This November, half of Portland’s city councilors will be up for re-election. In order to spare us the stress of electing 12 councilors at once, the City of Portland decided to stagger elections and they chose Districts 3 and 4 to go first (District 1 and 2 elections will be November 2028).
In District 3, five candidates have thrown their hat in the ring so far. Tom Sollitt was the first candidate to file and he’s got a solid head start when it comes to campaigning. He’s got a website, an Instagram presence, and he’s already hung out with us at Bike Happy Hour. From what I’ve seen and heard so far, Sollitt is a legit candidate who’s got a shot to win over a lot of fans. He’s exceedingly humble (there’s not even a portrait of him on his website that I could find!), he shows up everywhere, has made his campaign his full-time job, and he’s a student of the game. Sollitt has been attending City Council meetings and reading city plans.
On Thursday, Sollitt came over to The Shed for an interview. During our conversation, he shared a bit about his background. An an adoptee from Korea, he grew up with a family in Corvallis and enjoyed its compact urban form and campus from childhood through college (and still rides the same bike he did back then). He returned to South Korea to teach English and started a business doing marketing for Korean businesses before moving to his current home near Laurelhurst Park.
After living abroad for seven years, Sollitt found it difficult to re-integrate in his new city. “My personal network had almost completely disappeared,” he shared with me during the interview. “So I started from scratch.” This difficult experienced fueled Sollitt’s passion to make it easier for others and it shaped his political platform. “I know how hard it is to kind of build up a network from ground zero, and I think it doesn’t need to be that hard.”
In this interview, Sollitt and I touched on several important topics:
- how he gets around his neighborhood (by foot, mostly)
- how his community organizing work via Asian American Town inspired his political platform
- challenges with how the Portland Bureau of Transportation conducts project outreach
- the PBOT funding crisis, taxes, and why the city should lean more directly on individual Portlanders to get things done
- whether a “business candidate” (a title he embraces) can also stand for progressive transportation policy
- the 82nd Avenue Transit Project
- how to deal with all the cars people want to park near new apartment buildings along busy commercial corridors like Sandy and Belmont
- his idea for more “park and ride” lots
- whether he supports a protected bike lane on Sandy
- Vision Zero
- Waymo robotaxis
- and more!
Listen to the interview in the player above or on YouTube.
You can learn more about Sollitt and connect to his campaign on his website or via Instagram.
Thanks for reading.
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This was an interesting interview. I don’t think building or making more parking structures will help at all with our climate and transportation safety goals. I would suggest that Tom look into ways to increase funding for alternative means of transit rather than supporting the status quo.
I definitely agree strongly with his views on Waymo coming into the city and the need for community building and improved communication from PBOT.
As another commenter said, his ideas seem half-formed and need more specific policy behind them. Overall seems like he could be a good candidate if he listens to the right people and works on the specifics.
I don’t think his premise is that building more parking solves anything but rather that thinking about it holistically is better than playing policy wack-a-mole.
The city decides it wants to disincentivize driving by reducing parking requirements – or having maximums – for residential development. Okay. But then we have to think about what that actually means in terms of travel behavior.
I think what he’s describing is planning for auto travel and parking at a systems level – understanding where it’s needed and how much – and using that as a means to better attract people to transit.
We honestly need to think more about working with people instead of against them. We need to incentivize the behaviors we want instead of only disincentivizing the things we don’t.
Tom Sollitt’s campaign reads like a beautifully formatted annual report… for a city that’s on fire.
This is Portland — a place where downtown property values have cratered, homelessness is at record highs, and taxpayers and businesses are legging it for the suburbs (or Idaho) faster than you can say “urban vibrancy.”
And what’s the diagnosis?
“Economic fragility.”
“Resilience.”
“Shared agency.”
Mate. The issue isn’t a lack of poetic framing. It’s a collapse of basic governance.
Property values didn’t tank because we lacked civic participation. They tanked because investors don’t love open-air drug markets and a city hall that treats enforcement like a colonial relic.
Homelessness isn’t just some tragic weather pattern. It’s been actively enabled by a sprawling nonprofit–government complex that’s very good at grant writing and not so flash at outcomes.
Businesses didn’t leave because Portland wasn’t “economically independent.” They left because smashed windows and regulatory chaos are bad for business.
Sollitt sounds thoughtful, sincere, and extremely… Pollyanna. He talks like Portland is a delicate ecosystem that needs nurturing. Voters should t be thinking it needs a pressure washer and a spine.
In a city widely seen as a failed blue experiment, running on “let’s build resilience” without naming the policy failures that got us here feels less like leadership and more like denial.
Portland doesn’t need another systems philosopher.
It needs someone willing to say:
“This didn’t work. We’re changing it.
Shocking how people who are trying to participate in government and make things better in Portland have a different framing, language and motivation than doom-loop boosters.
SD,
If calling out failed policies is “doom-loop boosting,” then we’ve officially decided honesty is pessimism.
I’m not rooting against Portland — I live here. But pretending things are fine because someone uses warm vague language doesn’t fix boarded-up storefronts or public disorder.
Optimism is great. Accountability is better.
If you ever said anything of substance, it would be interesting, and probably useful. Instead, it’s just non-specific grievances. I get that some people who spend a lot of time in comments sections think that the little emotional burst they get from being mad is doing something or “calling out” something.
Is it your contention that “trying to participate and make things better” is the sufficient quality of a successful politician?
I think this about sums up what I think the majority of Portland voters think.
Which..is a thing…and definitely explains alot of whats going on.
No
Shocking how many Portlanders feel the status quo is just fine.
Probably all those 20 & 30-somethings that came to Portland in the early 2000s to retire.
I read Tom Sollitt’s D3 platform on his website.
Lots about “economic freedom” and “local resilience.”
Nothing about crime, vandalism, open-air drug markets, or unsheltered homelessness.
Nothing about high local taxes.
Nothing about collapsing commercial real estate values.
Nothing about the shrinking downtown tax base.
Nothing about high earners leaving while service costs rise.
Nothing about the inability of the city to provide basic municipal services
You can’t talk about “supporting small businesses” without addressing why they’re boarding up windows.
You can’t talk about “economic stability” while ignoring public disorder and fiscal math.
Portland doesn’t need more philosophy.
It needs enforcement of our social contract, tax reform, and measurable results.
Thanks for the philosophy, Jose
Facts on the ground ≠ philosophy. Deflection isn’t a rebuttal, Ted.
“Facts on the ground” are merely evidence until they are utilized. HOW they are utilized requires “study” in regard to implementation (i.e. philosophy).
I didn’t know quoting you in full was “deflection”. You could always rephrase or clarify next time.
I looked through Tom Sollitt’s campaign website and was surprised by how generic it feels. There’s a lot about “systems” and “resilience,” but very little about the real issues Portlanders are facing — homelessness, public safety, downtown recovery, transportation, neighborhood livability. If we’re serious about fixing “blue city dysfunction” and getting out of Portland’s doom loop, we need concrete ideas, not just polished buzzwords. Right now, the platform feels abstract when voters like me are looking for specifics, not platitudes.
The crux of these next elections is going to be whether theres more than 70 percent of voters who want more than platitudes which is what they’ve been looking for previously.
Given the new voting system a simple majority means nothing when 2/3 successful candidates in a district can get only 8,000 first place votes and outvote the candidate that actually “won” by any historical metric of judging elections.
I listened to a lengthy podcast interview of Stollitt a few weeks ago. He didn’t have a firm stance on nearly anything. He did make it clear he was hoping to get some union support, which I presume to mean, combined with his current lack of a firm stance on nearly anything, he is effectively for sale.
He may pick up enough votes to garner 25%+1 just by not being Morillo or Koyana Lane though.
I will say that I voted for Morillo and Lane and won’t vote for either of them again unless they really turn around before the election, which seems unlikely. I wrote Morillo at the start of her term and told her we need pragmatic progressivism and that Portland shouldn’t continue to be the poster child for failed progressive leadership. She didn’t write back and I have a sneaking suspicion she didn’t read the email either.
Morillo, Koyama Lane, and Novick have all filed for re-election, and I believe are representing my district really well, especially in the inagural building-the-plane-while-flying phase of our new form of city government. Sollitt might make an intriguing city counselor, but not as a replacement for those already serving district 3, IMHO.
This mindset is why I have low expectations for the outcome of the District 3 elections. It seems to host Portland’s more “aspirational” folk who still believe we are on the right course. We’re not on the right course, obviously. Yeah, things are better now, but mostly thanks to the mayor’s city management than what some councilors would prefer if they had their way. Without the mayor’s sweeps and introducing overnight shelters, it would be rampant homeless disasters everywhere with abandoned or lived-in cars leaking oil on city streets. At least those disasters are cleaned up now with some regularity and there are better options than sleeping on the street.
We need the city charter amended so that the mayor holds a tie-breaking vote in all matters. That’s how we can overcome the obstinate behavior of the so-called “peacock” partisans who decide amongst themselves matters before city council sessions even begin. Two of those sell-described peacocks are in this district and they occasionally consort with the third council person from this district. Ever since 2020 I want my quality of life back. The “peacocks” think I need to suck it up, accept higher taxes, and enjoy my unhoused neighbors who shoot up, throw used car oil into the street drains, and throw trash out of trashcans in search of cans to feed their drug habits. I don’t like to live in that environment, let alone bike through it.
Until we elect a peacock mayor that is; then we need to amend the city charter because the mayor is too powerful!
Actually, the mayor currently has the ability to cast the tie-breaking vote in any legislation the council is debating. The only place he’s restricted from doing this is in selecting the council president, which is as it should be. Sounds like you’re longing for a more Law-and-Order council. Those guys went down in flames in 2024.
Gonzalez was a joke, the archetype of the “weak man pretending to be a strong man” that they love on the right. Glad to see the back of him. We do need people in city council who won’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good and based on their behavior to date, Morillo and Lane (both of whom I voted for) fit the bill.
Ooh, bad typo. I meant to say that “Morillo and Lane _don’t_ fit the bill.” Both are all about performative progressivism and absolutists when we need people who are willing to settle for incremental progress towards our shared goal of a thriving city.