1974: A regional firm
Long before the internet and access to well-connected airports, ECOnorthwest’s earliest work was concentrated in the several hours driving radius around our founding office in Eugene, Oregon. We found plenty of public policy questions as our region made a dynamic, and often painful, transition from a resource to knowledge-based economy. The work was challenging and consequential but rooted close to home.
Litigating against polluters
That changed in the late 1980s with the Exxon Valdez oil spill. The affected Alaskan municipalities hired us to calculate damages and serve as the “expert on experts”—translating biological and marine science into economics. It was the largest project we’d ever undertaken, and we opened a Seattle office to support it. From that point forward, we committed to take our best work farther afield. Our Exxon Valdez testimony was well received and established ECO as a leading litigation support firm—especially in natural resource damages. A series of high-profile cases, centered on contamination caused by the gasoline additive MTBE, opened in South Lake Tahoe, California, and ended with testimony to an international trade tribunal overseen by judges from the Hague. (Yes, they wore wigs.) And along the way, we assessed damages of mining operations in Oklahoma, vinyl chloride emissions in Louisiana, industrial contamination in Mississippi, PCB contamination on the Hudson River, and more.
Easing congestion and demystifying the safety net
As economists, we are fans of Arthur Pigou and have carried his key insight forward: if you want less of something, tax it. Our municipal clients have long desired less traffic congestion and, in the mid-1990s, our team built the Toll Optimization Model (TOM) to illustrate how prices could get the roads moving again. Our clients could optimize commuter travel times or toll revenue—or find a sweet spot between the two. We have deployed the original TOM, and its upgraded successors, in ECO projects almost continuously since the late 1990s. Regional transportation agencies in Greater Los Angeles and the Bay Area have been the most frequent users, but our sophisticated tolling math has shown up in Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, North Carolina, Oregon, and Washington. Shortly after TOM’s development, we teamed up with the World Institute on Disability to model complex disability benefit rules. The intersection of Social Security Disability Insurance, Supplemental Security Income, Medicare, and Medicaid is so confusing that some beneficiaries avoid paid work out of fears they may lose benefits—especially health insurance. Our web-based benefit planning tool, Disability Benefits 101, replaced pencil and paper worksheets and now is operating in 13 states.
Measuring the scale of a national crisis
In our 50 years, no topic has pulled us as far and wide as the nation’s housing affordability crisis. Housing and land-use policy is a founding practice that, for most of our history, offered a reliable, steady flow of work year in and year out—until rapid expansion in the mid-2010s. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, financing for new homes and apartments was limited, household formation outpaced housing starts, demand exceeded supply, and prices rose steadily. 
Housing underproduction, which was once a problem concentrated in large coastal cities, spread to every state in the country. Underproduction reached 3.9 million units in 2021 (most recent data available), as we found in our groundbreaking analysis for Up for Growth, a housing research nonprofit. Thanks to our client and their networks, a root of the affordability crisis is now broadly accepted. With the problem better defined, our work turns from questions to solutions. Precisely how many units do we need, what kinds of housing do we build, and where do we put it? Housing needs analyses, and related production strategies, have established ECO as a West Coast firm and kept our Seattle and Los Angeles offices busy. And as word spreads that we’re good at this, our work has moved east—not only to nearby Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and Nevada but also to Connecticut, Indiana, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Jersey, and Texas.
While we venture far from our backyard, our work is unchanged: offer solutions with impact—one project, one community, and one policy at a time. Learn more here.