How much land Hillsboro’s data center amendment actually moves

The claim nobody has made

The City states that under the proposed code amendment, data and energy storage uses would be limited to the I-P and I-S zones. That sentence appears on the City’s data center page and in the Planning Commission record.

What has not appeared anywhere — not in the staff reports, not in public testimony, not in reporting — is the acreage. The amendment is being described as either meaningful reform or a development ban, and neither characterization has a number attached.

The record

The City of Hillsboro publishes its zoning geometry on a public ArcGIS REST service. The layer is maintained by Planning through Zone Change and Zone Ordinance Amendment ordinances.

Validation

Total zoned acreage, excluding land carrying the County designation, computes to 17,424 acres. The City separately publishes 17,378 acres as the total area of Hillsboro.

Agreement to 0.26%. That is the check that makes the rest of the arithmetic usable.

The numbers

Status under draft	Zones	Acres	Share of industrial
Allowed	I-P, I-S	4,276.3	67.5%
Closed	I-G, SCI, SC-BP	1,716.1	27.1%
Not addressed	SID I-P, SSID, HSID	341.0	5.4%
Total industrial	—	6,333.5	100%

Industrial land is 35.8% of all zoned land in the city.

Zone by zone

Zone	Name	Acres	Polygons
I-P	Industrial Park	3,046.6	14
I-S	Industrial Sanctuary	1,229.7	6
I-G	Industrial – General	1,406.9	9
SC-BP	Station Community Business Park	267.8	4
SID I-P	Industrial Park with Special Industrial District overlay	214.0	1
SSID	Shute Road Special Industrial District	81.4	1
HSID	Helvetia Special Industrial District	45.6	3
SCI	Station Community Industrial	41.4	4
ESID	Evergreen Special Industrial District	0	0

The number that cuts both ways

The City reports approximately 570 acres of data center sites in Hillsboro — 16 constructed on 346 acres and 7 in permitting or under construction on 224 acres, as of July 21, 2026.

570 of 4,276 acres. Data centers currently occupy 13.3% of the land the amendment would leave open to them.

Roughly 3,700 acres of I-P and I-S land is not currently a data center site.

That figure is inconvenient for both of the stories being told about this ordinance.

It is not a ban. Two-thirds of the city’s industrial land stays open to the use, and only about an eighth of that land is presently occupied by it.

Nor is it cosmetic. 1,716 acres do close, and they include SC-BP and SCI — the station-community industrial zones, which are the industrial land closest to transit and housing.

Three things the numbers surface

A zone with no land in it

Evergreen Special Industrial District is a valid code in the City’s zoning domain, with its own symbol and map color. No polygon in the city carries it. It is a defined zone containing zero acres.

Three industrial districts the draft does not name

The amendment names I-P and I-S as allowed and I-G, SCI and SC-BP as prohibited. Hillsboro has three further industrial designations: SID I-P, SSID and HSID, together 341 acres.

SID I-P is Industrial Park carrying a Special Industrial District overlay — whether it reads as I-P for purposes of the amendment is not stated. SSID is the Shute Road district. Existing data center facilities sit in these areas.

Three hundred forty-one acres and operating facilities, in designations the draft is silent on.

Zoning polygons are not parcels

The 14 I-P polygons average 218 acres each. These are contiguous zoning districts, not tax lots. Parcel-level counts require a separate query against the tax lot layer, and a developer asking “how many sites are available” needs that number rather than this one.

What this does not establish

• This is gross acreage. It does not net out floodplain, wetland, wetland buffer, steep slope, or the Significant Natural Resource Overlay. Whether the ordinance itself calculates on gross or net developable acreage is one of the provisions still unresolved in the draft. The 4,276 figure is a ceiling, not buildable land.
• It does not account for existing non-data-center industrial occupancy. Much of the 3,700 remaining acres is in active industrial use by other employers.
• It does not address whether a use vested before the amendment continues. Applications submitted before the July 27 moratorium proceed under the regulations in effect at submission.
• It does not address accessory use. The draft would permit accessory data storage on industrial sites under separate limits, which are bracketed and unresolved. Accessory capacity is not counted here.
• The zoning layer is maintained by the City and is authoritative for the City’s own designations. It has not been independently reconciled against Washington County assessment records.

Reproduce it

One query returns acreage and polygon count for every zoning designation in Hillsboro:

https://gis.hillsboro-oregon.gov/public/rest/services/public/LandUseGallery_Prod/MapServer/23/query?where=1%3D1&outStatistics=[{"statisticType":"sum","onStatisticField":"SHAPE.STArea()","outStatisticFieldName":"sqft"},{"statisticType":"count","onStatisticField":"OBJECTID_1","outStatisticFieldName":"parcels"}]&groupByFieldsForStatistics=DESCRIPTIO&f=pjson

Divide sqft by 43,560 for acres. If your figures differ from ours, we would like to know.

No individual is named. No position is taken on the amendment or on any bracketed provision. Acreage figures are computed from the City of Hillsboro’s published zoning geometry as retrieved on the date stated.