Strong Towns PDX is the Strong Towns Local Conversation in Portland, Oregon. Our group was founded in the summer of 2022.

Strong Towns PDX makes Portland a safe, livable, and financially resilient place for everyone by fixing small issues, advocating for the big issues, and celebrating success along the way.

We envision a future where everyone has an opportunity to live a good life in a prospering place. In the future, Portland will exemplify fiscal resilience and adaptability. By managing its budget, Portland will be a prosperous city. All Portlanders will have more diverse, higher quality options in how they move through the city and where and how they live. We envision a more equitable future with smaller gaps in quality of life between different neighborhoods. Community members will be empowered to create the life and city that they want. Change will be driven by bottom-up action and sustained in the long term by strong community bonds.

• Eliminate constraints on land use that reduce household wealth, encourage car dependency, reduce local business opportunity, reduce incremental development, and create an imbalance in city revenue and expenses.

• Ensure clear, transparent local accounting that balances equitable growth of household wealth with long-term resiliency of community finances.

• Create safe streets for all modes of transit, including walking, biking, rolling, and driving. Create streets that serve as places for people to connect, rather than prioritizing moving cars through our places.

• Promote abundant housing, with prices and locations aligned with the wages and needs of all households in our community.

• Stop highway expansions.

• Encourage better management of existing parking and remove subsidies for parking.

• Foster a fiscally-resilient community that can provide high quality services for all Portlanders － housing & support for all who need it.

Strong Towns PDX is an all-volunteer organization. We’re a group of organized, passionate community members dedicated to our city.

We are an inclusive space, where all people are welcomed. We strive to be respectful and open-minded, and we try to find common ground to understand how we can make a difference together.

Through connection, education, advocacy, and action, we empower our members to make tangible change in their community. 

We are stronger together. We make space for our members to connect formally and informally, in person and on Slack, our virtual discussion space. We encourage and enable smaller neighborhood-based groups to connect, as we understand the value of local insight and immediate community.

We foster relationships with other groups across the Portland region, including advocacy organizations, neighborhood associations, business groups, and other community groups.

For internal education, we host learning discussions, skill development sessions, book clubs, and more! We table at local events to share knowledge with our broader communities.

We advocate for the policy, laws, and budget decisions needed to achieve our goals. We support aligned advocacy organizations in their work and amplify their messages. Additionally, we educate our leaders at the local and state level to empower them to serve our communities well.

We know that local change should be grounded in lived experience, block-level insights, and community-rooted values. We encourage our members to recognize areas where their neighbors are struggling, identify the next smallest thing to address that struggle, and do that thing.

Our members are doing great things on their own! We support our members on their individual projects, providing resources, connecting them with the right people, offering feedback, and amplifying their efforts.