Skip to main content
To end 2025, we assigned each reporter in the WW newsroom to pick two stories by a colleague that stood out in 2025. We then had the recipient of the compliment pass it on—but not before penning an update to the tales. Here’s the first of these stories.
“Best Western Front”
June 25
Why Sophie Peel loved it: If every reporter has a magical power, Anthony’s lies in exercising the patience to find the unlikely intersection where public policy meets an odd (and sometimes problematic) character. That’s what he found when he reported on Brad Ketch, the entrepreneur-turned-nonprofit CEO who received homeless tax dollars from Multnomah County to operate a motel shelter in the beleaguered Rockwood neighborhood of East Portland.
Dysfunction at Ketch’s operation led Anthony to another entity that’s much larger and has much deeper coffers, one that gave Ketch a $6.8 million loan for his motel shelter: the Oregon Community Foundation, which the state handed $125 million in COVID relief funds to disburse to 32 nonprofits building shelters out of motels as part of the state’s Project Turnkey.
What started with a quirky, unassuming nonprofit leader in Rockwood led to questions about where $125 million in taxpayer funds went and what they accomplished. Those were questions no reporter had yet asked. It’s the type of investigative reporting that takes patience, persistence and the muscle to keep going after people tell you there’s nothing to see here.
Killer detail: Before Ketch got into housing the homeless, he was (among other short-lived endeavors) briefly the CEO of a company called Rim Semiconductor. Anthony reported that shareholders in the company, including Ketch, in 2006 “filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to sell 358 million shares of stock, even though Rim had lost $4.7 million in fiscal 2005 and a whopping $11 million in the first half of fiscal 2006.”
Anthony Effinger on what’s happened since: No surprise here, but Ketch’s spokeswoman stopped returning our calls and emails earlier this year. Multnomah County pulled all of its families, but the city of Gresham still has rights to five rooms in Rockwood Tower for homeless families. WW is seeking a copy of the application that Ketch made to the Oregon Community Foundation for the $6.8 million. We await word from the Oregon Department of Justice on whether OCF must disclose it.
