Steering Committee

Stan Amy

Stan’s experience falls into three areas of focus related to NDH’s vision:

• Housing and Urban Development: Assistant to Portland City commissioner with Planning and Public Works portfolio; Vice Chair of Portland Planning Commission; President, New Villages Group, LTD, a family Fund focused on neighborhood real estate development.
• Community Development Finance: Board Member, ShoreBank Pacific and ShoreBank Corporation of Chicago, the nation’s first chartered social purpose bank; Board Member, Craft3, a leading CDFI (Community Development Finance Institution), serving the pacific N.W.
• Consumer Empowerment: Co-Founder and President, Portland Student Services (now College Housing N.W.) a student initiated Not For Profit housing development company; President, Natures Fresh N.W., a pioneering natural foods grocer empowering consumers to vote with their dollars for a healthy food supply and environment; Co-Founder and Board Chair, New Seasons Market, an Oregon-based grocery chain creating urban/rural partnerships between local farmers, ranchers, fishers and producers, and consumers in the greater Portland metropolitan area, Seattle, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Stan believes that the same process of organizing the purchasing power of otherwise relatively powerless consumers that created student housing at his alma mater and helped start a transformation in America’s food system can be used to reinvigorate the opportunity for working families to build middle class wealth through home ownership.

Christy Eugenis

Christy Eugenis is the Executive Vice President of New Villages Group, Ltd.  Drawing upon her background in fashion design and small business development, she has a knack for bringing smart operating concepts together with interior and exterior design in her real estate projects, which span the past twenty years.

With an abiding passion for restoration, development and community, Christy restored a 20th Century Italian Renaissance-style Odd Fellows lodge in North Portland, and created The North Star Ballroom, a dynamic private and public event venue that opened in 1997.  She led the restoration and re-branding of two mid-century modern boutique hotels in Palm Springs: The Orbit In and The Hideaway, which opened in 2001 and 2002 respectively, and have been featured in design and travel publications around the world.  Christy and her husband, Stan Amy, have collaborated on several neighborhood real estate projects, including the 2014 transformation of a former grocery store into D Street Village, a mixed use community hub in southeast Portland.

Christy served as a Board Member of the Architecture and Design Council of the Palm Springs Art Museum from 2006–2011. 

She was a founding board member of Palm Springs Modernism Week, and served on its board from 2003–2012.

Norm Boice

Norm holds a Master’s degree in business and has an extensive background in multi-family housing and commercial construction and development.  In 1968, while working at Portland State University in facilities planning, he was approached by Stan Amy and a few other students regarding the dire need for affordable housing at the urban university.  Norm and Stan worked with the group of students, university personnel and private citizens to found the private, non-profit entity called Portland Student Services, now known as College Housing Northwest.  Norm served as general manager of Portland Student Services in the early years, overseeing the renovation of old apartment buildings previously destined for demolition in order to make way for the university’s expansion, as well as the development of new apartments in close proximity to the campus.  

In 1982, Stan asked Norm to come on board as chief financial officer at Nature’s Fresh Northwest, the small grocery store he had acquired. Norm spent the next 15 years there overseeing the acquisition and development of multiple store locations in the Portland metropolitan area before the company was sold in 1997. Since then, Norm has served on an ongoing basis as a consultant to New Villages Group, Ltd., the family fund owned by Stan and his wife, Christy Eugenis.  

Staff

Caroline Fitchett

With over 20 years’ experience as a grassroots organizer and political campaign director, Caroline’s work has helped to make historic changes on issues affecting our environment, climate change, education and children’s health. Caroline has run candidate and issue campaigns to expand outdoor school for children, protect farm and forest lands, preserve state and local parks, and has won campaigns at every level of government. Caroline’s work as a community organizer has given her a unique set of skills for building effective community alliances and broad coalitions working to build healthy and sustainable communities. 

 In 2007, Caroline began working with Home Forward, formerly Portland Housing Authority, and Portland housing advocates to create a new resident advisory program. The program supported residents as leaders, ensuring their collective voice had a respected advocate at the table of policy.  Made up of families of all backgrounds and those participating in all housing programs, this resident-lead program helped Home Forward make critical policy decisions affecting the quality of life of thousands of Portland area residents. 

Gloria Freshley

Gloria brings a background of customer service and project management to the team. Her experience includes five years in sales and operations management at the regional level for Nordstrom, where she honed her customer service skills, and seven years as a facilities manager and assistant to the president of ShoreBank Pacific, the first bank in the US to be chartered with a mission of environmental sustainability.  While at the bank, Gloria managed several branch construction projects and also oversaw the development of the bank’s Community Reinvestment Act Strategic Plan.  During the late 1990’s and again in 2001, Gloria served as president of the Oysterville Restoration Foundation, a small, volunteer-run organization tasked with the mission of maintaining historic properties in the Oysterville National Historic District located on the Long Beach Peninsula in southwest Washington.  Since 2012, she has worked for New Villages Group, Ltd. as Stan Amy and Christy Eugenis’ assistant, supporting them in their various endeavors. 

Advisors

David Grein

David is a founding partner of Parsons Farnell & Grein, LLP.  He values close interaction and collaboration with clients as a means to achieving creative, cost-effective solutions. He has been directly involved in helping to define and shape the organizational structure of NDH since its inception.

David advises small and mid-sized operating companies as outside general counsel and specifically with owner exit strategies and company liquidity events with special emphasis on tax structuring.  David also advises real estate portfolio companies with respect to purchases, refinancing, leasing and structuring tax efficient dispositions.

Bernie Cain

Bernie holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Construction Management and is the founder of Cain Companies.  The corporation’s portfolio of housing construction and forensics projects is both extensive and varied, including:

Development and Construction:

• Land Development / Colorado:   20 year emphasis on infrastructure development. 
• Land planning and infrastructure design: 18-hole golf course and adjacent residential single-family community. Managing principal for public/private infrastructure formulation/installation per multi-lateral agreements with local/regional water and sewer authority.  
• Residential design and build:  1000+ single family; 1000+ apartments, condos, townhouses, including the development of a luxury infill townhome project
• Homeowner’s Associations:  Formation and management small to large PUDs.
• Urban design build:   Light commercial and residential / West Los Angeles
• Desert design build:  Small single family subdivision / Palm Desert

Construction Forensics:

• Los Angeles, Orange, and Ventura Counties, CA:  Construction forensics consulting and ensuing project management, most often in communities with active HOAs
• Indianapolis and Lexington:  Consulting Project Manager on behalf of a major national builder in the correction of 2200 homes over a five year contract. Satisfaction of a class action lawsuit required the formulation of original implementation systems, documenting and managing the diagnosis, remediation and abatement, reconstruction and legal resolution on each property.  

Affiliates

New Villages Group

New Villages Group, Ltd. is a family office operated by Stan Amy and Christy Eugenis to manage their assets and to invest capital and expertise toward the development of sustainable neighborhoods and socially responsible businesses.

NVG manages investments in 604 multi-family housing units and 101,000 square feet of commercial space.  NVG’s involvements with socially responsible businesses range from purely advisory to direct investment. The businesses range in size from small startups like Portland’s Looptworks, to the mid-sized New Seasons Market.

Because of the scope and complexity of New Deal Housing, it is the sole focus of NVG’s current development efforts. Consequently, other new ventures are not presently being considered.

North Star Civic Foundation

The North Star Civic Foundation was founded by Stan Amy, Christy Eugenis, and Rejuvenation House Parts founder Jim Kelly in 2015 for the purpose of accelerating broad-scale change in the areas of wealth inequality, climate change and open democracy.  Based in Oregon, and led by Executive Director Caitlin Baggot Davis, the foundation supports and invests in bold inquiry and partnerships that break through a decades-long stalemate around the biggest threats to our way of life and legacy.

The foundation’s first project, begun in 2015, encompassed developing an innovative concept to raise wages for Oregon's lowest-paid workers in a way that reflects the local cost of living in every part of the state. The concept was adopted by the Governor in 2016. 

NCSF is currently focused on the housing crisis experienced by low and moderate income households in many cities. In Bend, the current affordability crisis may represent more than an urgent need to find shelter for the poorest families in the area; it may mark a long-term barrier to wealth creation for the next generation of working families, who have historically been able to use the asset-building benefits of home ownership as a primary means of reaching the middle class.  NCSF looks at this multi-sided housing crisis through the lens of wealth inequality, and it is actively exploring entrepreneurial ideas for new solutions.