Montgomery County's approach is also a way to avoid creating public-funded "housing projects" where the poor are shoved into one tight area. Most poor and working-class folks are decent and law-abiding, but if they are forced to congregate in one place, the criminal element takes over. Trying raising children in a neighborhood where drug dealers call the shots. 

This is why I don't trust the city of Portland to build "affordable housing." The city shouldn't be building housing. Let them set the kind of rules that Montgomery County (and other places) have successfully used to get developers to build a variety of housing.

I think you are oversimplifying here: "Oregon looks liberal on the surface but is pretty red in many of its practices and laws."

Liberals can talk a good game, but they don't want to live next door to just anybody either.