Madeline Kovacs
2018 Prize Winner
For some, the phrase “it’s complicated” conjures up a 2009 Meryl Streep film. For others, a relationship status. But for Madeline Kovacs, Program Coordinator of Portland For Everyone at 1000 Friends of Oregon, “it’s complicated” is the reality of housing law and zoning code in this city. It’s a complex reality she’s on a mission to help the rest of us understand – and change — right now.
Her umbrella organization [check],1000 Friends of Oregon, is the watchdog nonprofit that defends and strengthens Oregon’s statewide land-use planning program. 1000 Friends, in turn, founded the Portland For Everyone Coalition in 2016 and hand-selected Kovacs to lead it. Her unique blend of communications experience and policy development know-how perfectly fit the role, and she’s been helped considerably by a background of community organizing and environmental activism that began in college.
Kovacs’ coalition organizes Portlanders to advocate for policy changes at the city level to ensure abundant, diverse, and affordable housing options in every neighborhood. Kovacs focuses on buoying chronically under-represented voices in housing conversations — renters, young people, people of color, recent immigrants, and adults living with disabilities.
Kovacs, by her own admission not a morning person, recently took a big sip of her Barista coffee at Pine Street Market before turning an hour-long interview into a mile-a-minute master class on this city’s sordid history with exclusionary land-use policy.
With the meter of someone who has presented to more than 60 groups in the last two years and trained over 100 individuals to provide public testimony about housing, Kovacs swiftly but thoroughly summarizes the issues: Cities across the United States are adding jobs faster than they are adding housing. Rental prices are rising, and families are unable to find housing they can afford —pricing them out of entire regions of the country. This is why she took this job.
“I saw the need for focused community education and organizing around something both very complex and misunderstood — but critical to solving the housing shortage and housing affordability crisis,” Kovacs says.
Along with coordinating the schedules and needs of 43 coalition members, Kovacs launched and manages the PFE website, facilitates the city-wide conversations on Twitter, sends testimony alerts over social and email, and plans events.
For her, the affordable housing movement is not just a trendy buzzword; it’s personal. Thanks to a grant from Pround Ground, Kovacs (a single-earner, 31 year-old nonprofit employee) recently purchased her own Portland home: a 1938 horseshoe shaped apartment building that could not be built today in Portland, due to current zoning regulations.
Kovacs operates with urgency – her speech quick, eyes laser-focused, Tweets answered late and night and early in the morning, work bleeding into personal life. Decisions made today about zoning, she says, resonate generations deep.