About this site

the RUNOFF exists to document life in Portland as it is with an eye toward what it could be, and what stands in the way. first and foremost we care about life: existence day to day, how it flows around the spaces we inhabit and among its co-inhabitors.

the idea behind the RUNOFF is that learning more about Portland will help you to see it more critically and more optimistically. the primary problem we see is underutilization across the board. we as a city are not short of any resource, but rather the resources are kept idle in many hands, and to activate those resources will require real changes.

Portland has a reputation for liberal governance, and liberal governance has a reputation for well-meaning dysfunction. starting in 2025 with our newly chartered city council, liberal governance has a fighting chance to prove itself capable of addressing the real problems holding this city back; as such, our job as citizens is to make the most of that chance by surfacing these problems as we see them and documenting them as best we can, using the tools the city provides to us.

the RUNOFF will teach the reader how to better exist as a political being in Portland and elsewhere by sharing open-source research and reporting as one part of a larger community. if the RUNOFF is successful, it will spawn imitators; to that end, we intend to document our process to enable others to verify our work and build upon it.

the RUNOFF is built using Ghost and runs on DigitalOcean and Mailgun.