The Bottom-Up Revolution From Empty Lots to Budget Gaps: Mapping Portland
Feb 26, 2026
Jeremiah Vaya, a Strong Towns PDX leader using GIS to model redevelopment and municipal finance, and Sam Callen, a volunteer leader and housing-focused urban designer who analyzes land use with GIS. They map vacant lots, model road and pipe costs, estimate tax gains from removing a downtown highway, and propose a vacancy fee to nudge redevelopment.
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Sprawl Is A Longterm Fiscal Drain
- Strong Towns frames sprawl as a financial drain: low-density development consumes space but produces long-term fiscal deficits.
- Sam connected sprawl's costs to shortages in funding for services and public workers.
Local Density Sustains Neighborhood Businesses
- Neighborhood-level density reliably supports local businesses and amenities that sprawl cannot.
- Sam contrasted Portland's one-hardware-store-per-neighborhood with his Michigan hometown's single regional hardware store.
GIS Reveals Hidden City Patterns
- GIS combines siloed city datasets (fire, water, assessor) into single maps that reveal hidden patterns.
- Sam showed how layering addresses, permits, and infrastructure exposes mismatches like underserved hydrants or constrained development opportunities.
