About 40 years ago, before the world went crazy, an ordinary working person could buy a house in Oregon for about five times the price of a modest new car.

You could get a pretty nice import for $2,700. And an old house - now we would call it historic - on a big lot with a terrific view in Southern Oregon cost $12,500.

Even though both cars and houses have become more expensive, the proportion has shifted dramatically.

You can get a very good car for $23,000. But the average sales price of a house in the area covered by the Willamette Valley Multiple Listing Service in 2007 so far is around $250,000, more than 10 times the price of that car.

No doubt there are lots of factors that brought about these price increases.

Inflation is the main one. But also, most new houses are built far bigger than they used to be, and they contain fancier gadgets. But cars, too, have changed for the better. They may be smaller for the most part, but they are also much more reliable and safe.

It's hard to justify the shift in relative price without suspecting that supply and demand have something to do with it.

As for supply, the economy can always make or import more cars to satisfy the demand no matter how strong it gets. But while builders can always build more houses, the supply of land to put them on has a limit, a limit that Oregon has tightened over the years because we wanted to protect open space and resource lands.

I was prompted to think about all this by our report Wednesday that the assessed or taxable value of Linn County had once again jumped this year.

How can that be, I wondered, when everything we hear in the national news says that the housing market is in a slump and that retailers feel the pinch because the value of houses has shrunk? If the part about prices were true around here, the assessed value of property ought to go down, not up.

One answer is that there's a difference between market and assessed or tax value, and in many cases the market value has been higher than what's on the tax rolls. So market values can slump for a while before tax values feel the effect.

The other part of the answer is that the national news is wrong where mid-valley values are concerned.

According to the August edition of Valley Real Estate Review, the online publication of the Multiple Listing Service, the average sales price of houses sold in Linn County through August this year was $194,000. That was a jump of roughly 15 percent from 2006.

For what it's worth, the average sales price in Benton County was about $307,000, up from $273,000 last year, which helps explain why house buyers of average means flock to places like Albany, Lebanon and Millersburg when they're in the market for a house.

The lesson for news consumers: Whatever the news says about a national trend, it may well be that the trend does not pertain to us.

You can reach the Democrat-Herald editor at (541) 812-6097 or by e-mail at hhering@dhonline.com.