Urbanist Coalition of Portland

Yes, Portland needs significantly more housing, and the data backs that up: 64 percent of Maine households can no longer afford the median home, up from 39 percent in 2020. I met a young woman on Old Mast Road this summer, Carrie Ann, who told me a single bedroom in this city now runs about $2,500 a month. She still loves her neighborhood. She just does not know how much longer she can afford to stay in it.

Picture Portland five years from now, where Carrie Ann is not choosing between her neighborhood and her rent, where a nurse finishing a night shift drives home to this city instead of an hour outside it. That is not a fantasy, it is a supply problem with a real fix.

The crisis is not really about approvals. Portland approved a record 1,420 units in 2025 and completed only 187. The real bottleneck is a handful of large projects stalling before groundbreaking over financing and material costs, not paperwork. I would pursue city-backed gap financing for those large stalled projects, build housing on land the city, the school district, and local hospitals already own, and pilot an IZ-free zone on underused industrial land for a fixed ten-year term, with the neighborhood closest to it helping set the terms before any zone is drawn.

None of this works without honesty about the risk. Gap financing means the city taking on real exposure if a project still fails. A pilot zone that does not deliver has to be allowed to end on schedule, not quietly extended because ending it is politically hard. What would it take for you to trust a city government enough to let it experiment with your neighborhood first?

Your data is convincing, and I take it seriously. Since 2020, the 25 percent IZ requirement has produced only 12 unsubsidized units, and almost nothing has been paid into the Jill Duson Housing Trust Fund through the fee in lieu. That tells me the requirement itself is stalling projects, not that developers are cheaply buying their way out. I still believe in inclusionary zoning as a tool, a city should not build market-rate housing without building affordable housing alongside it, but a policy producing 12 units in five years is not holding a line, it is not working.

I support moving toward a flexible, project-based IZ that offers developers a real choice: more units at a higher AMI, easier to finance, or fewer units at a deeper, lower AMI.

Social housing, to me, means one thing plainly: more than 400 people who sought help at Portland's Homelessness Services Center this year came from other Maine towns, and too many of them are cycling through a system with no single door and no place that is truly theirs to keep.

Picture a building where a formerly homeless veteran and a young service worker are neighbors, not because either one needed charity, but because the city decided permanently affordable housing was infrastructure, the same as a road or a school. Community Housing of Maine has already proven a version of this works, FUSE Greater Portland has housed more than 538 people since 2015 with a 90 percent retention rate, over 20 organizations coordinating around the same people instead of past each other.

Portland already has real momentum here through the Social Housing Task Force, established by unanimous council vote in 2025. I want to build on that foundation, not replace it, with dedicated public financing that does not depend on winning a fight over inclusionary zoning every single year.

Here is the honest part. Social housing built well takes years, and a task force that does not outlive a single council term risks becoming a good idea that quietly dies at the next election. What would it take for this city to fund something patient enough to actually work?

Portland in Motion is a genuine opportunity, the city has called it the most comprehensive transportation study in over 30 years, and it is meant to guide the next 20 years of how people and goods move through this city.

Four pedestrians were killed on Portland streets in a four month span in 2025, Cynthia Karst crossing Franklin Street at Congress, Joe Lewis at India and Middle, Justin Mitchell near the Homelessness Services Center on Riverside. I want to picture a Portland where a plan like this is the reason that number stays at zero the following year, not a study that sits on a shelf while the same intersections keep failing people.

I want this plan to prioritize multimodal access and safety first, building directly on the city's own Vision Zero commitment, before it prioritizes driving speed or parking convenience. Yes, I am willing to prioritize walking, biking, and transit over car speed and parking supply where the data supports it.

The honest part: safety investment costs real money and sometimes real inconvenience for drivers, and a councilor who promises both faster commutes and zero deaths is not being straight with you. I would rather tell you plainly which one I am prioritizing. Which would you rather I protect first, someone's ten minutes, or someone's life?

I want to be honest that this is not a position I have fully settled. I understand the case for Site 3, getting the Downeaster onto the main line now, at lower cost, with real benefit to Maine Medical Center and Mercy Hospital commuters, and I take seriously that your own coalition changed its position on this after weighing the same tradeoffs.

I picture a station that actually serves the people who would use it most, hospital shift workers, students, someone visiting family without a car, not just the site that pencils out easiest on a spreadsheet. I do not yet know for certain which site delivers that.

What I am not willing to do is treat a decision this size as settled without hearing directly from the neighborhoods and riders it actually affects. If elected, I would want a real public process before I stake out a final position, not because I am dodging the question, but because a councilor who has not walked through the tradeoffs with the community has no business pretending certainty on a decision this size. If you had to choose between a station that opens sooner and one that serves the neighborhood better, which would you choose, and why?

Yes, I support Reimagining Franklin Street. This corridor destroyed immigrant and working-class neighborhoods in Bayside during urban renewal in the late 1960s, physically dividing the city in a way we are still living with. I want to be direct about something larger too: across this country, highways and thoroughfares like this one were often used as a tool against communities of color, cutting through Black neighborhoods specifically in city after city. I don't have evidence that Portland's history followed that exact pattern, the documented displacement here was largely Italian and other immigrant families, but I know the underlying instinct is the same one: whose neighborhood gets treated as expendable when a city decides it needs faster car access.

Door after door this summer, one thing has come up again and again, on its own, unprompted: people miss the trolley. Not the traffic it would relieve, the feeling of it, a city that moved together instead of everyone sealed alone in a car. I let myself imagine it sometimes. A corridor that actually connects people to where the city is growing, downtown to the Roux Institute, the current campus on Fore Street and the new one rising in East Deering. I can't promise that. It's not in my power to build it alone, and I won't pretend otherwise. But it's the lens I bring to every smaller decision on this corridor, does this choice make that kind of city more possible someday, or does it close the door on it a little further.

Narrowing Franklin Street, making it safer to cross, and freeing up land for housing is not just smart planning to me, it is repair. My priorities for the project: make sure the housing that gets built back is genuinely affordable to the people this corridor originally displaced, and keep pedestrian and cyclist safety as the design's actual priority, not an amenity added after the fact. What would it take for you to believe a street built to move cars faster could become a street that brings a neighborhood back together?

The Midtown lots are exactly the kind of decision I want to get right. The city already has $15 million invested in this land after a 15 year legal battle to get it back, and a broker has been hired to market it.

I picture those Somerset Street lots five years from now as something the neighborhood actually asked for, mixed income housing, maybe a real public gathering space, not another decade of empty parcels behind a chain link fence while lawyers argue over what they are worth. That is the opposite of what happened the first time this land was handed to a single private developer in 2011, a deal that ended in seven years of litigation and nothing built.

My priority is that these parcels do not simply get sold to the highest bidder the way that original deal was structured. I want genuine public input before any sale, real consideration of mixed uses beyond another large private development, and if housing is part of the plan, real assurance that the city's $15 million stake buys something back for residents.

Here is the honest part. Public process takes longer than a quick sale, and this land has already sat vacant for years while the city waited on a courtroom. Some further delay may be the price of getting this right instead of getting it done fast again. Is a slower, better outcome worth the wait, after everything this land has already cost us?

Only this: I am a mental health clinician by training, and the instinct that shapes how I approach every one of these questions is the same one that shaped my career, listen first, understand the actual barrier in front of someone, and build the relationship that lets you bridge it together. Transit, housing, public land, they are not separate issues to me. They are one city, and I want to represent all of it, not just the parts that are easiest to have an opinion about.