It might be Legal to Convert the Eastmoreland Golf Course to a Social Housing Metropolis after All
Two years after the 2015 MAX Orange Line opening, Portland housing advocates focused in on one of the most egregiously bad land uses in the United States: the Eastmoreland Golf Course, which occupies an area near two Orange Line stops, which is a quarter of the size of downtown. At the time, the Eastmoreland Neighborhood Association claimed that the city was unable to alter land use at the golf course site because of a 1924 deed in which the Ladd Estate Company provided the land to the city. This deed supposedly included a clause which would revert the land to private ownership if ever used for non-golf purposes. Recently, however, housing advocate Bradley Clover acquired a copy of the original deed to the Eastmoreland Golf Course and distributed it on Bluesky. This reproduction of the original deed lacks any clause with the stipulations specified in the 2017 claim, potentially opening the door for activists to again push for thousands of affordable homes near Reed.
The 1924 deed says that the Ladd Estate Company “does hereby… sell and convey to the City of Portland, its successors and assigns forever” the parcel of land that is now the Eastmoreland Golf Course. The deed includes a covenant that says the property is “free of all incumbrance [sic]” except for several specific liens and easements pertaining to road and water infrastructure, in perpetuity. According to the Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, in real estate law, encumbrance is defined as “A claim against an asset by an entity that is not the owner. Common types of encumbrances against real property include liens, easements, leases, mortgages, or restrictive covenants.” In other words, the actual criteria imposed by the deed are the opposite of what the Eastmoreland Neighborhood Association claimed in 2017: Portland is explicitly not subject to any claims against the property pertaining to prior ownership.
In fall 2024 I wrote an opinion piece advocating for direct action to transform the Eastmoreland Golf Course into a public sex forest. This was inspired by the anarchist “Make the Golf Course a Public Sex Forest” campaign targeting the Hiawatha Golf Course in Minneapolis. My view conveyed in that piece was based on the assumption that if the city converted the Eastmoreland Golf Course for different usage, it would revert to private ownership, so direct action would be necessary to reclaim such an opportune space for the public. That judgment is no longer supported by the facts. Without the threat of reversion to private ownership, there is no reason other than lack of political will for the city to refrain from discontinuing golf in Eastmoreland and preparing for a new neighborhood.
The crux of the 2017 argument in favor of replacing the Eastmoreland Golf Course with housing was that the golf course is a low-intensity land use, spread out over an enormous amount of space in a high-opportunity area. Golf courses require maintaining grass monocultures, creating massive demands for water and labor. As I wrote in 2024, “golf itself is an exclusionary activity premised on undemocratic, inequitable, and anti-ecological land distribution for the enjoyment of a small number of mostly upper-middle class and wealthy players who can afford membership and course fees, which is why this massive resource demand can’t be justified.” Portland golf courses are all publicly owned, but they accommodate an average of just 162 rounds per course per day, meaning that their recreational utility per unit area is tiny compared to parks that accommodate thousands of visitors a day.
Additionally, the Orange Line stops which serve the golf course are severely underutilized. With 386 riders on an average weekday in fall 2025, the SE Bybee MAX station is the second-least-used station on the entire network. The SE Johnson Creek park-and-ride on the south end of the golf course has 714 daily riders. Overall, in January 2026, the Orange Line had 5,589 riders on an average weekday, making it the least-used MAX line. Projections before construction anticipated 17,000 daily riders.
The City of Portland and TriMet are already pursuing steps to rectify bad land uses around Orange Line stations on SE 17th Avenue. The city is rezoning two vacant parcels fronting stations to make way for 80 affordable housing units. Meanwhile, projections show that Portland will need about 120,000 new housing units by 2045 to address the housing affordability crisis, and Mayor Keith Wilson has introduced a goal of building 20,000 units in eight years. The massive amount of land afforded by the golf course is a prime opportunity for the city to take advantage of if it wants to meet either of those goals.
Studies have consistently borne out that residents of transit-oriented developments in the Portland area are extremely likely to ride TriMet. One recent PSU study found that 41% of Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) residents commute on TriMet, compared to 7% of the total population. To date, nobody has conducted a rigorous study of how many units developing the Eastmoreland Golf Course site would add or how many of those new residents would ride the Orange Line, but a 2019 article on NextPortland.com presented a hypothetical design that would have included 3,928 dwelling units for 6,285 residents.
Even if the city was not free of encumbrance, it is unclear whether there is a successor to the Ladd Estate Company which might have standing to enforce a violation of the covenant against the city. Oregon Secretary of State records indicate that the Ladd Estate Company dissolved in 2001.