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Jessie Burke and Jonathan Cohen, married Portland entrepreneurs who courted controversy as they sought to remake the Old Town neighborhood, appear to be selling off many of their assets in the city.
Among the properties they’ve listed for sale: the boutique Society Hotel on Northwest 3rd Avenue. The asking price for the 38-room, four-story brick building is $4.5 million.
Having founded the hotel in 2015 with two former business partners, current owners Cohen and Burke became both influential and controversial in the beleaguered Old Town neighborhood. Now the duo is leaving Portland for the East Coast.
During the COVID-19 pandemic and in the years following, Burke in particular became a frequent critic of local government and its approach to homelessness, crime and business revival. From 2020 to April 2026, she served as board chair of the Old Town Community Association, which was heavily involved in decisions made about what development and improvement projects got city backing and, in some cases, city money. Cohen served as treasurer of the organization during much of that time.
Both Cohen and Burke left their leadership positions at the OTCA earlier this year. Burke presided over her last meeting as board chair in April. Cohen left his position as treasurer in February.
Burke also made a bid for elected office. She ran unsuccessfully for the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners in 2024, at the same time that she was running the successful campaign of current Multnomah County District Attorney Nathan Vasquez.
Cohen was a founder of the shoe incubator Made In Old Town, which imploded this spring after the project defaulted on a $7 million loan it received from the city’s economic development agency. As WW reported, Made In Old Town’s leadership used the Prosper Portland loan it received in 2025 to buy two Old Town buildings for $6.9 million even though an appraiser valued the buildings at just $3.8 million. (Notably, the Old Town Community Association was also instrumental in helping Made In Old Town secure the first of its government funding in 2024 when the state legislature approved a $2 million grant to the project.)
The project, built on a vision of a nine-building shoe manufacturing campus that pledged to revive the social services-heavy Old Town neighborhood, quickly failed to meet the terms of Prosper’s loan. While Prosper initially granted the project leniency, Prosper executive director Cornell Wesley in February lost his patience after learning that the project’s short-lived executive director had abruptly departed, and that the project had not informed Prosper about her leave. Prosper repossessed the buildings shortly after, and are now seeking tenants to fill the spaces.
Cohen and Burke, meanwhile, appear to be leaving town. They recently sold their North Portland home and have listed a North Portland triplex that for years they’ve rented out to tenants. Burke has previously said on social media that she and her family are relocating to the East Coast. While the reason behind the move is far from clear, Cohen and Burke have both voiced the complaint that they’ve been unfairly attacked for simply trying to help the city.
The Society Hotel listing boasts that a new owner could continue the building’s use as a hotel or as an “immediate adaptive-reuse conversion into senior, student, multifamily, or transitional housing to capture steady regional demand anchored by Portland’s $5.5 billion visitor economy.”
The couple owns another Society Hotel location in the Northwest in Bingen, Wash. That location does not appear to be for sale.
Burke did not respond to a request for comment.
