Portland's Caring Community
Old Town, Portland, Oregon
How It Came About
In late February 2018, coming home to Portland from visiting friends and family in San Francisco, I read an article about Glassdoor.com in the January issue of the New Yorker provided by a friend who keeps back issues for me. As I read about it I realized that it was an excellent model for correcting the "information asymmetries" of the buyer-seller relationship between renter and landlord.
As a renter for most of my life I found the challenges of finding affordable housing in Portland daunting and that was back in 2012 when there were options - choices galore compared to the marketplace today. I also had talked with friends more involved in the tenant movement about their concerns and decided to apply my knowledge and expertise to develop a proposal that would do for renters what Glassdoor has done for employees - empower them. The FrontdoorPDX proposal is the result.
In addition to heading up two start-ups, one a direct marketing agency, the other a search engine, my experience as an alumna of Hewlett-Packard Corporation, ComputerLand Corporation, Sun Microsystems and Informix Software fits developing frontdoorpdx.com like a hand to a glove.
A search engine in the service of sustainability was founded over ten years ago by Ruth Ann with the help of Geoff Clevenger, software developer, and financial officer, Blase Hents. We three have continued to work together and come to the FrontDoorPDX project as a team.
