City

The Portland City Council on Wednesday unanimously voted to appoint Raymond Lee as the city’s first long-term city administrator, the most powerful bureaucratic position in the city.

The former director of the Portland Housing Bureau, Helmi Hisserich, who resigned after being placed on administrative leave in October by Mayor Keith Wilson after the two repeatedly clashed over housing and homeless policy, took aim at the administration in a letter this week to the City Council.

Home Forward, the city of Portland’s housing authority, is sitting on 955 empty affordable apartment units, according to a Nov. 7 vacancy report the agency provided to WW last month.

Raymond Lee formerly served as city manager of Greeley, Colo.

At this pace, Portland would finish the full year with the fewest traffic deaths since at least 2019.

Home Forward, which serves as the city of Portland’s housing authority and provides rental assistance to thousands of Portlanders and owns 6,678 units of subsidized housing, says it’s facing a $35 million budget shortfall next year.

An initiative petition aimed for the November 2026 ballot seeks to let Portlanders decide where millions of the city’s budget is spent every year. If passed, the measure would set aside an amount equivalent to 2% of the city’s general fund budget every year—about $16 million based on this year’s budget—to be spent on projects determined by the community.

Data released by Mayor Keith Wilson’s office last week shows that most of his new emergency shelter locations are struggling to reach 50% occupancy on any given night.

The Wednesday night meeting preceded a social media fight between Councilors Dan Ryan and Angelita Morillo that broke out on Tuesday online.

Since the 1980s, Metro has run the city of Portland’s five performing arts centers, most of which operate at a loss.

The Portland City Council this week will consider a ban on landlords using AI algorithms to sent rents, a practice that’s widely been panned as a vehicle that artificially inflates rents.

The proposal died, though only after it kicked up a public fight between Councilor Angelita Morillo and Mayor Keith Wilson, who exchanged allegations the other was misleading the public about the consequences of the cut.