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In the next 20 years or so, Portland is expected to gain approximately 280,000 residents. City officials are preparing for that influx by updating the Comprehensive Plan, and they’re trying to involve citizens in the process. However, staffers have long struggled to convince Portlanders – especially low-income individuals and minorities – to become personally invested in complex planning.

So, city officials are taking the discussion online.

“If I can get someone to actually provide a public comment in a different language other than English, that would be a victory to me,” said Marty Stockton, community outreach coordinator for the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. “This is really the most transparent we can be – giving the community the same information, the same overload of information we struggle with, and saying, ‘This is your story too. You need to work with it and interact with it as well.’ ”

This week, BPS officials launched a new called the Comprehensive Plan Map App. The website lets people view the city’s infrastructure (like stormwater systems, public transit and even areas at risk of gentrification) in layers. Personalized, finely tuned maps can then be shared with city officials – as well as others via Twitter and Facebook. Foreign languages can be translated to English via a Google Translate add-on.

The website is likely the first long-range planning tool of its kind in the nation, according to Kevin Martin, BPS’ technical services manager. It’s also a far cry from the old outreach strategy that involved a pile of maps spread out haphazardly at a neighborhood meeting.

“We would go out to a meeting and have to bring 25 to 30 maps,” Stockton said. “It’s cumbersome to bring all those maps, and just laying them all out and trying to go through them … What’s nice about this is you can say, ‘Hey, I want to see centers and corridors, but can you put in the concentration of communities of color? I want to put those two together.’ ”

In that scenario, the map would illustrate with circles and highlighted lines the city’s various neighborhood centers and corridors – areas targeted for strategic growth and investment. The “Communities of Color” layer would show how those areas line up with Portland’s minority communities. The Gateway Regional Center, for instance, has a lot of overlap; the Belmont-Hawthorne-Division Town Center has less.

Development of the map app started about six months ago, mostly by three city staffers: Martin and colleagues Derek Miller and Carmen Piekarski. Martin said contracting the work out to a third party would have cost between $30,000 and $50,000, but technological advancements allowed them to do it in-house.

Likewise, Martin hopes the app will make the planning process more accessible to people who are unable to attend city meetings because of conflicting obligations.

“You can access this thing from anywhere, 24/7,” he said. “Hopefully that lowers a lot of barriers to people really wanting to participate. I guess the outcome of that would be to get some perspective we don’t normally get and how that changes what we really do over the next 25 years.”

Stockton said that typically after a neighborhood meeting plans are rolled up and put away, essentially out of sight and out of mind for most people. Now, neighbors are interacting with plans at their leisure.

“Any rational analysis of transit use would put the streetcar route on Hawthorne rather than Belmont,” wrote one user who outlined Southeast Hawthorne Street with the app’s pencil tool. “Spacing between Burnside and Division is the primary reason. But instead the route is shown on Belmont because Hawthorne merchants objected. Let’s plan things rationally, not based on community biases.”

City officials want the app to bring equity issues into focus. Stockton said planners are being cautious not to create new disparities in their efforts to end old ones.

With the Albina Community Plan, for instance, officials sought to revitalize the Northeast Portland area after years of neglect and discrimination. Properties were up-zoned and investments were made, but little was done to secure affordable housing for existing residents. Many were forced to leave the burgeoning area because they couldn’t afford rising housing costs.

To shed some light on the issue of gentrification through the map app, city staffer Tom Armstrong worked closely with Lisa Bates, an associate professor of urban studies and planning at Portland State University. The Coalition for a Livable Future also recently launched a similar tool in its . Now, the city is looking for community feedback to ground that work.

“When we think about addressing disparities and reducing them, we want to be mindful that we don’t create unintended consequences again,” BPS spokeswoman Eden Dabbs said.

In addition to concise explanations of planning strategies – like creating urban habitats and employment areas, and the need to balance each – the map app offers layers that explore median age distribution, income distribution and the distribution of vulnerable communities, among others.

BPS wants to air it all out.

“Land use issues can be pretty emotional,” Dabbs said. “It’s where people live. It’s their homes. It’s their community. So this is a way of kind of grounding everything that we’re talking about.”