How updating a few musty housing laws can promote the smart, affordable housing options we need across fast-growing Northwest towns and cities.
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Affordable housing is lacking across the Northwest, with housing policy here effectively excluding from the market many lower-cost options for low-income families and individuals. A raft of outdated laws bans the types of residential arrangements that once housed most of the North American working class and prohibits modest home options near jobs, transit, schools, and neighborhood centers—from mother-in-law apartments and triplexes to rooms that were safe, comfortable, and convenient but small and basic.
As a result, families may scrimp on food or heat to be sure they can pay rent each month; they may opt for black-market housing; or they may even go homeless. Everyone deserves a clean, safe place to live; but beyond safety regulations, the floor plans mandated by current housing rules aren’t affordable for everyone. In this series, Sightline researchers explore the key laws that prevent smart, affordable housing arrangements of the past from getting to market today, and look to a Northwest revival of inexpensive housing options.
This article is part of the series Legalizing Inexpensive Housing Takeaways The author’s time living on the housing margins has opened his eyes to new ways to live imperfectly but under his own control. Housing policymakers could better address the needs of the unhoused by learning from what many of them do already, when allowed. … Read more
Eliminating parking mandates is a simple solution to a big problem.
For about $10,000, you can own it. It can turn parking lots to villages, then back again. It can go anywhere with you. But our laws almost always ban the simple home on wheels.
How many times do voters need to say so before journalists believe them?
This article is part of the series Legalizing Inexpensive Housing Update 9/16: Senate Bill 9 is now law. Urban housing shortages aren’t just a cause of climate change. They’re a lot like climate change—it’s very hard to fix them unless you can get many different governments to act. That’s what we told the New York … Read more
This article is part of the series Legalizing Inexpensive Housing In 2019, Oregon passed a first-of-its-kind state law that ordered larger cities and the Portland metro area to rapidly legalize duplexes on all residential lots and fourplexes, triplexes, townhomes, and cottage clusters on more than half of lots. This is a short, reported history of … Read more
This article is part of the series Legalizing Inexpensive Housing This is a sidebar to Sightline’s history of the passage of Portland’s residential infill project. In August 2021, Oregon’s largest city legalized duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes and mixed-income sixplexes on the vast majority of residential lots for the first time since 1959, while making on-site parking … Read more
This article is part of the series Legalizing Inexpensive Housing In 2021, Portland became the largest modern U.S. city to end so-called “single-family zoning.” What follows here is a history of how the residential infill project could have died but didn’t. This history was developed in partnership with Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. See also … Read more
This article is part of the series Legalizing Inexpensive Housing After a seven-year campaign, Portland on Sunday formally lifted a series of 97-year-old bans on seven different types of homes. Becoming legal today on the vast majority of residential lots in Portland: a duplex, a triplex, a fourplex, a mixed-income or below-market sixplex, a large … Read more
This article is part of the series Legalizing Inexpensive Housing After decades of impasse in a thousand city halls, housing advocates are looking to statehouses for zoning reform. Many now think state, provincial, and even federal reforms may pass more easily than local ones. I don’t think that’s because the politicians who lead larger governments … Read more