Homelessness, Housing & the Questions Behind the Headlines
Portland Voices sent every council candidate the same twelve questions about homelessness, housing, harm reduction, and the everyday issues shaping this city. Here's exactly where I stand, and how it connects to the platform I've already published, with the research behind it.
Why are you running for City Council and what specific skills do you think you would bring to the position?
I'm a mental health clinician, currently Family Court Program Clinical Liaison for Maine State Forensic Services. Over twenty years as an educator and clinician, case management has always been one of my core skills, never the whole of the work, taught me trust isn't optional; it's the job. I co-founded the nation's first Young Adult Court in San Francisco, giving 18–25 year-olds a path through rehabilitation instead of a felony record. I also work as an electrician, rigger, and carpenter, trades I come by honestly, from a family of small business owners spanning janitorial companies to relatives managing HUD-compliant housing, including Alton Management in Oakland. I'm trained in systems, on paper and with my hands. That work shouldn't stop at a client's door, it belongs in City Hall.
This is the same clinical, systems-first lens that shapes Housing That Works: the belief that a city's housing crisis and its people's stability are the same problem, not two separate ones.
Read the full Housing brief →What are the top 3 challenges facing the city and how would you address them?
Housing Portland can actually afford, a faster lever and a fairer one: letting developers pick their own path under a flexible, project-based inclusionary zoning system, and piloting IZ-free zones to test what the market alone can deliver at the speed this crisis demands, while building housing for nurses, teachers, and school staff on land already available through the city and its partners. Behavioral health response that matches the need, not just more policing. And a Portland where the people who keep this city running, teachers, nurses, artists, service workers, can afford to stay in it.
This is the recalibrated IZ and IZ-free zone framework laid out in full in Housing That Works: two tools working together to get developers back to the table without giving up what the city needs in return.
Read the full Housing brief →What would be your top policy priorities to address the interconnected issues of homelessness, substance abuse and mental health that are so visible in the streets of Portland?
Portland has real service organizations doing real work, Preble Street, MaineHealth, Spurwink, Commonspace, Avesta, but they're not coordinated, and I know this firsthand: I served as a Forensic Intensive Case Manager in Cumberland County, meeting weekly with these same providers. Some coordination already exists, CHOM (Community Housing of Maine) has run FUSE Greater Portland since 2015, cutting hospitalizations 68% and ER visits 62% statewide for the people who cycle hardest through crisis systems, but FUSE, the Long Term Stayers initiative, and similar committees still meet in separate silos. Housing and crisis response are one failure split across six front doors. I'd formalize a single coordinated space, the Homelessness Services Center, Greater Portland Health, CHOM's FUSE work, and existing nonprofits sitting together, so a person's path doesn't depend on which door they knock on first.
Riverside already does some of this, and that's worth crediting, but access there requires a bed. You can't walk in to warm up, cool down, or get support without one, and someone court-trespassed from Riverside can lose access entirely for 30 days, 60 days, sometimes a year. A day center is distinct on purpose: coordinated with Riverside, not a replacement for it, open to anyone regardless of bed status or trespass history. This isn't a new program competing for funding: it's the connective tissue that makes every other plank actually reach people.
This is One Door, the seventh plank in Housing That Works: housing and homelessness treated as one failure, not two separate departments working past each other.
Read the full Housing brief →What changes, if any, would you make to the current 100:1 needle exchange ratio and the needle exchange program?
I wouldn't revert to 1-for-1, not my preference, but because Maine DHHS and Portland's own City Council already did this work. In November 2024, Council unanimously rejected reverting to 1-for-1 after health professionals testified it would increase HIV and Hepatitis C transmission. In March 2025, the state legislature rejected the same idea, bipartisan, citing an active HIV outbreak in Penobscot County. That part isn't up for debate anymore.
Where there's room for real conversation: Councilor Sarah Michniewicz has said the ratio debate gets flattened into two extremes when the honest answer might be somewhere in between, and that the city owes residents transparency about where that number comes from. I agree. Settled doesn't mean closed to scrutiny.
A car with three wheels is still, in theory, a car, it just doesn't drive like one. Portland has the core policy right, and the buyback program's real results, 58% more needles returned since launch, deserve credit. What's missing: a mobile unit, since Portland currently has none; more fixed distribution sites, since there are only two; sharps boxes at those sites; parks and schools as no-use zones; and a real place, not a jail cell, for police to bring someone instead of an arrest, feeding into One Door.
This is the clinical, evidence-first approach that runs through Keeping Us Safe: settled policy stays settled unless the evidence changes, and harm reduction works best paired with real infrastructure, not politics.
Read the full Safety brief →Would you support a safe injection site downtown? Why/why not?
This one's genuinely controversial, and I won't pretend otherwise. Amsterdam has run drug consumption rooms since the 1970s, the number of sites has shrunk as IV drug use declined there, a long-term win, but the Netherlands still recorded 338 overdose deaths in 2023, the highest on record. Harm reduction isn't a cure-all even where it's most established. California tried twice to authorize pilot sites; Governor Newsom vetoed one in 2022 despite a cost-benefit study showing every dollar spent would save San Francisco $2.33 in healthcare and law enforcement costs. This isn't settled anywhere, including places far more resourced than Portland.
The place I'd actually look to is Rhode Island, closer to our scale than California. RI became the first state to legalize overdose prevention centers in 2021, opening the nation's first state-sanctioned site in Providence in 2024, its own dedicated facility, sited next to Rhode Island Hospital, not folded into a shared space. New York's OnPoint sites have averted nearly 1,700 overdoses with zero deaths on-site and no rise in surrounding crime.
So: conditional support, only under Rhode Island's model. I'll be direct about the legal risk too, the first Trump administration sued to block Philadelphia's Safehouse, and a federal prosecutor has separately threatened OnPoint. That risk doesn't disappear because a state legalizes it. If Portland did this, it would need to be medically integrated, hospital-adjacent, and its own separate site, not layered into a shared recovery space. I've worked with people in recovery who have a real aversion to anything reminding them of active use; putting a consumption site inside peer-support space isn't compassionate, it's dangerous for people trying to stay clean. Get the separation right, and it's worth pursuing. Get it wrong, and it's worth waiting on.
Keeping Us Safe is built on the same principle at work here: connection before crisis, and infrastructure that protects both the person in treatment and the person still using.
Read the full Safety brief →What steps should be taken, if any, to ensure that people who may now refuse help seek shelter and treatment? How should we measure “success”?
I'll lean on research first, because clinical judgment without evidence is just opinion with a license attached. A national study by the Recovery Research Institute found the average number of serious recovery attempts before resolving a substance problem is 5.35, but for people whose primary substance was an opioid, the mean jumps to 8.48, the highest of any category. That's Portland's population. You cannot force readiness on that timeline. You meet people where they are, every time they come back, because each attempt gets them a little further toward what stability actually looks like.
That's the logic behind One Door: a person gets a consistent hand reaching out, the same place, every time, linked to every other door instead of starting over. If they're using, that's a real link to medical care. If they've committed a crime, it's something else, and I know that system firsthand: as a Forensic Intensive Case Manager, I worked directly with York County Jail's staff, attending their Monday debriefings on who needed what support. They saw me as a trusted partner because I did the work. York County has run a 24-bed recovery center on jail grounds since 2018, and was building a 58-bed expansion in Alfred as of 2024, status now unconfirmed, but when it was in place, it worked, and it solved a problem Cumberland County still has.
On measuring success: not just “housed or not.” HUD and HHS already track this the right way, movement along the housing continuum, days homeless per quarter, real health measures. Success is incremental because recovery is incremental.
Measuring what actually matters, not just what's easy to count, is the same standard Keeping Us Safe holds for every part of the city's crisis response.
Read the full Safety brief →The city relies heavily on non-profits to provide services to the unhoused. What changes, if any, would you make to the relationship between the city and non-profits?
The coordination gap is real, good organizations without a shared system.
On licensing: conditionally, yes, the destination, not a sudden mandate. Portland's nonprofits do extraordinary work, and accountability shouldn't put anyone out of business. Any organization touching state or federal money already answers to that money's rules; I've built logic models for every nonprofit dollar I've managed. I'd set a five-year graduation period, with the city funding consultants to help nonprofits already doing the work build the measurable outcomes taxpayers deserve to see, not audit them into the ground.
On food distribution: No, Portland's model is already the coordinated one other cities are being forced toward. Preble Street's Food Security Hub cooks up to 10,000 meals a day through fixed partner sites and outreach teams, not ad hoc handouts. Nationally, 70+ cities have restricted food sharing since 2013, and the strongest legal precedent found those restrictions unconstitutional. The one thing I'd insist on: a food site can't become a de facto place to use, exactly why any future safe-use site needs to be its own place, not layered onto services people rely on for something else.
Growing Our Community is about the civic structures that let neighbors and institutions actually trust each other. A city-nonprofit relationship built on transparency instead of suspicion is that same structure applied to social services.
Read the full Community brief →What is your plan to address the longstanding shortage of affordable housing construction and create homes for residents, in addition to subsidized apartments for low-income residents and formerly unhoused residents?
Portland faces a housing crisis, not a debate, it needs a faster lever and a fairer one, not a choice between them. Where inclusionary zoning applies, I'd let developers pick their own path: more units at a higher AMI, or fewer at a deeper one, locked into whichever they choose. I'd also identify specific sites for a fixed-term IZ-free zone, testing what market forces alone can deliver, with the city negotiating density and unit count directly instead of a blanket mandate. Stop selling public lots, build mixed-use live/work space instead, and housing for nurses, teachers, and school staff on land the city and its partners already have. Housing isn't just a cost, it's part of the solution: more workers housed means less homelessness, a bigger tax base, stronger schools. Portland approved a record 1,420 units in 2025 but completed only 187, permit speed isn't the whole story; large stalled projects need financing tools, not just faster paperwork.
This is Housing That Works in full: recalibrated IZ, IZ-free zones, and building on land the city already owns, the three planks working together.
Read the full Housing brief →What policies, if any, would you support to combat sea level rise and respond to climate change?
Portland's working waterfront caught fire on Custom House Wharf this past December, a three-alarm blaze driven largely by how old and tightly packed the wharf's timber structures are. Portland Pier itself floods during king tides and any tide 12 feet or higher. This isn't a future risk.
FEMA's BRIC program, the main federal vehicle for this work, was cancelled this year, I won't point anyone toward a program that no longer exists. But Maine built its own response: after two devastating 2024 storms, the state authorized $60 million in its supplemental budget, including a $25 million Working Waterfront Resilience Grant Program that's already put $21.2 million into 68 waterfronts, plus $69 million secured from NOAA. That money exists; Portland needs to aggressively pursue its share.
One thing I'd insist on: the state's fund requires a pier to be used by 10+ licensed commercial fishermen to qualify, so protecting the waterfront is a licensing question too. I'd bring the fishermen and aquaculturists actually working these piers to the table and ask them directly what's keeping them from functioning today.
This can't happen in one year, it's a multi-year commitment, with the people who work the water helping set priorities from the start.
This is the same stewardship argument at the heart of Caring for Our Coast: Portland's waterfront isn't a backdrop, it's a living system, and protecting it means bringing the people who work it to the table, not deciding for them.
Read the full Coast brief →What changes, if any, would you support to control property taxes?
Maine already ran the experiment on freezing seniors' taxes, a 2022 stabilization program let them freeze their bill regardless of income, and the Legislature repealed it after one year because it disproportionately benefited the most expensive homes. The smarter replacement: income-tested relief through the Homestead Exemption, the Property Tax Fairness Credit, and a Deferral Program.
What most Portland taxpayers may not know: the city already has P-STEP, offering rebates up to $900 to homeowners 62+ who've lived here 10+ years. That's the information barrier I'd close, a website overhaul so these programs are actually findable. There's a live opportunity now too: the Finance Committee was already discussing expanding P-STEP to all ages and renters, since roughly 20% of rent effectively goes toward property taxes as well. I'd push that forward.
For essential workers: Orlando just approved up to $10,000 in rebates for homeowners who build an ADU and rent it as workforce housing. I'd bring that model to Portland, with a deed-restricted, below-market-rent commitment for a fixed term, so the city knows exactly what it's getting.
None of this should bankrupt the city. It should target exactly who we're losing: seniors who want to retire in place, and the workers who keep Portland's culture alive.
The ADU and essential-worker rebate model here is a direct extension of Housing That Works: using existing tools and existing land more intelligently instead of asking taxpayers to fund something new from scratch.
Read the full Housing brief →Recently, some public officials have talked about creating a policy to reduce traffic speed to 20 mph on all City streets/roadways. Do you agree or disagree with the proposal, and why?
I support “20 is Plenty,” but not as a blanket rule for every street, because that's not what safety actually requires. Around schools, parks, hospitals, and dense corridors like the arts district, 20 mph should be standard. But one number for every street regardless of what that street is isn't precision, it's a slogan. The city's own process already recognizes this: it only applies to municipally-controlled residential streets that qualify after a traffic investigation. I'd follow that same logic, target where speed is actually the danger. This is live right now: Portland's Sustainability and Transportation Committee takes it up September 9, and I'd want to be part of that conversation with the position above.
Building Our City is about the everyday systems that make Portland livable. Street safety calibrated to the actual street, not a blanket rule, is exactly that kind of system: precise instead of performative.
Read the full Building Our City brief →Other campaign issues or comments.
Protecting our coast starts closer to home than the ocean itself. Portland's purple bags, in place since 1999, break under normal use, get torn apart by seagulls and crows before collection, and contribute to microplastics and street litter. Price increases haven't fixed it.
Here's the complication: those bags are real, non-tax city revenue that also funds Portland's recycling program. “Get rid of the bags” isn't a design fix, it's a funding question.
The answer is a model already working elsewhere: a monthly utility fee tied to bin size, not a fee per bag. Pasadena, San Diego, San Jose, Santa Rosa, and Seattle all run this way, residents choose a bin size, pay monthly the way they pay water or sewer, and put whatever bags they want inside. Denver switched in 2023. Tenants would pay their own bin fee directly, not buried in a landlord's tax bill.
This isn't a “no cost” fix, it's a fairer one, replacing a revenue source that's breaking under seagulls with one that funds the same services more reliably. Protecting our coast means fixing what leaks onto our own streets first.
Same coast, same question: what does the current system cost us, and what would actually work better? Caring for Our Coast starts at the harbor, but it doesn't end there.
Read the full Coast brief →All twelve answers above map back to the platform already published: Housing That Works (recalibrated IZ, IZ-free zones, One Door), Keeping Us Safe (harm reduction grounded in evidence, not politics), Caring for Our Coast (the waterfront and what protects it, literally and financially), Building Our City (precise, not performative, infrastructure), and Growing Our Community (the civic trust between the city and the people doing the work). Nothing here is invented for this survey. It's the same platform, applied to twelve specific questions.