Board member
Jeff Mapes was a professional journalist for more than four decades, most notably as the chief political reporter at The Oregonian. He also worked as a political reporter at Oregon Public Broadcasting before retiring in 2021. He has written frequently about land use issues and cares deeply about how cities and suburbs grow and develop. In his last assignment for OPB, he created a six-part podcast, “Growing Oregon,” that charted the history of Oregon’s unique growth-management system. He grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he saw the problems of unchecked sprawl and poor planning. In his first newspaper job, at The Napa Register, he also saw how one county managed to preserve, in the 1970s, its rural lands for what is now some of the most valuable agricultural land in the world.
Jeff is the author of the 2009 book Pedaling Revolution, which chronicles the rise of bicycling as a serious form of urban transportation. He is happy to live in one of Portland’s most walkable neighborhoods with his wife, Karen.