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Parking Mandates Are Vanishing Across Oregon

Update 7/20/23: Beaverton, the state’s seventh-largest city, unanimously voted to join the club and remove mandatory parking citywide.

In cities across Oregon, parking mandates are going out not with a bang, but a whimper.  

“It’s sort of been a sleeper issue here,” said Anne Catlin, the comprehensive planning manager for Albany, Oregon. When Albany repealed minimum parking requirements citywide earlier this June, not a single person from the public testified. Catlin didn’t recall the topic even making the newspaper. 

Normally, parking is one of the most contentious issues for local governments. Any relaxation of parking mandates—rules that prescribe a certain minimum number of parking spaces for any new home or business—is a political hot potato. But new state parking rules have taken that status quo off the table and turned what could be a big debate into a boring compliance exercise. “There really isn’t much to provide input on,” said Sandy Belson from the City of Springfield. “We’re just going to comply with the rules.”

By June 30, affected jurisdictions could choose to either eliminate all parking mandates or enact a host of more complicated regulations if they wish to retain minimums in some instances. The two other compliance paths include regulations ranging from pricing one in ten on-street parking spaces, to separating the cost of parking from rent, to creating parking benefits districts. All of which would take additional staff time and oversight. 

Planners for the City of Salem summarized the new rules succinctly in this image: 

Summary of policy options presented to the Salem Climate Action Plan Committee by city staff.

Summary of policy options presented to the Salem Climate Action Plan Committee by city staff. City of Salem.

At least seven cities have voted to go with the simple but sweeping Option 1: Portland, Salem, Corvallis, Tigard, Bend, Albany, and Central Point. Now over a million Oregonians live in communities where parking is fully voluntary. More cities are poised to join them the next year, after using a deadline extension granted by the state.  

Transit proximity already removed parking mandates from majority of lots 

Removing all parking minimums wasn’t the dramatic leap it would have been a year ago. Last January, state rules lifted parking mandates for all properties within a half-mile of frequent transit corridors and within three-quarters of a mile of rail stations. City-generated maps have revealed that those areas constitute the majority of lots in many cities. In Corvallis, those transit-adjacent areas covered 65 percent of the city. For Gresham, 53 percent. In Tigard, 62 percent.

The slivers of city not included were likely to be low-density residential neighborhoods, industrial land, or open space. “Most of our city falls within a half-mile of our transportation corridor,” Catlin said. “It was an easy decision.”  

Albany, ORAshland, OREugene, ORGrants Pass, ORMedford, ORTigard, ORPortland, ORWest Linn, ORSalem, ORLake Oswego, ORMilwaukie, ORHillsboro, ORCorvallis, OR

In Corvallis, city planners recommended removing all minimums because bus service can change over time. If transit service were downgraded, building owners might suddenly find themselves needing to add more parking to stay legal. Service-dependent rules could also give residents who like parking mandates a reason to oppose transit upgrades, thereby deepening transportation inequities.

Transit service changes are already putting zoning maps in flux. A planned improvement to bus line 71 in Milwaukie this upcoming September would have increased the fraction of the city without minimum parking requirements from 78 percent to 95 percent. Rather than keep adjusting things, they plan to fully eliminate parking mandates later this year. 

In addition to areas near transit, the state has also done away with parking mandates for a long list of uses for equity reasons, including for affordable housing, small residences, childcare facilities, and more. Those rules will give more flexibility to housing projects like a senior care facility that had its expansion plans scuttled over two parking spaces last year. 

State rules reduce barriers to new businesses 

Local governments are often well aware of the specific sites, like oddly shaped lots or old buildings, where parking minimums pose barriers to redevelopment. But before Oregon’s state rules, they didn’t have a lot of options for reforming those counterproductive codes without an arduous political process.  

One difficult property is a former restaurant in downtown Central Point, a small city outside Medford, that closed before the pandemic. After any six-month gap in use, city law requires any new user of the building to comply with current land use code, even if it hadn’t been up to code before. 

This empty 1964 building has a non-conforming parking lot, adding a barrier to re-use. Image by Loopnet.

This empty 1964 building has a non-conforming parking lot, adding a barrier to re-use. Image by Loopnet.

That is no small task for this site since the current gravel lot wouldn’t meet the city’s requirements for a parking lot. “Anybody who purchased this property and developed it would be required to pay for the parking lot, have it striped, landscaped accordingly, and then provide the required stormwater quality and quantity management facilities,” said Stephanie Holtey, planning director for the city of 20,000. “The improvements for those facilities are pretty expensive.”

The planning department was planning to amend the code to give downtown properties like this relief from parking minimums, but with only two planners on its staff, the city couldn’t have started a process to consider various possible code changes until 2024. But now, the mandates are simply gone and the job is done.  

The City of Tigard was Oregon’s first to officially repeal mandates citywide back in January. Tigard had already exempted some areas of the city, like downtown and the Tigard Triangle, from parking requirements. But elsewhere, parking minimums have still regularly caused headaches for Tigard. They can be a particular problem for commercial buildings whose parking lots are stuck at the same size as different businesses come and go over the years.   

Photo of a parking lot in a strip mall on a sunny day

Tigard Plaza. Photo by Catie Gould.

One of those businesses is owned by Jordan Elting. Obsessed with arcade games since he was a kid, he finally opened a brick-and-mortar arcade in February of 2022. It didn’t take long for the customers to start asking if they served beer. They didn’t. But demand was high enough that Elting put in his application for a state liquor license soon afterward.  

For nearly a year, his application couldn’t be approved because the new building use, now categorized as entertainment, required roughly 40 percent more parking than the former retail store that vacated the space two years prior. Meanwhile, Elting was watching potential revenue walk out his door. Later in the evenings, groups of adults would sometimes take off after learning there was no beer.  

Elting pointed out that several other businesses in the strip were already allowed to serve alcohol, and there was a second parking lot on the other side of the building that was always empty. The entire situation baffled Elting. “I’ve never understood what they expected to change here.” 

Photo of a goatee'd person in a grey shirt and black cap inside a video arcade

Jordan Elting at his business, Reset Button Arcade, in Tigard. Photo by Catie Gould.

Elting attempted to chase down documents from his landlord so the city could sign off on his application. But his issue remained unresolved when Tigard voted in December to eliminate its parking minimums citywide.  

“I honestly didn’t know how I felt about it when I first read it,” Elting reflected on a news article he had seen about the parking change in Tigard. But then the city planning department called to tell him the paperwork wasn’t needed anymore. “All right, I guess that’s what it meant,” said Elting. “That got rid of what I see as absolutely ridiculous red tape. Obviously, it ends up being a good change for businesses.” 

The public may save money, too. Schuyler Warren, a senior planner for the city, estimated that no longer having to work through cases like Elting’s will free up about 12 hours a week for city staff to put toward other initiatives.

Local opposition remains 

Many city officials don’t like Oregon’s new rules, which the state called “Climate-Friendly and Equitable Communities,” or CFEC for short. 

“Horrible name, horrible changes,” Millersburg Community Development Director Matt Straite described the CFEC program to that city’s planning commission in June. “We feel like they’ve really reached down from Mount Olympus and forced cities to do things they don’t want to do.”  

It’s a common sentiment among Oregon cities. Fourteen local governments filed a lawsuit last fall that challenges procedural issues with the state’s rulemaking process. The case is still pending. 

“This pretty much sucks, putting it bluntly,” Corvallis City Councilor Laurie Chaplen said in a hearing last October as she voted to comply with the new state law by repealing all parking minimums. 

Part of the issue is that the statewide relaxation of parking minimums is just one rule in a larger adopted package. Other mandatory parking reforms include requirements for bicycle parking minimums, electric car charging, and tree canopy coverage. That is in addition to designating climate friendly areas in larger cities and changes in transportation planning. As a whole, the package has been criticized as overly prescriptive. This month, the agency received an additional $2.7 million in funding to assist cities with implementation costs—an unusually large sum, but far less than cities said they’d need. 

In an effort to meet them partway, the state agency in charge, the Department of Land Conservation and Development, relaxed some rules this April. For example, the state reduced its standard for the mandatory amount of tree shade over large parking lots: 40 percent canopy coverage, down from 50 percent.

A boost for middle housing  

The additional flexibility over parking spaces has been particularly helpful for projects that add more homes to existing lots. In Ashland, a fourplex is using the state’s new flexibility to trade a couple of parking spaces for other outdoor amenities. In 2022, the four two-bedroom homes would have required seven parking spaces. “We could have made it work on this site,” said architect Tom DeVore, “but there are trade-offs.” After the rules were adopted in July, DeVore got together with his clients and asked, if it’s up to us, how much parking do we want to provide?  

“It just opens up so many more possibilities of what you can do on-site,” DeVore said. “Parking just takes up so much space.” 

Ultimately, they determined that Ashland renters would expect at least one parking spot for each household. Trimming their design from seven parking spaces to five allowed them to add a play area for children, shared gardens, and a larger shared patio. They plan to break ground in July.

Dylan Lamar, another small-scale builder located in Eugene, called the state action a blessing. “Thank god for CFEC,” he said. Lamar, who describes himself as a market-rate developer, aims to provide housing affordable to anyone making the median income and currently has two small projects in the works. Without any subsidy, he estimates his homes would sell for $210,000—half the price the typical detached home in Eugene. 

Lamar recently won a grant from the city for his first affordable housing development, targeting first-time Latino homeowners in the area. The four new homes will be sold for about $115,000 apiece, with one of them being fully accessible. Referred to as “grow homes,” three of them will have an unfinished attic to which the future homeowners can add more living space later on. None of the homes will have a dedicated off-street parking spot. 

These are exactly the type of projects Oregon hoped to create when it legalized “middle housing”—from duplexes to cottage clusters—in 2019. But though the housing types were now legal, even modest parking minimums could constrain sites too much to build. Lamar has no interest in tearing down the 1950s ranch house on his site, but it currently runs 8 feet away from the property line, too narrow for a driveway.

Thanks to the new state rules, he didn’t have to worry about that. The back lot homes won’t have on-site parking, and future buyers will simply use a sidewalk to reach their cars on the street. 

Concept art of a multi-unit home in a simple lot setting.

Grant Street Grow Homes will add these four new homes to an existing backyard. Image by Cultivate.

Despite the project getting a top score from city staff recommending funding, city council wrung their hands over the lack of parking.  

The state rules have made these types of debates moot, tipping the scales in favor of more housing for more neighbors. “I have 100 percent confidence this project would not have happened if the state had not taken action, both on middle housing and on CFEC,” said Lamar.  

What Can Portland Learn from America’s Oldest Proportional Election System?

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

Thanks to the charter change ballot measure voters approved in November 2022, Portlanders will see a few changes to the city’s election method and governance in the coming years. One of the first will be the November 2024 election, when voters will choose 12 councilors in 4 districts using proportional ranked choice voting.

Under the new system, Portlanders will be able to rank multiple candidates on their ballot, bubbling in their first choice, second choice, and so on.1Voters will be able to rank up to six candidates, including three write-in options, out of the entire field of candidates who filed for the election.
 Instead of a single candidate winning one seat with more than 50 percent of the vote, 3 candidates in each district will win seats with more than 25 percent of the vote each.2The 25 percent threshold comes from having three seats to fill in each district. In a race for one seat, like the Mayor or Auditor, the threshold is 50 percent (one over two) because only one candidate can get more than half of the votes. In these races for three seats, the threshold is 25 percent (one over four) because only three candidates can get more than one-quarter of the votes.
 Ballots are counted in rounds until these 3 candidates come out on top. Losing candidates in each round are eliminated, and their votes are transferred to the voters’ next-choice candidates. Candidates who pass that 25 percent threshold during counting will win a seat, and any votes above that threshold will be transferred to the voters’ next-choice candidates.3Following the newly-revised city elections code, a fraction of all votes for the candidate are transferred instead of the entirety of only some votes. This maintains the proportional effect while making sure that every vote is counted equally.

To get some ideas about what voters can expect from the new system, I talked to Cambridge, Massachusetts, City Councilor Burhan Azeem. Azeem is serving his first term on the council and is the youngest councilor in the history of Cambridge, home to the United States’ longest-running proportional election system. Since 1941, Cambridge voters have selected nine citywide councilors using proportional ranked choice voting. While Portland’s experience won’t look exactly the same as Cambridge’s, Rose City residents can learn a lot from the practices and results they’ve had over the last 80 years. Here are excerpts, edited for brevity and clarity, from my conversation with Councilor Azeem.

Why did you run for office?

There’s all sorts of political causes and stuff I really care a lot about: housing and transportation policy, as well as other things. But my first real call was showing up to City Hall and thinking, “This is not the city I see right outside the doors.” Cambridge is a very young city, even without counting kids.4 Of the 335 census-designated places with more than 100,000 residents in the 2021 American Community Survey (5-year estimates), Cambridge is in the top 25 for youngest median age (30.5, versus 38.4 nationally) and in the top 10 for youngest median age of workers 16 to 64 (30.8, versus 39.8 nationally).
 And especially when I first got involved in politics, everyone was fairly old. Besides our mayor, all my other colleagues currently on the city council are between 50 and 80. They’re all great people, but it was just very different than the city that was represented. Some of my main issues as a candidate were topics related to the universities we have in town, and I ended up getting lots of votes in areas where lots of students live. So I think the message you generate resonates with people.

How do Cambridge voters understand the proportional ranked choice system? Do you find yourself doing lots of voter education?

As a baseline, we have a good political culture, there’s really good explainers and other materials, Cambridge residents are extremely well educated, and enough people get it to explain it to other people who don’t. The government and council actually do a lot of voter education on top of that, because the median length of residency of a voter in Cambridge is so low that for a lot of people it’s their first time doing ranked choice voting.

One trade-off of our system of doing everything at-large is that we have almost 20 candidates run, and getting voters to understand the comprehensive differences between 20 candidates is really, really difficult. Cambridge voters tend to have a good understanding of who’s likely to win a seat and who the marginal candidates are that don’t really have a shot, but even the short list can still be a lot of candidates to sort through. So what the benefit might be of Portland having smaller districts is that you might have more like six candidates running. Six is a much more understandable number for most people; they’ll be able to get a sense of what’s going on in each district.

How do voters decide between all those candidates?

In Cambridge we tend to see slates, groups of candidates you’re aligned with based on your issues. The overlap between slates is not one-to-one, so there’s some people who I might be with on a pro-housing slate but aren’t part of my pro-bikes slate. Most of these slates are lists of candidates endorsed by advocacy groups, rather than a group of candidates explicitly allying themselves. It’s nonpartisan, it’s not Democrats and Republicans, but we have a pro-bike lobby that will independently say, “If you want to support bikes, go support these candidates and rank them however you want.” Voters tend to get a lot of voter guides from different advocacy groups.

There are some candidate-selected slates, it’s just that they’re less common because Massachusetts campaign finance law puts strict limitations on us. I was on a candidate slate where it was just three candidates, and we chose to work together and then made it clear to the voters that we were allied. The slate was two incumbents plus me, and one of them lost re-election while I won a seat. So the overall number of councilors from the slate stayed the same, even though who those specific councilors are changed.

How do these candidate slates impact campaign dynamics?

Here Councilor Azeem talks about the “surplus vote transfer” that happens during ballot counting for races using proportional ranked choice voting. If a candidate finishes a round of counting with more votes than the threshold needed for election, the votes beyond that threshold are transferred to voters’ later choices (similar to if a voter’s earlier choice was eliminated in a round). This surplus transfer helps create the proportional effect of the system, letting a big enough voting bloc elect multiple preferred candidates regardless of how individual voters ordered those candidates.

Those different overlaps between slates actually give you an incentive to be pretty nice to everyone, to get along and get things done. If we didn’t have ranked choice voting, if your goal was just to be the number-one vote-getter or be in the top nine, you’re worried about the person who’s closest to you in political positions just stealing your votes. But with proportional ranked choice voting, if you have even a slightly different position, it actually greatly reduces the stress level. I can afford to get along with someone who has the same positions and views as me, because we’re not directly competing. If there’s enough voters out there, it doesn’t matter if 60 percent of that bloc vote for him and 40 percent vote for me, because it’ll get rebalanced out during the surplus vote transfer.

If I have a campaign kickoff event, people who are nominally my competitors will show up because they might get a number-two or -three vote from my supporters. And when you’re in a debate, you don’t necessarily want to go after any particular person—well, maybe if there’s someone who’s on the complete opposite side of the ideological spectrum from you. But debates are much more constructive and moderated; people are gentle with their differences.

Do you think campaigning in Cambridge’s system is more civil than in other cities?

The way it plays out is that you want to keep other candidates close, but not too close; you want to be seen as someone who if a nearby candidate loses, their voters feel comfortable coming to you as their second choice. So if I’m pro-housing and pro-transit, the people who support candidates that are only pro-housing or only pro-transit have an option whether to support me or an anti-housing, anti-transit candidate with their second choice. So you’re in direct competition, to some extent, with the candidate who’s exactly opposite you. With those other two candidates, you want to try to be close to them so that their voters will give you a number-two vote, but you don’t want to be so close to one that the other’s voters won’t put you number two.

And that’s just the ranked choice voting part, but having multiple winners plays into this, too. Take the mayor, who is also pro-housing and pro-bikes. She’s extremely popular, she always gets 20 percent of the number one votes. So since those votes over the quota (10 percent) will get redistributed, everyone actually tries to be very close to her because they know that she’s going to win.5With nine seats elected in one citywide district, Cambridge has a threshold of 10 percent of votes to elect a councilor.
 So if they know that you’re close to her, if they’ve seen you at events together, her voters will rank you number two. So you definitely want number-two votes from other candidates, but you also need number-one votes of your own, a distinct identity and a base of people who will vote for you no matter what goes on.

How do these candidate slates impact governing?

“The slates help you naturally get a sense of what issues we can move on, because people campaign on them, and we’re pretty clear on where they stand.”


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Once we’re elected, slates help align the council’s policy ideas. Because we have two-year terms and new people join every term, it can be hard to figure out where you have a supermajority and where you don’t. The slates help you naturally get a sense of what issues we can move on, because people campaign on them, and we’re pretty clear on where they stand.

I think that we function mostly like a normal government. We’re fairly clear and transparent as far as governments go, and Cambridge voters hold us to a pretty high bar. The slates kind of say, “Here are the issues that we expect movement on, because these issues got a majority elected.” That tends to be fairly responsive; we’ve moved a lot on transit issues so far, and hopefully in the second half of the year we’ll move pretty aggressively on some housing issues.

One thing that changes with slates and ranked choice voting is that councilors can have a hard time with deal-making, giving up something of lesser value to get your main issues done, which I think is mostly good. People like that after the election they have a fairly good sense of how the next two years will turn out. Say my number-one issue is pro-housing and my number-two issue is pro-bikes, and there’s another councilor whose number-one issue is against bikes and number-two is against housing. So if they’re willing to give me the vote I need to get my pro-housing issue done, I might give them a vote on their anti-bike issue. That ends up being not ideal for me to do in a ranked choice voting system, because my number-one voters are people who are pro-housing and pro-bike. So if I end up being pro-housing but not pro-bike, that’s getting into a different lane, and those voters will find another candidate to support.

Who do you consider to be your constituency? Is it the entire city, the ten percent of voters who voted for you, or the communities and issue groups you’ve focused on?

It’s very clear to me who my base of core voters is, the people who I will get every time regardless of what happens. For me, this is people who are pro-housing and pro-transit, and people who tend to be affiliated with the universities. If they have something come up, I’m 100 percent on top of it. I’m leading the charge to make sure we get those issues resolved as quickly and effectively as we can.

But the vast majority of voters barely pay attention to local politics, and they like a lot of candidates, because with ranked choice voting candidates have an incentive to get along with everybody else. So if somebody comes to me and has an issue around gun violence, which is a signature topic for one of the other councilors, I won’t ignore that person and say, “Just go to the other councilor.” I’ll try to help them as much as I can, because it helps me to become their number-two vote; it’s hard to win with just number-ones.

But there’s also a chance I could become their number-one vote, and they put that other councilor number two; there’s a lot of fluidity. Cambridge has 22,000 people voting in every municipal election, which means 2,000 ballots helped get me elected. But there’s 8,000 people who put me on their ballots at all, maybe number two or three or four or later. If they’re impressed enough with me, they might move me to a number one.

So you do see that mobility historically: if somebody has a really good term, they could do a lot better than before, and if they ended up having a worse one, they go down in the rankings. So it forces you to be on top of your game even with people who are not your core base. If somebody voted for Burhan number two, they still consider themselves to be a Burhan voter. And most people even forget their exact ordering afterwards, so it’s very possible for them to vote for me number one in the next election.

So in between elections, how do you interact with constituents?

I’d put them into some different levels. Say 22,000 people vote in a municipal election. Fifteen thousand of them you never see after election day. They don’t really talk to city council, they don’t care what’s going on in City Hall, they did their job by voting. So for those people, you do a campaign event from time to time, go out door-knocking to say hi, show up to block parties and neighborhood events, give people a sense of who you are.

Then you might have 5,000 people who kind of pay attention, who are lightly interested. They vaguely know what’s going on, they read the newspaper, maybe they’re subscribed to your newsletter, maybe they’re part of a neighborhood group, they talk to you when they see you around in the neighborhood. They’ll also stay out of politics, unless there’s something that very deeply touches them or something that’s a hot-button issue. I think that those people end up being the group leaders for the first 15,000, where most of those 15,000 will go to one of the 5,000 that they know to give them their first level of advice on the election, then mix that with their own information.

Then you have maybe 2,000 people who are super involved, who will write to city council and comment on stuff, show up to meetings, follow you on Twitter, and really pay attention. Those people end up being the people who you most interact with in terms of writing policy or getting people to show up to protests or rallies.

And this might be the negative part of politics, but those different groups have different impacts on getting policy made. If I’m working on something that I think is extremely popular, but no one or even if only five people are going to show up to City Hall to speak in support of it, no one’s going to vote for it. I think that you don’t get anything done in City Hall unless you can have 100 people email or call in or show up to community meetings. So the reason we’ve had such transformative change in bicycle infrastructure is because we’ve had maybe 50 people who are dedicated, who will show up to a weekly community meeting every week for five, six years. And it sucks that you can’t just vote in an election for bike stuff and then it’ll appear, but it’s the system we have.

Since voters don’t have a single councilor they can claim as theirs, how do constituent services shake out?

Constituent services are casework that legislative offices take on for their residents outside of the legislative body, particularly interfacing with other parts of the government. Examples include accelerating the repair of a specific street, personally advocating for a property tax appeal, checking on a building permit that should have been issued sooner, or anything else a resident might call their legislator to get help with.

We do get constituent services; it just happens a little bit differently. Right now, we’re talking about the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the biggest landowner in Cambridge. They’ve had an open campus, you can go through any of their buildings, and a lot of Cambridge residents use MIT’s library. And right now, they’re continuing shutdowns and not letting the public use it, which is a big constituent issue.6Councilor Azeem and I spoke in August 2022, when MIT still restricted public access to many buildings under COVID-19 protocols. Many of these restrictions were lifted in December 2022.
 But everyone knows to just go to Burhan for that, so people reached out to me, and I was able to reach out to MIT. There was an issue around homelessness in Central Square, and there’s one city councilor whose brand is homelessness issues, so people knew to reach out to that councilor specifically. So councilors have pretty distinct identities, and for the vast majority of cases constituents know who to go to.

How does Cambridge’s nine-seat proportional system affect incumbents’ chances at reelection?

I think Somerville is a really great city to compare us to. They have seven ward seats and four at-large city councilors as well.7Somerville uses single-winner races for each of its seven ward seats. The four at-large seats are elected by bloc plurality, where voters can select up to four candidates on their ballots, and the top four vote-getters win a seat.
 They never get much competition for any of their ward councilors. And then at large, they get some competitors, but I can’t remember the last election where an incumbent lost. Cambridge is very different. We have nine at-large city councilors, and typically at least one incumbent loses every election cycle. So it’s very dramatic turnover. I will say as an elected official, it’s very stressful because you can lose every election.8While assessing “competitiveness” between two different electoral systems can be like comparing apples and oranges, candidate data from Cambridge and Somerville back up Councilor Azeem’s statements here. One or more Cambridge incumbents lost a reelection bid in six out of the last ten elections (2003-2021), and only one election (2003) saw all nine incumbents reelected. Over the same period in Somerville, incumbents only lost at-large seats in one election (2017) and district seats in three elections (2003, 2005, and 2017), and saw two elections with all 11 incumbents reelected (2009 and 2019). All seven Somerville ward incumbents ran unopposed in 2019, and in all ten elections at least three wards had unopposed races. Cambridge also saw more candidates run (2.3 per seat) than Somerville’s at-large races (1.7 per seat) during this period.

But even though city councilors change over time, it’s very proportional in that you will always have seven out of nine city councilors who are pro-other forms of mobility, like transit and bikes and stuff. That has been fairly consistent for a long time. And similarly, you see a fairly stable pro-housing majority, which has even increased over time. I think it’s because ranked choice voting to some extent negates the spoiler effect, so even with so many candidates to choose from, voters still get good representation at the end of the day.

Does Cambridge get a broad geographic dispersal of councilors with its citywide elections?

Absolutely. I think this is actually the best part about proportional ranked choice voting. We have had city councilors who were basically just representing East Cambridge, which is a very heavy immigrant, Portuguese-speaking community, and they would win solely by getting lots of votes in that district and not really competing anywhere else.9One example of this is Tim Toomey, who was a Cambridge City Councilor from 1990 to 2022 and represented East Cambridge in the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1993 to 2016. In the 2017 election, Toomey received about 35 percent of first-choice votes in the precincts making up East Cambridge, while receiving between 0 and 5 percent of first choices in most other areas.
 So kind of like a normal district system. And then you look at the Black community in Cambridge, which I think is very strong and integrated, and you have at least one Black candidate win every election cycle by getting votes spread throughout the city.10One example of this is Denise Simmons, who has been a Cambridge City Councilor since 2002. In the 2017 election, Simmons received between 9 and 20 percent of first-choice votes in most precincts.
 Sometimes you get pockets in other ways; I have strong support from students so wherever there’s a university, there’s clusters of my voters around there.11In the 2021 election, Azeem received 6 percent of first-choice votes citywide. He received over 10 percent of first choices in five precincts centered around Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including one MIT precinct where he received almost 70 percent of first choices.

“The most important identities to people are really what people end up voting around, whether that’s geographic or race-based or age or other sorts of occupationally based things.”


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So you see geographic clustering around different places, not necessarily just uniformly throughout the city or in a specific ward and district. I think that allows for really interesting combinations; the most important identities to people are really what people end up voting around, whether that’s geographic or race-based or age or other sorts of occupationally based things.

People imagine that the number one identity is geographic, that distribution really matters to people, and if you have an at-large proportional ranked choice voting system you won’t get much geographic distribution. I think that’s just false. If people care about it, it still happens. For example, a decent portion of the city is affiliated with the universities, which play a huge role in Cambridge. But there’s no district where those voters make up a majority, so you wouldn’t get that voice on council with just single-member districts. Even having just one person speaking to that issue now really helps. I think geography can be what people go to because it’s easy, but especially in a highly mobile city like Cambridge, geography isn’t the number one issue. I’ve lived in Cambridge for almost a decade now, and I’ve moved every year. My neighborhood wasn’t the most important identity that I carried to the council.

See the full interview on YouTube here.

Boise Poised for First Step Towards More Abundant, Affordable Housing

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Update: On June 15, after the publication of this article, Boise’s council amended, and then unanimously approved, its zoning reform proposal. The amendments removed many of the major obstacles to infill identified below. Starting Dec. 1, Boise will allow up to four homes by right on any residential lot as long as electric heat pumps are used, and ADU development will be free of anti-renter discrimination and additional parking mandates.

The rising tide of pro-housing policy in the Pacific Northwest is about to reach up to the popular mountain town of Boise, Idaho.

The city’s new zoning code, scheduled for a final vote by the city council this month, will legalize more types of housing in residential neighborhoods creating more affordable choices for the area’s growing population. While removing key barriers to increasing the supply of housing, the code also introduces some new ones. A full-strength embrace of abundant housing may require another round of reform.

Boise’s existing zoning code dates to the 1960s, when the city abandoned the flexible rules of the early 20th century in favor of exclusionary codes that limited residential neighborhoods to single-family detached homes on their own lot. The new code’s improvements to what’s allowed in residential zones include:

  • Decreasing the minimum lot size from 5,000 square feet to 3,500 square feet;
  • Simplifying the permitting process to lower the risk and costs for developers to gain approval from the city to build more housing;
  • Increasing the maximum size of backyard cottages and basement apartments from 700 to 900 square feet and ending city discrimination against renters in the primary house;
  • Allowing triplexes and fourplexes that were previously banned; and
  • Reducing off-street parking requirements for multiplexes by 50 percent.

Unfortunately, the last three bullet points come with new conditions: many of the newly allowed housing units will be subject to rent control through deed restrictions and incur higher costs due to requirements to meet sustainability goals.

An earlier version of the zoning rewrite, released in 2022, would have allowed construction of fourplexes by right in all residential zones. City planning officials later backed away from that idea and added new requirements that fourplexes must exceed the building code on energy efficiency and water use and must limit rents on some units with deed restrictions. These new requirements along with limits on the demolition of existing buildings included in the new code will ultimately constrain the production of this infill-friendly housing.

These late-arriving provisions of the new zoning code have a plausible logic: the city grants permission for more units per residential lot but in return developers must make the units sustainable and affordable through rent control. The problem is that these requirements don’t apply to single-family homes, so given the choice of redeveloping a lot with a large single-family home or, say, a fourplex, these added costs and conditions will push developers toward building familiar single-family homes.

Boise’s proposed zoning code embodies a skepticism that relaxing the existing barriers to building more units per lot will actually promote enough new supply to hold down prices. This distrust that the laws of supply and demand actually apply to housing resulted in the imposition of rent control on many of the smaller new units in residential zones. The experience of other cities shows that if the problem is high rental prices due to inadequate housing supply, then rent control makes it worse and more new construction makes it better.

It’s difficult to know exactly how infill developers will respond to Boise’s new code. Meaningful improvements in allowing smaller lots and more forms of housing could unleash a wave of new construction given the strong market for rental housing in Boise. But it is more likely given the new rules in the code that not much will change in the residential zones.

Boise’s new zoning code is 611 pages long; no one knows exactly how it will work in practice. Should the city council pass it into law this month, staff plan to work with the new code for one year to better understand its strengths and weaknesses. They will have an opportunity to revisit what’s successful and what’s not in the second half of 2024.

If Boise boosts its share of housing growth, its new code will be working

Boise Mayor Lauren McLean speaks at a microphone

Boise Mayor Lauren McLean championed the modernization of Boise’s zoning code. Photo: Dale Willman Photography (Creative Commons)

One key metric for evaluating the effectiveness of the new code is whether Boise increases its share of regional growth. If the new zoning code makes it easier to build housing relative to the status quo in the rest of the region, then Boise’s share of new housing units in the region ought to increase. Despite its many attractions as a place to live, Boise has been adding population at just one third the rate of the rest of Ada and Canyon counties since 2000. Reducing barriers to housing production means Boise should start building a bigger share of the region’s new housing units.

If Boise doesn’t see a meaningful change in housing production as a share of the region’s growth, then city officials will need to return to the abundant housing playbook. Areas for improving the zoning code for housing include:

If Boise’s city council adopts the new zoning code, it will represent a positive move towards allowing more types of housing for everyone. Then time and counts of new homes will tell if the city needs to take the next step toward housing abundance.

It’s Time for Cascadia to Start Pruning the Gas System and Electrifying Whole Neighborhoods

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Cascadians are swapping gas furnaces for heat pumps, gas stoves for induction cooktops, and gas dryers for electric ones. The “electrify everything” movement is accelerating, spurred by new federal, state, and local incentives. 

But when and how are we going to start pruning the gas system accordingly? Without shutting down gas infrastructure in tandem with electrification, an ever-shrinking number of gas customers will face ever-ratcheting costs to maintain a bloated gas system. Renters and low-income people who face the greatest hurdles to electrify are at the most risk of this so-called “death spiral.” 

Thankfully, there is a better way: strategic gas decommissioning paired with neighborhood electrification. In this world, all the buildings in a neighborhood or area electrify, as opposed to today’s scattershot approach. Then, the gas utility shuts off that part of the system, rightsizing its infrastructure to fit the new, smaller number of gas customers.  

Cascadia has yet to start decommissioning gas infrastructure or electrifying whole neighborhoods, but early work underway in California, Colorado, and New York offer some insights to get going. At a minimum, leaders in Cascadia who are committed to clean, healthy buildings and an equitable transition off of gas would be smart to:  

  1. Clarify or eliminate gas utilities’ “obligation to serve,”
  2. Require gas utilities to propose areas ripe for decommissioning and neighborhood electrification instead of replacing gas pipes,
  3. Incentivize decommissioning and neighborhood electrification while protecting ratepayers, and
  4. Shield gas customers from future stranded gas assets.  

Let’s take these steps in turn. 

1. Clarify or eliminate gas utilities’ “obligation to serve” 

All states and provinces of Cascadia (and all 50 US states) require gas utilities to provide service to any customer in their territory who wants it.1Alaska statute (42.05.291); British Columbia; Idaho code (61-302); Montana code (69-3-201); Oregon (75.020); Washington revised code (80.28.110).
 These “obligation to serve” laws used to make sense. They prevented monopoly utilities from discriminating against customers who were not profitable to serve, like people in low-density areas or those who use only small amounts of gas. And they helped lower gas customers’ bills by spreading fixed infrastructure costs over more households over decades, a model possible for a gas system that exists in perpetuity.  

But we no longer live in a world where the gas system can last forever. And electric alternatives abound for every residential need currently met by gas. The obligation to serve—or, at least, regulators’ interpretation of it—is getting in the way of strategic gas decommissioning.  

“A single customer can tank a project,” explained David Sawaya, Senior Manager of Decarbonization Strategies at Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), California’s largest utility, at a 2021 webinar organized by the California Energy Commission (CEC). CEC is funding a roughly $2 million, two-year body of research to identify potential pilot sites in northern and southern California for strategic gas decommissioning and neighborhood electrification.2See grant proposals from the two grant awardees, E3 and RAND Corporation.
 Given the obligation to serve, “every single customer has to agree to electrify” for decommissioning at the neighborhood scale to be possible, Sawaya continued. With recent uproar over an imaginary US ban on gas stoves, it’s not hard to conceive of a single gas system hold-out.  

Obligation-to-serve laws are nebulous enough that the issue could be resolved through regulation alone, Professor Heather Payne, an expert on regulatory policy at Seton Hall University School of Law, told Sightline. Payne argues that a state’s Public Utility Commission (PUC) could do away with the obligation to serve simply by shrinking gas utilities’ service territory once the PUC identifies an area ripe for strategic decommissioning and neighborhood electrification. “Regulators gave service territories and they can take them away,” she emphasized.  

But legal challenges from utilities or consumers could follow. This risk of lawsuits might warrant proactive clarification from state legislators that a utility’s obligation to serve is not equivalent to the right to gas, Claire Halbrook, Director at the decarbonization nonprofit Gridworks, told Sightline. (Gridworks is one of the CEC-funded groups researching potential strategic gas decommissioning pilots in Northern California.) Instead, legislators could clarify that the obligation to serve means the right to energy.  

The 2023 New York legislature considered a bill that would get rid of that state’s obligation to serve, noting that it is “a major obstacle to utilities developing neighborhood-scale building decarbonization projects.” Washington legislators, too, have attempted to revise gas utilities’ obligation to serve at least twice (in 2021 and 2023), to no avail. Legislators in the Evergreen State would be smart to reconsider similar bills next legislative session, as would their peers across Cascadia.    

2. Electrify neighborhoods instead of replacing gas pipes   

Gas utilities across Cascadia are spending billions of dollars to replace hundreds of miles of aging or leaky pipes. Avista, Cascade, Intermountain Gas, and Puget Sound Energy (PSE) combined plan to spend more than $1 billion of ratepayer money to install more than 1,300 miles of replacement gas pipes in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho alone over the next decade, as shown by the chart below.3See appendix for utility-by-utility breakdown and full methodology. Montana, Alaska, and British Columbia do not require gas utilities to provide forward-looking information about pipeline replacement plans.
 That’s the distance from Seattle to Portland, almost four times over. 

Chart showing a breakdown of companies replacing gas pipes in Idaho, Washington, and OregonThese replacement pipes will last more than 50 years, decades past when Cascadia needs to wean itself off of gas. Part of what drives this massive spending, which gas customers pay for through their utility bills, is federal and state safety regulations. But regulators also financially motivate utilities to spend massive sums on new infrastructure projects—capital spending is the only way utilities turn a profit.  

Traditionally, regulators have not required utilities to analyze “non-pipeline alternatives” (NPAs) such as neighborhood electrification that could mitigate the need for replacement gas infrastructure. That’s even the case in Washington and Oregon, where regulators require gas utilities to file long-term plans detailing how many miles of aging pipes they plan to replace and by when. (Regulators in Montana, Alaska, Idaho, and British Columbia do not require utilities to file pipeline replacement plans.)  

But the status quo is starting to change in a few places, and Cascadian regulators could take note.  

For example, the New York Public Service Commission adopted new gas planning rules in May 2022 that require gas utilities to file long-term plans every three years.4 See Order issued by the Commission on May 12, 2022, under case number 20-G-0131.
 As part of the rules, utilities must annually identify “the locations of specific segments of LPP [leak-prone pipes] that could be abandoned in favor of NPAs.” Similarly, the Colorado PUC issued new rules in December 2022 that require utilities to analyze non-pipeline alternatives for any new business and capacity expansion projects, though they unfortunately face no such requirements for replacement or repair projects. And staff at the California PUC recently put forward a draft gas decommissioning framework recommending that regulators in that state require gas utilities to analyze NPAs for any non-urgent repair or replacement projects. The Commission has not yet adopted final rules.  

Cascadian leaders will need to figure out the right regulatory venue for following and, better yet, building on other states’ efforts. Regulators could require gas utilities to propose high-potential areas for decommissioning and neighborhood electrification as part of utilities’ regularly filed Integrated Resource Plans.5Integrated Resource Plans (IRPs) are plans PUCs require utilities to file every two to three years that propose resource portfolios for the subsequent 10–20 years. Regulators “acknowledge” the plans, which makes it more likely the utility will be able to recover the costs they spend in a subsequent rate case. Acknowledgement does not mean pre-approval, however.
 Or they could require the same analysis in new, separate, long-term gas infrastructure proceedings. The former has the benefit of not piling more processes onto already busy regulators, but the latter may make it easier for both regulators and the public to evaluate specific gas infrastructure projects against non-pipeline alternatives.  

In the absence of proactive regulatory changes, lawmakers could require new, forward-looking gas system planning that would promote strategic decommissioning and neighborhood electrification. In Colorado, the 2021 legislature’s “clean heat plan” law catalyzed the Commission there to issue that state’s new gas planning rules.  

3. Incentivize decommissioning and neighborhood electrification while protecting ratepayers

Even with state and federal discounts on climate-friendly stoves, dryers, and heaters and on upgraded electric panels, neighborhood electrification will be expensive. Households that make more than 150 percent of an area’s median income are ineligible for the Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA) electrification rebates, for example, but still may not be able to afford a full suite of upgrades. (These higher-income households can still take advantage of the IRA’s tax refunds.)  

A consensus is lacking for who should front the costs for neighborhood electrification and whether they should be able to make money doing so. Below are three potential options (though not mutually exclusive or exhaustive) and Sightline’s initial perspectives on the pros and cons of each. Ultimately, Cascadian leaders will need to balance decommissioning gas pipes and electrifying neighborhoods at the urgent pace and scale that climate change demands with protecting ratepayers from inequitable and unjust energy costs.  

Option A: Gas utilities pay (via their ratepayers), with or without a profit incentive  

Gas utilities could use the money that they otherwise would have spent on new or replacement pipes to pay for neighborhood electrification instead. This is an idea some groups like the think tank Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) have suggested in response to the California PUC’s staff proposal on strategic decommissioning. (Remember, anything utilities spend is ultimately passed on to their customers through energy bills, if regulators approve it.)  

And RMI and others go a step further: to stimulate gas utility action, they suggest regulators consider allowing gas utilities to count electrification costs as “regulatory assets.” This treatment would enable the utility to earn a rate of return on these projects that normally they would not. In line with this idea, the New York PUC recently approved a request by ConEdison, the combination gas and electric utility serving New York City and Westchester County, to earn a rate of return on its non-pipeline alternative programs. ConEd identified 21 gas mains serving 320 households that could be retired in favor of electrification. (ConEd did not reply to Sightline’s request for information on the current status of these projects.)  

Following in ConEd’s footsteps, in December 2022 Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) proposed a pilot to electrify 391 buildings on the California State University Monterey Bay campus. The utility says it would otherwise need to replace aging gas infrastructure on the campus, for which it would turn a profit. Thus, PG&E has asked the California PUC to treat the $17.224 million it plans to spend on electrification and decommissioning as regulatory assets. If the California PUC approves PG&E’s proposal, the utility would profit roughly $12 million from the project; PG&E’s gas customers would pay the utility back through their gas bills. PG&E estimates the project would still save its customers about $1 million compared to replacing the gas infrastructure. As of May 2023, the project is on hold following new leadership at CSU Monterey Bay. 

Allowing gas utilities to get into the business of neighborhood electrification and to line their pockets doing so could galvanize them to use their scale and access to capital for good. In this world, gas utilities could act similarly to green banks, helping to finance the energy transition. Regulators and policymakers could also spur utility action in ways other than treating electrification costs as regulatory assets. For example, Washington House Bill 1589, which the 2023 legislature did not pass, included several possible sweeteners for Washington’s biggest utility, Puget Sound Energy (PSE), in exchange for the wind-down of the company’s gas business. The carrots included allowing the utility to earn a rate of return on power purchase agreements and upping the profit the utility could make on electric assets.   

But offering gas utilities financial upsides for electrification from ratepayers’ wallets comes with risks. “You need savings from the strategic decommissioning projects to offset some of the gas rate increases we’re seeing,” explained Claire Halbrook of Gridworks. She worries about scenarios in which a neighborhood electrification project costs the same as a gas pipeline replacement project would have, and the utility passes on those equivalent costs to gas customers. Doing so would obliviate one of the biggest reasons for gas decommissioning: rightsizing gas system costs to a shrinking number of gas customers. (Note: GeoNetworks, which Sightline has written about previously, as a neighborhood electrification option may avoid this problem because the electrifying households would remain customers of the former gas, now “thermal,” utility. But, depending on the cost of installing GeoNetworks, which is not yet known, unsustainably high rates to gas/thermal customers could still be a risk.)   

If regulators choose to financially motivate gas utilities to embark on decommissioning and neighborhood electrification, they can still mitigate the risk of unjust and inequitable gas rates. For example, regulators could allow gas utilities to earn a lower profit (but still something) than they would have on the gas infrastructure project and/or shorten the payback period for the electrification costs compared to traditional gas infrastructure. This latter option would save customers money compared to a traditional gas infrastructure investment because the costs would be spread over more customers upfront (before they leave the gas system) and the investment would accrue fewer years of interest. (A similar concept is the lower total cost of a 15-year versus a 30-year mortgage.) Indeed, several groups, including the Sierra Club, are pushing the California PUC to lower how much financial gain PG&E proposes collecting from its proposed California State University Monterey Bay pilot.  

Option B: Electric utilities pay (via their ratepayers), with or without a profit incentive  

Alternatively, or perhaps in addition, the same model as option A could apply to electric utilities instead of gas ones. Under current regulatory frameworks, investor-owned electric utilities will already recover with profit any “front-of-the meter” infrastructure upgrades associated with neighborhood electrification.6“Front-of-the-meter” costs fall on the utility’s side of the electricity meter, like upgrades to the electricity distribution or transmission grid. By contrast, “behind-the-meter” costs occur on the customer’s side of a electricity meter, such as any home appliances or electricity panel upgrades.
  But just like gas utilities, they couldn’t today profit on anything regulators don’t count as a regulatory asset.  

As they could with gas utilities, regulators could decide to keep the current ratemaking model and still require electric utilities to pursue neighborhood electrification with no financial incentive. This was the approach California regulators took to a pilot converting homes from wood or propane to gas or electricity in the San Joaquin Valley.  

But just as in the case of gas utilities, allowing electric utilities to turn a profit could encourage them to prioritize and pursue neighborhood electrification projects. The big risk to doing this is it could cause electricity rates to rise, potentially undermining electrification writ large.  

“Especially in California, where we have really high electric rates, rates are sending a signal that is discouraging electrification,” Kiki Velez, Equitable Gas Transition Advocate at NRDC, told Sightline. She worries that any additional costs on the electricity side will be both inequitable and self-defeating. That may be somewhat less of a concern in Cascadia, where retail electricity rates are roughly half what they are in California. Still, energy inequity is a concern here; in Washington, for example, a quarter of households are energy-burdened, meaning they spend more than 6 percent of their household income on energy bills. Regulators would need to carefully design any utility incentives in a way that avoids worsening these inequities, and better yet, alleviates them.  

Option C: The public pays by geographically targeting incentives  

Finally, the cost for neighborhood electrification could be fully removed from utility rates, which are a notoriously regressive system. Instead, a new progressive tax or geographically targeted existing incentives could foot the bill. “We should focus electrification dollars on targeted electrification and not on scattershot electrification,” Claire Halbrook of Gridworks told Sightline.  

And indeed, a lot of money is already on the table. US states in Cascadia will collectively receive more than $250 million from the IRA to distribute for home electrification. And both Oregon and Washington offer millions of dollars for heat pumps and other clean appliances. Individual utilities in Cascadia, too, offer incentive programs (see here, for example). 

But to date, legislators and state agencies have not targeted this funding toward areas with a high potential for strategic decommissioning and neighborhood electrification. (Most states haven’t figured yet out how they will disburse the new IRA money.) Doing so would require collaboration between the state agencies receiving and distributing these funds and the utilities pursuing the neighborhood electrification projects. What’s more, leaders will need to grapple with how to maintain a focus on helping low-income customers electrify while also targeting neighborhoods with high potential for strategic gas decommissioning, which may not be one and the same.  

4. Draw a “bright line” to shield ratepayers from stranded assets 

Decommissioning aging pipes instead of replacing them is the most straightforward opportunity facing utilities to shrink the gas system. But soon enough regulators and utilities will need to reckon with shutting down gas pipes that have not yet reached the end of their expected lifespan.  

Who bears the cost of these “stranded assets” is ultimately up to regulators and whether they decide utilities made infrastructure investments “prudently.” 7>Stranded assets are infrastructure that cannot be used for the duration of their anticipated economic lifetime and thus become a liability.
 Regulators can allow utilities and their shareholders to fully get paid back (i.e., “recover”) from ratepayers the value of stranded assets, either with or without a rate of return. Alternatively, they can decide that utility shareholders should eat the cost of imprudently made investments, absolving ratepayers of responsibility. Regulators have pursued each of these options in other cases, including for canceled nuclear plants or other types of power plants.   

Arguably, most, if not all, recent utility investment in new gas infrastructure could be considered “imprudent” given widespread global acknowledgement of the need to rapidly transition off of fossil fuels, including gas. But regulators continue to acknowledge utilities’ plans to spend more on gas and allow them to incorporate gas infrastructure spending in their rate base. These regulatory actions would give weight to any utility’s demand that it be fully repaid on its investments.  

Thus, Cascadian regulators could make explicit a “bright line”—a time after which utilities should not expect to be paid back by gas customers for installing new, polluting infrastructure. A conservative bright line would be after a state or province passed an economy-wide climate policy. That would mean utilities and their investors would be on the hook for any gas infrastructure spending made after 2007 in British Columbia, after 2020 in Washington, and after 2021 in Oregon that wasn’t necessary to resolve an urgent safety or reliability issue. 

Still, that would leave billions of dollars of assets in a gray zone. Who should pay for the assets that utilities installed after climate change was widely understood but before the states where the companies operate passed policies to do anything about it? And what should regulators do in the parts of Cascadia where lawmakers haven’t passed economy-wide climate policies?  

As an illustrative example of the continually worsening stranded asset risk, gas utilities across Cascadia increased the value of their undepreciated gas distribution system assets by more than $4 billion between 2013 and 2021, from  about $7 billion to $11.2 billion. Gas distribution system assets, – such as gas pipelines, – lose value over the course of their useful life—that is, they i.e., depreciate. When gas companies install new infrastructure, the total value of the company’s assets that have not yet depreciated grows, since that infrastructure is at the very beginning of its useful life. Thus, a growing undepreciated asset value means more new pipes and other gas infrastructure. (The breakdown by utility is shown by the chart below, with red bars representing undepreciated assets in 2013 and blue representing them in 2021.) This means the amount that gas ratepayers may be on the hook to pay back to utilities and their investors is now billions of dollars higher than it was a decade ago. That’s exactly opposite the trend we would see if gas utilities were winding down their infrastructure in line with climate science.    

Bar graph showing how gas companies continue to invest in assets that are doomed to become strandedSo, in addition to drawing a “bright line,” regulators in Cascadia could immediately initiate proceedings to estimate the likely scale of future stranded assets in the region and develop rules and procedures to protect ratepayers. (Some financial mechanisms that could partially protect ratepayers from eating the full cost of stranded assets include “accelerated depreciation” and “securitization.”8“Accelerated depreciation” is a financial mechanism that would shorten the amortizations period of a gas infrastructure investment to reflect the reality of how long it will be used and useful in the context of climate change and climate policies. It results in higher upfront costs to ratepayers to pay back more of the investment in a shorter period of time, but these costs are spread out over more customers before many have left the gas system, ultimately saving customers money.
“Securitization” is another financial mechanism in which the legislature issues a ratepayer backed bond, the proceeds of which are used to buy back the stranded assets and remove them from the rate base. Customers are still on the hook for paying back the stranded asset, but without a rate of return for utilities. See more discussion of these two tools here.

See the Environmental Defense Fund’s discussion of these ideas in its report on stranded gas assets in California.)  

Ultimately, fully dealing with the stranded asset challenge may require additional public funding from state legislators, if regulators decide it is neither fair to deny utilities and their shareholders repayment nor just or reasonable to lay the cost on ratepayers.  

Scattershot electrification is no longer enough  

Cascadia is electrifying. Its gas infrastructure now needs to shrink accordingly. Strategic gas decommissioning and neighborhood electrification are the way of the future and will require new, sometimes untested strategies by regulators and legislators. Early work in California, Colorado, and New York can give Cascadia a running start. Smart first steps would be removing gas utilities’ “obligation to serve,” requiring gas utilities to identify neighborhood electrification and decommissioning projects that can avoid the need for new and replacement gas pipes, galvanizing neighborhood electrification through new and more targeted financing mechanisms, and shielding ratepayers from ballooning stranded assets. 

Above all, Cascadian leaders will need to follow principles of accelerating action to combat climate change through potentially new and innovative policies and regulations, as well as minimizing burdens on low-income households.  

Building and incentivizing clean appliances and infrastructure for individual homes—Cascadia’s approach to date—is necessary but not sufficient to meet today’s climate challenge. It’s time now for a step-change to electrify entire neighborhoods and start the even harder work of untangling communities from dirty infrastructure.    

 

APPENDIX  

TABLE 1: NORTHWEST UTILITIES PLAN TO SPEND MORE THAN $1 BILLION TO REPLACE AGING PIPES OVER THE NEXT DECADE  

Estimated miles still to be replaced
Estimated pipe replacement cost
OregonWashingtonIdahoTotalOregonWashingtonIdahoTotal
Avista145 17763385$173,318,455 $128,598,534 $41,635,539$343,552,528
PSE
-228 -228 -$588,400,000 -$588,400,000
NW Natural--------
Cascade Natural75107 -181 $86,310,686 $126,341,012 -$212,651,698
Intermountain Gas--565565--$149,160,000$149,160,000
Total2195116281359 miles$259,629,141$843,339,546$190,795,539$1,293,764,226

Sources: Pipeline Replacement Program (PRP) documents filed with the Oregon PUC and Washington UTC by Avista, PSE, and Cascade Natural; Case No. INT-G-17-07 filed with the Idaho PUC by Intermountain Gas.  

Methodology: PSE and Avista provide information on the miles they have already replaced in Oregon and Washington as part of the PRP and totals that they plan to replace. Sightline found the difference to estimate the number of miles still to be replaced and used average historical costs per mile to estimate remaining costs. Avista also provides total priority pipes to be replaced across Idaho, Oregon, and Washington; Sightline calculated Idaho figures by subtracting the Oregon and Washington totals from the total for all three states. Cascade does not provide information on total miles it plans to replace, so Sightline estimated the remaining miles to be replaced and costs per mile based on the company’s historical averages. Intermountain Gas figures are based on a 2018 filing the company made to the Idaho PUC stating that it had 580 miles of pipes to replace and was replacing them at a rate of 5 miles per year.  

Getting Beyond the Detached House in Vancouver, BC

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As people across Cascadia buckle under soaring home prices and rents, leaders are scrambling to legalize, or try to legalize, more “middle housing” options amid their single-detached-dominated stock. While options like laneway homes and backyard cottages, duplexes and triplexes, may get the job done in some locales, bigger cities will need bigger solutions—and fast.  

Vancouver, British Columbia, has perhaps an over-lauded reputation for transit-oriented development, given its mere handful of tall neighborhoods. The city was early to legalize laneway homes in 2009, seen then as an incremental way to add more compact, environmentally friendly housing “without incurring the wrath of… wealthy homeowner groups,” some of whom expressed shock that a person might be able to look from a modest laneway home balcony into the primary home’s garden.1Laneway homes are better known in the US as backyard cottages, in-law suites, bonus homes, or accessory dwelling units (ADUs).
 About 4,500 laneway homes have been built there since, with another 4,000 planned by 2028. They’re popular, and as of 2018, fully 45 percent of newly constructed houses included a laneway home, and many of them also incorporated attached mother-in-law suites. 

Fourteen years later, Vancouver planning staff have now proposed legalizing four and sixplexes across the city, including in areas currently restricted to single-detached houses. The new proposal would allow a modest 16 percent increase in building size across the city’s low-density zones. It would also permit more units: four or six homes would be allowed, depending on the lot size. Right now, only three units are allowed in most detached house areas (the main house, plus an attached in-law suite and a laneway house). 

The proposed 16 percent increase in housing density is not enough to make up for decades of inaction. Detached home prices in the once-affordable East Vancouver have increased 100 percent in just the past ten years. Yet nothing but these homes is permitted on 81 percent of Vancouver’s residential land, effectively excluding anyone who can’t afford the high price of a stand-alone house and freezing even a relatively dense city like Vancouver in a predominantly suburban state.  

The results aren’t surprising: Vancouver’s population has grown more slowly than that of its surrounding suburbs, with detached home prices ballooning to $3.3 million on the city’s west side, well out of reach for most families. 

If we faced a less daunting housing challenge, then this 16 percent increase in allowable density might make sense. But our problems are bigger than that, and our solutions are going to have to be, too. It’s time to end detached-house zoning—and give Vancouverites more ways to call the city home.  

Introducing “The Plex” 

Rendering of a Plex design. Source: Lanefab.

Fourteen years after laneway homes were legalized, the results are in, and prices are way, way up. Whatever we do next, let’s not make the same mistake of doing too little, too late. In the spirit of doing enough, and fast enough, we set out the following goals, looking to bridge the gap between the city’s towers and its single-detached-dominated neighborhoods: 

  1. Make it dense—and build up, not out. 
  2. Make it affordable. 
  3. Make it fast. 
  4. Do it everywhere. 
  5. Make it accessible. 

What would a new housing form that does all of these things look like? We propose: “the Plex,” a modular, repeatable apartment building of six, eight, or ten homes. 

The Plex is a place for people to raise families, meet friends, and live their lives on quiet streets in the neighborhoods they love. They combine the large units and yard space that people associate with detached homes, with the walkability and affordability of apartments. 

Include a shared rooftop patio and solar panels, plus front and rear balconies to liven the streetscape and allow neighbors to mingle. Ensure full accessibility for residents of all abilities, design to energy-efficient passive house standards, and preserve or even add tree canopy and green space. Sound too good to be true? 

It’s not. On a typical, west side, 50’x122’ lot, it could look something like this: 

A Plex on a 50’ wide lot, typical on Vancouver’s west side. Source: Lanefab.

It works on a 33’-wide east side lot, too. You can add a second lot and nix the side yard between, and the options grow: 

Imagining 8-plexes on narrower, 33’ wide, East Vancouver lots. Source:Lanefab.

This kind of small apartment building is worth considering in every city hamstrung by outdated zoning rules, rules that outlaw all but the most expensive kind of house: a single-detached house on its own lot. The Plex could bring increased affordability, walkability, and housing abundance to all kinds of neighborhoods. 

1. Make it dense—and build up, not out

Allow approximately a 2.0 floor space ratio, so that four large three-bedrooms, or eight one- or two-bedrooms, can be built on a standard detached-house lot. 

The first and most important goal is to make it dense.  

The Plex would require a departure from many elements of Vancouver’s existing single-family zoning schedule—most significantly, the “floor space ratio” (FSR), or the ratio between a building’s interior floor space and its full lot area.2The US term is floor area ratio (FAR).
 Currently, the city’s maximum allowed FSR for a duplex is 0.70. For a detached house, it’s 0.86 (in some cases of character home retention, the city grants another 0.10.) Increasing the allowable FSR to about 2.0 would mean a Plex could offer four large three-bedroom units or eight one-bedroom units, on a standard detached-house lot. That’s a lot of new housing. 

By contrast, the proposal currently being workshopped by the City of Vancouver would allow just 1.0 FSR: barely more than the status quo, with up to 1.2 FSR for energy-efficient construction. 

As for height limits, the city would also have to raise its maximum of 9.5 meters and 3 stories to allow a four-story Plex. And adjusting the minimum setbacks (distances from property lines), especially the current requirement for a front setback that’s at least 20 percent of the lot depth, would support more creativity in design and larger back yards.  

By building up instead of out, too, the city could maintain its existing maximum of 60 percent impermeable surface on a lot. That’s any surface that water can’t penetrate, and leaving more of a Plex’s lot permeable means they could be built throughout the city without needing to upgrade every block’s sewer system, reducing strain on those sewer systems and preserving green space. A Plex of four floors could reduce its impermeable surface to just 50 percent, while furnishing an accessible, energy-efficient community of eight approximately 1,000-square-foot homes. 

Finally, Vancouver’s zoning rules should reconsider yard space, prioritizing back yards over side yards. In low-density rural or suburban settings, side yards can provide benefits. But on narrow urban lots, they tend to be dark, leftover spaces with negligible daylight and dismal views of adjacent homes’ walls. Opting instead for “attached building”—designing adjacent buildings to share walls, a practice common in older cities—dispenses with the side yard altogether and often gains a much larger and more usable rear yard. 

Attached buildings are a popular choice in older, pre-zoning cities like Montreal. Source: Bryn Davidson

What’s more, attached building design can radically reduce the amount of energy needed to keep the Plex warm or cool. As cities look both to densify and to address the climate crisis, they can ask: “Are side yards necessary, or can we have better buildings without them?” The Plex suggests the latter.  

Finally, it’s important to note that prioritizing density doesn’t mean only piles of small homes. The Plex is an attractive, modular design that could include large, common units for cohabitating intergenerational families just as easily as it could offer many smaller units for singles and couples, with mid-sized designs as well for everything in between: 

Rendering of a Plex, with variously sized options. Source: Lanefab.

2. Make it affordable

Where upzoning leads to higher land values, impose affordability requirements or cash contributions to capture those increases. 

Legalizing Plexes would improve affordability by allowing more people to share the cost of land. But there are three further ways this proposal could improve affordability. 

The first way that the Plex could promote affordability is with “density bonusing,” which is allowing extra housing density in return for cash payments or on-site affordable units. The four-floor version above would probably have to be priced at market rates, but an extra floor or two would increase the building’s value such that it could support some density bonusing. 

Second, a growing body of research shows that increasing the housing supply in cities stabilizes their prices and rents. What’s more, new market-rate housing makes nearby existing homes more affordable. This holds true even when building more expensive, market-rate housing, since lower- and middle-income households benefit from reduced competition over the remaining units. A Vancouver-based study of laneway homes by two UBC economists even found that laneway homes exerted a downward price pressure on nearby homes, especially in wealthier areas. 

And finally, tenant protections could be stronger for Plex residents than they are for residents of basement suites or laneway homes currently in detached-house areas. Vancouver’s Tenant Relocation and Protection Policy (TRPP) only applies to buildings with five or more units, carving out a loophole for the smaller-scale landlords who own and profit from these suites. But since the Plex design generally includes more than five units, the TRPP would cover them. 

3. Make it fast

Pre-zone for Plexes, pre-approve their design, and allow for small-lot construction that avoids the need for costly and time-consuming land assemblies. 

Removing regulatory obstacles would be vital to the Plex’s success. 

Too often in city planning, leaders’ vague pro-housing promises aren’t matched by real policies to make them happen. One example of lofty rhetoric being undermined by reality is the Grandview-Woodland Community Plan. Adopted in 2016 after a lengthy, contentious, and unique consultation process that involved a citizens’ assembly, the plan promised to bring 10,000 new residents to the neighborhood and to “increase and diversify the housing stock by providing a range of housing forms.”  

What has happened since? Grandview-Woodland lost more population than anywhere else in the city. The plan itself pushes most new housing to polluted arterial streets.  

Complex policies requiring months, years, even decades of consultation with community groups can sound progressive on the surface. But when these processes stand between struggling people and much-needed housing, they become the opposite. 

Right now, mansions and detached homes do not require public hearings in Vancouver. It’s only apartments—typically more affordable—that must undergo rigorous approval processes. The process for Plex-style apartments should be no more onerous than what’s required for detached homes, helping us build more housing, faster. 

Finally, allowing apartment buildings on single lots will speed up building, reduce costs, and open up opportunities for new kinds of smaller developers. Right now, only large developers have the patient capital and deep pockets to assemble multiple lots over many years. Allowing single-lot development allows a much broader pool of smaller, family, and niche builders to enter the space and contribute their creativity and ability. 

4. Do it everywhere

End the practice of confining apartments to polluted arterials, and spread new apartments through the city, in every neighborhood. 

Next, we should allow the Plex all throughout Vancouver’s detached-house zones. As Shane Phillips writes in his book Affordable City, “The best places in the world that we most love to walk, the Parises and Barcelonas of the world, aren’t dense only along their major arterials but in every direction.” 

So rather than selecting particular lots or a particular area, leaders should simply allow the Plex to be repeated throughout Vancouver—just like the Vancouver Special, the basement suite, and the laneway home before it. 

Narrowly based upzoning can send a signal about that particular area and lead to price increases by focusing development narrowly. More distributed upzoning, on the other hand, reduces the impact on any one location, spreading out development, construction, and density across a broader area.  

5. Make it accessible

Build elevators into the design so that every floor is accessible, unlike in most detached homes. The savings from a streamlined process and parking reductions will more than offset any additional costs. 

Detached homes have always been relatively difficult to make accessible for people in wheelchairs or with other disabilities and mobility constraints. As disability rights advocates have slowly won policies to ensure greater accessibility for all users, the City of Vancouver has adopted a number of rules aimed at making these homes more accessible, or at least “visitable,” to people with physical disabilities. Examples include wider doors and mandatory bathrooms on the main floor. 

However, the city has never addressed the fact that detached homes’ most common design—a single front door per unit with lots of internal stairs—is inaccessible in the first place, and worse in houses with basements that don’t have any floors adjacent to the ground outside. Other typical types of ground-oriented housing, such as rowhouses and townhouses, have the same accessibility drawbacks.  

The Plex could improve detached homes’ accessibility by having an at-grade entry and elevators between floors. Even without elevators, one-quarter of the units would be accessible, which is more than most detached homes at present. Elevators would add cost, if all else were equal. But by removing other pricey requirements like parking, this improvement could be made without increasing overall cost. It’s a question of values: do we want to require on-site car storage, or would we rather make our neighborhoods and homes more accessible to all citizens? 

 

Multiple Plex options with and without side yards. Source: Lanefab.

From suburbia to Plexes 

Flats and Plexes built on single lots, mixed in with detached homes. Source: Lanefab.

Successive city councils in Vancouver have promised to “provide more housing that falls between single-family homes and higher density apartments.” So far, this has meant basement suites and small laneway homes. The most recent proposal is for a modest 16 percent density increase, for four units city-wide. Given the scale of our affordability problem in lower-density areas, that won’t be enough. 

Vancouver’s original land use plan was introduced in 1927 “largely to prevent the intrusion of apartment houses in single and two family residential areas,” and it continues to serve that function today by banning them from most residential land. On top of that, each new apartment building typically gets scrutinized for years by staff, the public, and city council in years-long processes that delay much-needed homes and create a bottleneck to any large-scale influx of new units.

Today, only those people who can afford, by themselves, to buy a 33’x122’ lot can have secure, no-fuss housing in the about 80 percent of the city’s residential land that’s zoned only for detached houses. That’s just not very many people. What’s worse, it’s currently illegal for eight to ten less wealthy households to band together to outbid that richer person for the land and build a modest apartment building on it. That’s wrong, and legalizing apartment options like the Plex would allow a lot more people to afford to live in a lot more of the city, with a simple, adaptable, and reproducible small apartment building. The Plex could just be the next step in the evolution of urban housing in Vancouver—and beyond. 

Oregon’s Untapped Gold Mine: The Homes that Don’t Yet Exist

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Oregon’s housing catastrophe comes down to this: Alongside every home built in the state since the Great Recession is the ghost of another home that never was. 

Cottages that might have slipped into backyards if they’d been able to cover the sewer connection fee. Apartment buildings that might have filled up with nursing assistants and preschool teachers if they’d qualified for a slightly larger loan. Would-be projects across the state that, for one of a thousand reasons, came up a little short on cash and never left the drawing board. 

Economists calculate that it’s added up to the country’s fourth-worst housing shortage. When there aren’t enough new homes, bidding wars begin for the old ones. Since 2010, untold thousands of these price battles across Oregon have driven up home prices more than 60 percent. 

A grizzled squad of the state’s housing nerds says they have a “big idea” that could help end these bidding wars by bringing these ghost homes to life, especially in smaller cities where low wages and decrepit infrastructure keep much of anything from being built. They calculate that a $300 million investment could produce 12,000 mid-price homes around the state within several years. 

That’d be enough to meet several years’ worth of the state’s new production goal for that price category. 

Then, like blueberry bushes, the seeds planted would bear fiscal fruit year after year. Even without further funding, a revolving housing loan fund seeded by a one-time state investment would produce thousands more homes over the decades to come, bringing the total public cost to $10,000 per home created. 

The catch is that it’d cost money up front. But the concept’s backers say that if Gov. Kotek hopes to come anywhere close to her high-profile goal of nearly doubling housing production, there’s no more cost-efficient way to push up the numbers. 

The idea for making more of Oregon’s ghost homes exist was captured this year in House Bill 2980. On Friday, the Portland Business Journal reported that that bill appears dead for this year; its backers aim to keep developing it and introduce it again. 

Its concept is simple. The money comes from the future.  

Happy homes and ghost homes

Mieko Frederick lived with her son in McMinnville until 2022. She no longer drives and has a weak leg, so needed a ground-floor apartment within walking and transit distance of her daily needs. Photo: Michael Andersen/Sightline.

In a state with too few happy stories about housing, Mieko Frederick’s sidewalk-level apartment in Newberg, Oregon, might be home to one of the happiest. 

Sitting at the little wooden table outside the door to Unit 103, a few blocks from downtown, Frederick cheerfully counted the ways she loves her new place, built in 2020. 

“The grocery store is there, the library is there,” said Frederick, 83, gesturing this way and that from the makeshift patio she set up after moving into the three-story building a year-and-a-half ago. “I can walk and go everywhere.” 

Then there are the stories like the one about the 8th Avenue Garden Cottages. 

Dirk Knudsen was ready to add eight small, low-priced cottages to this Hillsboro backyard, but between construction costs and city fees he couldn’t make the numbers work. Photo by Kole Knudsen, KosenMedia.com.

That was the name Dirk Knudsen gave his plan to add eight 250-square-foot freestanding homes to an oversized backyard just southeast of downtown Hillsboro, a booming tech hub north of Newberg. Within three blocks were a hospital, a university campus, a grocery store, and a light rail stop. “We were looking for students, lower-income people in the service sector, and also seniors looking to move down out of their existing homes,” Knudsen recalled. 

But between construction costs and the $34,000 per new home that Hillsboro charges to finance new roads, pipes, and parks, Knudsen calculated that he couldn’t bring the cottages to market for less than $260,000 each—and he estimated that nobody would be willing to pay that much to live in one. So he pulled the plug. Today, the backyard is still sitting mostly empty, and the eight households that might have lived there are instead competing for housing with everyone else in Hillsboro. 

“We can’t solve the affordable crisis if we don’t solve the housing shortage” 

Mieko Frederick’s apartment building, built in 2020 at 800 E 2nd St. in Newberg, Oregon, created nineteen mid-price market rate homes. Photo: Michael Andersen/Sightline.

Mieko Frederick’s apartment building, built in 2020 at 800 E 2nd St. in Newberg, Oregon, created nineteen mid-price market rate homes. Photo: Michael Andersen/Sightline.

The difference between Frederick’s success story and Knudsen’s ghost story—about $25,000 per home—isn’t much compared to the $400,000 cost of developing most mid-price homes in Oregon. 

“It’s actually really common to have small feasibility gaps, especially on middle housing types and types that are more likely to be affordable to people on middle incomes,” said Lorelei Juntunen, the president of Oregon-based consulting firm ECONorthwest. “That is a reason why we don’t see a lot of those housing types even in zones where they’re allowed.” 

Bill Van Vliet, executive director of the Network for Oregon Affordable Housing, attributes it to the high costs of new infrastructure that new homes need. Many local governments are just too poor to pay for that infrastructure up front, he said. 

“Entire counties issue, like, ten building permits a year,” he said. “It’s all the roads and sewers and sewer treatment plants and water treatment plants needed to accommodate growth.” 

Van Vliet said the state can’t solve its shortage with below-market-rate homes alone. 

“We’re appropriately pouring increasingly big amounts of money into it, but we’re not making enough progress towards 36,000 units,” said Van Vliet, who estimates that his organization has financed about 14,000 below-market affordable homes around the state since its founding in 1990. “We can’t solve the affordable crisis if we don’t solve the housing shortage at the same time. Because it’s all connected.” 

Van Vliet, Juntunen, and Greg Wolf, a former executive with the Association of Oregon Counties now running the think tank iSector, were among the crew who hammered out HB 2980. It was sponsored by Rep. Pam Marsh (D-Ashland) and Sen. Dick Anderson (R-Lincoln City). 

“We call this our big idea bill,” Marsh told Oregon’s House Housing committee earlier this year. Last month, that committee sent it on to the state’s budget committee with an 8-2 vote of approval. 

“It’s a brilliant, audacious idea,” said the Housing committee’s Democratic co-chair, Rep. Mark Gamba of Milwaukie. 

How a revolving housing loan fund would work, in short 

Here is what a bill along the lines of HB 2980 would do. 

It would let the State of Oregon send money to people building relatively lower-priced homes around the state that can’t quite make their numbers work. Then, over the next ten years, the state would recoup its interest-free loan out of a payment in lieu of taxes. 

In other words, the project borrows tax money—taxes that its owner would have had to pay anyway—from its own future. 

Ten or fewer years after the initial payment, three things would be different: 

  1. The local property tax base would be bigger than it otherwise would have been, an ongoing boost to local city, county, and parks budgets as well as the state’s school taxes. “You create a pipeline of future revenue growth for the city that wouldn’t be there anyway,” says Van Vliet. 
  2. Oregon would have more relatively inexpensive homes than it otherwise would have. 
  3. The money would have flowed back to the state loan fund, ready to be loaned out again. 

“Whenever the loan is repaid, it goes away and everybody gets their money back,” said Juntunen, a lead consultant to Oregon’s land use and affordable housing agencies in their efforts to accelerate homebuilding. 

How a revolving housing loan fund would work, in detail 

If you want to understand the idea more fully, it can help to walk through the numbers for a particular apartment building. 

Let’s use Frederick’s—a three-story apartment building near downtown Newberg that went up in 2020. We’ll imagine that it had been on the cusp of not being built. 

Here is the property tax bill that Yamhill County sent the owner of 800 E. Second St. in 2019, back when it was still a fenced-in storage lot: 

Before Frederick’s future home was built, the land’s owner was paying a total of $941 per year in property taxes. That $941 was then divvied up among ten government budgets and to pay back four past loans, or bonds, taken out by the government. (The single biggest line item, though associated with Newberg School District, didn’t actually go directly to the district; instead it went, as everywhere in the state, to Oregon’s general fund. That fund in turn pays local school districts on a per-pupil basis regardless of local property values, a reallocation intended to prevent enclaves richer than Newberg from having out-of-proportion school funding.) 

Now let’s look at the same property’s tax bill in 2020, after the apartment went up: 


What had been a nearly vacant quarter-acre lot was suddenly gushing cash. The almost $17,000 per year in additional taxes came, ultimately, from a share of the rents paid by everyone living in the new building. (Frederick said she pays $950 a month.) 

Frederick’s building, of course, would have had no cash to gush if it had never been built. Here’s the 2020 tax bill for the modest house with the big backyard on 8th Avenue in Hillsboro where Knudsen had hoped to add eight backyard cottages: 


Unless something changes, 452 SE 8th Avenue is likely to send in the same measly tax bill for many years to come. 

A revolving housing loan fund would be one way to change things for projects like Knudsen’s cottages in Hillsboro. If it were in place, someone like Knudsen trying to develop 452 SE 8th could go through these steps: 

  1. Demonstrate, by filing a business plan sharing costs and revenues of a potential building, that a multifamily project on the site couldn’t work without a little more cash up front. 
  2. Commit to offer the new homes at prices affordable to low- or middle-income residents of the county. 
  3. Meet Hillsboro’s locally defined rules for qualifying projects, written in advance and used on a first-come, first-served basis. 

If the building met those conditions, then HB 2980 would authorize the State of Oregon to cut a check for something like $25,000 per home—no more than could be paid back in ten years of property taxes. That money would go to the city, then on to the developer, with the developer taking on the risk if something goes wrong. Buoyed by that cash, the project would move forward. 

Then, over the next ten years, the line items circled here would become much larger, and most of them (the amount attributable to the new buildings) would flow temporarily back to the state: 


Because of Oregon’s per-pupil system of funding its schools, local school districts’ revenue would actually be unaffected. If the new homes brought new students, the state would continue to cover that cost out of its general fund. Meanwhile, fire districts, bond payments, and local option taxes would also be unaffected. 

Cities, counties, park districts, and the state general fund would all have to wait up to ten years to benefit from the new property taxes. But because the whole program would specifically target homes unlikely to have otherwise existed, they wouldn’t actually be forgoing much revenue—and after ten years, all would benefit from the larger tax base. 

The program wouldn’t be available to projects receiving some other form of tax abatement, or to projects within a designated urban renewal area, because in those cases the additional property taxes would already have been spoken for. 

What’s missing: Cash to help plant the first crop of homes 

So, what’s the hold-up? Why didn’t HB 2980 sail easily through Oregon’s 2023 legislative session? 

The simple reason is money. Once it starts, a revolving fund would be able to finance itself for decades. But it can’t start without a bunch of cash up front. The bill’s supporters proposed $300 million; Gov. Kotek’s proposed two-year general fund budget is $117 billion. 

Kotek’s marquee priority for the next two years is a $1 billion public investment in below-market housing. That’d be enough to build maybe 4,500 homes, about 6 percent of Kotek’s total production target, at an average cost of $225,000 per home. 

Van Vliet, the affordable housing lender, thinks Kotek should complement that with an investment in mid-price homes: an average of $25,000 per home in the short term. 

“In the first three years, you could deploy $300 million and boost production 12,000 straight away,” Van Vliet said. “And that money would be collected over the next ten years, and as that money came back in you could start reinvesting it again.” 

By unlocking those new property taxes, the state’s investment would drop to $12,500 per home within the first 30 years and $10,000 or so over the life of the investment. 


Fiscal incentives could give cities a new reason to grow 

There’s a valid case against concepts like HB 2980. It’s that tax dollars are too precious to subsidize market-rate housing and should be reserved for the people who most need help. If the government wants more market-rate homes to exist, even modest multifamily ones, it should focus on reducing regulatory costs rather than further subsidizing the demand for buildable land. 

This is a totally fair perspective. Here are five reasons why a revolving housing loan fund might be a good idea anyway: 

1. Each public $1 could bring in more than $20 in private money. A $25,000 public loan can turn the ghost of a home into bricks and sticks, of which the other $375,000 or so would come from investors elsewhere, often outside the state. The property tax flowing back to the state for further loans would more than double that again.

2. The program could become an incentive for cities that upzone. This year, Oregon allowed its land use agency to intervene when cities fell too far behind state housing growth targets. One downside: it’s set up to give state attention only to failing cities. Is that unfair to cities that are doing everything they can? By giving cities access to this program as long as they have recently demonstrated that they’ve removed any local housing barriers, Oregon would be giving itself a fairly cheap way to reward good behavior.

3. There are many regulations that Oregon simply isn’t going to remove. Oregon can’t ignore the Americans with Disabilities Act and probably wouldn’t if it could. Oregon isn’t going to end the building codes that have vastly improved the quality and safety of new construction but didn’t exist when most of its buildings were constructed. Oregon can’t ignore the federal Clean Water Act’s standards for stormwater or drinking water, or the worker safety rules and processes that have probably driven up construction costs.

In Cascadia, bipartisan coalitions can agree on the benefits of re-legalizing apartments, fourplexes, and backyard cottages. But the state imposes lots of other regulatory costs, often for good reasons, that disproportionately block housing in parts of Oregon with less wealth and lower wages. It makes sense for the state to, essentially, fund some of the government’s many unfunded mandates. 

4. Cities would have another fiscal reason to prioritize growth, especially of less expensive housing. German cities allow more housing growth—and as a result, enjoy relatively lower home prices—than their peers. It’s likely that part of the reason is that Germany transfers money to cities based on their population. That rewards competition among cities to attract more people—unlike in the United States, where tax systems generally give cities an incentive to attract richer people. A loan fund like HB 2980 would make Oregon a little more like Germany.

5. It’s a perfect candidate for occasional state investment. Most government programs work best with consistent funding; it’s a waste to build a nice new library and then shut it down when you’re short on cash. But a revolving housing loan fund is different. For example, it would be perfectly fine if such a fund got cash infusions only in the years when Oregon collects a bumper crop of capital gains taxes.

Beyond these policy arguments, some backers of a program like this say they see a blunter political argument for something along the lines of HB 2980. Oregon’s new governor has said, over and over, that she wants to approximately double housing production. If housing production doesn’t significantly increase in the next few years, Gov. Kotek’s future opponents will find it easy to call her policies unsuccessful. 

Wolf, from the iSector think tank, said he doesn’t see how Kotek can possibly come anywhere close to her goals for additional market-rate housing without dedicating some cash to the problem in a relatively cost-efficient way. 

“How else you gonna get there?” he asked. “You don’t have a lot of options for how to do it.” 

The Best Wildfire Solution We’re Not Using

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It’s time to address the elephant in the room: the best and possibly only practical way to protect homes from fire is to stop building so many of them in places that are primed to burn. According to Dr. Jon Keeley, a fire ecologist with the United States Geological Survey, “People are so fixated on climate change, which is a very real concern, but the bigger driver of accelerating wildfire damage is building houses in the WUI.” The wildland-urban interface (WUI) is the area where houses are built in or near natural areas—either through urban sprawl or when satellite developments or individual houses spring up in the midst of forest, shrublands, or grasslands. 

New houses mix with open space in a suburb of Spokane, WA (source: Kirk Fisher/Shutterstock.com).

This concern is urgent. Wildfires are bigger than ever. Many are impossible to fight. Yet people are flocking towards fire-prone lands and populating the wildland-urban interface faster than any other area in the United States. Some developers are building new homes in the very footprint of recent wildfires. It’s worth emphasizing the obvious: without costly firefighting, these homes will burn down. 

These houses trap us on a wildfire treadmill by impeding efforts to restore wildlands to health through “beneficial fire.” They also ensure the diversion of billions of tax dollars to an expanding arsenal of bulldozers, aircraft, and firefighters. 

We can’t stop population growth. Cascadia is and will likely remain a major receiving zone for people who appreciate its natural wonders and for climate migrants. What we can do is guide this growth away from fire danger. 

According to Tim Trohimovich, Director of Planning and Law at the growth management advocacy nonprofit Futurewise: “There’s no doubt that the cities and towns and their environs where it makes sense to grow are big enough to accommodate all of the population increase in Washington, Oregon, Montana, and Idaho. We don’t need to build on forestland, grasslands, or farmland.” 

In a true meritocracy, the 2023 firefighter of the year award would go to city infill because new construction within existing urban areas is the most effective way to lower our collective fire risk. Runner-up would be compact development contiguous with existing city limits. If past fires are any indication, compactness is the single most important protection against wildfire damage. 

Fire-hardening communities against inevitable wildfire is important, but preventing development in fire hazard zones is how we solve the wildfire crisis. 

Flocking to fireplains ignites fires and firefighting costs 

Between 1990 and 2010, the number of new houses in or near wildlands in the United States grew by 41 percent. Even more surprising, the number of new homes where fires have recently burned grew by over 60 percent.  

A house goes up in the ashes of the Tubbs fire (source: US Army Corps of Engineers).

A house goes up in the ashes of the Tubbs fire (source: US Army Corps of Engineers).

Just as it has maps of floodplains, the United States maintains maps of wildfire hazard that chart where fires frequently burn. You can think of these areas as “fireplains.” But unlike floodplains, construction in fireplains is not regulated. And fireplains are expanding as the atmosphere warms.  

People are moving into fiery rural places primarily for the amenities. This has become possible with improvements in the communication infrastructure, expansion of the service economy, and the ability to work from home. And, of course, free wildland fire suppression. About 15 percent of WUI houses in the West are second homes. Of course, plenty of people are moving to the WUI to afford a home.  

WUI growth tends to follow the riskiest patterns: dispersed, detached housing and isolated clusters of houses surrounded by open space. Planners call the latter “leapfrog development” because developers hop over land close to a city or town and instead erect structures farther away, leaving forest, grassland, or shrubland between clusters of buildings. 

Constructing residences near forests and other wildlands in fireplains poses four main problems.  

  1. More homes—and the people they house—tremendously increase the risk and occurrence of wildfires to begin with. Oregon’s Eagle Creek Fire that ultimately burned 48,000 acres in the Columbia Gorge was started by teens throwing fireworks. California’s Ranch Fire, spreading over 410,000 acres, was sparked by a hammer driving a metal stake. Whether it’s burning debris piles, discarded cigarettes, arson, or downed power lines, people start 84 percent of wildfires and 97 percent of those that threaten dwellings.  
  2. There are more lives and homes at stake. More than any other variable, including the hotter and drier weather of climate change, the location of housing growth has had the greatest impact on how many human and animal lives and residences are lost to fire. 
  3. WUI growth in fireplains is the single greatest factor driving skyrocketing suppression costs. The United States’ annual firefighting bill grew twentyfold over the past 35 years, hitting $4.5 billion in 2021. Not only does WUI growth cause more fires but suppression costs ten times more when a house is at risk. 
  4. Building houses in fireplains keeps us trapped on the wildfire treadmill. When dwellings are near wildlands, it becomes hard or impossible to get more “beneficial fire” back onto landscapes.  

Trapped on the wildfire treadmill 

As I wrote recently, we are trapped on a wildfire treadmill: the more we suppress fires, the worse they get; and the worse fires get, the more we suppress them.  

To get off the wildfire treadmill, we need to restore forests and clear out forest fuels by returning low- and moderate-intensity fires to the land. Forest and other land managers have three main tools to do this: 1) managing wildfires to maximize the amount of beneficial fire during both suppression operations and when conditions are safe for “managed wildfire for resource benefit”; 2) intentionally starting controlled fires, called prescribed burn; and 3) when used in combination with fire, mechanical treatments (i.e., thinning) to reduce tree density and other fuels.

An expanding WUI (i.e., more sprawl) narrows our chances of success.  

In the United States, about 100 million acres of seasonally dry federal lands are at high risk of wildfire.1This includes lands managed by the US Forest Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, and National Park Service.
 Much of this area needs fire to return about every 20 years.  This requires tremendous resources—personnel, equipment, and bandwidth—resources that are getting tied up fighting the growing number of increasingly expensive fires near new WUI developments.  

Building near wildlands also limits our ability to use fire as a tool. Even small managed fires carry risk, and supervisors are less willing to burn near residences because of the liability should anything go wrong. Fires create smoke and, although unusual, managed and prescribed fires can grow out of control. When houses are nearby, the potential for them to cause damage surges.  

Controlled burn in southwest Oregon

For these reasons, forest managers can’t use “managed wildfire for resource benefit” anywhere near communities.  

Even prescribed fire is impeded by houses. Burn bosses can only green-light a controlled burn near a community if the calculated risk that the fire will escape falls below a threshold based on computer modeling using wind, temperature, humidity, and the forecast for rain.  

Another bar to clear is air quality. Kara Karbowski, who coordinates prescribed burn programs in Washington, told Sightline, “We don’t want to smoke out communities, right? On those days where it’s going to impact the community, no one’s burning.” In her experience, “If you go to certain parts of the state, where there’s less people, there’s less opportunity for that.”  

Ultimately, the objective is to let as much low- and moderate-intensity fire burn as we safely can. This will save lives, lessen smoke, reduce carbon emissions, and make forests healthier. Building houses in the wildland-urban interface blocks this exit from the wildfire treadmill. 

Three tools to redirect growth 

By 2040, Idaho is predicted to house an additional 660,000 people. Washington state will likely house an additional 3 million. Without planning and policy, millions of new structures will go up in Cascadia’s WUI fireplains.  

When a new house goes up in a fireplain, it perpetuates the wildfire treadmill, raises taxes and insurance premiums across the country, and exposes people near and far to dangerous particulate pollution. The new homeowners don’t pay these costs. 

If Cascadians want to guide population growth to safer places where it doesn’t burden the public, they can do so in three main ways, none of which would be politically popular. But the urgency of the growing costs of wildfires—in lives, homes, and forest health—demands that people think differently about the communities they’re building, making some concessions up front to avoid likely greater losses down the line.   

1. Channel growth toward towns and cities

Where enacted, land use and growth management laws have silently prevented wildfire damage for decades by guiding population growth into cities, containing sprawl, and keeping open spaces open. These protections are not designed to stop growth but to optimize how growth happens. They result in more concentrated and efficient use of land, coordinated infrastructure and public services, and protected natural resources.  

According to Joshua Chandler, city planner for The Dalles, Oregon, “by establishing urban growth boundaries, Oregon has avoided what continues to happen in California with sprawl.” If California had similar growth laws, wildfire damage would be a fraction of what it is today. 

All Cascadian states can make their communities safer by improving land use policy to keep homes out of wildfire harm’s way, even Oregon. Under its land use law, counties must identify natural hazards, but they don’t have to protect against them. According to Rory Isbell, staff attorney at Central Oregon LandWatch, “You could strengthen [the law] to say no new development or no conversion of farm or forestland for residential uses in your areas of high or extreme fire risk.” 

2. Eliminate perverse incentives

By fighting forest fires, by purchasing mortgages in the wildland-urban interface (through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), and by installing broadband and other infrastructure regardless of the area’s fire risk, the US federal government encourages growth in the fire-prone WUI.  

If it wants to lower its own wildfire bill and protect public health, it needs to eliminate these and other perverse incentives and stop subsidizing building in fireplains. This includes forgoing the creation of a federal wildfire insurance program and avoiding repeating the mistake inherent in the National Flood Insurance Program, which has caused population to increase in high flood-risk counties. 

Local and state governments also face a moral hazard. They benefit from the tax revenues and economic growth that development brings, but when wildfire strikes, the federal government typically foots most of the recovery bill. The federal government can’t tell people where they can and cannot live, but it can put pressure on state and local officials by conditioning federal grants on their adoption of wildfire-mitigating growth policies.   

3. Stop shielding new houses from the full costs of risky areas

Many people yearn to live in a forested landscape. Free firefighting services and subsidized insurance allow them to do so. Between 2010 and 2020, people generally moved away from areas with frequent hurricanes and heat waves, disasters that cannot be “fought.” But they moved into areas with higher risks of wildfires. 

Even without a nearby fire, a new dwelling in the fireplain already costs taxpayers. For 2023, the US Forest Service budgeted $1.3 billion dollars for “wildfire preparedness.” This includes research and development of firefighting technology; educating communities; training, transporting, feeding, and housing firefighters; purchasing, operating, and maintaining aircraft and bulldozers; and contracting for private fire aviation companies to remain on standby. For fires that require heavy firefighting, suppression spending adds another $1 billion to the budget. 

Houses in fireplains also increase the insurance rates of policyholders everywhere. After the 2021 fire season, home insurance premiums soared, with policyholders in safe areas picking up much of the tab. Some 90 percent of US homeowners swallowed an unusually steep jump, with premiums in Washington state, for example, up by 18 percent.   

Think like it’s already 2070 

Max Moritz, a UC Cooperative Extension Wildfire Specialist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has a warning for Cascadia: “I live in Santa Barbara, where it’s always hot and dry, and it’s fire-prone much of the time. But when the Pacific Northwest, with all that biomass, starts getting the same periodic warm droughts and wind events, it’s gonna be a spooky place to live.” 

It’s hard to imagine what we have not experienced. But if Cascadians can start designing forward-looking communities to thrive in an increasingly fiery future, we can save lives, avert enormous financial consequences, and step off the wildfire treadmill. 

After years studying wildfire in the West, Dr. Jon Keeley, fire scientist for the US Geological Survey, believes that “ultimately, what will solve the wildfire problem is not firefighters but concerned politicians who find a way to pass ordinances and laws to manage growth.”  

Washington’s Refinery Communities Just Got a Transition Boost

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Within Washington state’s newly released 2023 operating budget for the biennium is a nation-leading step toward oil refinery transition planning. Over the next two years, Washington will devote a quarter-million dollars to analyzing the future of the state’s refineries, laying the groundwork for a clean energy transition that supports workers, safeguards communities, and protects the environment.   

There are five oil refineries on Puget Sound—in Pierce, Skagit, and Whatcom counties. But as Sightline has highlighted previously, the state lacks a roadmap to protect workers and communities dependent on these facilities as the region shifts off of oil. That’s a risky bet when experts project oil demand will peak and then continuously decline over coming decades and when, from 2019 through 2022 alone, seven oil refineries across the United States shut down operations without warning. These abrupt closures resulted in more than 3,400 layoffs, millions in lost local tax revenue, polluted land without a cleanup plan, and minimal community say over future redevelopment of the sites.  

Washington is now embarking on a different, forward-looking path.  

The new $250,000 budget proviso tasks the Washington State Department of Commerce with assessing the future of the state’s refineries. Though an initial budget request of $750,000 submitted to the Senate would have allowed for a fuller analysis, this more modest investment is an important first step. The Department of Commerce will contract with a consulting or research firm to implement the project.  

Thanks to this investment, Washington and its refinery communities will gain important information they’ve been lacking to prompt future planning and to guide a thoughtful, inclusive process, including: 

1. A transparent picture of both the feasibility and desirability of refinery conversion to alternative fuels. Oil refineries globally are touting conversion to alternative fuels like “renewable diesel” as the way of the future.1 Renewable diesel is chemically identical to petroleum diesel but produced from vegetable oil (primarily soybean and corn oil) or animal fats instead of from crude oil. Washington’s BP refinery already produces renewable diesel, and it is a much-discussed option for the other facilities in the state. But several US refineries that recently converted to this fuel laid off most of their workers and cut their tax payments significantly. Plus, biofuels like renewable diesel are coming under increasing scrutiny for their environmental hazards, including using prime farmland or forests to grow their soy or corn fuel feedstocks. Rather than relying solely on industry assurances, Washington will now gain a clear-eyed assessment of this oil industry proposal and its likely impacts on employment, local taxes, and the environment. 

2. An understanding of options for workers and communities currently dependent on refineries. More than 4,400 people—2,000 employees and approximately 2,400 contractors—work in the Washington refineries, many unionized and earning well above area median income. In addition, the local governments that house the refineries currently collect from them more than $24 million in property taxes that pay for critical local community services like schools, fire departments, and libraries. To the first point, this proviso will fund the inaugural proactive assessment in Washington of refinery workers’ skillsets against alternative local industries, looking for transferability. To the second, it will forecast how local tax revenues may fall with reduced refinery output. With this information, Washington leaders will have a clearer view of needed investments to support refinery workers through the energy transition (see some ideas from a recent report on layoffs at a former Marathon refinery in California). And state and local leaders can use this information to start shoring up support for essential social services currently dependent on increasingly unpredictable fossil fuel markets.  

3. An assessment of and proactive vision for what refinery sites could become—and the cleanup needed to get there. Washington and the communities that live near the refineries deserve to understand what the land that the facilities sit on today could become. Will the land need to stay industrial? Could it be repurposed for other uses, like BP’s former refinery in Casper, Wyoming, which is now a multi-use site with a business park, golf course, and kayak park that, together, employ more than 200 people? What would it take—in dollars, labor, and time—to clean up what is no doubt heavily contaminated soil and other messes? Who would pay, and how could taxpayers be protected? The proviso-funded study will address these points so that local communities can better advocate for the future they want to see for these long-polluted sites. This work will require the Department of Commerce to embark on a robust public engagement process with groups including labor, frontline communities, and environmental organizations, as well as to consult area Tribes to understand potential impacts to tribal rights and resources.  

The project’s success will depend on the Department of Commerce selecting a consulting partner who can both conduct rigorous energy system modeling and lead in-depth, trusted community engagement. Once the findings are published in 2024, state legislators and local leaders should have the information they need to initiate a full-fledged, community-led planning process, perhaps similar to that of a coalition in California. And Washington will likely need new statewide policy solutions based on the report’s findings that can bolster support for workers and smooth the transition for refinery communities.  

While the study is just a first step, Washington is now on its journey to planning for a more resilient, healthy future that supports the workers, environment, and communities that have long hosted the refineries.  

We’re Stuck on a Wildfire Treadmill

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More low-intensity fires could have prevented the megafires that turned 700,000 acres of forest into a “moonscape” and incinerated more than one billion board feet of timber. That is what the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation claim in their lawsuit against the US government. There is good evidence backing them up.

Even with more flexible policy and some redistribution in funding, federal and state wildfire response still does not follow science-based recommendations to allow wildfires to burn when conditions are low-risk and to use intentional controlled fires to restore forest health and climate resiliency.

Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to our wildfire problem. As William Bagley, a seasoned fire professional and emergency manager for the Klamath Tribes, told me, “Fire’s not rocket science. It’s a lot more complex.” Still, it’s clear—especially in seasonally dry inland ecosystems—that forests need more fire, not less.

Cascadia is stuck on a wildfire treadmill

Cascadia, along with the rest of the West, is caught in a vicious circle: the more we suppress fires, the worse they get; and the worse fires get, the more we suppress them. It’s such a ubiquitous pattern, and such an entrenched and difficult problem, that it deserves naming. Let’s call it the wildfire treadmill.1Fire professionals have long called this dilemma “the fire paradox.” Given the severity of recent fires, though, it’s worth considering a less neutral term for this vicious cycle.
 (Sightline has illustrated the concept above. A higher-resolution version is available for download and use here.)

Wildfires have become larger and more ferocious than previously imaginable, and we are seeing more of the megafires that destroy communities and that no amount of firefighting can contain. As the planet warms, most areas in western North America will experience a doubling or more of their fire risk.

The three culprits that put us on the wildfire treadmill are:

  1. Climate change and the accompanying increase in those hot and dry days with strong winds that spread fire rapidly and make fire extinction very difficult, called “fire weather”;
  2. The buildup of “fuels” in the forest: small trees, shrubs, debris, and dead wood; and
  3. The expansion of the wildland–urban interface (WUI), where houses meet or intermingle with undeveloped wildland vegetation.
Smokey the Bear statue warning passersby of "Very High" fire danger (source: Oregon Department of Forestry).

Smokey the Bear statue warning passersby of “Very High” fire danger (source: Oregon Department of Forestry).

Ironically, the accumulation of forest fuels is a direct consequence of state and federal policies that since the 1600s in one Canadian province and the early 1900s nationwide in the United States have mandated the immediate suppression of all wildland ignitions. For decades, indigenous Americans caught using cultural fire were often jailed or worse.

Now we face a daunting predicament: having snuffed out nearly every ignition for over a century, we’ve suppressed ourselves into a corner where even a small and innocuous flame can explode into an uncontrollable megafire. So, we continue to fight nearly every fire.

A fire in time saves nine

Small, low-intensity fires now, while unpleasant and dangerous, mean fewer large, high-intensity fires later. It’s when a fire is hot enough to burn the entirety of mature trees, called crowning or torching, that higher-intensity fire can take off. At this point, the fire can spread embers across long distances and can become a “crown fire” that spreads from treetop to treetop.

Historically, smaller and patchier fires frequently swept through Cascadia’s seasonally dry forests, clearing out forest fuels. Indeed, throughout the bioregion, much of this fire was intentionally started by indigenous people who used it to prevent more dangerous fires, stimulate seed germination, recycle nutrients, and create open habitats for the plants and animals they relied on for food and fiber.

These lower-intensity fires travel along the ground, fueled by grasses, fine fuels, and small trees. Fire-adapted species, such as the ponderosa pine, with its thick fire-resistant bark, can survive low- and mixed-intensity fires. And these fires, every 15 to 20 years, make it unlikely for any one ignition to grow into a high-intensity fire. The footprint of a past fire also can act as a natural fuel break and can provide access for firefighters.

Ecosystem restoration burn in South Okanagan, BC (source: Province of British Columbia; cropped from original).

Ecosystem restoration burn in South Okanagan, BC (source: Province of British Columbia; cropped from original).

Now, farsighted leaders in the West, from Indigenous groups to the US Forest Service, are trying to step off the wildfire treadmill by carefully using wildland fire to clear out accumulated fuels. During safe weather conditions, fire professionals carefully reintroduce fire using prescribed burns and “managed wildfire for resource benefit,” the clunky term of art for attentively monitoring a wildfire instead of immediately suppressing it. Mechanical treatments, including thinning out small trees and debris ahead of time, can both reduce fuels and make it easier for crews to move around as they manage these active fires. However, when not followed soon by fire, these treatments may actually make fires worse.

It’s important to note that forests of different vegetation types, elevations, and moisture conditions respond differently to fire and fire management. For example, fuels reduction does not seem to mitigate fire severity in the cooler and wetter forests west of the Cascades.

Authorities monitored this wildfire as it burned along the forest floor without torching the treetops (source: US Forest Service).

Authorities monitored this wildfire as it burned along the forest floor without torching the treetops (source: US Forest Service).

The good work of healthy forest fire

Increased community safety

Protecting lives, homes, schools, and infrastructure from devastating conflagrations such as the Paradise and Lytton fires is the driving concern behind public efforts to return “good fire” to the land in seasonally dry forests. Regional strategies focus on reducing hazardous fuels in those firesheds where communities are most at risk.

Less smoke for better air quality

Low-intensity prescribed underburn in the wildland urban interface, western OR (source: US Bureau of Land Management; cropped from original).

Low-intensity prescribed underburn in the wildland urban interface, western OR (source: US Bureau of Land Management; cropped from original).

Planned fires can also improve Cascadia’s growing air quality problem. Most obviously, more frequent but lower-intensity fires can spread out particulate pollution, making it less intrusive and dangerous.

Additionally, in theory, fire professionals can plan prescribed burns for times when forest fuels are dry: just like chopped firewood, wetter fuels create more smoke. As Mike Petersen, vice-president of the Northeast Washington Forest Coalition, describes, “With a prescribed fire, you can kind of hone in on what kind of moisture level you want, and you plan it for a week or so before a big rainstorm so you can put the thing out.” Managers can also plan burns for times when the wind will blow the smoke away from communities and avoid thermal inversions that trap smoky air close to the Earth’s surface.

Greater carbon storage potential

Paradoxically, more fire also can dampen emissions of carbon from forests. Many people, including many media outlets, assume that all wildfires send sequestration gains up in smoke, that “when a tree burns, … that carbon is released back into the atmosphere.” The specifics are complex, but a few general ideas can help explain why that’s not necessarily true.

Fires that clear out forest fuels can create more carbon-dense and carbon-stable forests. Most forest carbon is stored in the trunks of trees. By thinning an over-dense understory, low- and moderate-severity fires free up resources to help larger trees mature into bigger carbon warehouses. Bigger trees also tend to be more drought- and fire-tolerant, a vital feature in a warming climate. These lower-severity fires also help prevent severe fires that can permanently convert forest into carbon-poor shrublands and grasslands. Finally, even when mature trees are killed in fires, most of their carbon remains in the dead trunks, releasing gradually as new growth sequesters carbon.

Improved forest health

This serotinous cone from the fire-adapted lodgepole pine was opened by fire, allowing it to release its seeds (source: US National Park Service).

This serotinous cone from the fire-adapted lodgepole pine was opened by fire, allowing it to release its seeds (source: US National Park Service).

Beyond smoke and carbon, there is wide agreement among ecologists that fire is one of the most essential influences on western forests and that more fire is needed on most landscapes. Dense forests crowd out the flight corridors that birds of prey need for hunting and the sunny clearings that bears need to forage for berries. By keeping forests open, wildfire creates key habitats.

Wildfires also contribute to species diversity by opening gaps between clusters of trees, leaving some old stands and creating some young stands, thus allowing for a range of different light and moisture conditions that suit a variety of tree and shrub species. Some species, such as the lodgepole pine, need fire to release their seeds from “serotinous” cones. Diverse and healthy forests are more resistant to the spread of insects and disease.

How do we say yes to fire?

It seems the wildfire crisis has pushed the US government past a first tipping point. Policy is finally responding to scientists’ call for more fire. The US Forest Service’s ten-year plan calls for more prescribed burn, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 added $1.7 billion for forest restoration and wildfire risk reduction.

But will it be enough? Policy has been changing since the 1970s, but on the ground, forest managers still face a system of incentives and liabilities that pushes toward suppression and away from managed wildfire and prescribed burn. Each year, despite intentions, new wildfire emergencies cancel plans to get more fire on the land. Authorities kick the can down the road, relieving short-term fears at the expense of a long-term solution.

In 2021, the Forest Service prohibited managing fire for resource benefit and limited most prescribed burning. In 2022, it directed a full moratorium on all prescribed fire. In both years, while some regions burned, others had exceptionally cool, wet, and safe conditions. Adam Gebauer, Public Lands Program Director at the Lands Council, explained the rare missed opportunity. “Given the limited amount of burn windows that we have here in eastern Washington, this would have been one of the better years to get a lot of prescribed fire on the ground.”

We have the technical know-how, but as a society, we’re only at the beginning of learning to live with fire.

Ponderosa seedling grows after a fire in the Umatilla National Forest (source: Kate Anderson).

Ponderosa seedling grows after a fire in the Umatilla National Forest (source: Kate Anderson).

Max Moritz, professor of wildfire dynamics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told me, “We struggle to use fire as a tool because we’ve sprinkled homes and communities across many of these landscapes. If we could roll back time and unsprinkle all those homes, or if we fire-hardened those communities, we could probably use fire in a lot of different ways that we’re not comfortable with now.”

The first step to getting off the wildfire treadmill is, in the words of Kara Karboski, who coordinates prescribed burns in Washington, “seeing the landscape and the trees as something that needs fire. When we do have smoke in the air from burning, we need people to understand and be supportive of the work that’s happening. If we have this cultural shift, maybe we can pass better laws and building codes.”

A Fairer Election System in Alaska Helped More Independents Win Office 

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The demographics of the Alaska Legislature looked slightly different after the 2022 election. Alaskans sent more Independents to Juneau than ever before. More Millennials won office as the years-long retirement trend among Baby Boomers continued. The share of women legislators held about steady. Racial diversity ticked up modestly.

We wanted to know whether Alaska’s first-time use of open primaries and ranked choice general elections affected any of these demographic changes.* Given the multiple factors involved and the very small sample size of one set of election results, the job seemed futile. The exceptionality of 2022 showed itself early with the unexpected death of Alaska’s longest-serving Congressman, and it persisted for reasons other than the debut of Alaska’s election system. The 10-year redistricting process reshaped legislative boundaries and put 19 of 20 Senate seats, along with all House seats, on the ballot (normally, Senators serve staggered 4-year terms and House members serve 2-year terms). The open seat in Congress triggered a special election. And a record number of incumbents chose not to run again. Attributing all the new faces and dynamics in Juneau to the election system would overlook these and a host of other factors that influenced who ran and how voters made their selections.

Still, we decided to check out the data. We found open primaries combined with the ranked choice general election most obviously influenced political diversity in the legislature. But when it came to age, gender, and race, nationwide demographic shifts toward greater diversity that predated the system appeared to exert more significant effects. The system probably didn’t do much to improve diversity in these cases but also did not appear to disrupt preexisting trends. Nor did it significantly alter the Independent/right-leaning dynamic of the House and the Senate. Its virtue lay in providing Alaska’s many Independent-minded voters a way to express their nuanced, non-binary political views.

How we did our analysis 

To measure diversity in the Alaska legislature, we gathered data in four demographic categories tracked by the National Council of State Legislatures. They were political party, age, gender, and race. We then analyzed legislative classes from 2008 to 2022 and the factors most likely to have shaped their demographic makeup, including the following: 

  • The debut of Alaska’s voter-approved election system of open primaries and ranked choice voting;  
  • New political boundaries from the latest round of redistricting changing the constituencies of some seats; 
  • An unusually high number of veteran legislators choosing not to run for a variety of reasons (e.g., family considerations, health issues), making way for an unusually large freshman class; 
  • Normal generational turnover; 
  • Shifts in political culture and societal norms; 
  • Quality of candidates and campaigns; and 
  • Buzzworthiness of candidates at the top of the ticket. 

Independents have more representation than ever  

More Independents serve in the Alaska legislature today than at any point in the state’s history, with six members of the House eschewing party labels. The growth in representation by Independents did not meaningfully alter the longstanding political order. In both chambers, Republicans maintained the majority they’ve held since the 1990s, and no Independents won seats in the Senate.  

Nearly 60 percent of Alaska voters are Independents, meaning they self-identified as “nonpartisan” or “undeclared” or opted not to choose any political affiliation when signing up to vote.1“Nonpartisan” means that a registered voter is not associated with or does not support the policies or interests of a political party. “Undeclared” means that a registered voter does not wish to declare an affiliation.
 The Independent identity of Alaska voters takes many forms: the pro-oil development Democrat is no anomaly here; nor is the Republican pushing to spend billions in state budget dollars on the Permanent Fund Dividend (or the “PFD,” which researchers from the University of Chicago and elsewhere have studied as a form of universal basic income, a concept with socialist roots).  

And yet, until 2022, Independent representation in the legislature never broke single-digit percentages. The advent of open primaries, which allowed all candidates and all voters to participate in a single primary, regardless of party, did away with election laws that were stacked against candidates outside the two major parties. And ranked choice general elections gave Independents the leeway to run with little risk of becoming the “spoiler” candidate. The new system, more than any other factor, was the most obvious game-changer for political diversity in the Alaska legislature.  


Before 2022, political parties ran Alaska’s primary elections and tended to treat Independents as second-class candidates. The Republican party barred Independents from its primaries entirely, and so did Democrats until 2018. In those years, Independent candidates wanting to run in a primary had to give up their political identity by registering with the party running the primary they wanted to enter. Maintaining their Independent brand meant missing out on the primaries and having to gather enough signatures to qualify for the general election ballot.  

Former Representative Paul Seaton (Homer) was a longtime Republican legislator. In 2018 he ran as a nonpartisan candidate because, he said, he felt the party “had gone off track and was not working on solutions.” In the previous session, as co-chair of the House Finance committee, Seaton had angered a panoply of voters because of his work to shield Alaska’s budget from the booms and busts of the oil market by diversifying sources of revenue. He annoyed a large cross-section of constituents, including those who opposed a fiscal plan that would have increased taxes on oil companies, introduced a state income tax, and reduced the PFD. 

“There was the Republican primary and the everybody else primary, and I ran in the everybody else primary.” –Former Alaska State Rep. Paul Seaton


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Seaton’s stance on state budgeting put him at a disadvantage, but so did Alaska’s election laws, which obfuscated his identity as an Independent. Democrats allowed third party candidates and Independents into their primaries that year, while Republicans did not. If Seaton wanted to participate in a primary, he had to go on the Democratic ballot. “There was the Republican primary and the everybody else primary, and I ran in the everybody else primary,” Seaton said.  

He ran unopposed in the primary and went on to face a Republican in the general, where ballot labeling presented another hurdle for Independents. Seaton had an (N) for “nonpartisan” next to his name, along with the far more prominent label of “Alaska Democratic Party Nominee,” determined by the Division of Elections. (Pre-open primary, the division’s choice of ballot labels was a contentious issue.) Though Seaton had been a Republican for 50 years, voters in his district, where former President Donald Trump won easily in 2016, could be excused for thinking he had switched parties. Unsurprisingly, Seaton lost the seat he had held since 2003.   

A few Independent legislators nonetheless managed to win elected office under the old system, starting with Rep. Dan Ortiz (Ketchikan) in 2014. Since then, their numbers have remained so low that name-checking all of them isn’t a huge stretch: Rep. Jason Grenn (Anchorage) ran successfully as an Independent in 2016, joining Ortiz in the House. Grenn then lost in 2018, while Ortiz won.  

(In 2019, two former Democrats, longtime legislator Bryce Edgmon (Dillingham) and John Lincoln (Kotzebue) changed their party affiliations to undeclared while serving in the legislature. Though they did not actually run for office as Independents, they are included in the chart below.) 

In the election years we analyzed, Ortiz and Grenn were the only Independents to run and win until 2020, the first year candidates had ample prep time to run in the Democratic primary. Even then the numbers were modest, with four Independent legislators winning office. Two of them, Edgmon and Calvin Schrage (Anchorage) ran in the Democratic primaries. Ortiz and Josiah Patkotak, a right-leaning Independent, appeared on the general election ballot only. 

In 2022, Alaska voters returned to open primaries and, for the first time, used ranked choice voting in the general election. Open primaries, where all candidates of all political affiliations run on a standard ballot accessible to all voters, equalized the playing field for Independents. Electoral reforms that lowered barriers for candidates and voters outside the major parties appear to be the likeliest explanation for the record high number of legislative Independents. The previous round of redistricting a decade ago did little to change the political diversification of the legislature. And Independents have been a large voting bloc in Alaska for years. The new system finally gave them a real chance to run and win. 

Millennials gained and Boomers waned (but remain powerful)   

Generational diversity in Juneau hit a low in 2014, when Boomers held 46 of the legislature’s 60 seats. Since then, the number of Boomers has declined every election, and an influx of Generation Xers and Millennials has led to more age diversity in the legislature.2The years used for each generation are: Generation Z (1998-present), Millennials (1981-1997), Generation X (1965-1980), Baby Boomers (1946-1964), Silent (1928-1945) and Greatest (before 1928).
 In 2014, two Millennials served in the legislature. In 2022 voters sent 17 Millennials to Juneau and Boomers made up less than half the legislature for the first time during the eight legislative sessions we examined.  


The gradual exit of Boomers masks the fact that they continue to win an outsized number of seats relative to their share of the population. In 2020, for example, Boomers won half the seats in the Senate and House combined, while making up just 28 percent of Alaska’s voting age population, according to American Community Survey data from the US Census. This isn’t surprising. Older lawmakers with years of experience have had ample opportunity to accumulate the connections, institutional knowledge, and seniority that afford them staying power.  

Alaska isn’t the only political body where Boomers hold disproportionate sway. In the US Congress, the median age in 2023 is higher than it’s ever been. And Boomers are a large cause for the increase. Boomers won 48 percent of seats in the current Congress, while making up about 21 percent of the general population.  

Natural aging of the population seems the likeliest cause of changes in generational makeup of the Alaska legislature. The steady drop in the number of Boomers began in 2016, well before open primaries and ranked choice voting went into place and several years before the COVID-19 pandemic kicked off a nationwide retirement boomlet. An unusually high attrition rate among incumbents due to redistricting, burnout, family obligations, pandemic stress, and the financial demands of maintaining a second household in Juneau, created more opportunities for new lawmakers to win office but didn’t noticeably alter the overall rate of generational transition. 

Open primaries and a ranked choice general election appeared to have little positive or negative effect on generational succession. Running for office is a daunting undertaking for younger candidates who lack the political experience, financial backing, and networks necessary to run a successful campaign. Youth-oriented political action committees, role models, and targeted encouragement may prove more effective than the election system in boosting the number of Millennials and Gen Zers holding political office. 

Women need more than electoral reforms to win  

An enduring but incorrect Alaska stereotype is that men vastly outnumber women. That’s certainly the case in the Alaska legislature, where just one-third of lawmakers who won office in 2022 were women. But among registered voters, the ratio of men to women is nearly equivalent. In October 2022, 49 percent were women and the rest were men.  

Open primaries and ranked choice voting didn’t appear to influence or alter the gradual, years-long trend of more Alaska women winning legislative seats. The presence of women lawmakers in Juneau has grown steadily over the past 8 election cycles. From 2008 through 2014, women never won more than about 28 percent of seats in the legislature. From 2016 through 2022, women have held at least 30 percent of seats. 


Nationwide, more women have moved into powerful political roles, regardless of the type of election they’re running in. The number of women in Congress is at a historic high, according to a report in October by the Congressional Research Service. And women have made political gains elsewhere: the vice presidency, the president’s cabinet, governorships, mayor’s offices, and city councils. Two of the three members of Alaska’s Congressional delegation are women, with voters sending Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Alaska’s senior senator, and Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola, a House freshman, to Congress in 2022. “There’s no clear narrative” as to why women are making gains, according to Kelly Dittmar, director of research at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. 

Alaska has a higher percentage of women in its legislature than Congress does, but among state legislatures, its record of electing women is exactly average, ranking 25th in 2023. Fourteen states and territories have over 40 percent of their legislatures represented by women, while Alaska’s legislature is 33 percent women, according to the Center for American Women and Politics. 

The share of women in the Alaska legislature representing both major parties is identical, with nine Republicans, nine Democrats, and two Independents. A woman, Rep. Cathy Tilton, a Republican, is House Speaker. Sen. Cathy Giessel, also a Republican, is Senate Majority Leader of a bipartisan majority that includes all but three senators. Data shared by Glenn Wright, associate political science professor at the University of Alaska Southeast, shows a decade-long trend in the Alaska legislature of Republicans fielding the higher intra-party percentage of women. In 2020 and 2022, however, Democrats reclaimed the top spot.3This is important because Republicans typically hold more seats than Democrats, so comparing the percentages of women within each party gives us a more accurate view of which party is doing better at gender diversity.
  

Women are underrepresented in US politics for all sorts of reasons, from sexism in media coverage of politicians to sexism on the campaign trail to sexism in state legislatures. A RepresentWomen study posited that ranked choice voting makes elections more women-friendly by reducing concerns over vote-splitting between women candidates, incentivizing more cooperation between candidates, and lowering the financial barriers for all candidates. More equitable election policies can help, but other changes, targeting barriers from the psychological to inadequate support for raising a family, are also necessary. 

Men are 40 percent more likely than women to field suggestions to run from close contacts, including colleagues, spouses, or family members. And men are two-thirds more likely than women to receive encouragement to seek office by an elected official, party leader, or political activist according to a 2022 report by the Brookings Institution.  

“Potential candidates’ self-perceptions are consistent with messages they receive—or don’t—about running for office,” the report said. “Still today, we operate in a world where people see men as candidates. And men see themselves that way. Significantly fewer women live in that world.”  

The Alaska legislature is more racially diverse than ever  

Of the eight election cycles we analyzed, voters sent the most racially diverse group of lawmakers to Juneau in 2022.4 Of the demographic categories we examined, race is by far the hardest to define. People are complex and may not fit exactly into any single category. We relied on previous candidate statements, news articles, campaign websites, and other searchable information to determine the race of Alaska’s legislators.
  Six identify as Alaska Native, three are Black, two are Asian, two are Hispanic, and one is Multiracial. They come from across the state: Southeast Alaska; Anchorage; the North Slope hub community of Utqiagvik; and Dillingham, in Southwest Alaska. 


Legislators of color tend to be Democrats, underscoring Republicans’ lower success in expanding the racial diversity of their candidates. The trend occurs nationwide. While the GOP added more people of color in Congress, it still lags Democrats. In Congress, 80 percent of lawmakers of color are Democrats, while 20 percent are Republicans. Similarly, in Alaska, two lawmakers of color are Independents, three are Republicans, and eight are Democrats. Two of the three Republican legislators are Black. Both Independents are Alaska Native, with one leaning left and the other leaning right. 

White politicians still make up an outsized majority of Alaska legislators, holding 77 percent of seats while whites make up about 65 percent of the population. Alaska Natives remain underrepresented. They make up close to 20 percent of the voting age population, according to Alaska Native voting advocacy groups, but hold only 10 percent of legislative seats. Still, that 10 percent marks a high point in the eight election cycles we analyzed for Native representation in the legislature.  

Open primaries and ranked choice voting coincided with the election of the most racially diverse class of legislators in the years we analyzed. While demographic change seems a highly likely reason for the increase in racial diversity in Alaska’s legislature, it doesn’t explain everything.  

True, younger generations in America are more diverse than older ones. And, as we explained above, Millennials appear to be replacing Boomers. This would seem to indicate that racial diversity is somehow tied to generational succession. And yet, until 2022, racial diversity in Alaska’s legislature remained essentially flat during the years we studied, even as the number of Boomer legislators decreased and Gen Xers and Millennials took their places.   

Does that mean open primaries and ranked choice voting in Alaska did somehow open the door for candidates of color? Possibly. But there’s also the marked shift in the way Americans view race that began during the pandemic with the police murder in 2020 of George Floyd. Political participation by people of color increased as a result. What’s more, across the country, states with election systems different from Alaska’s, including California,5California uses open primaries, but only two candidates can move on to the general election, rather than four, as is the case in Alaska. And unlike Alaska, California does not use statewide ranked choice voting.
 Oregon, and Minnesota, also elected their most diverse legislatures ever in 2022. We expect additional elections will offer a more complete picture. 

For better or worse, Alaska’s legislature hasn’t changed dramatically  

Alaska has had only one election using open primaries and ranked choice voting, and it appears to have had positive to neutral effects on four of the main markers of diversity tracked by the National Council of State Legislatures. While some may feel disappointed that the system didn’t cause a dramatic uptick in diversity, incremental change did occur. The system advanced political diversity by allowing more Independents to run; and it didn’t interfere with natural generational change, didn’t appear to help or hurt women, and possibly played a role in more seats being won by people of color. 

Is the legislature as diverse as it should be? Probably not. Boomers still hold an outsized influence, both in numbers and power, relative to their share of the population. (Podcaster Andrew Halcro, himself a Boomer, goes so far as to label these legislators the “tyrannical generation.”) Women continue to be vastly underrepresented. And so do people of color.  

On the other hand, the legislature does accurately reflect Alaska’s Independent/right-leaning politics. Anyone arguing that the system was rigged to send a wildly different cohort of lawmakers to Juneau has only to look at the makeup of the two chambers. The state Senate has a 17-member bipartisan majority and appears to be making good on its promise of “compromise and consensus.” Meanwhile, the House shifted rightward, veering into the tumult that has come to define some branches of the Republican party. The dynamic of the two chambers is a mirror image of Alaska’s most recent legislatures, where the House had a bipartisan majority and the Senate leaned conservative. 

Are they still haggling over the Permanent Fund Dividend? Yup. Are culture wars over sexual orientation and gender still a thing? Yes. Are school budget talks still hugely difficult and sticky? Absolutely. All this is to say Alaska’s legislature didn’t undergo massive change in 2022 when it came down to the business of lawmaking. But by choosing open primaries and a ranked choice general election, Alaskans gave themselves a more democratic method than they’ve ever had of picking the people for the job.  

Thanks to Nakeshia Diop for collecting the copious amounts of data that are the heart of this article.