From idea
to institution.

By the second half of my freshman year at Franklin High School, I had the plan figured out: I was going to drop out, or squeak by just enough to graduate, and then go work in the trades. Carpentry, maybe, though I wasn’t sure I had what it took to be an actual carpenter. Construction more generally seemed realistic. I was a poor student, and school felt like a system that had already made up its mind about me.

Then my brother, and now best friend, Aaron Howard started handing me books.

The books

Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation. Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. A social studies class about an Indigenous nation that had its own community, its own culture, its own way of organizing itself, and what happened when capitalism and the idea of money arrived and disrupted all of it.

Together they handed me a lens I’ve never put down: most of the systems shaping people’s lives are broken, and most of them are broken benignly. Not designed to oppress. Not engineered by villains. Just assembled over decades of ordinary decisions, neglect, and inertia until the harm compounds on its own. I find that almost sadder than deliberate cruelty. I also find it more exciting: what’s broken by accident can be fixed on purpose. It takes a long time and a concerted effort, but it can be done.

That lens gave me a broader understanding of the trappings of growing up low-income in East Portland. It also gave me a serious chip on my shoulder, which produced some behavior I’m not proud of, and I’d rather say that plainly than sand it down. But the same chip gave me an orientation I’d only later have words for: organizing. Community organizing, politics, policy, the rare arenas where a subversive streak and a frustrated, oppositional, righteous disposition aren’t liabilities to be managed. They’re fuel that’s actually rewarded.

Eugene

At the University of Oregon I treated coursework as something to finish as quickly and efficiently as possible so I could spend my real hours elsewhere: the Climate Justice League, the ASUO, student government, and helping develop the campus Sustainability Center, serving on its founding board of directors and hiring its first director. I think it still exists, living on in the student union. My last two years narrowed to one question: environmental harm, and who it lands on, lower-income people in Eugene, in Portland, in Oregon, everywhere.

Then I read a run of Eugene Weekly stories about Lane County Commissioner Pete Sorenson, the attacks on him and fellow commissioner Rob Handy over their work to preserve forestland, and the timber companies and outfits funding the opposition. I felt compelled to email him. Then call him. To his credit, Pete took a shot on a kid with no résumé, and I found myself serving as his campaign’s finance director, raising money, knocking doors, organizing house parties, with an assist from organizing dynamo Kevin Cronin. That’s where I learned the Voter Activation Network, NGP VAN, the unglamorous plumbing that had just helped an obscure senator named Barack Obama become president. I was being trained on the machinery while it was still warm.

The interview I skipped

Around the same time, a fellow student senator and I had helped fundraise to bring a small carpooling startup called Zimride to campus, fewer cars in Eugene, fewer emissions, easier for students to leave the car at home. Through that I met John Zimmer and Amy from Zimride’s tiny team, and John offered me an interview for a potential job. It would have meant moving to San Francisco. Zimride, not long after, became Lyft.

I said nah. Effectively no-showed.

I’ve gotten plenty of mileage out of that story as a punchline about foregone equity. But the honest version is that it was the first time I consciously chose leverage. I was feeling, more and more, that campaigns were the high-leverage point, the place to stand when big decisions and real values were on the line. Knowing when to quit something and when to start something is a skill I’ve had to learn in public, and that was the first rep.

Coos Bay, then Salem

That choice led to an introduction to Arnie Roblan, at the time co-speaker of an Oregon House tied 30–30. Days after graduating, I moved to Coos Bay to run his state senate campaign. We won. Then I got to watch the Oregon Senate operate on a 16–14 Democratic majority, first as a legislative staffer, then as a chief of staff, and learned exactly how much good legislation goes to die two votes short.

So I joined the project with the least romantic name and the most leverage I could find: get to eighteen. A supermajority in the state senate meant winning two more seats in hard, Republican-held territory, with the explicit goal of unclogging a decade-plus of progressive, science-based social and environmental legislation. My tool was one I have complicated feelings about and used anyway: maximizing money in politics, for the side I believed was bending the arc. Working with the caucus team, we raised several million dollars. We won the two seats. Eighteen–twelve.

The payoff

Here’s what a supermajority is for.

Kate Brown, then secretary of state, was the biggest booster of a Bus Project bill I’d worked on: automatic voter registration. When Governor Kitzhaber resigned, Brown became governor. New majority, new governor, bill ready. In 2015, Oregon passed automatic voter registration, the first state in the nation to do it, and the model has since spread across the country.

The systems were never out to get that fifteen-year-old. They were just broken, benignly, boringly, fixably.

The uncomfortable version

I try to hold myself to two commitments when I tell stories like this one. The first: say the uncomfortable thing, even, and especially, about myself. My own many deficiencies, blind spots, failures, and errors are part of the record; the chip-on-my-shoulder years produced real mistakes alongside the drive, and pretending otherwise would make the whole story less true and less useful. The second: don’t hold back in either direction. Offer praise and positive feedback freely. Offer honest, constructive criticism just as freely, to others and to myself, including on the hardest calls there are: when to quit something, and when to start something.

I skipped the Lyft interview. I’d do it again.

That’s the sad part about benign brokenness, and the whole opportunity: nobody has to be a villain for a system to grind people down, and nobody has to wait for permission to start fixing it.

Sometime in the mid-2010s, somebody in Portland listed a shed for rent. Not a “cozy garden studio.” Not a “detached ADU with rustic charm.” A shed, for around a thousand dollars a month.

Chloe Eudaly, bookstore owner, publisher, artist, single mom, professional rabble-rouser, saw the listing and did the most Chloe thing imaginable: she started a Facebook group called That’s a Goddamn Shed. It became a running public record of the absurdity of Portland’s rental market: the sheds, the closets, the overnight rent hikes, the no-cause eviction notices taped to the doors of people who had never once missed a payment.

It was funny right up until you remembered that every post was somebody’s housing.

How we got here

None of it came out of nowhere. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration gutted the Department of Housing and Urban Development, cutting the supermajority of its budget, alongside deep cuts to social services. Those investments were never restored, by anyone. Compound that over four decades against population growth and real human need, and you get a multi-trillion-dollar hole where America’s housing and social-service infrastructure should be. Modern homelessness as we know it, visible, chronic, everywhere, traces back to those decisions. We talk about homelessness like it’s weather. It was a choice.

Then the Great Recession hit. Homebuilding collapsed and stayed collapsed while the population kept growing, fastest of all in places like Portland. By the mid-2010s the math was brutal: too many people, not enough homes, no federal cavalry coming. Rents didn’t creep; they spiked. Double- and triple-digit percentage increases across the city, in single-family rentals and big apartment complexes alike. And where landlords couldn’t raise rents fast enough on sitting tenants, a rising tide of no-cause evictions cleared buildings so units could be re-let at much higher prices.

There was a name for what was happening: economic eviction. Tenants who paid on time, every time, pushed toward couches and cars and shelters and tents, not because they broke a lease, but because the market broke them.

And the one tool cities usually reach for in a moment like that, rent control, was illegal. Oregon had banned it back in 1985, in a quiet legislative maneuver most Oregonians never saw and never heard about.

The pledge

In 2016 I was working on Ted Wheeler’s campaign for mayor. Chloe and Margot Black started as acquaintances, became collaborators on the campaign, and became close friends, and two of the most consequential tenant leaders Oregon has produced. Margot founded Portland Tenants United to bring direct, unapologetically political advocacy to the fight, a sharp complement to the Community Alliance of Tenants’ long-running work supporting renters household by household.

Together, the three of us drafted a policy for the campaign: if a landlord hit a tenant with a massive rent increase or a no-cause eviction, they should have to pay that tenant’s relocation costs. We couldn’t cap rents, the ban made sure of that, so we designed around it. Make displacement expensive. Make stability the rational business decision. And build the thing carefully enough to survive the inevitable lawsuit calling it rent control in a trench coat.

Ted got behind it. It became a campaign pledge, on the website, in a press release, echoed in the TV and YouTube buys. A North Star in a few short paragraphs.

Ted won. And that November, Chloe did the thing almost nobody predicted: the bookstore owner from That’s a Goddamn Shed unseated an incumbent and won a seat on the Portland City Council, carried in no small part by renters who were done being pushed around.

The first month

January 2017. The administration was weeks old, and Chloe and I were both suddenly working in City Hall. With Ted’s go-ahead, I called her office: let’s do the thing. Chloe championed it as commissioner, it’s why she ran, Margot organized relentlessly from the outside, and I served as the mayor’s office lead and author, drafting what became the renter relocation ordinance: the first policy of its kind in the country.

The mechanics were simple. Raise the rent ten percent or more, or evict without cause, and you owe your tenant relocation assistance, thousands of dollars, scaled to the size of their home. That February, City Council passed it.

The lawsuits came, as we knew they would. The ordinance survived them.

And the impact was immediate and almost invisible, my favorite kind. The triple-digit hikes stopped. The double-digit hikes mostly stopped. Increases settled in under ten percent, not because anyone had a change of heart, but because crossing that line now cost real money. No-cause evictions stopped being free. Tens of thousands of Portland renters got to stay in their homes, near their kids’ schools and their jobs and their people, most of them never knowing that a city ordinance was the reason their rent rose nine percent instead of forty.

Most of the people this policy protected will never know it existed. They just… didn’t get the letter.

The kicker

Here’s the part I most want on the record, because it’s what turned a city policy into a statewide one.

The fight over the ordinance, the hearings, the coverage, the courtroom, dragged Oregon’s rent control ban out of the shadows it was passed in. Legislators, reporters, and regular people started asking the obvious question: wait, why is rent control illegal here? The City’s Office of Government Relations, with Council’s endorsement, made lifting the ban an official legislative priority. The city’s own lobbyists were now working Salem to win back the tools we’d had to engineer around.

Two years later, in 2019, against some of the most powerful, well-funded interests in the state, Oregon passed the nation’s first statewide rent control law, capping rent increases and requiring just cause for evictions for renters across Oregon. The protections we built for Portlanders at risk now reached the whole state. The ordinance drew national coverage, and other cities and states took up renter relocation policies and rent-control fights of their own, some already won, some still in motion.

A few paragraphs on a campaign website became the first ordinance of its kind in America, which helped open the door to the first statewide rent control law in America, in about three years, start to finish. Policy almost never moves like that. This did because organizers built power outside the building while a champion carried it inside, and because we wrote it to win.

Why this one

Of everything I’ve been lucky to work on, this is the work I’m proudest of, measured by the thing that matters most: real impact on people’s lives, especially people without much money.

Housing is now the single biggest expense in American life, the biggest line in the family budget in Portland, in Oregon, and across the country, eclipsing every other category by a widening margin. And housing stability isn’t just one good outcome among many; it’s the substrate the rest grow from. Public health, addiction recovery, safety from domestic violence, kids’ futures, mental health, steady work, all of it gets easier with a stable home, and harder without one. Psychological safety starts with a door that locks and a rent that doesn’t detonate.

Most of the Portlanders this policy protected never knew it existed. The sixty-percent increase that never arrived. The no-cause notice never taped to the door.

That’s what winning looks like, a lot of the time: quiet, uncredited, compounding.

I’ll take it.

The most important number in psychedelic healthcare right now is one almost nobody outside a small circle knows: about a hundred. As in roughly 100×, the cost-efficiency advantage that state-regulated psychedelic research is demonstrating over the traditional federal pathway, with safety and rigor intact. At the foundation we've started saying it plainly: this is likely revolutionary. And somehow it's still a secret.

Months, not years

Here's the existence proof. LIGPAT-D, the Low-Income Group Psilocybin Assisted Therapy for Depression pilot, led by Portland researchers Dr. Matthew Hicks and Dr. Olivia Hicks, enrolled about two dozen Medicaid-eligible adults with major depression and treated them in a group format inside Oregon's regulated program: two preparation sessions, two psilocybin sessions using whole mushrooms, two integration sessions, trained facilitators throughout.

It moved from seed grant to published results in under a year, funded by a modest grant from us, think tens of thousands; $30K, to be exact. What came back: 19 of 24 participants completed the program. Depression scores on the HAM-D fell from 22.2 to 8.8, statistically emphatic (p < 0.001), with an effect size (r = 0.87) you rarely see anywhere. Zero serious adverse events. Satisfaction averaged 4.8 out of 5. It was the first IRB-approved study to come out of Oregon's model, and the first anywhere built for a low-income population.

An FDA-style trial asking the same question costs millions at minimum and runs on multi-year timelines, for a similar sample size. We continue to applaud those trials. We just refuse to pretend they're the only way to learn things.

Why speed is a moral question

Across the country, states and the federal government have declared literal states of emergency around addiction, anxiety, depression, and loneliness, while hundreds of millions of Americans have no legal access to medicines that keep showing they can reach the root of those conditions. Every year of delay has a cost measured in people. The state-level model allows an appropriate level of speed, without forgoing safety, that the federal pathway simply does not.

The evidence machine

This is what the Sheri Eckert Foundation's Research Incubator exists to do: generate real-world evidence that insurers actually pay attention to, alongside partners like UC Berkeley, OPEN at OHSU, Synaptic, People Science, the National University of Natural Medicine, the Healing Advocacy Fund, and the Center for Psychedelic Policy.

The flagship is ORCHID, $1.79 million, anchored at UC Berkeley and UCSF, which links real psilocybin care to real medical claims: ER visits, hospitalizations, psychiatric prescriptions, before and after services. It's built to answer the question payers ask first: does this save the system money? That's the same unglamorous path acupuncture and chiropractic walked to insurance coverage. And it's begun, insurance is just starting to cover psychedelic healthcare in Oregon and beyond.

Access is the point

Evidence without access is a journal article. This year two new funds came online at the foundation, roughly $700,000 combined. The Inward Dive Fund, launched with Henry Fields, supports justice-impacted people: formerly incarcerated individuals, their loved ones, and people working inside the criminal justice system, with scholarships for Oregon-regulated psilocybin services, facilitators experienced with those communities, and ongoing integration support. The Community Leaders Resilience Fund supports the people who carry the load, nonprofit staff, government workers, environmental advocates, faith leaders, facing burnout or spiritual exhaustion, with up to $3,300 per recipient for group facilitation, lodging during journey week, and preparation and integration mentorship. Dozens of people across Oregon and the U.S. have already received legal psychedelic care through them, and both funds issue grants through 2026.

The math, plainly

Oregon and Colorado each stood up their programs for under $10 million; New Mexico did it through the legislature. Between the three, roughly twelve million people now live inside a legal framework for psychedelic care that took two to three years to build. The federal MDMA effort has consumed on the order of $130 million across nearly four decades and, after the FDA's surprise 2024 rejection, has still not delivered public access. This isn't either/or; both paths matter. But if the measure is people healed per dollar per year, it isn't close.

What's next

In 2026 the foundation expands into Colorado's Natural Medicine Program, keeps building studies, grows the access funds, and keeps working with the next wave of states, New Mexico, Maryland, Idaho, Washington. We're also working to bring back Horizons Northwest, the Pacific Northwest's psychedelic gathering, after a two-year sabbatical.

The mechanic on this site ends in evidence and replication for a reason. Policy wins start systems; evidence is what makes them permanent. This is that stage, live, right now, and it's going surprisingly, measurably well.

“New Portland Sucks.”

Recently when I saw that now-ubiquitous bumper sticker slapped on a telephone pole, I wondered, “what recent Portland transplant put that sticker there?”

I can't help but feel that this sentiment, that Portland sucks or has fallen, is a byproduct of tunnel vision.

A culture that rewards short-term thinking. One that's led to a highly inequitable boom and bust economy driven by short-term investing and that generates absurd discussion about whether Portland is the new Pompeii and FINISHED.

The newfound, and almost certainly short lived, existential cynicism about our little slice of the world will pass.

All of the studies, think pieces, and news articles about Portland's commercial real estate and our dead-end future, and whether or not Portland will rebound, will soon feel like a distant memory. This time next year, when vaccines are widely distributed and the once ever-present Trump is also a distant memory, we might recall this current fever pitch.

But we probably won't. We'll have moved on to the latest issue du jour.

The second thought I had about the “New Portland Sucks” bumper sticker was, what is New Portland? When did it supposedly begin?

Did it start when Portlandia told a story of who we are to the rest of the country?

Or did New Portland start when white settlers decided to steal land and occupy the village sites of the Multnomah, a band of Chinooks that lived in this area, as well as the Kathlamet, Clackamas, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla and the other Tribes who had made their homes along the Columbia and Willamette River for centuries?

Or perhaps when policymakers let the second largest city in Oregon, Vanport, flood in 1970, displacing the largest black community in the state?

Maybe when Oregon was founded as a white-only state through a series of Black exclusionary laws that were designed to discourage Black people from living here?

Or did new Portland begin to suck, and begin an irreversible decline, when the economic depression, acceleration of income inequality, and all the other trappings of the global pandemic began to set in? Arguments using this logic, however, must pretend that somehow Portland is uniquely negatively affected regardless of the fact that all other American cities are going through roughly the same things.

The whole conversation feels detached from even our most recent history. And often perpetuated by people and publications that want to be perceived as having the latest insight on the still very popular city of Portland. It's a formulaic click bait strategy, build up a hero, then tear that hero down.

Portland is dead.

I think I could agree with that sentiment if we were having this discussion in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The period when white settlers were bringing dislocation, genocide, military conflicts, disease, and rapid change to the indigenous populations of what we now call Portland and Oregon.

A time when new Portlanders were clearcutting the old growth forests, removing millions of native plants, and decimating a thriving ecosystem and animals that evolved in tandem with those plants over millions of years. And when we replaced millions of native trees and plants with sterile plants, which continue to do very little to support our complex ecosystem, and were bred largely for one purpose; to appeal to our eyes. A time when Portland pridefully embraced the nickname stumptown because new Portlanders were cutting down the mature trees so fast they left the stumps in the ground to handle later.

Yes, after all that, the village sites of the Multnomah were over. The community we'd soon rename Portland was destroyed and might've been compared to Pompeii.

But Portland in the 21st century, while recently negatively impacted by COVID-19 in real ways, is still very much thriving.

Our community's spirit, defined by threads of altruism, advocacy, and putting values into practice even when it looks weird to others, has been on full display in beautiful fashion.

When we marched for months against systemic racism, that was our community coming together to embrace anti-racism. That some people around the country saw this as a bad thing, that somehow that ‘damaged Portland's reputation’, shows just how much work we have ahead of us when it comes to confronting our nation's horrendous founding and righting wrongs.

Portland is not over. We will be fine.

Hopefully as we emerge from the COVID-19 global pandemic, and rebuild businesses and broken institutions, we'll incorporate more history, less short-term thinking, and more racial justice. And we'll thrive again.