Am I required to retrofit my URM (unreinforced masonry) building?

Portland is not currently mandating immediate retrofit of every unreinforced masonry building, but the city has inventoried roughly 1,600 URM structures under the Earthquake Ready Initiative and is phasing in compliance triggers over multiple decades. If you own one of these buildings, the answer for now is conditional rather than absolute.

The inventoried inventory is heavily weighted toward pre-1962 brick-veneer commercial, mixed-use, and multi-family structures, since modern seismic detailing did not enter Oregon code until the early 1960s. The full URM layer is published on portlandmaps.com and is the authoritative source for whether your address is on the list. The Bureau of Development Services administers permits for retrofit work, while the City Council has been working through phased policy since the 2018 ordinance pause.

The key trigger for homeowners and small property owners is substantial renovation. Once a project crosses the threshold for substantial improvement (generally work valued at 50 percent or more of the structure value), parallel retrofit obligations apply, including parapet bracing, wall-to-diaphragm connections, and roof-diaphragm strengthening. Voluntary retrofit ahead of that trigger is the cheaper path, and the city offers fee discounts plus expedited review for owners who proactively schedule work.

The most common gotcha is stripping interior finishes for a remodel and only then discovering the URM status, at which point the structural retrofit must be folded into the project scope mid-stream. Order a structural assessment from a licensed engineer before you finalize remodel scope on any pre-1962 brick-clad Portland building.

Baily has matched GCs and structural engineers who specialize in URM retrofit and remodel sequencing. Chat with us with your address and we will pull your portlandmaps.com URM record alongside qualified contractor candidates.