Elana on why she's running for City Council - a short clip here.

Elana talks with Marcia at the League of Women Voters about the Critical Energy Infrastructure Hub, the Joint Office of Homeless Services and Housing - watch here!

Elana talks with X-RAY Radio about culture, our Central City neighborhoods, and her favorite Ethiopian Restaurant - watch here!

A lot of candidates look at what Portland has been. But "Old Portland" had challenges too. That's why Elana is future-focused, and thinks about every issue in terms of how it will address our challenges today and also help us build the future of our City that we want to live in - learn more.

Elana's group interview with the Willamette Week is here.

Elana's group interview with the Oregonian is here.

Elana's Know Your Candidates interview on KATU is here.

Portland’s Biggest Challenges: Housing, Homelessness, Substance Abuse, Mental Health, and Public Safety

These challenges require a system of short and long-term solutions, which are too often pitted against each other.

Tackling any of these issues requires active coordination with our partners in the State and the County. But there are solutions that the City can pursue alone, as well. As a member of the City Council, I will insist that we work in coordination with our partners, all while prioritizing opportunities for City-led action.

There is so much Portland can do: actively support the Albina Vision Trust to create new affordable homes and homeownership opportunities for Black Portlanders; ensure our policies don’t continue to diminish so-called naturally occurring affordable housing; maintain sheltering villages that are near services for people experiencing homelessness; and invest in our 911 system and Portland Street Response to ensure people experiencing health crises, physical and mental, can get help when they need it and police can focus on solving crimes and closing cases.

These challenges impact all of our neighborhoods. They have also changed the nature of the work many of our City employees do. While we tackle the root causes and implement long-term solutions, we also must ensure the safety of our City workers who have suddenly found themselves on the front lines supporting people in crisis while doing their jobs.

I know Portland is a place where my kids can grow up and, no matter who they decide to be, find community. But I’m not convinced they’ll be able to afford to live here.

If we continue to lose our young families, our artists, our small business owners, our middle class, Portland’s challenges will be even harder to solve in the future. It’s time we are honest about how the City Council’s decisions affect our economy – who it helps and who it hurts.

Do our economic development policies benefit local, growing businesses, who will employ more people who already live in Portland in high wage jobs? Do our housing policies create middle income housing opportunities? Does the City set the bar high enough in the way that we treat our own employees and city contractors?

As Portland grows we are losing naturally occurring affordable housing, middle income homeownership opportunities, and the affordable commercial spaces that allowed new entrepreneurs to take the risks that put Portland on the map.

When our communities are resilient, we can adapt to a changing economy – and we know our economy will change, from climate change and automation to predictable population changes. I will support every opportunity to create good jobs, registered apprenticeship programs, and career pathways, in diverse industries to help keep us resilient, including using opportunities like the Portland Clean Energy Fund to drive the development of these pathways in the public and private sectors.

We must actively ensure that our decisions are creating affordable housing and commercial spaces, incentivizing good jobs, bringing wages up, and not pushing Portlanders out of the City.

In this section:

Affordable Housing

Permitting

Unions

Affordable Commercial Space

Wages

Affordable Housing

We need more affordable housing - both the subsidized apartments this phrase often brings to mind, and also workforce housing, the starter homes and subsidized homeownership opportunities that are nearly impossible to find in Portland anymore. We must continue to create opportunities for rehabbing and building new housing. We must expand homeownership programs that the City of Portland funds (there are a few, and they're all woefully underfunded). And we must find a way to expand voucher programs that help people stay in their homes - especially families with school-age kids and residents in subsidized housing units who can still barely make rent (missed rental payments are destabilizing our entire subsidized rental market right now).

Permitting

Portland Permitting and Development, our new streamlined permitting agency, is a good start to making sure that our City systems don't stand in the way of affordable development. But we can do more. I have heard from multiple people who work in development that assigning every project - not just a small subset of projects where owners are willing to pay more - a navigator to foresee and resolve conflicts between permit types, ensure project owners have clear and timely communication from the City, and make sure permitting timelines are met, could cut down on time to a permit by 20-30%. This is just one example of easy solutions that would signal real change.

Unions

Unions are an important part of creating an equitable economy. Unions also organize workers to weigh in on important policy issues, helping leaders hear from working people and not just management. Often, unions allow us to hear from front-line workers who are closest to the challenges we are trying to solve. I will always treat unions as partners - in our work with our own city employees, and as we do our broader work.

Affordable Commercial Space

As Portland grows and more areas of the central city are redeveloped we are losing the commercial spaces that made Portland a place where artists and entrepreneurs could afford to try something new and creative. If we want to continue to have vibrant creative spaces we have to invest in them. That's why I'll propose including affordable commercial space for first and second time entrepreneurs and artists in all of our city's master plans.

Wages

Affordable spaces are one part of affordability. But Portlanders also need to make enough to afford the spaces here. We don't set the minimum wage at the City, and we don't control what private businesses in the City pay. But there are plenty of businesses who commit to paying wages that are average or better for their industry in order to do work with the City. Average wages in most industries don't pay the rent in Portland, though. We need to reconsider our contracts with private employers and determine where we can increase the average and help ensure more people who work in, and for, our city can afford to live here.

Too many Portlanders are struggling. And while we must immediately address “the big four” – affordable housing, homelessness, supporting Portlanders in crisis, and public safety, the issues so many Portlanders are talking about – we also must build toward Portland’s future.

Portland is a growing city.* But we haven’t made the changes we need in order to keep up with that growth. If we want Portland to be a place where every family finds opportunity we must make decisions that prioritize equity, sustainability, and resilience.

We also know that Portland is built from the neighborhood up. We love our schools, our parks, our neighbors. Some of the most meaningful investments in Portland right now are happening through neighborhood-based nonprofits.

​

We must continue to invest in neighborhood centers across the City while also thinking about what will support our City as a whole, and our Central City specifically. We need more parks for a growing population and transportation solutions that help people get to nearby neighborhoods. We need to listen to our neighbors, as well as the small businesses, community members, and organizations helping our neighborhoods thrive.

In this Section:

Housing and Houselessness

Supports for Portlanders in Crisis

Public Safety

Parks, Pools, and Public Green Space

Transportation

Resilience and Emergency Preparedness

Our Sustainable Future

Housing and Houselessness

Portland needs enough shelter today to ensure every person who is houseless can find an appropriate place to stay. We will always need some shelters, but we also must stem the tide on people becoming houseless by simultaneously investing in more housing options and just-in-time supports to keep people housed - like interventions before the eviction process begins.

Supports for Portlanders in Crisis

We know that Portland does not have enough treatment beds, sober living facilities, supportive housing, or options for people experiencing an acute mental health need who are not yet in crisis (the mental health equivalent to an urgent care need - you can't wait for your doctor to have an appointment available, but you don't need the emergency room - yet). The City doesn't have the funds or expertise to do this work alone. That's why I'll build relationships with our partners at the State and the County, use the power of committee hearings and convenings to cut through the finger pointing and get to the bottom of what needs to change to create the infrastructure we have lacked for too long.

Public safety

We have historically viewed our public safety response system as two-pronged: a response to fire and medical calls, and everything else. It's time to acknowledge the shifting nature of emergency calls and the growth of concerns we've asked law enforcement to address. I am proposing that we restructure our public safety system to have three prongs: a response to fire and medical calls, a response to calls about someone in acute crisis, and a response to crimes. If we start by asking what types of responses are needed to each call type, how many calls of that type we get, and therefore what staffing we need for our many public safety response programs (including Portland Street Response, and our sworn and unsworn police officers), we can start to build a public safety system that keeps everyone in our community safe.

Parks, Pools, and Public Green Space

Parks are a recreational asset and also a resilience asset. Pools are a recreational asset and also a safety asset. Public green space fights climate change and improves public health while increasing livability. Our parks are an integral part of what makes Portland, well, Portland. But our aging infrastructure needs more investment, and as we grow denser we must invest now in the land we will need to ensure we have enough parks, pools, and rec centers to keep up with the needs of a growing population and to ensure we have enough green space to fight heat islands as we have fewer lawns and backyards.

As a former Parks Board member I am committed to getting a real assessment of the cost of catching up on our parks maintenance over the next 20 years, and I will continue to push our Parks and Recreation Bureau to look at access not just as distance to a park but also as the number of people relying on each of our parks' resources.

Transportation

The current state of our roads is unacceptable. We must push the State to change how we pay for our roads and bridges so that as cars get more efficient and more users leave their cars behind we can still maintain our roads. And we should focus on creating roads that are safe for all user - whether you move by bike, walking, transit, or car. Each user needs a safe, designated, space, and separating who travels where can help with this. Our system can work for everyone.

As we move away from fossil fuels and create more dense neighborhoods we need to ensure every driver can access car charging infrastructure so that where you live doesn't determine whether or not you can drive an electric vehicle. I will sit down with our utilities to negotiate installing curbside charging stations in dense neighborhoods so that people who live in houses and apartments without driveways and garages can still drive electric cars.

Resilience and Emergency Preparedness

District 2 faces an outsized risk from natural disasters. But we can take steps now to begin to become more prepared. We must push the State to move quickly to identify a new space to store our fuel reserves - one that doesn't sit on liquefiable soil like the Critical Energy Infrastructure Hub does. We must replace or reinforce bridges and overpasses that serve as the only way in and out of communities and that will collapse in an earthquake - including routes over the cut and into St. Johns, across the train tunnel through North Portland, and the I-5 Bridge to Hayden Island. And more generally, we must continue to face threats head-on. Leaders don't avoid hard conversations about our future - they meet them directly. I would rather talk about how we can address risks, even if it will take a while, than ignore them until it's too late.

Our Sustainable Future

Portland has long been known as a green city. But we are no longer living up to that reputation. We must balance our industrial land and job base, natural areas, and housing needs. We must invest in good, green, jobs. We must ensure that the Superfund Site cleanup along our River is thorough, and doesn't leave dirty sediments in the riverbed that will resurface in an earthquake, and that the cleanup creates good jobs for local people here in our community. We must look for opportunities where we can improve our economic, ecological, and health sustainability simultaneously. And we must ensure that Portland Clean Energy Fund resources are invested in our sustainable future - maintaining the original promise of community-invested resources while also considering how we can invest excess funds in big projects that support our community.

Government isn’t working for Portland right now. Our priorities aren’t reflected in our City’s budget. Our elected officials aren’t working together to solve our problems. We don’t have a City Council that is willing to take hard positions and work together to get things done. But it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s time to elect problem solvers, coalition builders, advocates, and decision-makers - people who are committed, and able, to make Portland work for Portlanders.

In this Section:

Budgeting for our values

Changing culture: constituent services and accountability

Charter reform: now what?

Budgeting for our values

I hear regularly from Portlanders that costs here have gone up too much. When people tell me their taxes are too high I ask whether they'd think that if our schools were great, our roads were well paved, our city was clean and safe, and we had the services to prevent homelessness. With only one exception people tell me that they wouldn't think their taxes were too high if we could meet their expectations for what a well-funded city provided. It's time to decide what our priorities are and make sure our budget reflects our policy priorities and ensure that taxpayer dollars are being spent effectively to achieve those priorities.

Changing culture - constituent services and accountability

Portlanders voted to change how we elect City Council and what the job is. But at the end of the day I think what we were all really after was culture change. That won't happen unless we elect a Council that is committed to finishing the job.

Constituent service must be a priority - and that's why I'm committed to proposing a schedule that allows us to be in our districts for two full days a week, so that I can meet with you and understand your concerns.

Accountability must be a part of our committees' work - creating opportunities to hear from Bureau directors and front-line staff about how they are progressing on meeting the goals Council lays out, and if they are not able to meet the goals determining what needs to change to get there.

Charter reform: now what?

We're in the midst of a lot of changes. It's an opportunity to elect a Council that charts a path toward Portland's future - a more equitable, sustainable, resilient future, where our city is affordable, we plan ahead, and everyone can make their voice heard. To get there we need to elect a City Council that not only shares our values, but that has the collective experience and long-term vision to see the opportunities in the challenges before us, and to bring our community together to invest in a future that is better for all our families. I hope to earn your support to be a part of that Council.

Why is my name missing?

Lots of organizations are asking candidates to sign pledges, and you may notice that my name isn’t on the lists of signers.

A pledge can be a good way to hold someone accountable to the promises they’ve made. But many of these pledges ask us to promise we will do things that require the full Council’s vote – and I don’t know yet who I’ll be serving with and what I’ll be able to build a majority to accomplish.

My word is what I have as a leader, and I’m not comfortable signing a pledge that asks for tangible actions that I don’t individually control. I am always happy to share what my values are, how I would approach an issue, or solutions I want to propose, and have conversations about what we could pursue together.

But you won’t see my name on pledges that make commitments about taking specific actions (I have signed on to a few values statements that are part of endorsement processes and do not commit to specific actions).

Here’s a pledge I can make, though: when I evaluate policy I will always ask whether it makes our community, and our economy, more equitable, more sustainable, and more resilient. If it doesn’t do these things it probably isn’t the right policy.