Sam Assefa Arrives At OPR
- Josh Stephens
- Nov 9, 2021
- 9 min read
Sam Assefa started his planning career in San Francisco in the early 1990s—a postindustrial port city with housing pressures, politically active residents, and the promise of becoming one of the world’s technology hubs (and most expensive cities) and most recently completed a five-year tenure as the planning director of an uncannily similar city: Seattle. In between, he worked in Chicago and Boulder, Colorado. Amid Seattle's dramatic population growth and economic boom of the late 2010s, Assefa led efforts to increase housing supply and empower historically disadvantaged communities, culminating in sweeping zoning changes citywide.
