2025 Membership Update

What we’ve been up to in 2025

So … 2025 – you might say there’s a lot going on 🙂 Despite all the swirl, P:NW has been staying laser-focused on housing abundance and we’d like to update our membership on the progress and what’s to come and the ways you can get involved.

Engaging with the new City Council

With the biggest change in Portland City government in decades, P:NW decided it was a great time to increase our outreach to City leadership and engage proactively with the new Council. 

We formed a Council Outreach Taskforce where individual P:NW volunteers are assigned to individual Council members (where possible matching Councilors with volunteers in the same District) and then requesting meetings with each Council member for an initial conversation with these goals:

• Introduce Portland: Neighbors Welcome and our history

• Understand the Councilor’s specific priorities for their term

• Gauge the Councilor’s interest in housing and alignment with our goals

• Position P:NW as a resource for Councilors and their staff for housing policy research

• Introduce our most important goal for the year – Inner Eastside for All!

• Start introducing other P:NW priorities like Single-Stair zoning and Parking Districts

Our outreach effort is off to a roaring start and we’ve met or will soon meet with every Councilor or a staff member at least once. We’d like to share what we’ve learned.

The new Council is eager to act

One thing is abundantly clear – the new Council wants to get stuff done! A consistent message we are hearing is that Councilors want to achieve concrete results soon for their areas of focus. And that includes progress on housing.

A number of Councilors strongly support more housing while other Councilors are new to housing policy and to Portland’s history of restrictive zoning.

One consistent message we’ve heard is that Council is eager for solutions and wants to move quickly.

The budget is at the top of Council’s priorities

Portland is starting 2025 with a nearly $100 million dollar budget deficit and navigating that challenge has consumed a lot of Council’s time and energy. Even after a new budget is passed, the precariousness of Portland’s financial situation will continue as a central concern.

We see this as a strategic opportunity to advocate for better housing and land use policy because P:NW projects like Inner Eastside for All, Single-Stair, and Parking Districts would increase our property tax base and revenue collection in a budget positive way.

We have an opportunity to shift the conversation to abundance

With an action-oriented Council looking for concrete ways to improve Portland’s financial sustainability, we see this as a crucial moment to explain that housing is the cornerstone of equitable economic expansion. In other words:

You can’t have a Boom Loop
without a Housing Boom

Our current focus is on crafting a suite of concrete proposals that Council can take action on, framed around housing as a fundamental driver of opportunity for Portlanders at all ages, wages, and life stages.

How you can get involved

If you’re as excited about this opportunity as we are, we’d love more help! Whether it’s the detailed crafting of policy or helping to get our message out, this is going to be a big effort. If you haven’t joined P:NW yet, now would be a great time:

https://portlandneighborswelcome.org/get-involved

Our goal, as always, is to unlock housing abundance and we’ll need lots of help to build on this momentum. We are also looking for allies, so if you are a member of an organization that would want to amplify and extend our message, please reach out to team@portlandneighborswelcome.org.

We’re also working at the state level

Did we mention we’ve been busy 😃 Oregon legislators submitted a ton of housing-related proposals for the 2025 session and P:NW has been actively tracking and advocating for key bills, including Governor Kotek’s HB2138, supporting middle housing across Oregon, and Senator Pham’s SB684, a revolving loan fund for mixed-income development.

https://portlandneighborswelcome.org/2025-bills-we-love

Led by Leigh Shelton, P:NW’s Housing Policy Community Organizer, P:NW formed a State Legislative Task Force that has been tracking the bills, crafting the P:NW response, and making trips to Salem to talk to legislators in person. We’ve also identified District Captains to take point on contacting individual legislators in districts with P:NW membership representation.

HB2138 is a big deal for middle housing

Governor Kotek’s signature housing bill for the 2025 session is HB2138. It would expedite middle housing construction through streamlined regulations, timelines, and processes for land use applications. It also eliminates restrictive covenants that limit infill housing.

SB684 creates a sustainable fund for mixed-income development

It’s a tough interest rate environment right now, and that creates barriers to development projects. Senator Pham’s bill would create a revolving fund to offer low-interest loans that would bridge the financing for stalled projects. As a revolving fund, loan payments would be continually reinvested into new projects.

There’s lots of housing energy at the state level

This legislative session saw a lot of housing bills and bipartisan support. Concepts like Land Value Taxes (HB2124) and Public Banking (HB2966) and new prefab construction techniques (HB3145) are being explored and debated.

We plan to build on this energy so our work at the state level will certainly increase over time. In the meantime, you can help get some of our favorite bills over the line using the talking points in the page here:

https://portlandneighborswelcome.org/2025-bills-we-love

Find your Oregon Senator and Representative using this link:

https://www.oregonlegislature.gov/FindYourLegislator/districts-initial.html

We’re leveling up our events game

The P:NW Happy Hour has been a fantastic way for people interested in housing to get together and share ideas and energy around housing abundance. P:NW member Saurav Palla has taken the lead on taking our events even further, including:

• Co-hosted events with allies like Strong Towns PDX

• Invited speakers

• More structure to help new members learn and drive engagement

If you’re interested in helping out, please contact team@portlandneighborswelcome.org.

Thanks

All of this activity wouldn’t be possible without a huge cast of amazing characters. Big thanks to the P:NW members working across all of these areas:

• Andrea Haverkamp

• Andrea Pastor

• Beth Deitchman

• Cassie Wilson

• Dave Peticolas

• David Sweet

• Debbie Kitchin

• Heidi Hart

• Ian Meisner

• Jacob Apenes

• Kayla Kennet

• Luke Norman

• Michael Andersen

• Neil Heller

• Rob Hemphill

• Sam Kallen

• Sam Stuckey

• Saurav Palla

• Sean Gillen

• Will Hollingsworth

• Zach Lesher

It’s a big list, but housing abundance needs an abundance of housing activists, and we’ve always got room for more! Please consider joining, we’re fun:

https://portlandneighborswelcome.org/get-involved

Big news for Portland: Neighbors Welcome in 2025

A note from P:NW’s Board President

TLDR: Portland: Neighbors Welcome has a big year ahead - this fall, we won a substantial grant to hire staff and expand our ability to fight for more housing and more livable communities. We are hiring a part-time organizer to support housing abundance in the upcoming 2025 legislative session, we will be hiring an Executive Director next year, we are looking for new board members and I am personally asking you to consider becoming a member at a level meaningful to you to support our work next year. Onward!

Look, there’s no sugarcoating it. America voted to reinstall a vicious and cruel administration into the White House, people whose values appear deeply antithetical to those that guide us here at Portland: Neighbors Welcome. We have every reason to suspect that the next federal government will be virulently anti-neighborly, to put it mildly, and their atrocious housing agenda as outlined in Project 2025 appears explicitly designed to screw over renters, punish and incarcerate the unhoused, stifle sorely needed construction of new market-rate and affordable housing, and do so in ways that calcify hideous racist and classist housing practices that housers have spent decades trying to dismantle. It’s capital B Bad.

Thanks to PNW volunteer Saurav Palla for testifying at Portland City Council last month

In many ways, these awful federal results only affirm the importance of an organization like Portland: Neighbors Welcome. Our group exists because we believe there is a moral imperative to make it easier and more affordable for more people to live here. So many Americans are directly threatened by this upcoming administration, and the Pacific Northwest has an opportunity and a responsibility to be a beacon of neighborly inclusion that actively welcomes those fleeing what’s happening in the rest of the country - be it evangelical revanchism, volatile climate degradation, erosion of the public sector or economic uncertainty. Building more homes in Oregon is also a political imperative - without major reform, Oregonians are likely to suffer less representation in Congress and the Electoral College. 

Building a sharable city

Wonking out on zoning reform and housing policy may not immediately seem like the sexiest or the most urgent contribution one can make towards girding our community for another Trump presidency. But we at Portland: Neighbors Welcome know that all of Oregon’s claims of valuing inclusion and tolerance are irrelevant if we don’t get a handle on our reality of unaffordable rents and rising housing costs that prevents us from actually welcoming new people into Tom McCall’s Eden. We know that greater housing abundance is a necessary and singularly insufficient component of a larger movement for housing justice that aims to ensure everyone is welcome to live and be sheltered in the City of Roses.  Oregon needs to build 500,000 homes over the next two decades; we aim to organize our prolific volunteer base to proactively push the city, region and state to adopt more aggressive targets for building more homes, at more levels of affordability, catering to different family sizes, in our most walkable, desirable neighborhoods as praxis for economic development, climate action, racial justice, and yeah, as resistance against the forces of fascism at our doorstep. We recognize the importance of being unapologetic allies to others demanding tenant protections, supporting those ensuring our homeless neighbors are sheltered and met with dignity and respect, and those fighting for government investments in affordable housing and supportive services.

Simply put, Portland must build (a lot) more homes if our city is going to be affordable and accessible to people at all ages, wages and stages of life - for current and for future Portlanders alike. Housing scarcity breeds inequality and instability; housing abundance enables collaboration and community. We must build a sharable city. 

A big year ahead

I’m proud to share that as an organization, Portland: Neighbors Welcome is poised to take the next step to grow our power. Over the years, our all-volunteer organization has made significant contributions to tackling housing affordability in Portland, including our critical role in passage of the Residential Infill Project, our leadership in building a vision for support for the Inner Eastside for All campaign, and our electoral work which ended up endorsing and greenlighting 9 pro-housing members of the new City Council, as well as the new Mayor.

This fall, the organization won two significant philanthropic grants that will help us scale up our local and statewide work by hiring staff to leverage our formidable volunteer base, policy wonkery and electoral advocacy into demanding Portland has enough houses for anyone who wants - or needs - to call it home. We’re eager to work with the new Portland City Council and Mayor (11 of 13 them who support our Inner Eastside for All campaign) and the Oregon Legislature, where we are tiptoeing into exploring how to help support initiatives for social housing and other public funding to dramatically increase housing production across the city and state. We are hiring an organizer to help turn out our community in the 2025 legislature, and will be hiring our first Executive Director next Spring. 

Are you with us?

But our organization is only as effective as our base of members, and that’s where you come in. For us to fully leverage these grants and build the political power at local and state level of government to demand the housing we need, our organization needs to continue to build our base of volunteers who believe in our mission and contribute whatever mix of time, money, energy, and passion they have to give. If you believe in us and want to see us continue our work to demand that Portland build enough homes for everyone who needs one, I’m writing today to ask you to become a member of Portland: Neighbors Welcome, or renew your membership. With your support, we can continue to expand what’s possible - and make sure our elected officials continue to listen to our demands for a robust and aggressive agenda for housing production and stability.

There are so many worthy causes and organizations to support as we buckle up for whatever awaits our community in the years ahead, and I encourage you to find a way to show up for these efforts in ways that feel meaningful to you. If fighting for housing as a human right and demanding that our city, region and state prepare for the metaphorical and literal storms ahead by building abundant housing in inclusive, climate-smart communities are causes that speak to you in this moment, I hope we can count on your support today and in the years ahead, whether as a volunteer, member, donor, or new board member. 

- Your friend, neighbor and conspirator in housing justice,
Aaron Brown, Board President of Portland: Neighbors Welcome

Apply to be on the Board of Portland: Neighbors Welcome - Applications due December 8th
Apply for our Organizer Position - Application Review begins December 8th