Portland, meet the housing champions on your 2024 ballot.

Photo by Mitchell Laurren-Ring (CC)

Organizing for housing as a human right isn’t easy, and Portland: Neighbors Welcome won’t succeed without leaders who share our values and value our methods. After reviewing questionnaires and public policy positions from 41 candidates, we’re proud to say that many of this year’s candidates do.

Every one of these candidates endorsed our top-priority Inner Eastside for All campaign and offered strong and informed pro-housing positions on a variety of issues. Like our organization—and like Portlanders—they come from a range of ideologies. We found them united in a common belief that Portland thrives when we welcome all our neighbors.

Below you will find our endorsed Housing Champions, those candidates who received our strongest endorsements, and our Green Lights, those candidates we believe deserve to be ranked due to their pro-housing stance. Under our new Ranked Choice Voting system, you can rank up to six candidates in each race. Each name links to the campaign site for the candidate where you can make a donation and find volunteer opportunities. Where possible, we’ve also linked directly to the site to see and join upcoming events for that candidate.

A lot (but not all!) of the candidates use the Mobilize platform. We’ve created this link to see all upcoming events for candidates on the platform that we have endorsed.

Our process: After multiple emails (and in some cases calls and texts, just to be sure) not all candidates responded to our questionnaire. Working from the 41 questionnaires we did receive, a team of 20 volunteers led by our board members Andrea Pastor and Matt Tuckerbaum read and scored every response, then discussed their reactions (informed in some cases by independent information about the candidates). We gave our top-level endorsement to candidates receiving the most enthusiastic scores from our volunteers.

If you’d like to read all applicants’ words yourself, their full responses are collected here.

For mayor of Portland

Carmen Rubio

As an elected city councilor for four years, Commissioner Rubio has an almost unbroken record of supporting housing in contested votes—or else in helping win over all her peers. She most recently supervised the city’s planning and housing bureaus, during which she led efforts to fully fund Portland’s inclusionary zoning program and to simplify zoning rules that had made new apartment buildings more expensive. She took on the difficult task of consolidating Portland’s slow and complicated permitting process, overcoming opposition on the council. In our questionnaire, she also pledged to lead the effort to bring a new affordable housing bond before city voters.

In addition, we also gave our “green light” in this race to a housing supporter: Keith Wilson. Voters can rank up to six mayoral candidates on their November ballot.

For council district 1 (East Portland)

Candace Avalos

Candace Avalos was a founding board member of Portland: Neighbors Welcome and will bring the same frankness, joyful determination, and sense of justice to helping lead the city. As executive director of the environmental justice organization Verde and a board member of the news organization Street Roots, Avalos has built housing expertise alongside her work for city charter reform, police reform, and downtown revitalization. “When I see our homeless neighbors,” she wrote in our questionnaire, “I think of my grandfather—alone in a strange country, on a D.C. park bench with snow clinging to his eyelashes, and that’s part of what fuels me: the desire to help others just like he did.”

Steph Routh

Steph Routh has been a staunch and independent voice for housing on the city planning commission—always diplomatic, but never cowed into needless caution when she knows that her neighbors’ lives are at stake. As co-mayor of the YIMBYtown conference that we co-hosted in 2022, Routh drew on a lifetime of personal relationships to help advance the modern pro-housing movement. In her decades of work for safer, cleaner, and more efficient transportation, she’s shown a deep understanding of how homes and streets have to work in tandem.

Timur Ender

As a volunteer for housing and transportation efforts, a city council staffer, and a project manager at the Portland Bureau of Transportation, Timur Ender has shown a record of understanding both cities and neighborhoods. In our questionnaire, he also called for a full review of city-owned land that could be used as housing and for a rule to unbundle parking fees from rent, so tenants don’t have to pay for parking spaces they don’t need.

In addition to the three champions above, we also gave our “green light” in this race to a housing supporter in District 1: Jamie Dunphy. Voters can rank up to six candidates from their district on their November ballot.

For council district 2 (North and Northeast Portland)

Debbie Kitchin

As a public-sector economist, as the owner of a small residential construction business, and as part of the city’s charter reform commission, Kitchin has spent her 40 years in District 2 building a deep understanding of the city and how to make it work for everyone. Her support in our questionnaire for fully funding Portland Street Response and opposition to criminal camping bans seems to come from the same place as her support for allowing more housing in close-in neighborhoods and focusing more affordable housing dollars on preservation: a relentless interest in which ideas actually work to make a city more efficient, effective, and equitable.

Nat West

West had a close-up view of bureaucratic rigmarole when the expansion of his local cidery (Rev. Nat’s Hard Cider) triggered a three-year permit battle between two city bureaus. As a political candidate (plus his new day job as a TriMet bus driver), he’s built an impressively detailed housing housing platform that includes support for expanding voucher funding, for adjusting the city’s inclusionary housing program to target people with lower incomes, and for banning evictions for students and education workers during the school year.

Marnie Glickman

Glickman has spent much of her career behind the scenes of politics, building wisdom about the uses and misuses of power. As a council candidate she’s carved out a nuanced housing platform that includes focusing TIF district revenue on people with lower incomes, publicly funding lawyers for tenants in eviction hearings, and reducing development fees for projects that are already required to improve adjacent streets.

Sameer Kanal

After studying nonviolent protest movements in grad school and working in international affairs, Kanal returned to his hometown of Portland in 2020 and became project manager for the Police Accountability Commission. In his council race he has endorsed the full Renters’ Bill of Rights compiled by DSA Portland and the Renters Action Network and called for a big increase in construction of market-rate and especially below-market housing, as well as a tax on vacant homes.

Michelle DePass

DePass’s many years of work in Portland began in her childhood attending Portland Public Schools—the district whose on whose board she now serves as vice chair. Along the way she’s worked at the city’s bureaus of Parks, Housing, and Planning and Sustainability. “Development on the scale we need it, or to meet the demand, will require more aggressive zoning changes, and creative development of courtyard cottages, triplexes, and other places where inter-generational housing can be developed,” she wrote in our survey. “I’m in favor of using all the tools we have on hand to advocate for this level of development, especially if the developers can guarantee there is no residential displacement.”

In addition to the six champions above, we also gave our “green light” in this race to two housing supporters in District 2: Elana Pirtle-Guiney and Jonathan Tasini. Voters can rank up to six candidates from their district on their November ballot.

For council district 3 (Southeast Portland)

Tiffany Koyama Lane

“Teacher Tiffany,” as the longtime public school teacher calls herself in this campaign, describes "a housed Portland” as “one with stronger rental protections to keep families in their homes, and better permitting and land use to improve housing supply and affordability.” She calls for a “Renters’ Bill of Rights” that would ban evictions for nonpayment of rent for families during the school year, and also for “abundant housing near transit and schools and improved transit and bikeways.”

Angelita Morillo

Morillo’s introduction to some social services was as a recipient. Soon after graduating from Lincoln High School (where she had helped their Constitution team win a national title) she became homeless for months. “Nobody knew that every night I fell asleep in a park or in stairwells,” she recounts. Today, as an advocate for Partners for a Hunger-Free Oregon, she’s informed by her experiences in poverty as well as in constituent services for former Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty. “Incentivizing density around existing MAX stations needs to be a top priority at the city,” says Morillo, who doesn’t own a car herself.

In addition to the two champions above, we also gave our “green light” in this race to three housing supporters in District 3: Rex Burkholder, Chris Flanary, and Luke Zak. Voters can rank up to six candidates from their district on their November ballot.

For district 4 (West Portland)

Mitch Green

Every candidate we’re endorsing has also endorsed our Inner Eastside for All campaign, but Green took it a step further: he joined us last summer to testify in favor. “It makes good economic sense to support an abundance agenda for housing in amenity-rich areas,” the professional economist and self-described “supply-side progressive” wrote in our questionnaire. “There are spillover benefits to this kind of development for all of Portland.” Green also signed the Renters’ Bill of Rights from DSA Portland and the Renters Action Network and argued in our questionnaire that there’s an empirical economic case for the benefits of rent control.

Chad Lykins

The son of struggling but hardworking teenage parents in Alabama, Lykins deeply supports the need for other people to migrate to Portland for opportunity, just as he was able to. Now the founder and operator of a youth chess camp, he’s built a detailed platform “focused on evidence-based policy” such as removing regulatory barriers to abundant housing, opposing any city budget that does not fully fund Portland Street Response, and expanding legal representation for tenants.

Lisa Freeman

Lisa Freeman’s professional specialty for 10 years has been helping governments transition to new forms in countries around the world. Though that knowledge was the catalyst that led her to seek a seat on Portland’s council as it does the same, she is fluent in transportation and housing policy and the links between affordability, climate action, and social interaction. “More housing in amenity-rich areas makes living in Portland more affordable for more people,” she wrote in our questionnaire.

In addition to the three champions above, we also gave our “green light” in this race to one housing supporter in District 4: Olivia Clark. Voters can rank up to six candidates from their district on their November ballot.

Those are all our endorsements! But many candidates had good things to say. You can read every applicant’s answers to our questionnaire here.

And one more thing: A ballot measure we love

Portland: Neighbors Welcome has formally endorsed a YES vote on Measure 117, which is on the ballot for voters statewide this November. Measure 117 will give Oregon voters more voice and more choice in our elections by instituting ranked choice voting on elections for statewide office. Thanks in part to our organization's engagement with Portland's 2022 charter reform (the very same initiative that allows us to endorse so many wonderful candidates), P:NW recognizes the importance of strengthening Oregon's democratic institutions as a way to empower policymakers to deliver greater housing abundance, stability and affordability.