The Portland Feasibility Market: SBA, USDA and Its Structural Variables

Data as of June 2026. This companion research post carries the full structural and capital-markets detail behind the Portland feasibility study hub. Every figure traces to a primary source named in the Sources list. MMCG's city briefs use primary and FOIA sources and do not carry commercial rent, vacancy or occupancy figures.

Portland carries its own set of statute and government rooted variables that redefine the underwriting envelope for a commercial real estate, SBA or USDA feasibility study. Each is stated here at the level a primary source supports.

The urban growth boundary, a hard edge on where development may go. Metro states that it is responsible for managing the greater Portland region's urban growth boundary, a boundary that protects farms and forests and helps ensure the efficient use of land, and that the region's urban growth boundary has to have enough land in it to accommodate 20 years of growth. Oregon is not the only state with growth boundaries, and the sibling Washington state page carries that state's own Growth Management Act, so the claim here is not that the instrument is unique but that it is administered for this region by an elected regional government against a twenty-year land supply test. For a feasibility study it reframes the site-selection section: comparable land outside the boundary is not comparable at all, because it cannot be developed to urban use on the project's timetable, and the scarcity that shows up as a land price is a regulatory quantity that can be changed by a Metro decision rather than by a market. A study that treats land supply here as elastic will misread both the entry price and the competitive set.

A city business tax on net income, with a surcharge on large retailers. The City of Portland states that its Business License Tax is a net income tax on business activity conducted in Portland, and that for tax years beginning on or after January 1, 2019 the Clean Energy Surcharge is a 1 percent surcharge on retail sales within the City of Portland imposed on large retailers, with businesses reporting total gross income of $1 billion or more and Portland gross income of $500,000 or more required to file. The surcharge rarely touches a single-site SBA borrower directly, but it reaches a franchisee of a large system and it reaches the anchor tenants whose presence a retail demand model leans on, so it belongs in the competitive picture. The city net income tax reaches the borrower directly, and it is not alone: the Revenue Division administers three local business income taxes on the same return, the city's, Multnomah County's and Metro's, with the Metro supportive housing tax at 1 percent of net income above $5 million of gross receipts. A Portland city projection therefore carries three local income-tax layers beneath the state's, where a national template carries none.

The boundary and the city tax are Oregon instruments, and the river is inside the metro. The urban growth boundary is administered by an Oregon regional government and the business taxes described above are levied by an Oregon city. The metropolitan statistical area is delineated across Oregon and Washington, and the member-county list computed from the Census delineation file names counties in both, so the river runs through the middle of a single housing and labour market with a different land-use regime and a different tax regime on each bank. This is the rare metro where the two questions a feasibility study asks first, can this be built here and what will the operator owe, are both answered differently by a crossing of a few hundred metres. A comparable set assembled without regard to the river is not a comparable set, and an absorption argument that treats the two banks as one market has to say why.

Nationally, the U.S. Small Business Administration closed fiscal year 2025 having guaranteed 84,400 7(a) and 504 loans for $44.8 billion, comprising 77,600 7(a) loans for $37 billion and 6,750 504 loans for $7.8 billion, per SBA News Release 25-83 dated September 30, 2025. The Portland metro cut below is computed in-house from the SBA 7(a) and 504 FOIA release by county membership across the Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro, OR-WA Metropolitan Statistical Area, never read from an SBA district total.

In fiscal year 2025 the Portland metro recorded 739 7(a) approvals for $339,471,600 and 41 504 approvals for $58,537,000, filed largely through the PORTLAND DISTRICT OFFICE. The most active 7(a) lenders in the metro that year, by approval count, were U.S. Bank, National Association (107 loans); Columbia Bank (102 loans); Northeast Bank (72 loans); Newtek Bank, National Association (44 loans); Readycap Lending, LLC (32 loans); KeyBank National Association (28 loans); Banner Bank (25 loans); Wells Fargo Bank National Association (21 loans). The most active 504 Certified Development Companies were Mortgage Capital Development Corporation (16 loans, $27,374,000); Evergreen Business Capital (13 loans, $17,471,000); Cascade Capital Funding (9 loans, $9,814,000); Northwest Business Development Association (2 loans, $3,670,000); C.C.D. Business Development Corporation (1 loan, $208,000).

USDA Business and Industry and Community Facilities credit runs on a statutory geography, not a county line. Under 7 U.S.C. 1991(a)(13)(A) the terms rural and rural area mean any area other than a city or town of more than 50,000 inhabitants and any urbanized area contiguous and adjacent to such a city or town. The Portland urbanized core is therefore out. What remains in this metro is the outer parts of the member counties in both states, beyond the urbanized area that runs with Portland, Vancouver and Hillsboro. The urban growth boundary and the USDA rural test are separate determinations, made separately and documented separately in the report. Because the test turns on the subject address and the urbanized-area boundary around it rather than on the name of the town, MMCG verifies eligibility at the address on the USDA Rural Development eligibility map at intake, before any work on the study begins, and no town is named on this page as eligible.

A Portland market piece would ordinarily carry submarket rents, vacancy and absorption. Those come from commercial market reports, which MMCG's city briefs do not carry, so they are omitted rather than shown on a weaker source. What remains is the statute, the federal program frame and the SBA record computed from the primary file, which is the part of a Portland study a lender can check.