Housing, Priorities & the Portland I Want to Build
The Portland Press Herald sent every council candidate the same voter guide questionnaire. Here are my answers to the questions that go beyond biography, where I stand, and how it connects to the platform I've already published, with the research behind it.
What are your top three priorities?
Housing Portland can afford. Affordable for who? Essential workers: teachers, nurses, artists, service workers who keep this city running. Picture a nurse finishing a night shift and driving home to Portland, not commuting in from an hour away. Recalibrate the housing requirement so developers actually build it, instead of it stalling projects before they start. Improving behavioral health response, not just more policing.
This is the earliest public version of the recalibrated IZ position that's now fully built out in Housing That Works: replace a rule that's stalling projects with one that actually gets housing built.
Read the full Housing brief →Why are you running?
I have a family here. Roots here. A daughter here. We are not going anywhere, and I want to help shape the Portland she inherits. Other cities have suffered growing pains that hollowed out their neighborhoods and priced out the people who built them. I refuse that fate for Portland. Twenty years as a clinician taught me how to hold a community through hard change. That is the work I want to bring to City Hall.
What is the biggest challenge facing Portland? The biggest opportunity?
Biggest challenge: housing costs and homelessness, woven into every priority I hold, not solved overnight. Biggest opportunity: Portland already proves it can act. Franklin Street just won federal funding to reconnect a neighborhood cars tore apart sixty years ago. Picture that same follow-through aimed at housing: cranes over Bayside instead of empty lots. We have the will. Now we need it applied here too.
Franklin Street is the proof point at the center of Building Our City: real investment in the everyday systems that make Portland livable, not just the big, visible wins. Reconnecting a neighborhood cars tore apart sixty years ago is exactly the kind of follow-through this priority asks the city to bring to infrastructure across the board.
The biggest opportunity in this answer is what Housing That Works argues next: that same follow-through, applied to housing instead of roads. Franklin Street shows the city can do hard things when it decides to. Housing is the next hard thing.
Read the full Building Our City brief → Read the full Housing brief →Do you support more development? Why or why not?
Yes. I'm the artist and musician in this race, and I know what happens when a city sells off land instead of building with it. Stop selling public lots. Build mixed-use live/work space instead, affordable to creatives, service workers, and hospitality workers alike. Hospitals and the school district already own land. Build housing for nurses and teachers on it. A city's culture is a coral reef. Remove enough organisms holding it together and the whole structure collapses. Protect the reef.
This is the land-use plank of Housing That Works in its original form: build on what the city and its institutions already own, rather than treating every new unit as land the city has to buy or sell first.
Read the full Housing brief →If you could change one thing about how Portland functions, what would it be and why?
Community Housing of Maine (CHOM) already proved coordination works: FUSE Greater Portland has housed 538+ chronically homeless neighbors since 2015 with 90% retention, over 20 organizations working together. I would scale that model and give it a front door on Congress Street: medical care, crisis care, and housing together. Protect small business. Treat unhoused neighbors with the dignity of a real plan, not a doorway to move along from.
This is One Door, named here months before it became the seventh plank of Housing That Works: CHOM's FUSE model, scaled and given a physical home instead of staying scattered across six separate front doors.
Read the full Housing brief →Every answer above traces straight back to Housing That Works: recalibrated IZ, building on land the city already owns, and One Door's coordinated response to homelessness. This wasn't written for a survey and then abandoned, it's the same position I've held since before the platform brief existed, now built out with the research behind it.