“Pigs or cows?” Ridgefield resident Alyssa Curran remembers her classmates asking her when she moved to Ridgefield in the early 1990s. Back then, Ridgefield was a city of a few thousand people, largely dominated by farms and patchworks of sprawling fields.
Now, many of those fields are compact developments of new homes with miniscule yards. The city’s small-town charm and available land attracts about 1,000 people a year, many of them fleeing bigger cities.
The demand has boosted city’s median home price to $625,150 — one of the highest in Clark County.
Ridgefield’s population has grown by about 21/2 times its size over the past decade, making it by far the fastest growing city in Washington during that period. Between 2014 and 2024, Ridgefield’s population grew from 6,175 to 15,790, according to Washington Office of Financial Management data, beating out the next fastest growing city by 48 percent growth. The city estimates it’ll grow to more than 26,000 people in 2035.
“It’s bittersweet,” Curran said. “There’s something therapeutic about driving by cows or cornfields. It’s been weird to watch those things slowly disappear.”
At the same time, Ridgefield has been able to maintain parts of its remote, small-town allure while a commercial boom has simultaneously brought more activities to the city, said Curran, who is also a real estate agent in the area.
“It’s just right up that (Interstate 5) corridor, so (growth) is bound to happen. It’s just a matter of whether or not we embrace it and have a good attitude about it,” Curran said.
Old city, new homes
In the early 2000s, Ridgefield became the ideal place for people seeking to build sizable homes on large plots of land, Curran said. New homes with manicured yards and lengthy driveways sandwiched between aging homes with pastures and livestock.
But after the recession, that slowly changed. A combination of market forces and zoning shrank new houses and they’re squeezing together on smaller and smaller plots. That style of home has persisted into 2025, although the city still invites people looking for spacious properties.
“I do think Ridgefield has seen an influx of homes that are closer together without as big of a yard, but (they’re) also at the price point people can afford. It’s supply and demand,” Curran said.
In the past 10 years, the median home price in Ridgefield has grown 147 percent, from $253,534 in January 2015 to $625,150 in January of 2025, according to the Regional Multiple Listing Service. That makes the median home in Ridgefield about $55,000 higher than Clark County’s overall median home price.
On Redfin, a home listing site, almost half of homes for sale in Ridgefield as of February are newly built, but they come with a high price. Newly built homes in Ridgefield have a median listing home price of $729,930, according to Redfin.
Still, the new construction has sparked a boom in new townhomes, Curran said, which are sometimes packed into developments as a more affordable option.
And although Ridgefield’s median home price is higher than Clark County’s overall median home price, Ridgefield has the lowest city-specific property tax rate out of all Clark County cities, according to the county website.
“It’s probably more affordable than you think,” Curran said.
Preserving Ridgefield
Everyone wants to be the last person to move to Ridgefield, resident Sandy Schill said.
The need to preserve the area often occurs to people once they move in, said Schill, who moved to Ridgefield 20 years ago. But the city has its own safeguards.
The area’s geography provides a natural divide between neighborhoods, with wooded hillsides and trails earning the city its namesake.
The layout of Ridgefield also includes lush green spaces and protected natural areas, including the Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge where bald eagles nest.
“With that landscape of the ridges, the green, the fields — it gives people a good feeling (compared with) that checkerboard landscape,” Schill said.
She also believes Ridgefield’s quaint downtown area, still home to many of its original buildings, balances out the city’s growth.
“When they come into the downtown, they still feel like they’re in a small town environment,” she said.
Most importantly, there is still the expectation that everyone contributes to the community in some way, Schill said. For 17 years, she has served as the Ridgefield’s Fourth of July festival director while helping to organize many other community events. Her husband, Ron Onslow, previously served as mayor for a decade.
If someone can’t dedicate quite that much time, even small gestures can keep Ridgefield’s spirit alive, Curran said.
“It’s about community involvement, waving to people, all those little things that are kind of old school, but I think it matters,” she said.
