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How Governor Inslee Can Rebalance Washington’s Utility Decarbonization Bill

Find audio versions of Sightline articles on any of your favorite podcast platforms, including Spotify, Google, and Apple.

Washington state leaders set out again this legislative session to move the state’s utilities forward on a path toward electrification and away from gas. House Bill 1589—a bill that passed in the 2024 session and is to be delivered to Governor Jay Inslee’s desk any day now—is a move in that direction.  

This bill, initiated by Puget Sound Energy (PSE), Washington’s largest electric and gas utility, requires the utility to proactively plan for the transition from gas to clean energy. The coalition of climate and consumer advocates who helped usher it to passage knew that to get PSE to retire its existing gas infrastructure, the bill would have to include sweeteners for the utility, likely in the form of financial benefits to be paid by ratepayers.  

However, the final version of the bill, as amended during this year’s legislative session, overplays the PSE incentives piece, upsetting a delicate balance between climate benefits, ratepayer protections, and enticements for the utility. Further, overly generous financial boons to PSE could hamper the state’s future negotiating power with the utility on important, additional decarbonization moves.   

The two outsized financial benefits to PSE include accelerated depreciation (Section 7) and earnings on large electric projects still in construction (Section 5.2.d). These upsides for PSE are set to become law by the end of March 2024, but Governor Inslee could rebalance this bill in the next few days, using his veto authority to remove specific sections. 

Below we outline what’s good about the bill and what needs to be cut in order to retain the spirit of the original decarbonization solution—balancing perks for PSE with the provisions that step the utility toward a thoughtful and systematic transition to clean energy—and away from fossil fuels—keeping on track with the state’s climate commitments. 

A critical step toward decarbonization: HB 1589 reinforces Washington’s climate priorities 

This bill goes a long way toward putting PSE on a path toward decarbonization—an essential piece in Washington’s carbon emissions puzzle if the state is to meet its 2050 goals. In particular, Section 3 of the bill calls for PSE to undertake comprehensive decarbonization planning.  

The policy sets up an entirely new planning framework for the utility, folding together most of its existing planning requirements on both the gas and electric sides of its business into a single integrated system plan and orchestrating a holistic approach that prioritizes substantive decarbonization. Here are the most important planning updates that the bill puts in motion: 

  • Sets up expansive new electrification programs to help transition PSE customers off gas 
  • Drives PSE to assess potential to electrify entire neighborhoods as an alternative to aging pipeline replacement and as an opportunity to decommission sections of the gas system 
  • Requires PSE to evaluate a suite of alternatives to additional investment in the gas pipeline system 
  • Increases the annual commitments for electricity conservation and demand response to offset some of the expected new electric loads 

The utility receives cash from auctioning off its carbon allowances in the state’s carbon market. HB 1589 reaffirms a provision in the Climate Commitment Act to prioritize this cash to support low–income families with bill assistance, non-volumetric bill credits, and electrification programs. The bill directs PSE to use the remaining funds towards programs to help residential and small commercial customers electrify in lieu of the non-volumetric bill credits that nearly all PSE customers are receiving today.

Veto the accelerated depreciation provision to rebalance the climate upsides with the financial perks for PSE  

Buried deep in a section in HB 1589 is a provision called “accelerated depreciation.” Accelerated depreciation (AD) would ramp up the repayment rate for PSE’s long-lived gas infrastructure so that the utility could recover its investments sooner—ideally, before 2050 when the state’s emissions targets call for a 95 percent reduction in carbon pollution from gas.  

This AD provision, offered as an enticement to PSE in exchange for unwinding its gas business, might have made sense when the bill still contained its original provisions to end new gas connections and allow PSE to decommission and retire gas pipelines. However, those parts were negotiated out of the bill over the course of the legislative session.  

The final package passed this month is therefore lopsided, with too many financial perks for PSE and too few financial solutions for managing the costs of the gas-to-clean-energy transition for consumers. Governor Inslee has the power to help correct this imbalance. Sightline recommends that the Governor veto Section 7 of the bill, which would remove the provision for PSE to accelerate the recovery of its investments in gas assets. 

Accelerated depreciation, on its own, can’t support the decarbonization transition; it needs complementary policies 

Managing the energy transition means choosing a strategy that achieves the state’s decarbonization goals while minimizing costs overall for ratepayers and shielding the lowest-income households from bearing those costs. If left unmanaged, the ongoing costs of the expansive pipeline system will be spread over a shrinking number of gas customers, resulting in sky-high gas rates for those remaining, likely low-income homeowners and renters.  

Decarbonization thought leaders have proposed a suite of policies that could work together to lessen the financial impacts on consumers as their utilities transition away from gas. Policies like ending gas pipeline expansion, electrifying as an alternative to replacing aging or leak-prone pipelines, and modifying gas utility’s “obligation to serve” all work together to avoid growing the piles of cash invested in gas pipelines. Meanwhile, policy and regulatory tools such as securitization, accelerated depreciation, adjusting rate cost allocations, changes to utility profit rates, and using external funding sources to recover gas transition costs can support the utility and state in managing the sunk costs of the energy transition.  

But none of these policies is adequate on its own. The state’s lawmakers and regulators must join these policies with one another to effectively manage the energy transition. Some of these policies, like accelerated depreciation, raise rates for gas consumers. To balance this, securitization can refinance the borrowing costs of the rate base. So together, these policies can stabilize rates while reducing the risk of stranded assets. In a similar way, ending new gas connections while also allowing electrification to satisfy a gas utility’s obligation to serve complement one another: together, they let the utility start to shrink its infrastructure footprint, leading to reduced operations and maintenance costs.  

Unfortunately, HB 1589 only offers the accelerated depreciation policy, absent complementary policies that could minimize rate impacts, especially for low-income households. The bill emphasizes electrification but continues to allow gas system expansion and avoids the key policy needed to shrink the gas system: changes to the gas utility’s “obligation to serve.” In doing so, the bill fails to advance the interlocking tools needed to effectively manage the energy transition. Granting PSE accelerated depreciation, a tool for minimizing stranded asset risk, without having a strategy for how to handle the financial impact of a declining number of gas ratepayers during the transition, could dissuade both PSE and legislators from coming back to the table to work on this critical issue. 

The legislature must create a plan for PSE to end gas hookups, end the “obligation to serve,” retire pipeline assets to remove them from customers’ bills, and look at other funding sources to help cover the future rising costs of gas, especially for low- and moderate-income households and tenants—and all of this prior to adopting accelerated depreciation. 

Implications of accelerated depreciation: Higher gas bills 

Section 7 of HB 1589 mandates that regulators approve accelerated depreciation schedules for PSE’s existing gas assets. Gas pipeline assets are long-lived: a new gas main is estimated to have a 60-year life, with repayment schedules extending out as far as 2084. Few, if any, gas customers will remain to pay off the residual value of that gas main past 2050, possibly denying PSE’s shareholders their approved returns.  

House Bill 1589 removes this incongruity for gas assets in service by July 1, 2024, and requires PSE to accelerate the rate at which its shareholders are paid back, so that it is by 2050 or sooner. At the same time, for assets that would otherwise be fully recouped before 2050, it allows the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission to stretch out the shareholders’ recovery period to 2050, to help temper rate impacts. For gas assets put into service after this summer—and PSE is planning to invest $416 million in just 2025–2026, according to its general rate case—HB 1589 fails to lay out a strategy on how the rate recovery for those assets will be handled. Presumably, the new decarbonization plans that PSE drafts will prescribe much less spending on pipelines, but its first plan isn’t due to the WUTC until 2027, more than 2.5 years away. 

Shortening the depreciation period on younger assets increases near-term costs for consumers. In the long run, consumers pay much less overall, saving on payments for profit and taxes over the longer depreciation term. The concept is like a 15-year versus a 30-year mortgage, where the borrower pays much less interest over the life of the 15-year loan but has higher monthly payments than the 30-year loan. Still, most homeowners choose 30-year mortgages because the monthly payments are more affordable.  

PSE’s 2024 general rate case, filed in February, requests accelerated depreciation for its gas assets and forecasts how various AD rates would affect depreciation expense. WUTC regulators can authorize accelerated depreciation without a change to the law, but under HB 1589, lawmakers have essentially overruled the WUTC’s authority. This sets a precedent that could invite utilities to argue their rate cases before the legislature instead of using the adjudicated process followed by regulators. 

According to PSE’s filing, recovering the full value of all existing gas assets on or before 2050 would push the annual depreciation expense 52 percent higher than current levels. The filing does not provide an analysis of impacts to profits or taxes, nor does it contemplate extending depreciation lives as HB 1589 would allow.  

To examine the impacts of both depreciation and profits, Sightline performed a similar analysis, modeling the full depreciation of all assets by 2050 but stretching out some asset lives to 2050 to moderate the rate impacts. With accelerated depreciation over the course of 2024–2049, customers would pay an extra $199 million over status quo. Overall, examining the time horizon 2024–2085, when all assets as of 2023 would be fully paid off under the status quo approach, customers could save $501 million in avoided profit.  

Total 2024-2049Total 2024-2085
Depreciation Expense and Profit (Status quo)$11,059,995,523$11,760,567,683
Depreciation Expense and Profit (Accelerated depreciation)$11,259,257,036$11,259,257,036
Analysis notes: Data sourced from PSE’s 2023 depreciation study. All depreciation lives extending beyond 1/1/2050 were accelerated to end on 12/31/2049. Assets with shorter depreciation lives were stretched to 12/31/2049 so that the annual depreciation expense in the first year was approximately equal between the two scenarios. A 7.3 percent profit rate was assumed.

Ultimately, the accelerated depreciation provision, as currently laid out in HB 1589, removes substantial risk for PSE’s investors. The utility has $6.1 billion of future depreciation expense on its books, and AD guarantees that investors will see their expected returns.  

But the provision fails to balance the risks to ratepayers versus shareholders, especially in terms of protections for low-income ratepayers. It also ties the hands of the WUTC to throw out unfair accelerated depreciation proposals. 

What to keep? Section 5: Early earnings on large electric projects transfers risk but supports rapid buildout of renewable electricity and transmission  

Another area of House Bill 1589 deserving attention is its “construction work in progress” (CWIP) provision. CWIP would be a new accounting method applied to the construction of large, new electric projects that would transfer some of the investment risk from investors to ratepayers. CWIP is tangentially related to the package of policies needed to manage the energy transition because it provides better cash flow to PSE, which could in turn support more aggressive construction schedules for electric infrastructure needed as the state ditches gas. Importantly, though, it could still cost ratepayers less overall than the accounting method used today, called “allowance for funds used during construction” (AFUDC).  

Let’s compare what the bill would do as written to the status quo. Under the status quo AFUDC, PSE puts all its construction expenses on a big credit card that amasses compounded interest for the duration of the construction period. Once the project is in service, customers start paying off that credit card’s balance. At that point, five years or more down the road, the debt is much larger because of the compounded interest charges. 

The bill’s added CWIP option, in contrast, is written to allow ratepayers to avoid some of those financing costs by paying off some of that debt on very large electric projects that are still under construction (not yet in service)—like making the minimum payment on one’s credit card. The utility benefits because PSE earns both a profit on those payments much sooner than it would under the status quo and it has more cash on hand to redeploy for other projects. Regulators in California have raised concerns that these profit earnings on CWIP—the projects still under construction—can drive up customer rates when projects take longer than planned or costs escalate beyond initial forecasts.  

The CWIP provision in Washington’s HB 1589 is limited to electric projects like renewable energy generators and transmission lines costing more than $100 million with a project schedule greater than five years—precisely the kinds of projects that will help bring Washington the clean electricity it needs to decarbonize its economy. At its discretion, the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission can deny this alternative accounting method and maintains its authority to disallow rate recovery of expenses (regardless of accounting method) if they are found to be imprudent. For these reasons, Sightline supports retaining section 5, which offers an alternative accounting method for regulators to consider using. 

With an eye to the long game and leverage, Governor Inslee can improve this bill—and his climate legacy—with a single section veto 

House Bill 1589 charts a direction for Washington’s largest gas company to decarbonize its operations in line with the state’s climate and clean energy transition commitments.  

The decarbonization approach in Section 3 is sound: transition customers’ combustion appliances to high-efficiency electric alternatives like heat pumps, and aggressively pursue energy conservation and demand response to forego the need for new resources and to draw down emissions.  

But this bill has a concerning provision that could burden the company’s gas customers with higher bills, absent complementary policies: accelerated depreciation. And while the initial bill that PSE proposed had several additional decarbonization principles that might have sufficiently warranted the accelerated depreciation giveaway to PSE, the version of HB 1589 that passed, lacks complementary policies for leveraging accelerated depreciation to its full potential—to meet decarbonization goals and to protect Washington ratepayers.  

Lawmakers and gas utilities in the state need to put a comprehensive financial package together, including the use of accelerated depreciation, to support Washington families during the transition. Until that full package emerges, Sightline recommends that Governor Inslee veto Section 7 to rebalance the bill’s decarbonization upsides by removing the mandate of accelerated depreciation.

 

This article was updated on 3/15/24. A previous version stated that HB 1589 would prioritize funds received from the state’s carbon market for low-income families. We have updated the article to reflect that this policy is already law under Washington’s Carbon Commitment Act and that HB 1589 only reaffirms this policy.  

The Missing Piece of Oregon’s Housing Package: Legalizing Apartments

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It’s hard to imagine a building more compatible with Oregon Governor Tina Kotek’s stated goals than the Owens II Apartments. 

A four-story apartment building that’d sit next to another four-story apartment building in central Astoria, the proposed mixed-income project would be priced entirely for low-income and very-low-income seniors thanks to millions of dollars in federal subsidy that have already been lined up. Sitting in the walkable core of a small city where home prices are up 48 percent in the last four years, the 50 new homes would replace a mostly empty parking lot. 

However, the site is directly downhill from three Airbnb rental units that describe themselves as “riverview” and charge $181 a night for the chance to watch cargo ships humming up and down the Columbia River, just across that mostly empty parking lot. 

In public hearings and legal filings for more than a year now, the owners of those Airbnbs and another family that owns a house across the street have raised first one issue about the proposed apartment building, then another. It’s been a very expensive game of chicken for the dueling lawyers hired by the site’s neighbors and the Northwest Oregon Housing Authority, which wants to build those 50 homes. Regardless of how this legal battle ends, the delay has postponed the project and could end up killing it. 

In short, the Owens II Apartments would be exactly the sort of building Gov. Kotek seems to want to dedicate much of her governorship to helping create. So why, after more than a year of policy development, will Kotek’s top-priority housing bill do so little to help it—and thousands of other potential buildings like it—get built? 

50,000 missing apartments in Oregon 

To be clear, Gov. Kotek’s Senate Bill 1537, which passed the state legislature Monday, might help the Astoria project claw its way over the finish line and provide permanently stable homes to 50 low-income senior-led households in northwest Oregon. One notable provision of the bill: if the people trying to stop the project lose their legal argument, the new law could eventually require them to pay attorneys’ fees for both sides. 

But that outcome is not certain, and would come only after a long and risky legal battle. 

A different section of SB 1537, the subject of much quiet debate within Oregon’s government over the last year, might have been a much bigger help. An earlier version would have automatically approved requests by housing developers for exceptions, or “adjustments,” to various zoning rules. For their Astoria project, the Northwest Oregon Housing Authority would have automatically been allowed to build a much smaller parking lot, avoiding the need for excavation that’s become the latest focus of the legal battle. 

But during the lead-up to Oregon’s 2024 legislative session, that section of Kotek’s bill was largely gutted in the face of opposition by various Oregon cities. 

Subsidized housing like the Owens II aren’t the only homes at stake. Gov. Kotek has set a high-profile goal of accelerating the state homebuilding rate between 50 and 100 percent, enough to both keep up with future growth and to add 66,000 homes to the housing stock that, had they been built over the last 20 years, would have prevented Oregon’s current shortage. 

That will inevitably require figuring out how to bring homes to market at lower prices, and therefore how to develop market-rate homes with lower costs. Of those 66,000 missing homes, more than 50,000 would need to be at prices that only multifamily buildings, with their shared land, roofs, and utilities, can generally meet. 

These are the low- to mid-price market-rate homes that the millions of Oregonians who live in market-rate housing rely on to keep housing market prices within reach. When more apartments get built, as they have been in almost unprecedented numbers in cities like Austin over the last few years, rents stabilize or fall. 

chart showing rents peaking in the United Sates, Texas, and Austin in early to mid 2023, then declining, especially in Austin, to 6.7% below their February 2023 level.But Oregon has seen no such boom in apartments. And unfortunately, despite various helpful and potentially helpful parts of the bill, SB 1537 would do very little to ignite one. 

Kotek’s 2023 bill would have loosened local rules against apartments 

For supporters of infill housing, the heart of Gov. Kotek’s housing package when it was first introduced in 2023 was the part that essentially overruled local zoning rules. 

Introduced as part of House Bill 3414, the concept was a Kotek original: sweeping, unprecedented, even wacky. It amounted to something like an abrupt upzone of the entire state. 

How it worked: the exceptions to zoning that real estate developers regularly request, called “adjustments” or “variances,” would no longer be requests. If they applied to housing, the state would simply require local governments to approve those adjustments except in cases of health and safety. For example: most local zoning codes forbid buildings from being built directly against the edge of a property in most zones. The original version of Kotek’s 2023 bill would have automatically approved a request to build up to the edge of a lot. 

Or, in the case of the Owens II project in Astoria: A project could be built without any on-site parking, despite the city code usually requiring 0.65 parking spaces per home. Building it with no on-site parking would resolve the stated concern of its opponents, Bob and Cindy Magie, who have said they object not to the building that would block their view (and the views of the Airbnb guests in the other building they own) but to the construction of an underground parking garage below it. They said they fear any excavation would endanger their property just uphill. 

(This concern of the Magies about excavation is the remaining legal obstacle to construction of the Owens II, but it isn’t the only concern they’ve raised. According to a document summarizing Bob Magie’s testimony to Astoria’s Historic Landmarks Commission in late 2022: “The neighborhood has Victorian, Neoclassical, Mediterranean, and Craftsman construction. He felt this would not quite fit. The style does not fit the character of the neighborhood.” The Landmarks Commission, however, disagreed. After that decision was upheld by Astoria’s city council, the Magies turned their attention more fully to their concerns about excavation.) 

Opposition from Oregon cities 

Screenshot of a Teams meeting of a public hearing in the Oregon State Capitol. Within one frame, a brown-haired woman in a checkered jacket is speaking as others look on.

Eugene Mayor Lucy Vinis testifies to the Oregon House of Representatives Rules Committee against the auto-adjustment section of HB 3414 in May 2023.

Kotek’s concept of automatically approving zoning adjustments was as sloppy as it was creative. 

The bill had been inspired, in part, by a case in Troutdale. That Portland suburb had spent a year refusing to grant adjustments on parking and a handful of smaller design issues for a proposed apartment complex near its downtown, threatening to kill 94 below-market homes. 

Some hated Kotek’s bill concept. Its leading opponent was the League of Oregon Cities, many of whose members—241 cities across the state—objected to the legislature taking an axe to their sometimes carefully crafted and painstakingly negotiated zoning codes. 

“The proposal will render all but a narrow list of development criteria effectively irrelevant,” wrote Tom Ellis, mayor of the suburban City of Happy Valley.  

Rep. Mark Gamba, a Milwaukie Democrat and former suburban mayor who generally votes as a pro-housing progressive, had a similar take. “All of those things that cities have put into place are at risk,” he said. “This definitely needs work.” 

Ed Sullivan, a land use attorney who’s spent decades advocating for infill housing, teamed up with Carrie Richter, policy chair for the state historic preservation advocacy group, to be fiercer. “Better fit for the dustbin than the governor’s desk,” they wrote.  

Others praised the automatic adjustment section as a match for the Kotek administration’s language about a housing emergency. The sloppiness and uncertainty, backers said, were the whole point. 

“We must establish a regulatory environment that nurtures innovation,” said Rep. Maxine Dexter, a Portland Democrat who chairs the House housing committee and helped add to the bill an eight-year “sunset” date after which the auto-adjustment section would expire. “True innovation requires an environment that makes failing on a small scale acceptable. An ugly building that houses our neighbors now is better than a perfect building that takes years longer to be built.” 

Kotek’s team scaled back the section further. But with various cities, historic preservationists, and some environmentalists still in opposition, the Democratic Kotek looked for votes across the partisan aisle instead. She made a deal with Republicans, adding to the bill a one-time expansion of urban growth boundaries that some cities favored. That move cost her many more Democratic votes without scoring quite enough Republicans. The bill passed the House but died in the Senate, a single vote short of passage, on the last day of Oregon’s 2023 legislative session. 

The idea came back in 2024, but with an option for cities to mostly ignore it 

After the 2023 session ended, Kotek stopped into a meeting of the “Housing Production Advisory Council” she’d convened, urging them to think big. 

“This is a crisis,” she told the group. “We need more production. There’s no question about that. … If we just do the same thing we’ve been doing, we’re not going to produce enough housing.” 

The advisory council responded by recommending, among many other things, that she come back in 2024 with a much bigger version of her auto-adjustment section. In addition to granting an additional story of potential height to most new buildings, their version of the bill would have also granted unlimited flexibility on the number of units in a building and the amount of floor space within the building envelope. 

Meanwhile, in a separate series of video calls, Gov. Kotek’s negotiations with the League of Cities and its members were continuing. As they did, the auto-adjustment section got weaker instead of stronger. Drafts of the 2024 Kotek bill largely exempted any city that could show it had approved at least 90 percent of adjustments—a standard almost any city would likely meet, simply because developers rarely bother to formally request adjustments they don’t think they’ll get. 

Then, just before the legislative session, a new concession: cities could also mostly ignore the auto-adjustments section as long as they could solicit “testimonials of housing developers” who’d recently received adjustments, saying that the city’s existing adjustment process was fair. (This passage is in Section 39(2)(c)(B) of the final bill.)

And what developer who hopes to do future business in a city, and had been granted the adjustment they requested, would turn down a request by that city to testify to the state that the city’s adjustment process had been fair? 

“The exception completely guts the rule,” said Christe White, the attorney for the Astoria project. 

architect's rendering of an apartment building with three levels of housing and, down the slope of a hill, a concrete podium.

An architect’s rendering of the proposed Owens II apartments, at left, in Astoria, Oregon. The owners of the property just up the hill have raised various challenges to the plan for 50 new below-market homes for seniors and people with disabilities. Rendering by Jones Architecture.

SB 1537 does other things for housing – just, not much for infill 

Gov. Kotek’s bill does include a few other things that could help the Owens II and other infill apartment projects. 

Sections 1 through 7 of the bill create a new “Housing Production and Accountability Office” at the state’s land use agency. This body would be empowered to both enforce state housing laws and provide jurisdictions with model codes, grants, and other potentially useful resources for accelerating homebuilding. 

Sections 8 and 9 allow projects to opt into new zoning rules on the somewhat rare occasion when zoning becomes more flexible in the middle of a project. 

Sections 10 and 11 might deter people from bringing tactical or frivolous legal challenges to housing projects. It orders Oregon’s Land Use Board of Appeals to require people who unsuccessfully challenge housing projects to cover any attorney fees paid to defend the project. That wouldn’t necessarily affect projects that don’t make it to the state land use board, but it would give appellants less leverage over projects they dislike. 

Sections 24 through 35 create, and add seed funding to, a revolving loan fund to essentially put a cash bounty on projects that could deliver mid-price, market-rate homes. Though it’s a cleverly cost-effective way to subsidize mid-price homes, the legislature allocated just $75 million for the purpose—enough to unlock about 3,000 homes statewide in the first 10 years, and maybe twice that many over the life of that funding. It’d be about 0.8% of Kotek’s 10-year housing production target. 

Sections 44 through 47 streamline a few discretionary decisions cities can take to allow replats, property line adjustments, and expansions of nonconforming uses within urbanized areas. 

Sections 48 through 60 are the part of the bill that has drawn the most headlines: a limited, one-time urban growth boundary expansion insisted on by Republicans. That section, too, was scaled back since 2023 but remains controversial. 

If local politics are a barrier to housing, optional state zoning laws will not change that 

Then there’s the auto-adjustment section, now mostly optional due to Section 39.

One of its provisions would force some small changes. Cities that do not currently allow adjustments even to be requested—for example, to height limits in downtown Portland—would have to at least start letting housing developers request adjustments. But a city doesn’t have to grant those requests. 

And after all, if a city wanted its zoning to be more flexible, it could just make its zoning more flexible. The whole point of state housing action is for state politics to do something that local politics can’t: get many cities to work together to end the housing shortage. 

When a state gives cities an easy way to opt out of a housing law, this doesn’t work. Any local politics that have been blocking housing are likely to keep blocking it. 

The Kotek administration has more chances to boost apartment construction 

Announcing on Monday that her bill had passed the legislature, Kotek went out of her way to say that passage of SB 1537 was “not a finish line.” 

Her housing production council wrapped up its business last month with lots of recommendations that haven’t yet been translated into bills. Kotek’s administration is also about to kick off months of work to implement three bills that passed in 2023. 

HB 2001 and its companion HB 2889 set housing production targets for all larger cities and create an accountability system intended to motivate local housing reforms. Together, they might be a way to remove local zoning barriers that is firm, but less sloppy. And HB 3395 includes a provision that could boost construction of small multifamily buildings on small lots by introducing fire safety codes specifically for small-footprint buildings. 

It’s not certain, however, that any of those bills will end up changing much of anything, either. That’ll depend almost entirely on the Kotek administration’s own choices. Which is why implementation of these bills will be the focus of future articles in this series. 

On Even-Year Elections, Trust Voters—and Evidence

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Editor’s note: HB 1932 did not pass out of the Senate Ways & Means Committee by the February 26 deadline and will not advance.

For supporters of democracy, the equation should be simple. Higher turnout = better representation.  

Research bears this out. Aligning local elections with higher-profile state and national races—in even-numbered years—boosts voter turnout more than any other change that election scholars have studied. Sightline’s recent analysis comparing 2021 and 2022 turnout in Washington showed that fully 62 percent more people—1.2 million Washingtonians—voted in the even-year election over the odd.  

The sheer numbers speak for themselves; a democracy serves communities when more voters participate.  

And digging into the academic studies regarding how voters understand and communicate their preferences confirms this conclusion, despite fears from critics. When more people vote, more people vote on local issues, and their ballots largely reflect their values and ideas—leading to better representation and a more responsive democracy.  

To build a more representative democracy, then, we should do everything we can to increase voter participation when we have a choice.  

What Washington voters and leaders need to know about even-year elections 

1. Washington state could see far higher turnout for local offices—contrary to the naysayers

With House Bill 1932 in the 2024 legislative session, Washington state legislators have an opportunity to significantly increase participation in local elections across the state. HB 1932 would allow (but not require) cities and towns to move their elections to even-numbered years if they wish to do so. For jurisdictions that make the switch, turnout for mayor, city council, and other city offices would likely double, or more. Local government leaders could take advantage of the much greater turnout and govern with a clearer mandate from their constituents.  

Opponents of this legislation are raising concerns that moving local elections to even-numbered years will result in voters who are uninformed about local issues or who will stop filling out a long ballot. KUOW reported in December that Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs “opposes the move to even-year elections. He argues that voters won’t have time to learn about local races, and there will be a lot of undervotes. He also thinks candidates for smaller races won’t be able to break through in grabbing voter attention.” These comments were echoed in public testimony last month from Secretary Hobbs’ office opposing HB 1932. Sec. Hobbs is not the only one—Seattle City Council president Sara Nelson, for example, has espoused similar views, as has the Seattle Times editorial board.  

Concerns about undervotes and about voter attention and information are unwarranted. Evidence reveals that the increase in voter turnout in even years completely swamps any undervotes. And when people turn in a ballot, they are able to effectively communicate their interests—including on local issues, when the ballot is long, and with scant available information.  

2. More voters means more votes for local offices—far more votes, not undervotes

The data show that undervotes are not a reasonable concern. More people vote for local offices during even years, not only on high-profile positions like US President or Senator.  

Sightline has previously explored the issue of “undervoting,” also known as down-ballot drop-off—when voters stop voting for the races farther down the ballot, which tend to be local offices. We found that while drop-off occurs in almost all elections, the switch to even-year elections results in an increase in the total number of votes cast in local races: greater overall participation vastly outweighs the small amount of individual ballot drop-off. Oregon’s turnout for local elections is double that of Washington’s, after taking ballot drop-off into account.  

If cities in Washington switched their elections to even years, local races, at the end of a ballot, would receive far greater voter participation than they do in the current odd-year elections. In other words, the total votes cast for local elections would be far higher in a switch to even years than the status quo.  

3. Outcomes for voters demonstrate that they know—and vote—their own hearts and minds

Data on how voters understand and communicate their preferences are more complex. Scholarly research finds that 1) we do not definitively know how more bubbles on a ballot changes available information and voter decision-making and 2) we definitively do know that people voting in even-numbered years do a better job representing the interests of their community than voters in odd-numbered years—even if they may face longer ballots or might not remember as much about lower-profile races (more on this below). That’s because voters in even-numbered years tend to be a larger and more representative group of people. 

A deeper dive into what research says about how voters engage in elections  

Inconclusive: Voter behavior with long ballots 

We don’t definitively know how more bubbles on a ballot changes voter decision-making: academic conclusions are mixed regarding how voters seek out and process the information needed to fill out their ballot. Some studies indicate that voters have less knowledge about lower-profile offices or issues when ballots are long. Others contradict this, finding evidence that that voters learn more about all offices when high-profile positions are on the same ballot, as they would be if local elections were held at the same time as state and federal offices in even-year elections.  

Most of the scholarly research related to voter information and ballot length in general focuses on direct democracy—that is, when people vote directly on a specific policy issue via a ballot measure (e.g., Nicholson in his 2003 article on ballot proposition awareness). While a full discussion of that literature is beyond the scope of this article, most studies indicate that voters can get overwhelmed by too many ballot measures.1Nicholson (2003) found that an increase in the number of ballot propositions slightly decreases awareness of each individual proposition and raises the likelihood that voters will vote to retain the status quo. Selb (2008) similarly found that there is a marginally significant increase in the number of no votes and that vote choices tend to get more ideologically inconsistent with more propositions on a ballot.
 And there are sometimes quite a few: Texas, for example, had 14 detailed ballot measures on its 2023 ballot.  

The conclusions are less clear when it comes to electing representatives to public office. Ned Augenblick and Scott Nicholson of Stanford examined different ballot positions of the same proposition in California in their 2015 paper, and observe that longer ballots can increase the amount that voters use heuristics (mental shortcuts, like voting according to candidates’ party, class, endorsements, gender, and race), abstain from voting, or simply pick the first option on the ballot. Use of heuristics has benefits and drawbacks, as noted by Steenbergen and Colombo’s chapter on the subject in 2018: research suggests that all voters, in all elections, somewhat rely on these mental shortcuts, with some variations based on a voter’s level of education and overall political knowledge. Heuristics may introduce bias but also help voters make effective decisions when dealing with lots of information.  

While Augenblick and Nicholson’s conclusions provide some evidence to be wary of long ballots, their data do not capture variations over time, changes in the composition of the electorate, or how voters behave differently in vote-by-mail settings or with comprehensive voter guides, all of which are essential to extrapolating their conclusions to changes in election timing in Washington state. Notably for all vote-by-mail states like Washington, they note that one might predict a smaller or negligible “choice fatigue” effect for absentee voters.  

Inconclusive: Awareness of lower-profile and local offices with consolidated elections 

When taking election timing into account, research on voter information and awareness is ambiguous. Comparing various aspects of US federal House elections in her 2009 article, researcher Jennifer Wolak finds that recognition and knowledge of House candidates is slightly higher when Senate races are more intense (as measured by spending), although she sees little effect from presidential elections. In other words, she found that voters are more likely to learn more about lower-profile races when they are paying attention to a high-profile race on the same ballot.  

Looking at the same data pool, however, David Andersen shows in his 2023 research that name recall of lower-profile House candidates decreases as other offices are added to a ballot, which suggests that awareness of lower-profile offices diminishes as ballots get longer. Exploring other facets of the data, he sees no significant changes to political engagement beyond voting, such as participation in campaign activities, when additional higher-salience elections are on a ballot. But he confirms that engagement as measured by voter turnout is much higher.  

Based on the findings from his research, Andersen suggests that “engagement is not very deep” (16) and echoes concerns that voters are not well-equipped to vote on lower-level offices. Yet these studies do not explore what level of engagement is sufficient for voters to represent their interests, nor do they account for differences in composition of the electorate or for the different information environments achieved by vote-by-mail and voter guides. In addition, both Wolak and Andersen explore how federal House races might be affected by higher-profile US Presidential or Senate races (all of which are in even-numbered years), which may or may not be applicable to the question of how much attention local offices receive when paired with national elections. 

In one of the few studies that does explore voter information in local elections, University of Chicago and Public Policy Institute scholars J. Eric Oliver and Shang E. Ha show that voters in off-cycle elections are more likely to have their vote choice influenced by local issues (which makes sense, as local offices comprise a larger proportion of the ballot). They also find that there is no statistically significant difference in interest in local campaigns and knowledge of city council candidates in off-cycle years compared to on-cycle, even years—so voters do seem to still pay attention to local issues in even-numbered years.  

In another study, this time of school district elections, Julia Payson (2017) observes that local news sources are just as likely to report on student achievement in even-numbered, on-cycle and odd-numbered, off-cycle years, combatting the idea that local issues will not receive any media attention when there are national elections at play. 

Reviewed together, the available research does not come to conclusive answers regarding whether voters gain more or less information about local offices when other higher-profile positions are on the same ballot. Unlike what opponents of election consolidation suggest, moving local elections to even years would have an unknown or likely negligible effect on voter information and attention. And the omissions in the relevant studies and gaps in the research on voter information are essential to understanding how election consolidation could improve democratic representation, particularly for local offices in Washington state.  

Conclusive: Winners of even-year elections better match “we the people” 

Presumably, having well-informed voters is important so that they can effectively translate their interests onto the ballot and thereby into government policies and processes. With that objective in mind, scholarly research is conclusive: people voting in even-numbered years do a better job representing the interests of their community than voters in odd-numbered years. That’s because of the additional participation; voters in even-numbered years comprise a larger and more representative electorate.  

Voter turnout is much lower in odd-numbered years than even-numbered years, and, as oft-cited political scholar Arend Lijphart noted in 1996, unequal participation spells unequal influence.2Lijphart’s idea was presented in 1996 but is cited as an article in 1997.
 Who votes determines what is heard in government.  

A broad swath of studies has found that when turnout is low, the composition of the electorate changes. From Lijphart’s (1997) vast compilation of international studies to Oliver and Ha (2007)’s conclusions related to local suburban elections, academic research reveals that low-turnout elections tend to overrepresent people who are more educated, higher-income, older, or more likely to own homes.3Most of the studies Lijphart cites conclude that it is the more highly educated and higher income people who vote in low turnout elections. Oliver and Ha observe that the most politically engaged people in local elections tend to be older, more educated, and more likely to own homes than the rest of the population in a jurisdiction.
 People who are more informed about local issues are typically of a certain demographic and tend to prioritize their own interests when voting.  

Studies that specifically explore election timing point to similar trends about voter demographics, including recent Sightline research. They also show better alignment of political preferences during even-numbered (“on-cycle”) years. Scholars Hajnal, Kogan, and Markarian (2021) find that a shift to on-cycle elections in California led to a strikingly more representative electorate in terms of race, age, and partisanship. And researchers Hartney and Hayes (2021) conclude that on-cycle (even-year) elections are more aligned with the political preferences of the people they represent than those chosen in off-cycle (odd-year) elections; also, when state governments mandate off-cycle elections, school board decisions are more likely to differ from preferences of average voters. Regarding how elected representatives are answerable to voters, Payson (2017) surmises that school board incumbents are more likely to be held accountable to school district performance in even-numbered election years than in odd.  

Most of these studies move past analysis of the information voters have, which is difficult to measure precisely, in favor of examining election outcomes. The real-world results indicate that even if the larger group of voters in an on-cycle election relies more on heuristics with a longer ballot, they still do a better job representing the interests of the community as a whole than does the small electorate voting in off-cycle elections.  

If local government leaders are more representative of their communities, more aligned with the preferences of their constituents, and more accountable when their elections are held at the same time as other offices, it’s clear that voters are sufficiently informed and aware to make the choices right for them.  

The worrying implications of emphasizing voter information at the cost of participation 

An overemphasis on the need for voters to be “well-informed” as a prerequisite for participation (or for policies that encourage broader participation among more voters) leads down a dangerous path, and not simply because it’s impossible to determine what amounts to adequate information.  

A functioning democracy relies on voter participation, first and foremost. When concern for an informed electorate is used as an argument in favor of low-turnout elections, it has the whiff of poll taxes, literacy tests, and the like—and we know that what was behind those ideas was not genuine concern for effective democracy.  

In the conclusion to his 2023 paper, Andersen explicitly asks, “Is it normatively better to have a wide canvass of uninformed voters, or a low-turnout but better-informed electorate?” While the question is rhetorical, it suggests that voters should possess a certain level of information to participate—an implication that runs counter to foundational American ideas about democracy and equality.  

One might—and should—reasonably ask how to improve the information that potential voters receive and what can be done to facilitate citizen understanding of government, from boosting K-12 civics education to plain-language voter pamphlets, from participatory budgeting to any number of other means to engage the public on an ongoing basis. But none of this need come at the cost of limiting voter access. Indeed, referring to fears about voter information in their 2003 paper on election timing, scholars Zoltan Hajnal and Paul Lewis write,  

These concerns are solid arguments for civic education, voter outreach campaigns, higher quality media coverage of local races, and intensive campaigning by candidates for mayor and council. They are, in our view, not good arguments for scheduling local elections so as to knowingly reduce public participation. (662) 

To have an effective democracy, we should question how best to hold our representatives accountable to the values and wishes of their constituents. Timing elections to encourage a large and representative electorate, through a shift to holding local elections in even-numbered years, helps move towards that aspiration. Raising spurious doubts about voter awareness does not.  

Washington’s legislature can turbocharge voter participation 

The reasons to allow jurisdictions in Washington to shift local elections to even years stack up overwhelmingly against the cautions piled on by the naysayers, and are backed up by research and evidence. State legislators have a chance to turbocharge voter participation in local races. 

If local elections move to even-numbered years, Washingtonians might get lengthier ballots, and they’ll have to sort out their preferences and work through who is going to represent them best—just like they always do. Fortunately, living in a vote-by-mail state, they’ll have time to do that outside of a polling booth. And as studies have shown, once people get to voting, they do a pretty good job representing their interests.  

Moving local races to higher-turnout even-numbered years is not the only tool we have to improve democracy, nor should it be. But we can start by showing that we value and trust voters by easing basic electoral participation and moving elections to the time that works best for them.  

In Washington, state legislators have an opportunity to help build a democracy where more people elect the local leaders who attend to the issues that matter to their daily lives. House Bill 1932 would remove the mandate on odd-year elections, giving local governments the option to meet voters when they vote. 

Now Fully Funded, Portland’s Affordability Mandate Should Be a Model

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Hey, here’s some cash. While you’re at the store, would you grab me some eggs? 

That’s the simple, efficient premise behind the housing policy just approved by Oregon’s most populous city and county. Here’s some cash. While you’re building those apartments, set aside some of them to be rented at less than the market rate. 

In a 3-2 vote Thursday, the Board of Multnomah County Commissioners followed up on a unanimous Jan. 31 vote by the Portland City Council to fully fund this concept in the form of Portland’s inclusionary housing program for rental projects. 

Together, the two votes will remove what has been a major obstacle to new apartment buildings in close-in Portland neighborhoods. In most of the city, what had been an underfunded mandate will no longer be underfunded. 

“It just makes our entire city more equitable,” Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson, an East Portland resident who spearheaded the county action, said Wednesday. “People at many different income levels have opportunities to live close to where their jobs are.” 

You get what you pay for 

It’s easy to overthink “inclusionary zoning” programs like Portland’s, but the concept is not complicated: New buildings should include homes priced for a mix of different incomes. 

The problem is how to get a good quantity of mixed-income apartment buildings to exist. If you required 30 percent of homes in every new building to be priced at less than the cost of building them, you wouldn’t get a mixed-income building; you’d get nothing at all. Thirty percent of zero would be zero. 

With this round of changes that takes effect March 1, Portland has faced that problem head-on and come up with a relatively simple answer. Fully fund the gap between costs and prices. 

Don’t just ask for the eggs; pay for the eggs. 

“We only get those homes if private-sector projects move forward, and they only move forward if the financials make sense,” Portland Commissioner Carmen Rubio, who steered the reform through City Hall, said last month. 

Portland’s program in brief: For new apartment buildings of 20 or more homes, at least 10 percent must be set aside for people earning no more than 60 percent of the metro area’s median income. (Currently, that 60 percent limit comes to $54,180 for a household of two, for example.) Those homes’ rents, meanwhile, must be capped at levels those households can afford. (No more than $1,250 a month or so for a one-bedroom, for example.) The price restriction lasts for 99 years.

The government then makes up for that reduced revenue, mostly with a temporary property tax break, to keep the project in the black. 

There are a few other options for new buildings to comply, such as putting below-market homes in a comparable location elsewhere. But with this being the only option that’s fully funded in higher-rent parts of the city, it’s expected to be by far the most common choice. 

If you do the math to calculate the public’s cost per home, the below-market housing created via fully funded inclusionary housing is less expensive than a comparable home created by a local housing bond. That’s presumably because the affordable homes hitch a ride on a project that was already being financed. 

“We have to go where the data tells us” 

The city’s inclusionary housing program had already been fully funded for years in Portland’s “central city,” the approximately one-mile radius around Pioneer Courthouse Square. But outside central Portland, the program’s funding had been tightly limited by the city and county, which must both sign off on any tax abatement. 

The result of this underfunding over the last seven years had been that many projects bent over backward to avoid the program. The share of new homes in 12- to 19–unit buildings, those just below the program’s threshold, had approximately doubled. Hundreds and maybe thousands of other homes likely weren’t built at all, in part because of cost gaps left behind by the underfunded program. 

“We have to go where the data tells us,” Multnomah County Commissioner Lori Stegmann said Thursday, voting to support the revised program. “Look, it’s working in this area, but it’s not working in this area. So how can we be pretty precise and make these little tweaks?” 

Joining Stegmann and Vega Pederson in support of the program Thursday was Commissioner Jesse Beason. Voting against it were commissioners Sharon Meieran and Julia Brim-Edwards. They expressed concern about the program’s potential cost in forgone revenue, preferring a version that would have eliminated both the tax subsidy and the affordability mandate if the total tax abatement had exceeded $60 million over five years.

Economists for both the city and county called that a remote possibility. And Stegmann said it didn’t worry her in any case, since the larger property tax base would still wind up in government coffers after the 10-year property tax break expires. 

“Worst-case scenario, you have hundreds of developers rushing to market to build affordable housing,” she said. “I’m fine with that.” 

A slow but steady payoff 

Despite various claims made over the years, Portland’s previously underfunded affordability mandate wasn’t the only thing stopping homebuilding in the city. And the full funding of the program, which begins March 1 but will be retroactively available to projects already in progress, won’t lead to an immediate rebound in apartment construction.  

After all, the city’s population has been falling for a few years. The bright side of this is that vacancy rates are above 5 percent, leaving landlords with little power to raise prices. Rents in Portland proper have, for a change, been more or less flat since 2020. 

Until local population growth picks up again, this way to fund the program—through temporary property tax breaks on new buildings—will cost the government almost nothing. And when population growth does at some point pick up again, fully funding the inclusionary housing program should help Portland avoid falling behind on homebuilding. This, in turn, should help avoid a rock-bottom vacancy rate followed by a rent-hike crisis. That’s what Portland went through from 2010 to 2017. 

And, thanks to public funding, the program will also ensure that new buildings in opportunity-rich areas will be mixed-income on day one. 

Portland’s program still has flaws. For one thing, these changes don’t fix the formula for condo buildings of 20 or more homes, which all but vanished from Portland after the program launched and will now struggle even more to compete against apartment projects. The program likely remains underfunded in a handful of mid-price neighborhoods like Woodstock and St. Johns; in other mid-price neighborhoods like Montavilla, it may actually be overfunded. 

But the city and county have also agreed to check in on the program again in 2027. That’s another important feature of a functional inclusionary housing program. It needs regular calibration as economic conditions change. 

Inclusionary zoning, even when fully funded, probably isn’t a good fit for every city. Even at its best, it’s just too complicated. But cities that want such programs should look to Portland and Multnomah County, especially if it turns out that Portland’s next wave of private homebuilding includes a surge in production of new below-market homes. 

British Columbia Just Took First Place in Pro-Housing Policy

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While other Cascadian jurisdictions have been struggling to adopt piecemeal housing reforms—reducing parking requirements in Washington, or legalizing duplexes in Oregon, duplexes and lot splits in California, and fourplexes in Portland—British Columbia just enacted all of this and more, in a single month: November 2023. 

By legalizing apartment buildings up to 20 stories next to all Skytrain stations, legalizing fourplexes province-wide, eliminating parking requirements near transit, and proposing single-stair apartments, British Columbia has set a new standard for zoning reform in North America. More locally, it has created a framework for the construction of some of Canada’s best neighborhoods in the near future. 

As Alex Armlovich, housing analyst at the Niskanen Center, recently tweeted about BC housing minister Ravi Kahlon: 

Screenshot of a tweet by Alex Armlovich

Screenshot of X post from Niskanen Center senior housing analyst Alex Armlovich: “Nobody in the last 60 years has ever successfully decriminalized construction of multifamily homes near mass transit in a large North American city. And this guy just walks in, presses the “houses aren’t illegal anymore” button on his ministry desk, & carries on with his day”

The legalization of apartments in BC happened gradually, and then suddenly 

For years, the opponents of transit and infill housing in British Columbia mostly had their way. Some development was allowed on old industrial sites, but a formidable dam of zoning regulations held back new homes and transit. Zoning rules preserved the built form of single-detached house neighborhoods, even as prices rose, making homeowners millionaires many times over.  

The system may have reached its apogee in the year 2000 when Kerrisdale resident Pamela Sauder uttered her now-infamous opposition to a transit line: “We are dentists, doctors, lawyers, professionals, CEOs of companies,” she said, explaining why the area was unsuited to public transportation. “We are the crème de la crème in Vancouver.” Sauder and her fellow opponents of the proposed “Arbutus Line” won that fight, and the city routed both the transit line and accompanying new homes well to the east of Kerrisdale, along Cambie Street. The dam held. 

In 2017, in the same style, media executive David Radler wrote in opposition to a seniors’ home proposed for Vancouver’s wealthy Southlands neighborhood. Radler wrote that Council “would be allowing one of the last upper-scale residential areas of the city close to the airport to be commercialized” if it approved the rezoning, harming the economy by ruining an area of “executive housing.” Despite this, Council approved the senior center, and construction is almost finished. A leak in the dam, perhaps. And the economy? Arguably not ruined by this one seniors’ home. 

“You’re dropping the ghetto in Kitsilano…we are one of the treasures of the city.” This was the reaction of Kitsilano homeowner Judy Osburn to a proposed five-story apartment building in 2019. After 25 hours of heated debate over three days, Vancouver’s City Council voted eight to three to approve the building. An apartment building was allowed on a quiet, low-density street on Vancouver’s west side. The leak had become a trickle. 

Four years later, in November 2023, the dam finally burst. 

Under the leadership of Premier David Eby, Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon introduced and the Legislature passed Bills 44, 46, and 47, remaking British Columbia’s housing landscape. “The housing system as we have it now is not working,” Minister Kahlon told The Tyee.  

To remedy this, BC’s government has enacted a wealth of reforms for residents to unlock much-needed new homes, in all shapes and sizes, across robustly transit-connected neighborhoods: 

  • Legalizing 4–20-story buildings near bus, rail, and subway stops 
  • Eliminating public hearings for proposed buildings that comply with local regulations and plans 
  • Ending parking requirements for housing in transit-oriented areas 
  • Allowing 4–6 homes on most lots and 
  • Considering the legalization of low-rise apartment buildings with a single staircase, instead of two. 

The first of three important bills was introduced on November 1, 2023. By November 30, all three bills had been through first, second, and third reading, committee, and had been given royal assent. Both supporters and opponents of these changes have said the government is “ramming” these changes through, though they disagree on whether this is a good or a bad thing. For supporters of these changes, housing delayed is housing denied, and the speed of the reforms has been welcome. 

This is in addition to moves earlier in the year to establish housing targets for municipalities with sticks and carrots to ensure that these targets are met. 

With these reforms, BC’s government has shown just how much can be done quickly by a government taking the housing crisis seriously—at least, it shows what leaders who are committed to abundant housing can do when they operate in a unicameral parliamentary system of government with strict party discipline. Together, these changes set a new record for rapid legalization of apartments and multiplexes in North America. 

Bill 47: Legalizing robust transit-oriented development 

Governments looking to spur housing construction have many options. Among the fastest is to simply and directly legalize multi-story apartments. Traditionally delegated to municipalities, land use zoning remains within the jurisdiction of state and provincial governments in Canada and the United States; they have authority to step in and create their own zoning where municipalities have been unduly restrictive or exclusionary. 

Recognizing this legal fact, British Columbia has just legalized up to 20-story buildings within 200 meters of all SkyTrain stops, 12 stories within 400 meters, and 8 stories within 800 meters. In addition, 8–12 stories are now legal next to many bus exchanges, and next to West Coast Express commuter rail stations, in all of the central municipalities of the Greater Vancouver region. Lower minimum densities and heights are also set for major bus exchanges in cities farther from Vancouver and outside the Lower Mainland. 

Quick table displaying data for minimum density and height in transit oriented areas of Vancouver metro area.

The result is that a significant portion of Vancouver, and parts of surrounding municipalities with SkyTrain, now permit mid-rise apartment buildings. 

Figure 1: SkyTrain, bus, and commuter rail stations in Vancouver, with 200-, 400-, and 800-meter radii. Courtesy of Joss Messmer, used with permission. 

These changes are part of Bill 47, which authorizes the Minister of Housing to designate transit-oriented areas (TOAs) and bus stations, setting both minimum densities and heights, as well as the distance from each class of TOA or bus station where they will apply. The Minister can also list new TOAs or bus stations by regulation, making it relatively easy to add new areas as SkyTrain expands, bus service increases, or future governments decide to upzone new areas with already-excellent bus service. 

Bill 47 requires local governments to designate TOAs under their own bylaws, but it provides that the Province can step in and directly zone for apartments if the minister concludes that the local government is stonewalling. 

Bill 47 also prevents cities from requiring off-street parking as part of housing projects in TOAs, except for accessible parking spots for people with disabilities. This moves away from the current system, in which cites arbitrarily decide how much parking each housing development requires and force developers to build that parking, whether residents want it or not. At $80,000 per underground space, these requirements can easily kill homes. It leads to the overbuilding of parking, too. A 2017 City of Vancouver study found that there were 1.5 residential parking spaces for every car in the dense West End neighbourhood—an oversupply of 8,000 parking spaces. Besides just the cost, building parking can slow construction, requiring huge and time-consuming parking craters before above-ground construction can begin. This is why the Squamish Nation’s Senawk project will have 6,000 homes with just 886 parking spots (it will have over 4,000 bike parking spots). BC Premier David Eby dismissed concerns about parking at Senawk as “NIMBY nonsense that I just don’t have a lot of time for because we’re in the middle of a housing crisis.” 

Opposition political parties have leveled a variety of criticisms at the bill. While supporting transit-oriented communities in principle, one legislator said that the bill will lead to confusion and that some fire truck ladders are only equipped to go up to four stories.  

Another common opposition claim is that new housing is racing ahead of available space in local hospitals and schools, to which the answer is, now and always: creating a housing shortage on top of a school or hospital shortage will not make things better. If we need schools for our children, then we should build those. And since we need housing, we should also build that. To the extent that new housing does increase population in a given area, it also brings in the property and income tax revenue that pays for new schools and hospitals. 

The opposition BC Greens have also vocally objected to Bill 47 on the grounds that much of the new, dense housing may not have any affordability requirements. (Notably, the same criticism is rarely levied against more expensive, existing, lower-density housing.) But in most cases, that new, dense housing will be more affordable than the single-detached homes that they replace. 

A more cutting critique of Bill 47 is its limited scope—in particular, its exemption, for now, of the south and west parts of the City of Vancouver, the areas of “executive housing” for the “crème de la crème” that have so long resisted apartments and transit. The entire area of Vancouver west of Arbutus has only one small, TOA-designated bus station. Future governments could (and should) remedy this limitation either by subway expansion on Vancouver’s west side or by designating more bus stations as TOAs—or better yet, both. 

Multiplex policy success to depend on FAR and accountability measures 

British Columbia’s government also passed legislation requiring municipalities over 5,000 people to legalize more small, multifamily housing across the province. With this, British Columbia followed Oregon, which legalized duplexes in cities over 10,000 people, plus triplexes and quadplexes in some areas; California, which legalized duplexes; and a variety of other jurisdictions. But the province went much further, legalizing four units on almost every lot, and six units on all but the smallest lots (more than 281 square meters), or near prescribed bus exchanges. 

A binding provincial policy manual correctly sets out the problem this policy addresses, that of single-detached zoning that bans other housing types from even being options for people: 

Single-family detached homes are out of reach for many people in a growing number of BC communities. However, zoning regulations that exclusively permit single-family detached homes often cover 70-85% of the privately held residential land base in communities. 

One analysis found that these changes could produce 216,000–293,000 additional completed homes over 10 years, across the whole province. 

In my last article, I argued that not just home counts, but also floor area ratio (FAR, the ratio of built floor space to lot size) was vital to small-lot zoning reform and that Vancouver should aim for a FAR standard of at least 2.0 to facilitate broad-based adoption of these zoning reforms. A FAR of 2.0 means that there is twice as much floor space in the building as there is lot area, so that a four-story building that takes up half of the lot would have a FAR of 2.0. Insufficient FAR standards can lead to marginal uptake that renders well-publicized zoning reforms merely symbolic. This happened recently in Toronto and in Victoria, BC. 

One provincial report suggests that the FAR for missing middle will be set at just 1.5. While this may satisfy demand in lower-cost parts of the province, it will be of limited use in the extremely high-demand parts of Vancouver. 

This policy also has a loophole that could be exploited by crafty municipalities seeking to maintain exclusionary zoning. Because the missing middle reforms only apply to detached and duplex zones, municipalities could enact their own fourplex zones at lower FARs. This would exempt them from provincial minimums while still falling below the provincial standards. Vancouver’s multiplex plan, for example, sets density at 1.0 FAR, just above the 0.86 FAR in detached home areas. City staff estimated this will spur 150–200 projects each year—a nice addition, but well short of the supply boost the city needs. To have the province’s largest city side-step the missing middle upzoning in this way would sent the wrong message. The province has tools to ensure compliance with both the letter and the spirit of its missing middle reforms, including further legislative amendments, and only time will tell the results of this showdown. 

The success of these missing middle reforms will depend on both the FAR set by the province to support the minimum units, and on the province’s ability and willingness to prevent municipalities such as Vancouver from sandbagging progress by adopting subpar quadplex reforms—reforms that will not unlock construction of new homes on a scale commensurate with the shortage.  

Considering single-stair apartment buildings 

Along with these changes, and in response to a 2021 report for the City of Vancouver by Seattle architect Mike Eliason, British Columbia also announced that it will consider removing an unexpectedly important impediment to building more, and better, housing: the requirement that apartments between two and eight stories have two staircases.  

This double-stair requirement is ostensibly a fire safety measure, though its effectiveness as such is questionable. What is unquestionable is that the double-stair rule severely constrains the number of city lots on which apartment buildings will fit. It also disqualifies whole categories of floorplans for the apartments in those buildings.  

Single-stair apartment buildings, which are ubiquitous in Europe and parts of Asia, can have smaller floor plates and lower construction costs than double-stair buildings. Because they fit on most individual lots, their developers can skip the time-consuming and therefore expensive process of assembling multiple neighboring lots for each apartment block. Double-stair buildings usually need an elongated rectangular floor plate with a corridor connecting the stairs at each end. The corridor entails that most apartments have windows on only one face.  

Single-stair buildings, in contrast, are usually erected around a central stair and have smaller floor plates. Most of their apartments are corner units, with windows on two faces, and in some designs, apartments span the depth of the building and have windows in three directions. Because both building codes and most humans prefer rooms with windows, single-stair buildings therefore make it easier to design larger apartments. (Vancouver-based documentarian Uytae Lee makes the case for single-stair buildings in a recent 12-minute video. Highly recommended!) 

All hail North America’s new zoning-reform leader 

After decades of damming the flow of apartments, transit, and renters, the regulatory walls of exclusionary zoning in British Columbia came tumbling down on November 30, 2023, when the BC Legislature passed Bills 44, 46, and 47. These measures put BC squarely in the lead of North American zoning reform. 

This shift was made possible by a striking realization on the part of the provincial government: housing is extremely popular. For example, a recent poll found that two-thirds of Vancouverites support a First Nations-led project to build towers for 24,000 people on the Jericho Lands on Vancouver’s pricey and sparsely populated west side. 

Housing is popular not just in Vancouver, nor just in Canada. A recent Pew poll found that 8 in 10 Americans support allowing apartments near train stations and job centers. 

Not everyone is on board with these changes, of course. Some former mayors and councilors complain that these new policies show “insufficient regard for the responsibilities of local and regional governments for community planning.” (Considering the advanced state of British Columbia’s housing shortage, perhaps excessive regard for local and regional governments was the problem all along.) 

Minister Kahlon might have had these critics in mind when he told the Legislature that “in some communities throughout British Columbia, restrictive zoning and delays in development approvals continue to slow down the delivery of homes.” 

Although the reforms stop short of where they might have gone, particularly on Vancouver’s west side, they do mark a profound break with the past and a welcome new day in the province. 

With transit-oriented areas, missing middle upzoning, parking relaxations, and possible single-stair reform, BC’s government is no longer a laggard behind Oregon and Washington (or Montana, Anchorage, or Boise). Indeed, the province of British Columbia is not only Cascadia’s new abundant-housing-policy leader but has set a new standard for improving affordability and the built environment in North America. 

Next—and Sightline will be watching—comes the implementation phase: bringing local rules into compliance with the new provincial reforms. 

Lawmakers Across the Political Spectrum Should Help More Alaskans Vote

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Conventional political wisdom says that laws to make voting more convenient help Democrats, but not Republicans. That doesn’t appear to be the case in Alaska, where voters across the political spectrum would stand to benefit from policies that smooth the way to casting their ballots.  

Why does this matter? Because the Alaska legislature can still mobilize to get a big voter access bill over the line in 2024, after two consecutive years of attempts. But the sticky false narrative of how it would help the left and not the right blocks passage of these common-sense voter laws.  

The truth is that in Alaska, registered Republicans, Democrats, and especially independent voters could all stand to gain from pro-voter laws like same-day registration and a cure process for mailed ballots. Similarly, at the federal level, more reliable mail service would help all voters across the political spectrum (and not just during elections).   

For the third year in a row, lawmakers in Juneau have the legislation before them to make it happen.  

Alaska has a history of middling voter turnout 

In Alaska’s most recent six elections, statewide voter turnout1To calculate voter turnout in each election, we divided the number of ballots cast in an election by the citizen voting age population. Our approach differs from that of the state of Alaska’s, which calculates turnout based on the number of registered voters. We opted to use the number of citizens of voting age as the denominator because it provides for a more consistent comparison across jurisdictions and years, and controls for a big jump in registered voter numbers in 2018, when Alaska implemented automatic voter registration. For the quantitative analysis in this article, we relied on data from the Alaska Division of Elections and the US Census Bureau. Official election results are available on the Division of Elections website in both machine-readable (text file) and human-readable (PDF) formats, as are official descriptions of the state’s legislative districts. To process this many records, we parsed the text file data using the statistical programming language R and spot-checked our work against the PDF reports. We collected Census data using the tidycensus R package, specifically from the American Community Survey 5-year estimates. ranged from a low of 17 percent in the 2016 primary election to a peak of 68 percent in the 2020 general election. If voter participation statewide were graded using the Anchorage School District system, the report card would say “N” for “Needs Improvement.”  

Several factors contribute to patterns in turnout and can be observed in the chart below:  

  • Public awareness of high-profile campaigns: High-profile contests, particularly the US presidency (starred on the chart below), motivate voters to go the polls, causing peaks during presidential election years and troughs at the midterms.  
  • General versus primary elections: More voters show up for general elections (blue bars in the chart below), when their votes will lead directly to a decision about who is elected, as opposed to primary elections (light brown bars in the chart below), which narrow the candidate field but don’t produce a winner.2We didn’t include any odd-year elections here because Alaska only holds state elections in even-numbered years. But most local elections in the state happen every three years, and voter turnout craters during these off-cycle, odd-year elections.
     
  • Lead time for voters and officials: Special elections often have the lowest turnout because the date isn’t set until a few weeks before the election. Election officials have less time to publicize information about the election, and voters have less time to plan when, where, and how they’ll vote. Alaska had one special election in 2022 to choose a replacement for U.S. Rep. Don Young, who died in office after representing Alaska in Congress for 49 years. The special primary (green bar) occurred in June 2022. The special general election was on the same ballot as the regular primary election in 2022.  
  • Voter profile: More experienced voters tend to pay more attention to the timing of elections and are more likely to vote. For that reason, special election voters tend to be more politically active and older than the average registered voter in the same district.3These last two factors stacked on top of each other for 2022’s special primary election, which only had one contest on the ballot.
     

Graph showing how Alaska voter turnout has long had room for growth 

Aside from the factors listed above, turnout in individual elections can vary significantly for other reasons. On one hand, turnout could go up if the election were conducted fully by mail (indicated by white dots on the chart above), improving convenience for voters, or if a candidate or contest received a lot of media coverage and inspired more voters to come out. On the other hand, turnout could go down if the only statewide office on the ballot one year had a popular incumbent running uncontested, so voters didn’t feel the need to show up, or if candidates discouraged voters from participating. 

Case study: The 2022 midterm election 

Consider 2022, a midterm year when the absence of a high-profile presidential contest means fewer voters typically participate. That year, Alaska posted strong turnout for the primary and slightly lower than usual turnout for the general election. Attributing turnout numbers to any one factor would be a huge mistake, but listing the factors that might have played a role is kind of fun.  

In 2022, Alaska’s electoral landscape underwent dramatic changes on many fronts. The big news was the death of Rep. Don Young in March. State election officials had to scramble to hold a special primary election in June and then combined the special general election with the regular primary on a single ballot in August. The state also debuted its system of open primaries and ranked choice general elections.  

Perhaps most importantly, Alaska election officials toggled between all-mail/absentee and in-person elections. In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread, Alaska moved to all-absentee elections and saw record high turnout. It revived the all-absentee approach in June 2022 for the special primary, posting turnout that exceeded most of the previous regular primary elections.  

But during the subsequent regular primary/special general election ballot in August and the regular general election ballot in November, the state reverted to its previous practice of requiring voters to request mailed absentee ballots. While turnout for the regular primary was strong, the general election numbers were down. It is possible that voters who automatically received a ballot in the mail for the 2020 general election were expecting more of the same in 2022. When they didn’t receive a ballot, they didn’t vote. (Please keep this in mind. We’ll return to the importance of consistent all-mail voting later in this article.) 

In short, for a variety of reasons, middling voter turnout has persisted among Alaskans through six elections across more than a decade. And, as we discuss in the next section, Republicans, Democrats, and Independents in Alaska cast ballots at roughly the same unimpressive rates through both midterm and presidential elections. Turnout, it turns out, is everyone’s problem.  

Alaska’s voter turnout is unimpressive for Republicans, Democrats, and everyone in between 

“Because there are nearly twice as many registered Republicans as registered Democrats in Alaska, similar percent turnout among those groups means nearly twice as many Republicans failed to vote as Democrats.”


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The chart below shows voter turnout by party for the last four general election cycles. We looked at the total number of registered voters in each party (and non-party) and figured out what percentage of them voted in each of the last four November elections. Since turnout is consistently lower during midterms than in presidential years, we chose two of each to provide apples-to-apples comparisons.  

Only a slightly higher share of registered Republican voters came out each cycle compared to Nonpartisans and Democrats, regardless of whether it was a midterm or presidential year. In every election, tens of thousands of registered Republicans, nonpartisan voters, and Democrats didn’t cast a ballot. And because there are nearly twice as many registered Republicans as registered Democrats in Alaska, similar percent turnout among those groups means nearly twice as many Republicans failed to vote as Democrats. 

  Graph showing how all Alaskans across the political spectrum can benefit from laws that help voters.

Looking at voter turnout by geography, the lowest-turnout state legislative districts include those near military bases in Anchorage and Fairbanks and in remote villages along the Arctic and Bering Sea coasts. That’s not surprising. The military is highly transient and skews young, so in addition to being new to Alaska, transplants in the armed services could very well be new to voting. And in rural communities, poor weather, unreliable transportation, and postal service vacancies can stymie even the most committed voters.  

With turnout percentages tracking about the same for all major groups of voters, lawmakers across the partisan spectrum should be rallying to address these issues and make voting easier for all their voters.    

What Alaska lawmakers can do to increase voter turnout 

Make it convenient, like Montana 

As we’ve seen, lawmakers can’t control every variable that affects turnout. But a key factor they can influence is convenience. Convenience greatly affects the likelihood a person will vote. Sure, a person’s decision to fulfill their civic duty is ultimately their choice. But just like sitting on hold for an hour makes it more likely that you’ll give up on protesting that denied insurance claim, deterrents to voting diminish the odds you’ll get your ballot in. If the laws governing election logistics make voting feel like great customer service, more people will do it. But if it feels like an insidious IQ test or an unwinnable game, constituents won’t bother.  

Take Montana, a state whose hybrid voting system supports both in-person and absentee voting. Montana already has in place some key pro-voter policies that Alaska has yet to enact. For instance, Montana allows voters to register on Election Day. It also makes absentee voting extremely easy by allowing permanent absentee registration for all voters, providing ballot tracking, using voter signatures as a verifier rather than Alaska’s practice of requiring unchecked witness signatures, and, like about two-thirds of US states, has a cure process for mailed ballots. It’s no surprise that Montana’s general election turnout is consistently high relative to other US states and has been higher than Alaska’s in all but one general election since 2012.  

Alaska’s Republican legislators tend to drag their feet on pro-voter laws. So it may be worth nothing that Montana is a very Republican state that reliably sends its electoral votes to Republican presidential candidates and whose state legislature is dominated by Republicans. Three of the four members of Montana’s Congressional delegation are Republicans. So is its governor.  

And lawmakers on both sides may find comfort in a study by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics that found absentee voting doesn’t give one party an advantage over the other. “All told,” the study authors wrote, “The sharp increase in absentee voting in 2020 wasn’t disproportionately beneficial to either presidential candidate.” 

Strengthen the postal service 

In addition to passing Montana-style pro-voter laws at the state level, Alaska lawmakers at all levels of government should be advocating for the US Postal Service to boost recruitment efforts for postmasters, who manage employees and oversee the delivery of ingoing and outgoing mail. The post office plays a critical role in delivering ballots from polling places to vote counting centers on time and ensuring timely postmarking of absentee ballots sent on or before Election Day. A study published in 2023 in the Election Law Journal found that convenient absentee voting laws boost voter turnout, but that even in states with restrictive absentee voting laws, good postal administration alone helped increase voter participation.  

The issue of functioning post offices is particularly acute in rural Alaska. Nearly 80 rural communities across all regions of the state don’t have a postmaster, according to a recent count by the US Postal Service. In 2022, the US Postal Service failed to deliver ballots from six rural Alaska communities to the state’s election headquarters in time to be counted in the general election results. Though the number of ballots involved wasn’t large enough to affect the outcome, the late delivery resulted in the disenfranchisement of 259 voters. 

No need to reinvent the wheel on key pro-voter laws   

In 2022, Sen. Mike Shower, R-Wasilla, and former Rep. Jonathan Kreiss-Tompkins, D-Sitka, along with other members of both parties, collaborated on an excellent multipartisan election bill that would have made absentee voting easier and cleaned up Alaska’s bloated voter rolls. The legislature gaveled out before the bill could be passed. In 2023, the Alaska House and Senate took another run at improving the voter experience, but once again fell short.   

Still, those bills included a slew of sensible proposals that leaders could take up again to support Alaskans of all political stripes and ensure their constituents’ voices are heard:   

  • Give voters a cure process: Allow voters to correct mistakes on their absentee ballot envelopes so their vote counts rather than gets tossed out.  
  • Drop the witness requirement: Ditch the requirement for voters to have a witness sign their ballot. The state doesn’t even verify the authenticity of witness signatures but still tosses out ballots that lack them.  
  • Set up “one and done” absentee voter sign-up: Require a one-time sign-up to receive absentee ballots for all statewide elections, rather than repeated sign-ups year after year. Alternatively, allow voters a one-time sign-up good for a period of four years. While not as efficient as permanent absentee ballot registration, it would improve upon the current policy requiring voters to re-register for absentee ballots every year.  
  • Same-day voter registration: For presidential and vice-presidential elections, Alaska already allows voters to register to vote on the same day they cast their ballot. The state should expand same-day voter registration to all contests to accommodate people who have moved between districts, are new to the state, or who did not apply for a permanent fund dividend and therefore were not automatically registered. 
  • Count absentee ballots sooner: Allow the Division of Elections to start processing (or even counting) absentee ballots no fewer than seven days prior to Election Day.  
  • Provide postage-prepaid return envelopes: Spare voters the search for a postage stamp—especially those without a secure ballot drop box nearby. They could drop the provided prepaid return envelope straight in the local mail. Alternatively, the US Postal Service could continue delivering all absentee ballots, regardless of whether they have postage, and improve outreach to let people know their ballots will be sent even without postage. 
  • Establish a tracking system for absentee ballots: Allow absentee voters and election officials to track their ballots with intelligent mail barcodes. Get live updates when the Division of Election mails it out, when the voter receives it, when the Division receives it back, whether they find any problems with it, and when they’ve counted it—not unlike tracking an online order. 
  • Audit the master vote list: Alaska is already one of 31 states belonging to the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a program for keeping voter lists clean and accurate. Using ERIC, states can remove from their rolls voters who have passed away, moved, or registered to vote in another state. They can also update the addresses of those who move within Alaska. But even after using ERIC’s data to remove these voters from the rolls, Alaska still has more registered voters than voting-age residents. Alaska can ensure it’s using the best available information sources for keeping voter lists updated with biennial third-party audits of the master voter list. 

Helping Alaskans get beyond so-so turnout 

Aside from the 2020 general election, when Alaska ran a universal vote-by-mail election and a nail-biter of a presidential contest brought voters out in droves, turnout in Alaska has hovered right around 50 to 60 percent. Though middling voter turnout occurs regularly, it doesn’t have to be the norm. Lawmakers on both sides have a strong case for supporting upgrades to the state’s voting system rather than engaging in another run-of-the-mill partisan fight.  

Our analysis shows ample room for improvement in turnout for Alaskans across all major political groups. And while we didn’t actually break it down, it’s safe to assume the beneficiaries of more voter-friendly policy would include all sorts of Alaskans: military personnel and civilians, urban and rural residents, newbie and seasoned voters, subsistence users and supermarket shoppers, skiers and snowmachiners.  

Obviously, these groups overlap, and that’s really the point. Every eligible voter in Alaska, not just certain demographic groups or members of one political party, would benefit from a smoother voting experience. And state lawmakers are the people with the power to provide it. 

Updated: Housing Bills to Watch in Washington in 2024

Lieutenant Governor Denny Heck declared 2023 “the year of housing.” From Spokane to Skamania to Seattle to Skagit County, Washingtonians have cried out for solutions to control the state’s soaring home prices and rents and worsening instability and homelessness.  

The legislature stepped up with a suite of housing affordability bills, lifting bans on fourplexes, duplexes, and basement and backyard apartments (ADUs) in cities and towns across the state; cutting red tape and costs added by delayed permitting and excessive review; opening pathways to homeownership; and making unprecedented investments in low-income housing and supportive services.  

State leaders made great strides in 2023, but Washington’s communities still need more affordability solutions. A decades-in-the-making shortage will take more than a single year’s concerted action to solve.  

Fortunately, this year lawmakers are stepping up again with a raft of housing bills, even though 2024 is a “short” session, only two months long. And like last year, the bills cover all three of the policy pillars necessary to take on a housing crisis, known as “the three Ss”:  

  1. Supply: More new homes to reduce the shortage and cool rents and prices 
  2. Stability: More protections to safeguard those with the least housing security  
  3. Subsidy: More subsidies to help those who can’t afford what the market offers 

Sightline’s expertise is on zoning and other regulatory obstacles to housing affordability, so that supply pillar is where we focus our state housing policy work. However, Sightline also supports stability and subsidy policies. Alone, each “S” is insufficient; together, they form a mutually reinforcing suite. 

Below we summarize around 20 of the most impactful housing bills introduced in Washington’s 2024 session across the three Ss, plus a bonus section of other housing-related bills. Status is current as of March 1, the cutoff for passing bills.* We also note their status as of February 13*, the cutoff day for passing bills out of their house of origin. As a refresher, bills must pass out of both the House and Senate via a “floor vote” of all the chamber’s members; this occurs after the bill has been heard and amended in one or several committees of that chamber. Our icons are as follows:

Double green check marks with a circular border

Passed both House and Senate

A green check mark with a circular border

Passed either House or Senate

grey_pencil

Not yet passed either chamber 

A red X with a circular border

Dead

*Bills with a fiscal component can be exempted from the March 1 cuttoff if they are deemed “necessary to implement the budget.”

1. Supply Bills

Supply bills loosen overly restrictive zoning laws and regulations that needlessly impede home-building. Adding homes—especially in places with lots of jobs that drive high demand for housing—keeps average prices and rents lower for everyone. Supply measures support subsidy measures because lower prices and rents mean market-rate housing is more affordable to more people, which reduces the need for funding to subsidize housing. And when housing is abundant, stability measures such as rent stabilization are less likely to backfire by squeezing the supply of rentals and will still prevent gouging.   

Double green check marks with a circular border

Legalize community-centered, economical housing: Co-living homes 

PASSED HOUSE AND SENATE HB 1998 legalizes co-living homes statewide on all lots that currently allow multifamily housing with six or more units per lot. Co-living homes are a low-cost housing option in which each resident has a private bedroom or living quarters but shares with other residents a common kitchen, bathroom, recreational room, or other facilities. Read more from Sightline Institute and from KUOW.

A red X with a circular border

Legalize lot splitting to create lots for smaller, less expensive houses 

DEAD HB 1245 allows homeowners to sell off part of their house lot for the construction of another home, authorizing subdivision into lots as small as 2,000 square feet, creating more affordable homeownership choices while also providing financial options for existing owners. Read more from Sightline Institute and from the Black Home Initiative. In 2023, HB 1245 passed the House 94–2 but then died in committee in the Senate.

A red X with a circular border

Legalize more homes near transit

DEAD HB 2160 legalizes four– to five–story apartment buildings within a half–mile of rail stations, and three– to four–story multifamily homes within a quarter–mile of bus rapid transit stops. It also requires housing built in these areas to set aside 10 percent of units as affordable to households earning 60 percent of area median income, excepting parcels that already meet the bill’s density requirements or that are already subject to affordability mandates.

Double green check marks with a circular border

Make parking more flexible to allow the construction of lower-cost homes

PASSED HOUSE AND SENATE SB 6015 sets new state standards for more flexible and efficient parking configurations, including legalizing tandem parking and prohibiting requirements that parking must be enclosed. Read more. 

Double green check marks with a circular border

Reform building codes for small multifamily homes and energy efficiency 

PASSED HOUSE AND SENATE HB 2071 instructs the Washington Building Code Council to recommend (1) changes to the residential code so that it applies to housing with up to six units and (2) a reduction of the minimum habitable space for studio apartments. (The original bill’s provisions to allow external insulation for Passive House retrofits and construction to extend into setbacks, and to prioritize tree protection over parking mandates were amended out in committee, and the tree/parking provision was amended into SB 6015.)

A red X with a circular border

Legalize detached accessory dwellings in rural areas 

DEAD SB 6029 / HB 2126 allow the construction of detached ADUs outside of designated urban growth areas where attached ADUs are already allowed. Read more from The Urbanist. 

Double green check marks with a circular border

Prevent HOAs from discriminating against unrelated people who want to share a home

PASSED HOUSE AND SENATE HB 1054 prohibits an association of unit owners in a common interest community (a.k.a. an HOA) from regulating or limiting the number of unrelated persons that may occupy a home. It expands the protections provided by SB 5235, passed in 2021.

A red X with a circular border

Ease impact fee deferrals 

DEAD HB 1468 reduces red tape by repealing the state requirement for home builders to grant local governments a lien on a newly built home in order to be allowed to defer their payment of impact fees assessed on the home until after construction is completed.

Double green check marks with a circular border

Allow adjustments to urban growth boundaries  

PASSED HOUSE AND SENATE HB 5834 authorizes counties to revise their urban growth areas (UGA) subject to limitations, including that revisions may not increase the net acreage of of the UGA.

A red X with a circular border

Establish a housing production accountability system 

DEAD HB 2113, the “Housing Accountability Act,” grants the Department of Commerce authority to approve or reject the city and county housing plans required under the GMA based on whether the plans adequately address the full spectrum of housing needs. It also creates a system of accountability for jurisdictions with plans out of compliance, requiring them to automatically permit the construction of any new housing proposal that includes a specified minimum portion of homes affordable to lower-income residents. Read more from The Urbanist. 

A red X with a circular border

Monitor housing need 

DEAD SB 6152 requires the Washington Center for Real Estate Research to report on each county’s housing needs and prioritizes public works grants to encourage infill development or affordable housing. 

Double green check marks with a circular border

Improve the State Building Code Commission 

PASSED HOUSE AND SENATE SB 6291 streamlines State Building Code Commission (SBCC) operating procedures by establishing criteria for amendments to the state building code concerning timelines, adoption cycle flexibility, councilmember selection, technical advisory groups, and energy code consulting. 

2. Stability bills

Stability bills safeguard housing security in conditions of rapid change. Most commonly, they provide protections for renters, such as limits on rent increases. But they also include policies to help first-time buyers to attain the security of homeownership and existing owners to stay in their homes. These policies provide near-term support, in contrast and complement to the supply measures supporting construction of new housing—both market-rate and subsidized—which are longer-term solutions that play out over years.   

A red X with a circular border

Enact statewide rent stabilization 

DEAD HB 2114 and its companion SB 5961 set limits on the amount landlords can raise rent annually. HB 2114 caps increases at 7 percent per year, exempts buildings less then 10 years old, and allows greater increases when tenancy changes. SB 5961 amended the cap up to 15 percent, with an allowance for cities to enforce a lower cap. Read more here. 

A red X with a circular border

Increase funding for rental assistance 

DEAD HB 2425 authorizes cities to assess an additional 0.5 percent tax on residential construction to fund rental assistance for low-income households.

A red X with a circular border

Stop cities from denying permits to supportive housing

DEAD HB 2474 requires cities to vet with the Department of Commerce proposals for permanent supportive housing, transitional housing, indoor emergency housing, or indoor emergency shelters. It prohibits cities from denying a permit application if Commerce approves the proposal.

Double green check marks with a circular border

Support ownership opportunities for mobile home communities  

PASSED HOUSE AND SENATE SB 6059 strengthens requirements for notices to mobile home community residents of the opportunity to compete to purchase their community if put up for sale, and it increases eligibility for relocation assistance.  

3. Subsidy bills

Subsidy bills increase funding to deliver more homes to those who still can’t afford what the private market can provide. Subsidy is most commonly thought of as public dollars spent on building and operating affordable housing, but it also includes targeted tax and fee exemptions.   

The high cost of housing construction and land in Washington makes it impossible to produce new housing that is affordable to those on the lowest end of the income spectrum. However, because housing construction is so expensive, the public subsidy required to produce it at scale is enormous—which is why concurrent supply policies are critical to lessen the need for subsidy. And why concurrent stability policies are critical to protect low-income people who can’t get into subsidized housing because there isn’t enough of it. 

A red X with a circular border

Establish a graduated REET as a permanent revenue source for affordable housing  

DEAD HB 2276 imposes a new real estate excise tax (REET) of an extra 1 percent on property sales over $3.025 million and directs the revenue to the Washington Housing Trust Fund and other affordability programs. It also lowers the REET from 1.28 percent to 1.1 percent on sales from $525,000 to $750,000. 

A red X with a circular border

Exempt affordable housing development from sales and use taxes 

DEAD HB 2219 authorizes cities to establishes a sales and use tax exemption for the construction and maintenance of affordable housing by nonprofits. 

Double green check marks with a circular border

Grant sales and use tax deferrals for commercial-to–housing conversions that provide affordable homes 

PASSED HOUSE AND SENATE SB 6175 allows a city to establish a retail sales and use tax deferral program for the conversion of underutilized commercial property to affordable housing. It requires a set–aside of 20 percent of units affordable to moderate incomes and half of units at or below federal fair market rents or prices. 

A red X with a circular border

Tax short-term rentals to fund affordable housing 

DEAD SB 5334 authorizes local governments to impose a special excise tax of up to 10 percent on the furnishing of short-term rentals and to use those tax revenues only for affordable housing programs. 

Double green check marks with a circular border

Create a revolving loan fund for affordable housing development 

PASSED HOUSE AND SENATE HB 1892 creates a new state revolving loan fund program to administer loans to eligible organizations to support the development of housing for low–income households (earning from 50 to 80 percent of area median income).

A red X with a circular border

Fund social housing

DEAD SB 5975 expands the scope of affordable housing eligible for state funding, including the Housing Trust Fund, to include social housing. Social housing means housing on land owned in perpetuity by a public housing or development authority, the state, or other political subdivision that is available to households earning up to 80 percent or 120 percent of area median income.  

Double green check marks with a circular border

Increase funding for affordable ownership housing development 

PASSED HOUSE AND SENATE HB 6173 authorizes cities to use revenue from sales and use tax to fund the construction of housing intended for owner occupancy that’s affordable to households earning up to 80 percent of area median income.  

Other related bills 

A red X with a circular border

Creation of a new state Department of Housing  

DEAD HB 2270 authorizes Washington’s Office of Financial Management to hire a consultant to study creating a new state Department of Housing.

Green Checkmark

Allowing neighborhood cafes in residential areas 

DEAD HB 2252 would allow non-drive-through neighborhood cafes to establish in residential areas, with limited menus and hours of operation. Read more from The Urbanist.

A Housing Agenda for Oregon: More Homes without Higher Prices

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Oregon is basking in a bit of bipartisan consensus. The state, most people agree, needs more homes.

That’s it. That’s the extent of the consensus. As the state’s brief 2024 legislative session launched this week, Oregonians on left and right were girding for battle over what, exactly, to do about this shared housing shortage. In the middle of the battlefield was a bill developed by Gov. Tina Kotek, which includes various ideas from left, right and center aimed at accelerating homebuilding.

But as many lawmakers and interest groups try to tug the contents of that bill in their direction, it’s also worth stepping back to ask: What, in the broadest sense, caused this decades-long underproduction of housing that we can all agree exists? Before Oregonians start negotiating over specific policy goals like quick-and-dirty sprawl allowances or revolving zero-interest loan funds, they should understand in some more general way why this problem, unlike shortages of toilet paper or baby formula, seems unable to solve itself.

The answer to that question—what actually causes housing shortages?—is the starting point for a new Sightline series that begins today. In the weeks and months to come, we’ll lay out a housing agenda that Oregon could achieve under its most housing-focused government in many years.

But first, as so often happens in the first U.S. state to impose state-level urban growth boundaries, we need to talk about urban sprawl.

To avoid growing out, grow in. but what stops infill?

For decades, many Oregonians have claimed that the simple answer to Oregon housing problems is that in Oregon, developers are not allowed to build subdivisions wherever they can afford to. Instead, “urban growth boundaries” around every city let the state and regional governments dictate where new suburban development is allowed. The boundaries are designed to gradually expand as needed, but some say they should expand faster, or be abolished.

To which other Oregonians have long replied: but there’s lots of space for more homes inside urban boundaries. It’s in backyards, abandoned malls, half-empty parking lots, and the sky.

Damon Motz-Storey, head of Oregon’s Sierra Club chapter, spoke for many environmentalists on Sunday. “I see empty lots in popular, central Portland neighborhoods all the time,” Motz-Storey wrote. Motz-Storey was right; as right as if they’d said it about Hillsboro, Salem, Monmouth, or Burns.

But Motz-Storey’s accurate observation also raises a question. Why does one see empty lots all the time? If these would be good locations for housing, why weren’t homes built there already?

The answer, once you clear away all the details, is not complicated. The thing that stops homes from being built in a housing shortage is that the cost of building them outweighs the revenue they would bring in.

Pointing at an empty lot or shopping mall isn’t, in itself, an answer to a housing shortage. To actually create more infill housing in a market economy, one or both of these two things has to happen:

  1. the cost of building infill homes needs to go down, or
  2. the amount of money to be made by building infill homes needs to go up.

Those are the options. There aren’t any others.

We won’t STOP RENT HIKES until we cut the cost of building homes

A market economy, of course, can include government and public programs. And that’s one way to solve for the two-factor equation above: with public housing subsidies.

When the government spends tax money to subsidize a poor person’s rent, or to hire people to build and manage a new below-market apartment building, that’s a form of option (2) above. This can be good. But it’s only as good as we can find public money for it—and there are always plenty of competing ideas for how to spend public money. (On Wednesday, state economists estimated that Oregon’s legislature has about $1.3 billion in new money to allocate this year; Kotek’s housing bill, if fully funded, would use more than a third of that.)

The other, and unfortunately far more common, version of option (2) is something that almost anyone who’s rented a home in Cascadia in the past 20 years has plenty of experience with: rent hikes. When there are more people looking than there are homes in places people want to live, people bid against each other for the ones that exist. Landlords get more negotiating power, prices go up, and people with less money get locked out. If the government limits rent hikes, as Oregon does, that can slow this process a bit for some people. But it can’t stop the process.

The whole basis of Oregon’s consensus about the need to produce more homes is that rapidly rising home prices are bad. In that sense, “accelerate homebuilding by waiting for rents to go up” is perfectly acceptable to a real estate developer, but for the public it’s no solution at all.

So, if we don’t want rents to go up and we don’t have unlimited public money to subsidize rents, what’s left? Option (1): making it less expensive to build homes.

When it’s getting less expensive to build homes, rents don’t need to go up before more homes get built.

This is the escape hatch; this is the win-win scenario. And the bad news for Oregon this winter is that almost nothing in Gov. Kotek’s big housing bill advances it directly.

Oregon has many opportunities to reduce barriers to infill homes

A recently built three-story apartment building.

A small apartment building in Newberg, Oregon, created nineteen mid-price market rate homes near downtown. Photo: Michael Andersen/Sightline.

Here’s the good news: Gov. Kotek seems to know what’s up.

“Oregon currently has a shortage of 140,000 homes across our state,” she told the legislature last year, testifying for a prior version of her bill that didn’t include urban growth boundary expansion but would have done more to reduce barriers to infill housing. “This deficit negatively impacts our state’s economic growth. It has made homes less affordable to Oregonians looking to move up the economic ladder, and it is the fundamental cause of our homelessness crisis.”

“I know these are difficult conversations,” Kotek went on. “But we must be willing to do things differently if we are going to stop making it so unreasonably difficult to build housing in our state. We must act with the level of urgency that Oregonians are demanding of us.”

Maybe that attitude is why Kotek and some legislative colleagues in both parties last year passed several other bills that could, if implemented well, reduce the cost barriers to infill housing within current urban growth boundaries. And why they’re considering future laws that could do more.

In this series, Sightline will look, one by one, at these opportunities for Oregon to find an escape hatch from its housing shortage. We’ll look mostly at potential state policies, but also some local ones. We’ll be looking past the month-long legislative session that began this week toward the long five-month session in 2025. And we’ll be focusing on the politically achievable, including incremental changes that could improve Kotek’s flagship housing bill in 2024. (Which, to be clear, does include various good ideas worth passing.)

“Our lawmakers should be doing everything it takes to increase housing density and add housing to inner areas,” Motz-Storey, the Sierra Club director, wrote on Sunday.

Maybe, even in an election year, most Oregonians can agree on that. Because if we don’t go looking for ways to hold down home prices, higher home prices are going to come looking for us.

Inside Minnesota’s People over Parking Act, with Chris Meyer

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If Minnesota becomes the first state to end parking minimums, it’ll be thanks in large part to Chris Meyer. 

Since he read the High Cost of Free Parking over a decade ago, Chris Meyer has been on a mission to liberate new homes and businesses from costly parking mandates—rules that dictate every building have a pre-determined minimum number of parking stalls. 

From writing about parking minimums in his college newspaper, the Minnesota Daily, to handing out copies of Shoup’s book to Minneapolis City Council members, Chris has been sowing the seeds of reform wherever he is. “I’ve never met anyone that is as excited about parking than Chris Meyer,” US Representative Ilhan Omar said at the bill’s press conference, recounting the years she worked at city hall leading up to Minneapolis’s 2015 transit-related parking reform. Meyer went on to serve on the Minneapolis Planning Commission, which added the City of Lakes to the list of cities who fully repealed parking minimums in 2021. 

Now, as legislative assistant to state Senator Omar Fateh, he is behind an ambitious new bill in Minnesota that would prohibit parking mandates across the state: All cities, all uses. Sightline called him up to learn more. 

Chris Meyer is still handing out copies of The High Cost of Free Parking. Photo by Jeff Harrison.

Chris Meyer is still handing out copies of The High Cost of Free Parking. Photo by Jeff Harrison.

Catie Gould: How did the People over Parking Act originate? 

Chris Meyer: I suggested it to my boss [Senator Fateh]. He was persuaded it was a good idea, because he cares a lot about housing affordability and climate action. This was a good way to take on both of those issues.  

Latest draft of the Minnesota People over Parking Act in its entirety.

Latest draft of the Minnesota People over Parking Act in its entirety.

CG: You took a pretty bold stance. No minimums at all, no exceptions. What is your thinking around the politics of that versus incremental reform—like no minimums for certain uses or around transit? Those approaches seem more common. 

CM: A more modest version would probably have an easier time passing but—first, the reception has been pretty good! The Star Tribune, the big paper here, their editorial board wrote an opinion piece in support of the bill. And a GOP legislator just came out in support. Opposition has been more muted than anticipated. But even if it hadn’t been, I felt like it was important to make the case for the full-fledged elimination of parking minimums, across the board. 

Parking minimums are only ever bad or pointless.


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I know a lot of other places started with removing them around transit stations. That’s how Minneapolis did it as well in 2015. But I feel the case against parking minimums is just as strong regardless of whether it’s a small-town, suburb, or a big city, and regardless of how car dependent the place might be. I’m from a small town of 6,000 people. We have a nice downtown main street. It would be illegal to build as it is under parking minimums. There would be too much parking required between buildings for it to be a nice, walkable, main street. In small towns it makes sense to get rid of these. It makes sense to get rid of them everywhere. 

Parking minimums are only ever bad or pointless. If you set requirements low enough that they would be building it anyway, it’s a pointless requirement. If you set it above what they would be building otherwise, then you’re forcing unnecessary parking to be built. So regardless of the situation, we felt that it was important to communicate that these parking minimums are bad policy everywhere.  

CG: Has statewide parking reform ever been attempted in Minnesota before? 

CM: Not to my knowledge. If it has, no one knows about it because it seems like everyone is being introduced to the idea for the first time. 

CG: Will this bill have an impact on people’s everyday lives? 

CM: It’ll be a gradual one. Minneapolis, St. Paul, and now Duluth also eliminated parking minimums as well. As we did that there wasn’t any dramatic change overnight. But gradually it did reduce housing costs pretty substantially. There was national coverage of how Minneapolis was keeping inflation low because rents were staying low. That was largely because of reforms like this, that allowed more housing to be built. 

CG: Why does the state need to be involved? Parking issues are incredibly local. 

CM: Cities have only ever had the right or ability to implement zoning policies because the state delegated that to them in the 1920s. And from the start, there have always been parameters around it, and they have adjusted those parameters over time. So you can’t, for example, implement racist segregation zoning. We believe it’s important to adjust the parameters to account for the housing crisis and the climate crisis, which are two of the biggest crises of our time. 

CG: How are you talking about this differently with your Republican vs. Democratic colleagues? 

CM: So, my boss is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. He’s the polar opposite of some of the other legislators who are interested in this. And he comes at it from the perspective of caring about climate action and housing affordability. But other people who care about free markets and property rights and freedom are supporting as well. So there’s a very diverse ideological coalition who wants to see this happen. 

CG: How do you respond to concerns that people still drive, they still own cars, and therefore they need parking? 

CM: I will nod in agreement when they say that. Just let them decide how much parking they need. 

CG: I was impressed by the number of organizations that were on stage at the press conference. How long have you all been talking about a policy like this? 

CM: A lot of the main players involved were also previously involved in the efforts in 2015 [eliminating parking mandates around transit in Minneapolis]. They’ve been having discussions on how to make things more affordable, less car-dependent, and reduce carbon pollution for quite a while. So organizations like the Sierra Club and SEIU already understood the issue pretty well. 

Senator Fateh introducing the Minnesota People Over Parking Act. Photo by A.J. Olmscheid.

Senator Fateh introducing the Minnesota People Over Parking Act. Photo by A.J. Olmscheid.


CG: You’ve been a part of multiple parking reforms, at the city and now at the state level. Do you have any advice? 

CM: My advice for policymakers is to be ambitious. There are a lot of policymakers who understand that this is good policy but are worried about the politics. The politics won’t be that bad—that was the experience we had in Minneapolis. I would also advise people to start out with full elimination. If you need to compromise from there to get something that can pass, fine. But you should still express that parking minimums are bad policy across the board and should be fully eliminated. 

“My advice for policymakers is to be ambitious…. to start out with full elimination.”


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One of the goals of the Parking Reform Network is to get legislation like this at least introduced in every state. Even if it can’t pass, find someone to put the idea out there. Part of the function of that is not just enacting the legislation itself but getting the conversation started. We’ve already seen so much of that. 

One organization opposed to the bill said, “Parking minimums aren’t arbitrary. They are the result of studies and engagement.” After some extensive conversations, they have acknowledged they are, in fact, arbitrary. Now they’re like, “So what if we make them not arbitrary?” Well, they’re intrinsically arbitrary. You can refine them better, I suppose, but it’s always going to be what the demand is for a point in time. You don’t have the money to constantly do these studies to adjust for every situation. The people who are best to do that, figure out what they need, are the builders themselves.  

Even if this bill fails completely, it has started a lot of conversations that are going to lead to reform on the city level. That’s not good enough. There are some 800 cities in Minnesota. It would take forever. But it’s still moving the conversation forward. Not just minimums, either; we’re having productive conversations about things like parking benefit districts and sharing arrangements, and better using technology like apps that help you identify where the parking is. 

 

This transcript was edited for brevity and clarity. 

Anchorage Removes Barriers to Small Multifamily Homes

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The Anchorage Assembly has removed major impediments in city building and land use rules that have long discouraged builders from putting up tri- and fourplexes. The changes are the latest in a series of reforms that could spur more infill housing in a wider variety of styles and price points in Alaska’s largest city. 

City code saddled tri- and fourplexes with a raft of extra requirements, like having to pave over enough land for a vehicle to make a three-point turn. They were also subject to extra landscaping, lighting, drainage, and architectural requirements.  A one- or two-unit home on the same lot of the same size or even larger, even if built to house fewer people, didn’t have the same requirements, making them cheaper to build. 

No surprise, then, that Anchorage developers have been leaving a significant number of units on the table. No more than five triplexes have gone up in Anchorage in a single year since 2001, according to data provided by affordable housing developer Cook Inlet Housing Authority. Some years, no developer has built a single triplex. 

A working group consisting of officials from across the municipality, from the fire marshal to the planning department, along with local developers and community members, spent about a year hammering out changes. They consulted with officials from Shelby County, Tennessee, which reclassified structures of three to six units as residential instead of commercial under its building code. The process resulted in two sets of reforms, one in the municipal land use code (Title 21) and the other in the building code (Title 23).  

Developers have long known about the regulatory impediments to small multifamily homes. But only in the last couple years have high home prices, low inventory, a homelessness crisis, a trend toward smaller, more numerous households, and a shrinking working-age population propelled these and other housing supply fixes to the forefront of city priorities. 

The land use and building code reforms for tri- and fourplexes are the latest in a series of pro-housing ordinances passed with healthy majorities in the 12-member assembly. The assembly has done away with parking requirements, removed key regulatory barriers to accessory dwelling units, and changed zoning rules to encourage more residential construction downtown. In October 2023, the assembly hosted Housing Action Week headlined by Charles Marohn of the urban reform organization Strong Towns and unveiled a strategic action plan for housing. It’s considering further changes in the summer of 2024 to bring zoning rules into greater conformance with the pro-housing goals stated in Anchorage’s 2040 Land Use Plan. 

Both ordinances went into effect in January 2024. But before construction can really get going, developers are waiting for additional action by the city to change drainage requirements and walk back rules passed this summer dictating where on a site parking is allowed. 

Land use changes will treat small multifamily more like single-family homes 

In an 11–1 vote, the assembly on December 19 passed updates to Anchorage zoning code that eliminated a few of the major differences between how Anchorage code treats single-detached (a.k.a. “single-family”) homes and small multifamily homes. 

The minimum lot size for triplexes now matches that of single-family homes and duplexes in a residential zone known as “R-2M,” where triplexes are already allowed. Triplexes can go up on lots measuring 6,000 square feet or more, where they previously required an 8,500-square-foot lot. R-2M zones exist throughout the city: along the Chester Creek greenbelt and near Westchester Lagoon, the U-Med district and Campbell tract, Sand Lake and Campbell Lake, and Muldoon. 

The assembly also changed the allowed gross density of R-2M to 30 dwelling units per acre in accordance with Anchorage’s 2040 Land Use Plan. 

The reforms treat tri- and fourplexes like single-detached houses in other ways: 

  • In all districts, the height limit for homes with fewer than four units is 30 feet, regardless of the number of stories.  
  • They now are subject to the same residential design standards as one- and two-unit homes rather than the multifamily and townhouse design standards. 
  • Three- and four-unit developments no longer need to provide the city with a warranty guarantee their landscaping will survive.  
  • In the R-2M zone, any single structure larger than 5,000 square feet requires a 10-foot front setback, no matter how many units it contains. Otherwise, a 5-foot front setback applies. 

Finally, on the land use side, a separate wide-ranging ordinance on parking and site access contained changes relevant to tri- and fourplexes. In July 2023, the assembly modified a requirement that tri- and fourplex homes have a large enough driveway to allow for a three-point turn. Now, the city will allow multifamily homes to have the same driveways as those single-detached homes, where cars pull in and back out. But the driveways must be on a local street and cannot be wider than 20 feet. It’s an improvement over the old rules because the cost of paving over a substantial amount of square footage and designing homes around sprawling driveways is a huge deterrent to small multifamily homes and not required for single-detached or duplex homes. 

Updates to Anchorage building code 

On the building code side, the reforms reclassify triplexes as residential construction and allow independent professional plan reviewers to ensure triplexes comply with building code, an option already available to one- and two-unit projects. 

The assembly did not include fourplexes in all the building code changes since Alaska doesn’t allow local jurisdictions to override the status of fourplexes as commercial on the building code side. The Alaska Legislature, however, could act to have fourplexes recategorized as residential rather than commercial. The Washington State Legislature is considering a similar change that would reclassify homes up to six units as residential. These homes would then need to meet standards set under the International Residential Code, rather than the International Building Code, as is currently the case.  

Assembly member Kevin Cross called fourplexes “the platypus of real estate” while discussing the ordinance at a special assembly meeting before unanimous passage on January 16. Cross, who represents Eagle River, sponsored the set of ordinances along with Daniel Volland (Downtown and Fairview) and Randy Sulte (South Anchorage and Girdwood). 

Cross noted that code-wise, fourplexes are commercial, but federal housing finance agencies such as the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and Veteran’s Administration, as well as private financial institutions and local zoning codes, recognize them as residential. 

“So we treat them as kind of in between, and they end up getting bogged down and not built,” Cross said. 

Still, the assembly was able to establish uniform permitting fees for homes with four or fewer units. And, based on close consultation with the fire marshal and other fire safety professionals, the assembly enacted a sprinkler standard that costs less while maintaining life and safety standards. Specifically, the building code no longer requires sprinkler heads in spaces smaller than 55 square feet, like closets and bathrooms. The modified rule reduces construction costs by allowing for narrower water lines. 

“Bringing in a two- or three-inch water line made the cost of building fourplexes oppressive,” Cross noted. “Most of these now can be built with a standard ¾- or 1-inch water line.” 

The assembly also passed resolutions asking the Development Services department to propose, over the next 6 months, amendments to the city’s Design Criteria Manual that align fourplex construction requirements with residential construction. And in the meantime, permit reviews for projects with four or fewer units should go through the residential process, which is presumably shorter than the commercial one. The department also must establish a process for fourplex permitting and plan review workflows that is simpler and faster than the usual workflow for commercial construction. 

“It shouldn’t take as long as it would take, say, 15 or 20 units, to build a small, residential multifamily property,” Cross noted. 

Crucial changes still needed for parking and drainage 

Developers are still looking to city departments to make the following changes before the snow melts and the 2024 building season begins:  

  • Rolling back a design requirement passed in the parking and site access ordinance in July that limits on-site parking in front of new multifamily buildings. Multifamily builders note that the new rule takes away their flexibility on parking layout and say existing successful projects could not have gone up had this rule been in place when they were built. 
  • Dropping automatic requirements that tri- and fourplex projects provide drainage plans, which are costly and time-consuming, and instead base the need for a drainage plan on a project’s square footage.    

Making way for expanded housing choice and affordability in Anchorage 

Housing developers have long noted that the extra costs and time required to build anything larger than a duplex essentially forced them to build fewer housing units on lots that could have accommodated more. In 2019, a triplex design contest staged in Fairview by Cook Inlet Housing Authority surfaced multiple ways the land use and building codes made small multifamily homes significantly more expensive to build than one- and two-unit homes of the same size. 

Single-unit properties on large lots dominate the Anchorage housing market, driving up costs for anyone looking to buy or rent. Of the occupied housing units in Anchorage, 80,274 are single-detached homes, according to the 5-year American Community Survey in 2020. Combined, the six other housing types counted in census data, including duplexes, triplexes, townhomes, and mobile homes, account for the other 58,660 homes. 

“We’ve spent years writing codes and local policies that make it challenging to build anything over a duplex in our multi-family zoned urban neighborhoods.  It’s taking equally as long to unravel this web of rules that are making it hard for homebuilders and affordable housing providers to meet Anchorage’s housing needs,” said Tyler Robinson, vice president of community development, planning, and real estate at Cook Inlet Housing. “This is an important step and most importantly demonstrates the political will to ensure that we keep removing regulatory barriers.”