The Portland City Council on Wednesday unanimously adopted the city’s first housing production strategy, a state-mandated blueprint for expanding where and how housing can be built.

The plan is light on specifics, instead laying out 35 categories of actions the city will tackle. The strategy seeks to meet demand for 120,546 additional housing units by 2045.

“We leave working out all of the details to the projects themselves,” said Tom Armstrong, supervising planner for the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. “What we want to do is provide a guidepost.”

If completed, the expansion of housing would transform Portland, which had 296,479 total housing units as of 2021.

“We need more housing in Portland – a lot more housing,” said Commissioner Carmen Rubio.

The housing production strategy stems from a 2019 state law that sought to hold Oregon cities more accountable for how much housing gets built. Every city in Oregon of more than 10,000 people must submit a housing production strategy. The plans have a check-in at three years, and a new plan is due every six years.

The work is overseen by the state Department of Land Conservation and Development.

“It is a way that the state is increasing the city’s responsibility and increasing the state’s accountability,” Armstrong said.

Among the strategies, Portland is reconsidering zoning in Inner Eastside neighborhoods. That may result in greater allowable density, including apartment buildings.

Portland Neighbors Welcome, a pro-housing group, has lobbied the city to allow multifamily buildings of up to four floors in the Inner Eastside. Several members of the group testified Wednesday.

The housing strategy will “ensure that apartments, especially affordable apartments, will no longer be relegated to our busiest, loudest and most dangerous streets,” said Jennifer Shuch, a board member for the group.

Armstrong said the group makes a valid point about the city’s zoning.

“We have a zoning pattern that’s very focused on our corridors, and we have very sort of thin strips of higher density mixed-use along Hawthorne, Belmont, Division, Broadway, and then it quickly transitions to single-family neighborhood zoning,” Armstrong said.

In Portland’s tony Eastside neighborhoods, it may not pencil out for a housing developer to buy a $700,000 house and turn it into four units. But, Armstrong added, it might work to turn that house into a small apartment building.

“We don’t see a lot of that uptake of the middle housing because the home values in that neighborhood are too high for it to be feasible development,” Armstrong said.

Ben Hufford, a local architect who’s running for City Council in District 4, noted that Portland built less than 1,500 units in 2023.

“Our housing market is about to get worse,” he said. “Portland will see less affordability overall, and we will see an increase in homelessness.”

Mayor Ted Wheeler took a wider view.

“Housing is becoming one of those issues that local government is owning,” he said. “It is now probably considered a local government responsibility. But I want to remind people, a generation ago, it was not. It was a federal government responsibility in terms of funding, financing and incentivizing. Slowly but surely, over the course of a generation, that got cost shifted onto local government.”

Wheeler said the city should focus on what it can control — not outside economic forces such as interest rates that also affect development.

“Zoning, first and foremost, that is probably the biggest lever that we can pull — and I feel like we already did,” Wheeler said. “We did it with Central City 2035, we did it with Better Housing by Design. We did it with residential infill.”

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