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Homebuilder D.R. Horton has proposed a 58-home development in Southwest Portland near River View Cemetery.

(Mark Graves/The Oregonian)

The city of Portland doesn’t have much vacant land for new single-family homes, but

suggests a major homebuilder has uncovered one such site.

The Texas-based

, the largest U.S. homebuilder, has proposed building 58 homes on a site near River View Cemetery. If it moves forward, it will be among the largest single-family housing developments within Portland’s city limits in several years.

The development would include 11 houses on a northern site and 47 townhouses to the south. The sites would abut established neighborhoods made up of homes built in the 1950s and 1980s.

The proposal is still in an early stage in which the developer is working to determine the project’s viability. Riverview Abbey, a funeral home unaffiliated with the River View Cemetery, is still listed as the owner of the wooded land targeted for development.

Neither D.R. Horton nor the owners of Riverview Abbey returned messages left Wednesday.

Portland hasn’t seen a single-family housing development of this scale since at least 2008, said Douglas Hardy, a planner with the city

.

“Even those tended to be farther out in the city," he said.

Most new single-family homes in the city are infill developments built on a smaller scale, or the demolition and redevelopment of an existing home, simply because large scale tracts of land are hard to come by.

"Something like that is extraordinarily rare," said

, a Lake Oswego-based real estate broker and developer. "I'm kicking myself. I drive up and down that road, and I never paid attention ... that there was that much land right under my nose."

And Horton is typically more comfortable building in Portland's suburbs. Its website lists a dozen active Portland-area developments, mostly in Happy Valley, Hillsboro, Bethany and Vancouver, Wash.

-- Elliot Njus