Greater Portland Landmarks
The aspect I care about most is the one that's easiest to overlook: the history that doesn't have a plaque yet. When I'm canvassing, I hear it at the door, not from a brochure. A man near the Jetport told me his grandfather ran a bakery and a grocery store on a street that doesn't exist anymore, taken for the Franklin Arterial in the 1960s. That kind of story is preservation work too, even once the building is gone.
On City Council, I'd support preservation by making sure the Historic Preservation Board and city staff have the capacity to do their work well, by treating the history of working-class and immigrant Portland with the same seriousness as architecturally significant buildings, and by making sure preservation decisions include the people whose family history is actually tied to a place.
My approach to any issue starts with the people closest to it. That's how I helped build San Francisco's Young Adult Court: by bringing every stakeholder to the same table before a decision got made. On a preservation question, that means talking directly with GPL and Historic Preservation Board staff, reading the technical findings instead of just the summary, and hearing from the residents and property owners the decision actually affects.
I don't think preservation and other city goals have to be in permanent conflict. The City's own Comprehensive Plan and the 2023 Trends report both point to preservation supporting density and sustainability goals rather than working against them, and I'd want any solution to start from that evidence instead of treating it as a zero-sum fight.
My engagement with development in Portland comes mostly through housing policy rather than the ReCode process itself. I serve on the board of Avesta Housing, and I spent most of my adult life as a renter, moving often while trying to find the right fit, which shapes how I look at zoning and permitting fights now.
On ReCode's results, the number that stands out to me is the fee-in-lieu data: the city approved 1,420 units in 2025, but only 187 were completed. That tells me there's still a real gap between what the Land Use Code allows and what's actually getting built. Going forward, the city needs to look hard at any area still coded in a way that doesn't allow for housing density, and recode it where it makes sense to build, with the neighborhood at the table, not after the fact. ReCode was a necessary modernization of a code that hadn't been touched in fifty years, but the work isn't finished until the areas still standing in the way of housing get the same honest look, with the people who live there in the room.
Same approval-versus-completion gap my Housing brief runs on: 1,420 units approved in 2025, just 187 completed. ReCode made the code modern. The gap is still real.
Yes, I support increasing housing density in Portland, but how we do it matters as much as whether we do it. My Housing That Works platform is built around getting homes built within our existing fabric: bringing chronically vacant buildings, three or more years empty, back into use through a structured "Other Doors" process, rather than demolishing historic structures to start over.
Where we do build new, I want it built to a standard that keeps the charm Portland is known for: contextual materials, human-scale massing, and design that reads as a continuation of the block it's on, not a break from it. The same Trends report GPL cites found historic districts already carry higher housing density than the city average while reusing more buildings than they demolish. That's the model I want to build on.
The "Other Doors" vacant-building program is a named policy step in my Housing brief. Reusing what's already standing, instead of demolishing it, is the same housing-supply argument applied to historic fabric specifically.
I place real importance on Portland's historic preservation programs. They protect something that, once it's gone, as Franklin Arterial taught this city the hard way, doesn't come back. Less than 10 percent of the city's land currently carries historic designation, which tells me there's room to look at more, particularly in working-class and immigrant neighborhoods whose history is just as much a part of Portland's identity as its landmark buildings, but hasn't always gotten the same recognition.
My focus there is mainly on commercial buildings. Storefronts and main street facades carry a lot of Portland's historic character, and they're also where historic standards hit hardest: the specific window styles, materials, and veneers a historic district can require are expensive to install and maintain, and that cost falls hard on small business owners trying to keep a building up to code. I'd support expanding designations paired with real funding, grants or low-interest loans that help property and business owners afford those historic-standard upgrades, so the standard is something they can meet without it becoming another barrier to keeping a small business open on a historic block.
Portland has already lost neighborhoods it didn't get to choose to lose. Franklin Arterial took more than 100 buildings and displaced hundreds of Italian, Jewish, Polish, Irish, and Armenian families in the name of urban renewal, and that history is the reason today's preservation conversation matters.
I want to bring that same care to how this city makes decisions about its built environment going forward: slower, more honest about who's affected, and more willing to ask whose voice got left out last time. I'd welcome the chance to keep talking with GPL after November 3rd, win or lose.