra jobs? What must they sacrifice to house themselves? There is nothing affordable about $2000+/month rent. Rents will increase yearly at what %?
Allowable rent increases are variable:
https://ktvz.com/news/government-politics/2025/09/30/oregon-sets-maximum-rent-hikes-for-2026-but-its-no-longer-just-one-number/
Pretty sure decision makers know it’s not affordable, since they post the obvious on the city website: https://albanyoregon.gov/demographics/income
This data is 2019, before staggering housing cost increases and current unemployment. I seriously doubt the situation has improved. Reading minutes from various city & committee meetings, it appears increasing rentals (outside “downtown”) is the only lever that gets consensus to pull.