Portland is considering the most literal building decarbonization schedule in the country: not a target with a plan to have a plan, but a staircase written into city code — cut your building’s greenhouse gas intensity by 20 percent, then 20 percent again, every five years, until it reaches zero in 2050. The proposal is still moving through City Council, and the details matter for any owner of a larger commercial or multifamily building in the city. Here is what the ordinance actually says.
What is Portland proposing?
The proposal is Ordinance 2026-377, which would replace City Code Chapter 17.104 with a new chapter: Climate and Health Standards for Buildings. Its stated purpose is to reduce carbon emissions from commercial and multifamily residential buildings to zero by 2050, and to give tenants information about the affordability, health, and resilience of rental housing.
Status matters here: this is a proposal, not a law. The Sustainability and Climate Commission endorsed it in August 2026. The Housing and Permitting Committee took it up on October 20, 2026 and continued it to December 1, 2026 — so the next decision point is December 1, and the draft can still change. Everything below describes the ordinance as currently written.
Which buildings would be covered?
Covered buildings are commercial buildings and residential buildings with four or more dwelling units, with specified exclusions. The carbon performance standards apply to covered buildings of at least 20,000 square feet.
Reporting comes first. Annual energy performance reporting would apply to covered buildings of at least 20,000 square feet beginning June 1, 2028. That is an extension of familiar ground: Portland has run a Commercial Building Energy Reporting Program since 2015, and in 2025–2026 the city piloted multifamily reporting with five properties. The pilot found the first year of benchmarking took 3 to 9 hours of active staff time (median 6), and participants expected two hours or less in later years.
How does the step-down work?
The standard is a greenhouse gas intensity (GHGI) target — emissions per square foot — that tightens in 20-percent increments every five years, beginning with the 2030 performance standard and reaching zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Zero means zero. The code defines the final standard as a GHGI of zero without the use of offsets, renewable natural gas, or unregulated credit mechanisms. There is no buying your way to the last step.
One provision works in owners’ favor: the code’s emissions factors are designed to account for Oregon’s clean-energy targets, so as the electric grid gets cleaner, an electrified building’s measured intensity falls with it. Efficiency and electrification do the rest.
What happens if a building misses its standard?
It pays a carbon pollution impact fee. For the first interim standard, the ordinance sets the cost of carbon at $380 per metric ton of CO2e per year, charged on emissions above the building’s target.
Three features of the fee are worth knowing:
- It ratchets. Future rates are set by the City Administrator, reviewed at least every five years, and approved by Council — and a future fee may not be lower than the fee for the previous interim standard.
- The money is locked to compliance. Fee revenue goes into a dedicated fund used solely to support compliance with the chapter — grants, technical assistance, and financing for retrofits — with priority for regulated affordable housing, naturally occurring affordable housing, small property owners, and buildings serving low-income or climate-vulnerable tenants. Administrative costs paid from the fund are capped at seven percent.
- It is also an off-ramp in hard cases (see below).
What are the off-ramps?
The ordinance builds in flexibility, because a hard staircase meets buildings that genuinely cannot climb it on schedule:
- Extensions and exemptions for specified circumstances.
- Alternate Compliance Plans for qualifying campus portfolios with shared utility services — a provision shaped by higher-education and institutional owners whose energy systems serve whole campuses.
- A full exemption from both the carbon performance standards and the impact fee for regulated affordable housing.
- A displacement escape valve: if required whole-building upgrades would force tenant relocation for more than ten calendar days or termination of a tenancy, the City Administrator may authorize compliance through payment of the impact fee instead of the upgrades.
At least once every five years after 2030, the City Administrator must also publish an impact report — covering displacement, implementation costs, electric-system capacity and reliability, and utility-cost impacts — with recommendations for adjusting the program or its timeline.
What changes for tenants?
The standards’ costs may not be passed through to residential tenants. Beyond that, the chapter adds a tenant-information layer that starts before the first carbon standard bites:
- Beginning January 1, 2028, prospective tenants get climate and health information, including utility costs and energy assistance, cooking fuel and ventilation, and mechanical and passive cooling.
- Beginning June 1, 2028, residential covered buildings complete a climate and health inventory every five years.
- When upgrades require temporary relocation, owners must file a tenant impact plan — addressing temporary housing and, where applicable, moving, storage, and transportation assistance — and guarantee a right to return to the same unit.
What should an owner do while this is still a proposal?
Three things. First, watch December 1 — that is when the committee takes the ordinance up again. Second, if your building already benchmarks under the 2015 reporting program, treat that data as the foundation it is: a step-down schedule measures every future cut against your baseline, so a sloppy baseline becomes a permanent handicap. Third, read the proposal alongside the other performance-standard regimes now stacking up — Washington D.C.’s BEPS pathways and New York’s LL84/LL97 benchmarking-and-limits sequence are the closest cousins, and portfolios that span cities are already learning to run one compliance calendar for all of them.
Portland’s draft is unusually honest about its own mechanics: the steps, the price of missing one, and the exits are all on the page. Whether Council adopts it as written is the December question.
Informational only — this article summarizes a proposed ordinance (Portland Ordinance 2026-377) as published by the City of Portland; it is not legal or compliance advice, and the proposal may change before adoption. Primary source: the City of Portland’s ordinance page for the Climate and Health Standards for Buildings Code.