Drive to the gate at The Parklands at Camas Meadows and you are looking at one of only forty-one homes ever built there. The community was raised in a single push for the 2018 NW Natural Parade of Homes, on oversized lots that recent vacant-parcel listings put at roughly 10,644 to 13,570 square feet, and it has stayed at that number since. A few miles away, Lacamas Shores holds something closer to 250 homes, built out gradually over decades rather than in one plan, with the kind of mixed architecture and mismatched remodel schedules that come from a neighborhood that grew instead of appeared.
The marketing shorthand for choosing between them is lake versus golf. That shorthand is not quite true, and the part it gets wrong is the part that matters most to a buyer's financing and an eventual resale. The real fork is not what view you wake up to. It is how many other homes exist to compare yours against, and what happens when that number is very, very small.
The Comp Problem Nobody Mentions at the Open House
An appraiser working a loan in The Parklands has forty-one total homes to draw from, full stop. That is the entire population, not a typical year's turnover. Recent Redfin data on Lacamas Shores view-home listings shows the practical effect of a thin pool even in the larger neighborhood next door: when only two homes closed there in a recent month, the site's own related listings pulled comparables from Evergreen East, Fisher's Landing East, Fisher's Village, Bennington, and Exeter at Century Village, none of which sit inside Lacamas Shores. If a neighborhood of 250 homes occasionally needs to borrow comps from three or four miles away, a neighborhood of forty-one homes built once and never expanded needs to borrow them far more often.
This is not a defect in either community. It is simply the arithmetic of scarcity. A gated enclave that never grew past its original footprint protects privacy and consistency, but it also means a lender pricing your loan may be leaning on a sale from a different neighborhood with a different lot size, a different builder, and a different HOA. That gap between what the appraisal says and what the seller believes the home is worth is the kind of friction that surfaces mid-transaction, not on the listing sheet.
Two HOAs, Two Very Different Bills
The two communities also ask for money in almost opposite ways.
| The Parklands at Camas Meadows | Lacamas Shores | |
|---|---|---|
| Homes | 41 total, built 2018 | Roughly 250, built out over decades |
| Access | Gated | Open streets |
| HOA cost | One-time buy-in of $1,500, plus $1,500 per year | Canoe/Kayak and Recreation Club membership around $40 per year per family |
| What it funds | Gate, road maintenance, common areas | Private boat launch and dock, Meadowlands Picnic Area, shared canoes and paddleboats |
| Borders | Camas Meadows Golf Club | Camas Meadows Golf Course runs through the neighborhood itself, plus direct access to the Lacamas Heritage Trail |
A Parklands buyer is paying roughly $3,000 in year one and $1,500 every year after for gated privacy among a fixed, tiny group of neighbors. A Lacamas Shores buyer is paying closer to pocket change for boat and trail access shared among hundreds of households, in exchange for a housing stock that varies far more from one lot to the next. Neither structure is better. They are simply buying different things, and the dollar figures make that visible in a way that a listing description never quite does.
The Golf Course Runs Through Both
Here is where the lake-versus-golf framing breaks down. Camas Meadows Golf Course does not stop at The Parklands' gate. It weaves directly through Lacamas Shores as well, and current MLS view descriptions for homes in both areas list golf course, mountain, and trees and woods interchangeably depending on the lot. A Lacamas Shores buyer chasing lake views can end up backing onto a fairway just as easily as a Parklands buyer can. The two communities are not cleanly split lifestyle products. They are two different ownership structures wrapped around a shared piece of geography.
The real question a buyer should be asking is not which view they prefer. It is whether they want to be one of forty-one owners in a fixed, gated cohort, or one of roughly 250 owners in a larger, older, more varied one.
What the Citywide Numbers Actually Mean for These Two Streets
Camas as a whole cooled through the first half of 2026. Redfin's three-month window ending in May 2026 put the median sale price at $826,000, down 4.3 percent year over year, with homes taking an average of 43 days to sell compared with 17 days the year before. Movoto's figures for June 2026 showed a median of $839,900 and an average of 121 days on market, up from 68 days the prior year. The most recent local market update, covering July 2026, sharpened the picture further: the median listing sold in 63 days, but the average across all listings stretched to 133 days, a gap the report attributed to overpriced and luxury listings sitting far longer while accurately priced homes still moved at a normal pace. That same update pointed to roughly $1.3 million as the rough line above which activity slows noticeably.
Lacamas Shores' current view-home listings carry a median asking price of $1.47 million as of mid-August 2026, with an average of 45 days on market and about one offer per listing. That places these homes just above the point where the July report said momentum starts to fade, and the 45-day figure sits closer to the citywide average story than the median one. In plain terms, a Lacamas Shores seller at this price point should plan around the slower average, not the faster median that gets quoted in headlines.
The Parklands does not even offer a clean median to compare against, because so few of its forty-one homes trade in any given stretch that a single sale can swing the number wildly. That is not a gap in the data. It is the data telling you something true: pricing either of these communities off the citywide Camas median is a mistake, and pricing The Parklands off any monthly snapshot at all is close to meaningless.
The Real Question to Ask Before You Write an Offer or List Your Home
- Ask for the actual count of closed sales within the specific neighborhood, not a zip code or school boundary, over the past twelve months.
- Ask your lender directly whether they are comfortable underwriting in a market this thin, and what their fallback comp radius looks like if they cannot find enough sales inside the neighborhood line.
- Compare the HOA structure against your holding timeline. A one-time buy-in and higher annual dues behave differently over a five-year hold than a low-cost recreation club fee does.
- Weigh the July 2026 median-versus-average gap against your own price point. If you are near or above $1.3 million, plan your timeline around the average, not the median.
FAQ
Is The Parklands actually gated? Yes. The community's HOA describes gated entry as part of its structure, alongside road maintenance and common area upkeep funded by the $1,500 annual dues.
Do Lacamas Shores homes ever sit directly on the golf course? Yes. Camas Meadows Golf Course runs through the Lacamas Shores neighborhood itself, and current listings in the area show golf course, mountain, and wooded views depending on the specific lot, not a strict lake-only outlook.
Does the citywide Camas median apply to either of these communities? No. Both sit well above the broader Camas figures reported through mid-2026, and both trade in numbers small enough that a single sale can move the local median more than it would in a larger, more liquid part of the city.
If you are weighing a home in either of these two enclaves, the numbers behind the gate matter as much as the view through the window. Leigh Calvert - Oxford Street Partners works these two communities and the comp data behind them regularly, and can walk you through what a lender will actually see before you write an offer. Book a Consultation to talk through the specifics before you decide which side of the fairway makes sense for you.
