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The big, hard-fought housing ballot issue that Portland-area voters approved this month set aside 10 percent of its revenue—$65 million—specifically for low-income-affordable housing near transit lines. But as the same regional government draws up plans for the region’s next light-rail line, it’s also been quietly preparing to give the rest of the Pacific Northwest an object lesson in what not to do. It’s weighing whether to dedicate $168 million or...

We’re going to call it: No city in the Northwest, and few cities in North America, are doing parking policy better than Portland. With a unanimous vote last week, its city council dropped two crucial pieces into place. First, they agreed to adjust parking-meter prices up or down each year based on the number of people using them, aiming for an average occupancy rate between 65 and 85 percent—one to...

Every time someone parks a car on the street outside Steven Lien’s downtown Portland shop, an invisible clock inside his business plan starts to tick. If they’re stopping by his men’s underwear store, of course, he’s happy. If they’re not, he’s eager for the minute they’ll finish their errand, get back in their car and move along. “I can definitely say that when we get more turns on the parking...

When we at Sightline talk about the opportunity to end hidden subsidies for parking that drive up the cost of everything else in our economy, it can be hard to know how much it all matters. It’s just a parking space—homely and unremarkable. How expensive can it possibly be? A new report published last week by the Research Institute for Housing America offers a new way to think about the...

If I were Emperor of Cascadia, I would ban all rules that require new buildings to provide off-street parking spaces. The case against mandating parking couldn’t be stronger: parking makes housing more expensive; it reinforces reliance on carbon-spewing cars; it hinders travel by walking, biking, and transit; and it makes cities ugly. Not being the emperor, though, I’ll take what I can get, and the set of parking reforms Seattle...

This is a convoluted story about an 11-page memo on parking meters. It seems a trifle at first—an obscure bureaucratic kerfuffle. But it’s not. The subject of the memo is a surprisingly large opportunity for affordable housing in Cascadia, and the memo—an exercise in obstructionism—reveals much about why progress on building desperately needed homes is infuriatingly slow. It also points to a chance still available to put housing for people ahead of...