Project purpose
The Buildable Lands Inventory (BLI) is an assessment of the City's development capacity under current City plans, zoning, and market conditions to accommodate forecasted housing and employment needs through the year 2045. Oregon's statewide planning goals require cities to maintain at least a 20-year supply of land to accommodate forecasted housing and employment growth. The results of the BLI inform both the Housing Needs Analysis (HNA) and the Economic Opportunities Analysis (EOA).
There are several reasons for conducting the BLI analysis:
- to quantify the existing development capacity within Portland under the current Comprehensive Plan and zoning regulations;
- to identify likely redevelopment scenarios and prospective clusters of future development activity by identifying sites that are likely to develop based on market feasibility and development potential;
- to estimate development capacity for different areas of the City;
- to serve as a basis for predicting residential and employment growth under different development scenarios; and
- to help measure the possible impact of recommended land use plans, by predicting where growth may occur, which provides a basis to evaluate impacts – for example, impacts to the transportation system, tree canopy, housing supply, and air quality.
About the BLI
The 2023 BLI is based on a Geographic Information System (GIS) model developed by the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability (BPS) that applies a market-feasible development capacity analysis, which calculates the likelihood of development for different housing types. This model identifies capacity where development is financially feasible.
The BLI model consists of five main steps:
- Calculate existing development in terms of building square footage and number of residential units;
- Identify likely development parcels based on development feasibility and site condition (vacant/non-vacant underutilized);
- Calculate gross development capacity using a matrix derived from market research;
- Apply development constraints to determine remaining, estimated development capacity in terms of building square footage and number of residential units; and
- Integrate permit data for new housing units and building square footage built since 2020 as ‘realized’ capacity.
The results of the BLI include a citywide inventory of vacant and non-vacant underutilized land, net new housing unit capacity, and net new building square feet for employment use. Maps showing the location of buildable land and the resulting capacity, as well as the full BLI report, are available for review.