Ridgefield Now Has Two Downtowns, and They Aren't Trying to Be the Same Place

This past Thursday, a nearly 25,000-square-foot Goodwill opened its doors at 8 a.m. on 65th Avenue east of Interstate 5. Across town and a full generation older, La Catrina was still serving carne asada out of the same food cart it has run for years on Pioneer Street, next to a produce stand that closes when the vendor sells out. Both are true descriptions of Ridgefield this month. Neither one describes the whole town.

That's the part easy to miss if you only track one side of the city. Ridgefield isn't filling in as a single expanding downtown. It's building two separate commercial districts that happen to share a zip code, running on different timelines, serving different errands, and in most cases not competing with each other at all. Understanding which one does what changes where you actually go this fall, whether you've lived here five years or five months.

The Junction Runs on a Different Clock

Everything happening at the Pioneer Street and I-5 interchange traces back to a 2023 financing decision most residents never had to think about. The city set up a 942-acre tax increment financing area that redirects property taxes from new development straight into the roads and infrastructure those developments need, a mechanism expected to fund roughly $98 million in improvements by the end of 2029 and generate about $3.4 million a year for the city once everything is built out. That's the machinery underneath what looks, from the driver's seat, like a shopping center appearing out of a field.

Costco anchored the first wave, opening in August 2024 with an expected 300-plus jobs and about $700,000 a year in combined sales and property tax revenue. Washington's first In-N-Out Burger followed at the same Union Ridge Town Center, along with a second Starbucks and a Chipotle. This spring, Jersey Mike's Subs pulled tenant improvement permits for a 1,160-square-foot space there, its first location anywhere in north Clark County.

A few hundred yards over, Royle Ridge Station is bringing in a 16,902-square-foot Grocery Outlet, permitted for its building shell in January. And the Goodwill that just opened sits inside Tri-Mountain Station, a development that was still in the pre-application stage as recently as late 2024.

None of this is downtown filling in. It's a highway corridor being built from scratch, chain by chain, on a schedule set by permits and infrastructure debt rather than by which local owner decided to open a shop this year.

Pioneer Street Still Runs on Saturday Mornings

The older Ridgefield, the one with Main Avenue storefronts and a food cart pod, moves at an entirely different pace, and this is the stretch of town most residents mean when they say they're going "downtown."

Sportsman's Public House at 121 N Main Ave has been the default dinner-and-a-drink spot under new ownership, with the kind of pub menu, karaoke nights, and pool tables that make it as much a living room as a restaurant. Ridgefield Mercantile, a few blocks down at 418 Pioneer Street, runs curated vintage booths of the sort you don't find at a highway retail pad. Old Liberty Theater does pastries and a breakfast sandwich in the morning. Zebrun's Starliner, the family-owned grocery and deli, is still where people grab a take-and-bake pizza on the way home.

And every Saturday from June through the end of this month, Davis Park hosts the Ridgefield Farmers Market, a fixture that has run since 2009 and now draws around 47 vendors, from Storyteller Farm's grass-fed beef to Dark Pine Candles' Pacific Northwest-scented candles and diffusers. With the season wrapping up in the next few weeks, this is close to the last real stretch to make it a Saturday habit before it disappears until next June.

The Hillhurst Commercial Center, near Ridgefield High School, is the one project that splits the difference. Designed as a walkable neighborhood hub rather than a highway pad, it has been stuck in permitting since being discussed back in 2016. This year it finally started filling in, with Fika Coffee, a Nordic-inspired coffeehouse serving breakfast through lunch, permitted at 2,337 square feet in late 2025, and Cheeky Noodles and Mahoney's Public House following into the same three-building project. A few miles over at Legacy Trails, Zaiqa Indian Cuisine, an Oregon restaurant with three existing Portland metro locations, is opening its first Clark County spot.

Why the Two Sides Don't Compete

Here's the part that actually matters if you live here: the junction and downtown aren't rivals for the same dollar, because they were never built to serve the same errand.

The junction exists to capture spending from outside Ridgefield. City Manager Steve Stuart has been direct about this, describing the sales tax generated by out-of-town shoppers as money that pays for the city's police services and its potholes. Costco was built to serve Clark County and beyond, not just Ridgefield. In-N-Out draws from across the Portland metro. That's the whole design.

Downtown was never trying to do that. Its businesses serve people who already live within walking distance and want a reason to stay in town on a Saturday rather than drive out. A vintage mercantile, a food cart, a farmers market running on volunteer vendor signups, these don't scale to regional draw and were never meant to.

That split shows up in something as simple as parking. The junction has hundreds of stalls built into every site plan because it expects highway traffic. Downtown parking gets genuinely tight during First Saturday events and market mornings, because it was built for a town, not a freeway exit.

Where to Actually Go This Fall

If you're trying to build a routine out of both sides of town, the pattern is straightforward once you see it laid out.

The honest takeaway is that Ridgefield residents no longer have one town center to check on. They have two, moving at different speeds, and the interesting story this year isn't that Ridgefield is growing. It's that it's growing in two directions that don't need each other to succeed.

If you're trying to make sense of what any of this means for property values or timing a move in either direction, that's a longer conversation, and it's the one we have every day. Green Buck Real Estate tracks Clark County development file by file, not just the headlines. Request a free home valuation and we'll walk you through what the Pioneer Street corridor's build-out actually means for your specific block.