Portland's Neighborhood Land Use

A few years ago, as a resident of Cathedral Park (in St Johns), I joined the Cathedral Park Neighborhood Association. Like many Portlanders, I was interested in knowing about events and developments in my corner of the city.

One of the civic functions of a neighborhood association is to help residents understand what changes are coming so as constituents, they can influence the future of their community. While alot of this land use stuff is dry and unimportant, over time, more than any other factor, it ultimately dominates the character and livability of a place.

But keeping track of this info and communicating it to residents in a timely manner is hard. Developers often (not always) reach out to neighborhood associations, and the city provides a great tool in PortlandMaps (no affiliation or endorsement of this project), which provides authoritative address-based permitting information. But for residents and neighborhood associations, the missing link is an easy-to-use way of answering, "What changes are coming to my neighborhood?". For this purpose, many associations have land use chairs, and maintain tracker spreadsheets. This takes alot of volunteer effort, and can be challenging to keep current.

To this end, the Portland neighborhood land use tracker is intended to help neighborhood associations and residents keep abreast of developments on a more regular cadence. The website pipes data directly from PortlandMaps, unedited, and groups new developments by neighborhood. You can subscribe to receive updates for your neighborhood, and the map can be embedded on neighborhood association pages (like this! to supplement other land use materials.

This tool isn't comprehensive in the way PortlandMaps is. Moreover, permitting data is only a proxy for developments that can happen, and I've heavily filtered the info to improve usability. Sometimes developments that you know are happening might not show here. My hope is this helps get 80% of the way there. In many cases, I expect this will likely be the first place you will hear about new developments in your area.