Neil Heller 

Neighborhood Workshop Principal &

Faculty at Incremental Development Alliance:

Neil is an award-winning urban planner & designer with a focus on aligning municipal regulations with the kinds of development outcomes a community wants to see. This is accomplished using a real estate development pro-forma-based approach that quantifies the physical and financial effects of various policy decisions.

With a strong background in design, urban planning, housing policy, and real estate development, Neil brings value to communities through user-focused site design, equitable housing policy, proforma-based scenarios, and supporting projects through to adoption.

Neil crafts the baseline 3D model/building plans, site plans, and accompanying proformas to be used as the starting point for conversations with the focus groups and to provide clear example models to explore opportunities and constraints in construction considerations, capital structure, lending/underwriting, and context-sensitive site planning.

As a small landlord himself, he is familiar with the regulatory, operations, and maintenance for 2–4-unit buildings through renovation of a duplex and the addition of a basement suite and ADU using owner-occupied financing.  He is a long time, practically driven advocate in Portland for changing zoning and related regulation to unlock new opportunities for increasing housing supply in the city. 

He was recently featured in the prominent northwest-based think tank blog, Sightline, for his work to provide financial justification towards the political action for increasing the number of units allowed on typical single-dwelling lots owned and managed by non-profits seeking to provide housing affordability.