Poll: Washington Voters Out Ahead Of Local Leaders On Zoning Reforms

Takeaways

A new poll conducted in January 2023 by a bipartisan research team finds overwhelming support among Washington voters for zoning reforms that would deliver more homes, in more shapes and sizes, in cities and towns across the state.
Compared with a similar poll one year ago, support has jumped more than ten points for many of the recommended reforms.
In addition, respondents understood a shortage of homes to be the top factor in the state’s high costs of homes and rents.
Support held for more homes near transit and job centers across demographic, partisan, and geographic lines, and when it was proposed that multifamily housing would be built nearby or next door.
Notably, small and medium apartment buildings gained broad-based support, along with accessory dwellings and duplexes and triplexes, to address the state’s acute housing shortage and control prices.

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If you live in Washington state, it’s just about guaranteed that you or someone you know is struggling with the cost of housing. This isn’t just an I-5 corridor problem either. Crosscut reported last week that the most drastic percentage increases in prices and rents over the past several years are in Washington’s smaller cities and rural areas, on both sides of the mountains.

Opinion research bears this out as well. Over several years, in poll after poll after poll, Washingtonians have ranked housing affordability, the cost of living, and homelessness among their top concerns. Seventy-six percent of the 6,000 respondents in a Department of Commerce and Puget Sound Regional Council-commissioned survey from late 2022 said they were directly impacted or knew someone directly impacted by the cost and availability of housing in the state.

Washingtonians agree we have a big problem, even if we haven’t always found consensus about how to fix it. But that is changing. The overriding signal from a new statewide poll, commissioned by Sightline and conducted in mid-January 2023 by a bipartisan research team, is that a range of solutions to add more housing, including zoning reform to allow multifamily housing in single-family neighborhoods, is not just palatable; it’s popular. And it’s broadly supported. Favorability toward allowing more homes of all shapes and sizes in Washington cities spanned partisan and demographic lines and held strong across urban, suburban, and rural areas.

Support to allow more homes, lifting single-family zoning rules, ballooned in the last year alone

Sightline conducted a similar survey a year ago, finding that majorities approved of zoning changes to allow more middle housing and backyard cottage options: a respectable 61 percent supported a generic zoning reform proposal. This year, we expected some movement of public opinion. With greater urgency comes intensifying public will for action.

But the evolving mainstream mindset surpassed our expectations. In 2023, we saw higher support for pro-housing solutions, by more than ten points in many cases. Support for statewide pro-housing policy is rising, from lukewarm to blazing.

What’s more, we more rigorously stress-tested those views this time around, doubling down on the political hot potatoes: namely, a) explicitly stating that the policy would eliminate single-family zoning laws and b) checking people’s tolerance for new housing being built in their neighborhoods. As expected, some support did drop away (those potatoes are hot for a reason), but robust majority support remained.

Today we can say that when it comes to reforming zoning to allow more homes in our cities, including changes that critics have insisted were doomed to be perpetually controversial, strong majorities of Washingtonians are on board.

Washingtonians want more homes near transit and jobs, support multifamily options

A whopping 88 percent of likely voters agree that to keep Washington communities affordable, cities should allow housing of all kinds near public transit and jobs.

Survey respondents were also presented with a proposal to change state law and zoning requirements to eliminate local zoning laws that allow only single-family houses in cities and towns with populations over 6,000 to facilitate the development of multifamily housing. Seventy-one percent said they would support this proposal, with over one-third (34 percent) “strongly” in favor. Support cuts across partisan, demographic, and geographic lines, including:

82 percent of Democrats, 62 percent of independents, and 62 percent of Republicans;
80 percent of white voters and 82 percent of voters of color; and
79 percent of voters in cities, 75 percent of suburban voters, 64 percent of small-town voters, and 59 percent of rural voters.

Support proved durable in the face of positive and negative messaging about that proposal, too. Seventy-two percent of voters still said they would support the proposal even after hearing an exchange of typical arguments for and against it.

Support for Zoning Reform Proposal

I would like to ask you about a new proposed law related to zoning in Washington. This proposal would change state law and zoning requirements to eliminate local zoning laws that allow only single-family houses in cities and towns with populations over 6,000. It would allow more homes like duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, and townhouses, including housing more affordable for lower- and middle-income families, near public transit lines, and in areas with a lot of jobs.

And support held when pollsters raised the stakes, making people think about new housing going up near them:

68 percent of Washington state voters say they would support zoning changes in cities statewide even if it meant multi-unit housing developments in their neighborhoods.
61 percent of voters in the state would support policy to change zoning rules to allow more housing in Washington cities, even if the new housing, like a duplex or triplex, happened next door.

Washingtonians see housing shortage as top cause of high prices, prefer affordability solutions over “local control”

Voters see Washington’s housing shortage as the top driver of the affordability crisis. Seventy-two percent of respondents say a shortage of housing is a “major” cause of the state’s soaring housing costs.

In addition, a majority (66 percent) believes zoning rules like parking, design, and environmental requirements contribute to high costs. Seventy-three percent cite “too few housing choices of different sizes and kinds” as a cause, but only 38 percent see that as a “major” factor. And to be fair, voters were liberal in assigning blame for high housing prices to a wide range of factors, from wages being too low to landlords’ profits to population growth. But a shortage of homes driving up costs topped the list—ten points above any other factor.

When it comes to questions of “local control” over housing development and residential zoning decisions, a persistent dog whistle housing opponents sound against statewide policy efforts, Washingtonians appear to be out ahead of their local elected leaders.

68 percent of Washington voters believe having a range of home types to promote affordability is a higher priority than allowing neighborhoods to control housing types.
By a 40-point margin, Washington voters prioritize allowing a range of housing types (68 percent) over maintaining strict local control (28 percent).
Given a choice, 57 percent favor property owners’ right to build housing without strict restrictions versus local governments’ right to strictly limit types, size, and location of housing (35 percent).

Washingtonians favor range of options, from zoning for ADUs to small and medium-sized apartment buildings

Voters favor adding just about every housing type, from the smallest and least obtrusive accessory dwelling unit (ADU)— also known as backyard cottages, in-law suites, or granny flats, tucked into existing buildings and neighborhoods—to taller multifamily buildings.

This embrace of apartment buildings marks a significant shift. Past polling has generally revealed near-universal love of ADUs (as we saw again in our poll this year), mild support for more modest-sized buildings, like duplexes and triplexes, and then a line drawn when it came to bigger multi-family housing like apartment buildings. The mood has improved in 2023 for a wider range of middle housing types, with a jump to more than eight in ten respondents favoring mid-sized apartment buildings:

88 percent of Washington voters favor zoning changes allowing people to add more ADUs on any residential city lot where only single-detached housing was previously allowed.
82 percent of Washington voters favor zoning changes allowing more small and medium-sized apartment buildings within existing cities.
82 percent of Washington voters support allowing more kinds of housing near frequent bus and train stops, including 4- and 6-story residential and commercial buildings.
66 percent support allowing people to split residential lots and build two houses where just one was previously allowed. This is solid support considering that to most, lot-splitting is a new and unfamiliar concept.

Beyond the shortage and zoning, real families and faces

The statewide housing shortage isn’t just an abstract concept for people who call Washington home. Residents are living it, whether it’s their own family and friends or people they rely on in their communities. It’s costing people in long commutes, traffic, increasing homelessness, businesses that can’t find workers, and pressure on housing development to sprawl into the state’s farmland and rural areas.

This survey signals that Washingtonians want this to change. Housing remains a dire priority—with urgency mounting. More and more, voters understand that a shortage is the major factor keeping prices and rents high. And while most Washington voters don’t likely spend too much time thinking about how local zoning restrictions are driving the shortage, they are clearly eager for more housing—including more apartments, triplexes, and backyard apartments—just the kinds of homes that zoning reforms can deliver. The question remaining is whether their state and local leaders will work together to deliver those homes.

Video: Zoning for All Kinds of Affordable Homes

A fixed-income senior. A public-school teacher. A line cook. A medical technician. When there’s a housing shortage, if you’re middle- or low-income, you may struggle to find a home you can afford in your neighborhood.

The same land use rules that limit homes like triplexes or apartments, the kinds of modestly sized homes that more middle-income Washingtonians can afford, also limit subsidized, affordable housing that lower-income residents need.

One major fix is pretty straightforward: For homes that people of all incomes can afford, we must allow all kinds of affordable homes.

Gif of homes popping up out of the ground

Blame the shortage. Blame the bans. Fix the zoning.

In places like Washington state, the shortage of available homes is so acute that even middle-income workers can’t find places they can afford. This is true in the state’s big metros and their suburbs and, increasingly, in medium and small towns too. When competition is fierce, all the smaller, older, “naturally affordable” homes are snapped up by the highest bidder. People who make too much money to qualify for housing subsidies but not enough to find a home they can afford to rent or purchase, are left with no options. 

And so are their lower- and fixed-income neighbors. When most cities ban multi-family housing types in most of their neighborhoods, it means in most communities, there aren’t enough subsidized homes to go around, and not enough subsidy dollars either. If you qualify, you can still be on a waitlist for years before getting a place.

Bans on apartment buildings, townhomes, and duplexes, combined with costly parking mandates, have contributed to Washington having the fifth-worst undersupply of housing  in the United States. These same zoning and land use rules—effectively, bans—are ubiquitous in most cities, keeping both kinds of affordable homes out of our communities: subsidized and market-rate.

Our current rules are inflicting a housing shortage, driving up prices and limiting our choices. Patience Malaba, Executive Director, Housing Development Consortium of Seattle-King County, a membership association of more than 200 organizations who seek to advance housing stability, put it simply: “The one-size zoning we’ve got now isn’t working.”

The good news is we can update our land use rules to stop limiting choices and pushing prices up. We can adopt rules that allow the homes that better fit the needs of people who live and work here now. And we can make all kinds of affordable homes legal and available, where we need them.

We can solve this challenge when more low-income housing and housing justice advocates, homelessness solutions champions, affordability champions, and subsidized housing developers work together to make all kinds of affordable housing legal to build in our cities. Together we can rein in prices and rents and make sure all our neighbors are safely, affordably housed.

Learn more in this 90-second video, and share this resource with your networks:

Our Homes4WA video was adapted for Washington state from a California YIMBY production, in collaboration with Ruben DeLuna Creative.

UPDATED: 50 Housing Bills and How They Fared in Olympia

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This year, in response to the state’s ever worsening housing shortage and residents’ increasing concern over home prices and rents, the Washington legislature took up far more housing bills than ever before: the compilation below covers a whopping 50 bills (and we invite you to note in the comments any we missed).

That’s a lot, but what made it even more promising is there were bills covering all three of the policy pillars necessary to take on a housing crisis—what are commonly referred to as the three Ss: supply, subsidy, and stability. Alone, each “S” is insufficient; together, they form a mutually reinforcing suite:

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

Most housing bills only address one of the three Ss and need not be expected to cover the others, too. Their impact is maximized when bills from all three categories pass as a package. Legislators never had more options to work with.

Below we summarize the 50 bills we tracked this session. Where you see / marks, we are indicating companion bills between the House and Senate. For some bills, we link to longer explainers we or partners have written on the topic.

1. Supply Bills

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

Washington’s supply bills for 2023 fall into two categories: zoning reform and permitting streamlining.

A. Zoning Reform

These bills reform zoning laws and other local codes that make it illegal or cost-prohibitive to build the many types of housing, including so-called “middle housing” like duplexes, triplexes, backyard cottages, and small apartment buildings, that Washington needs to overcome its massive shortage of homes.

Double green check marks with a circular border

Legalize middle housing in residential neighborhoods

PASSED HOUSE AND SENATE HB 1110 legalizes duplexes, fourplexes, or sixplexes, depending on city size and proximity to transit, on most residential lots in Washington’s urban communities, subject to the same building form and site restrictions that apply to single-detached houses. Read a run down of what the bill does here, and more about the benefits of middle housing from Sightline and the Black Home Initiative.

Make it easier for homeowners to add ADUs (three bills)

PASSED HOUSE AND SENATE HB 1337 lifts local barriers on ADUS by ending renter bans (requirements for owners to live on-site), capping impact fees and parking mandates, legalizing two ADUs per lot, and setting baseline standards on minimum lots size, ADU size and height, and more, read about the details here. 

DEAD SB 5235 is a weaker bill that ends renter bans with exceptions, legalizes detached ADUs and two ADUs per lot on larger lots, but leaves ADU parking mandates untouched. 

DEAD HB 1133 / SB 5357 legalizes detached ADUs on properties located outside of designated urban growth areas. 

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

DEAD: HB 1245 would have allowed homeowners to sell off part of their house lot for the construction of another house, authorizing subdivision into lots as small as 1,500 square feet, creating more affordable homeownership choices, while also providing financial options for existing owners. Read more from Sightline and from the Black Home Initiative.

The House Housing Committee passed HB 1245 unanimously, and then it passed the House 96 – 2. Subsequently, the Senate Local Government Committee declined to bring the bill to a vote before cutoff.

Legalize more homes and jobs near transit

DEAD As introduced, SB 5466 would have legalized midsize apartment buildings within three-quarters of a mile from bus stops with frequent service, and larger buildings within a quarter-mile of light rail stations, enabling the creation of modest, convenient, and affordable workforce homes that Washington cities need, close to where residents work, learn, and find recreation and community. Read more. 

The Senate passed a slightly narrowed version by 40 – 8. Then the House Housing Committee passed amendments that severely cut both the level of density legalized and the amount of land near transit effected, and also added an inclusionary zoning requirement that all housing developments set aside 20 percent of their units at rents affordable to 60 percent of area median income. Proposed floor amendments would have brought back some of the density and extent, and lowered the inclusionary requirement, but the House declined to bring the bill to a floor vote before cutoff.

Make parking optional near transit

DEAD HB 1351 / SB 5456 would have eliminated local requirements for off-street parking in new housing or commercial developments located within a half-mile of transit stops with 15-minute service, and within a quarter-mile of stops with 30-minute service. Read more. 

The House Local Government Committee passed HB 1351 after amending it to reduce the distance from transit from a half-mile to a quarter-mile, but the bill then died in the Rules Committee. The Senate Local Government Committee heard the bill but then declined to bring it to a vote.

Loosen restrictions on adding housing to existing buildings

PASSED HOUSE AND SENATE HB 1042 makes it easier to add housing within the envelope of existing multifamily buildings by exempting the added units from parking mandates, density limits, and other potential regulatory barriers. HB 1042 passed the House 96 – 0 and the Senate 45 – 3.

Legalize single-stair apartment buildings up to six stories

PASSED SENATE AND HOUSE As introduced, SB 5491 would have established building code cities can adopt to raise the height limit of buildings with a single stairway from the current typical limit of three stories to (a) five stories for purely residential buildings and (b) six stories for buildings with commercial uses on the first floor, all subject to size restrictions and additional fire safety measures. Read more. 

SB 5491 passed the Senate 46 – 2. The House Housing Committee amended it to be less specific, requiring the State Building Code Council to develop recommendations for single-stair buildings up to six stories, and to adopt those changes by July 2026. The bill then passed the House 96 – 1.

Reform various codes for small-scale multifamily housing

DEAD As introduced, HB 1167 would have: instructed the Washington Building Code Council to modify the residential code so that it applies to housing with up to six units; lifted setback requirements and set guardrails to prevent design standards on middle housing that are more onerous than those that apply to detached houses; established code for single-stair apartments; and exempted from SEPA most urban infill housing developments.

After the setback and SEPA provisions (redundant with SB 5412) were amended out, and the design review language of HB 1026 (see description below) was amended in, HB 1167 passed the House 95 – 0. The bill passed the Senate Housing and Ways & Means Committees without major changes, but then died in the Senate Rules Committee.

Create special regulations for middle housing

DEAD HB 1401 authorizes local governments to create design standards and an expedited permit process for houses, duplexes, triplexes, and ADUs no larger than 1,801 square feet per unit. 

Reform regulations for small-scale condominiums (two bills)

PASSED SENATE AND HOUSE SB 5258 modifies condo laws on construction defect actions and warranties, deposit requirements, and local government planning, and would exempt condo sales to first-time homebuyers from the real estate excise tax. Also, to reduce unfair fee burdens on condo construction, it requires local governments to scale their impact fees based on the size of the housing unit. Read more about previous condo reform.

PASSED SENATE AND HOUSE SB 5058 exempts buildings with 12 or fewer units and no more than two stories from the definition of “multi-unit residential building,” which eliminates building enclosure design and enclosure inspection requirements that add excessive costs to small scale-condo developments.

Reduce conflict between homebuilding and tree preservation

DEAD HB 1078 authorizes local governments to create a “tree bank”—a designated area in which trees can be planted to compensate for trees removed elsewhere to enable the construction of housing. Read more about trees and infill housing.

Establish permitting targets for new housing and penalties for failure to meet them

DEAD SB 5609 instructs the Department of Commerce to calculate the amount of housing each local government needs to produce by 2033 to eliminate the state’s housing shortage and to require them to approve permits for that amount of housing. Those jurisdictions that fail to do so would become ineligible to receive from the state their portion of the real estate excise tax. 

Allow more housing as a climate strategy

PASSED HOUSE AND SENATE HB 1181 makes a broad set of changes to the Growth Management Act to address climate change, including a provision for local governments to legalize higher-density housing. 

B. Permit Streamlining

These bills enable the production of more and lower-cost housing by reducing the delay that excessively long permitting timelines, design review, and environmental review can cause.

End design review of housing by volunteer boards

DEAD HB 1026 prohibits local governments from requiring design review of proposed housing developments by boards composed of volunteers, limiting local design review to an administrative process conducted by local, professional government staff. Read more.

Reform the environmental review process

PASSED HOUSE AND SENATE SB 5412 exempts from State Environmental Policy Act review proposed housing developments within urban growth areas that comply with local Comprehensive Plans. Read more.

Streamline local design review

PASSED HOUSE AND SENATE HB 1293 requires local design review to use “clear and objective” standards that don’t reduce development capacity otherwise allowed, and the process cannot require more than one public meeting.

Support local governments in streamlining their permit processes for new housing

PASSED SENATE AND HOUSE SB 5290 establishes grant programs for local governments to reduce permit review timelines and to support local governments’ transition from paper-based to software/web-based systems. 

Establish permit approval deadlines and penalties for failure to meet them (three bills)

DEAD SB 5473 sets maximums for the number of days local governments can take to approve permit applications for housing construction and requires a refund of 20 percent of the permit fee if the deadlines are not met.  

DEAD HB 1519, similar to SB 5473 above, establishes new standards for permit completeness, sets a deadline of 120 days for permit processing (with some exceptions), and requires a partial refund of 10 to 20 percent of the permit fee if the deadline is not met.  

DEAD HB 1611, related to the above two bills, establishes project-size-dependent permit approval deadlines (120, 180, or 270 days). If deadlines are not met, it establishes automatic approval of permits for affordable projects and prohibits local assessment of the real estate excise tax on the first sale of all projects. 

Require reporting on housing permit approvals that exceed 120 days

DEAD HB 1449 requires counties and cities larger than 20,000 to report to the Department of Commerce on permit approvals that exceed 120 days, including explanations for why. 

Ease impact fee deferrals

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

2. Stability bills

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

A. Renter protections

Lengthen notice requirements for rent increases and limit fees

DEAD HB 1124 requires 180 to 220 days’ advance written notice for any rent increase of more than 5 percent, and caps first month and security deposit fees at no more than one month’s rent. 

Limit rent increases

DEAD HB 1389 / SB 5435 caps annual residential rent increases at the rate of inflation or 3 percent, whichever is greater, up to a maximum of 7 percent, with exceptions for public housing, buildings less than 10 years old, improvements beyond maintenance, and other hardships. 

Limit rent increases and fees through the landlord-tenant act

DEAD HB 1388 applies the Consumer Protection Act to the Residential Landlord-Tenant Act to cap annual rent increases at the rate of inflation or 3 percent, whichever is greater, up to a maximum of 7 percent. It also caps first month and security deposit fees at no more than one month’s rent and prohibits differential treatment for month-to-month leases. 

Limit landlord withholding of damage deposits

PASSED HOUSE AND SENATE HB 1074 establishes rules to ensure that landlords fairly and promptly return tenants’ damage deposits after they move out. 

Strengthen tenant rights in eviction processes

PASSED SENATE AND HOUSE SB 5197 modifies eviction notice and eviction legal process requirements to give tenants more options and leeway. 

Establish a rental assistance voucher program

DEAD HB 1817 / SB 5741 creates a “Housing Gap Voucher Pilot Program” to provide rental assistance to qualifying seniors, low-income families, and members of marginalized communities living in manufactured or rental housing, to be administered by Public Housing Authorities.  

Monitor rents and vacancy

DEAD SB 5060 requires landlords to register rentals and vacant units, and to report their rental rates to the Department of Commerce, which will create a website that tracks rental housing inventory and rent data.  

B. Homeownership support

Support first-time homebuyers harmed by historical discriminatory covenants

PASSED HOUSE AND SENATE HB 1474 establishes a Special Purpose Credit Program, funded by a $100 document recording fee, to provide down payment assistance and closing cost assistance to first-time homebuyers with income less than the area median who were themselves, or are descendants of someone who was, excluded from homeownership in Washington by a racially restrictive real estate covenant prior to April 11, 1968 (passage of the Fair Housing Act). Read more. 

Support homeownership for essential workers

DEAD HB 1633 creates the Home for Heroes Program to provide down payment assistance to people earning up to 120 percent of the area median income and who are employed in law enforcement, firefighting, emergency response, healthcare, social work, childcare, or the armed forces. 

Update the state property tax exemption on homes owned by low-income seniors and disabled veterans (two bills)

DEAD SB 5250 adds certain homeowner healthcare expenditures to the determination of their eligibility. 

DEAD HB 1560 adjusts income eligibility levels and establishes grants to help homeowners navigate the program. 

Increase housing security for mobile home owners (three bills)

DEAD HB 1810 creates a program to provide assistance for rent on mobile home lots to mobile home owners who earn up to 80 percent of the area median income, covering up to $200 per month or half the total lot rent, whichever is less. 

PASSED HOUSE AND SENATE HB 1771 strengthens the rules governing relocation assistance provided by the Mobile Home Relocation Assistance Program for displaced mobile home park residents. 

PASSED SENATE AND HOUSE SB 5198 strengthens rules to give mobile home owners the opportunity to purchase mobile home communities when owners propose closure or conversion. 

3. Subsidy bills

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

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

A. Funding for housing construction and land

Fund affordable housing through the Capital Budget

PASSED SENATE AND HOUSE SB 5200 / HB 1147 Washington’s 2023 – 25 Capital Budget allocates $570 million for affordable housing, including:

$400 million to the Housing Trust Fund (the highest amount ever);
$60 million to connect affordable housing developments to infrastructure;
$50 million for projects designed to increase the supply and affordability of transit-oriented housing;
$40 million for the Housing Finance Commission Land Acquisition Program;
$14.5 million for youth shelters and housing; and
$5 million for landlord mitigation.

Increase the REET to fund affordable housing

DEAD HB 1628 establishes a new 4 percent real estate excise tax (REET) on the portion of sales over $5 million and authorizes cites to enact an additional 0.25 percent REET, with revenues to be used for affordable or supportive housing development and operation. 

Boost bonding capacity to fund affordable housing

DEAD HB 1149 / SB 5202 authorizes the State Finance Committee to issue up to $4 billion in general obligation bonds to finance programs and projects that address housing insecurity. If passed, it still requires approval by voters at the state’s next general election. 

Tax short-term rentals to fund affordable housing

DEAD SB 5334 authorizes local governments to impose a special excise tax of up to 2 percent on the furnishing of short-term rentals and to use those tax revenues only for affordable housing programs. 

Secure land for affordable housing near transit

DEAD HB 1111 authorizes cities to create “Transit Benefit Districts,” in which they can acquire land for the future construction of affordable housing. It also instructs the state’s Housing Finance Commission to establish a grant program to help fund these land acquisitions. 

Facilitate the use of surplus property for affordable housing

PASSED HOUSE AND SENATE HB 1695 clarifies the definitions of affordable housing that qualify as a “public benefit” to authorize governments and public agencies to sell publicly owned surplus property at discounted prices for affordable housing development. 

Improve affordable housing program management

PASSED SENATE AND HOUSE SB 5301 makes a number of technical and bureaucratic updates to how the Department of Commerce manages various affordable housing subsidy programs.  

B. Tax exemptions and fee waivers

Expand the MFTE (three bills)

Three bills broaden the state’s multifamily tax exemption (MFTE) program that waives property taxes on buildings that reserve a specified portion of their units at prices or rents affordable to low-income households.

DEAD HB 1350 expands MFTE to existing buildings, not just newly built ones, that reserve 30 percent of units at rents affordable to people making 80 percent of the area median income. 

DEAD HB 1343 expands MFTE to buildings at least 25 years old that reserve 25 percent of units at rents affordable to people making 50 percent of the area median income. 

DEAD SB 5118 extends the MFTE term to 99 years for a higher affordability requirement of 35 percent of units reserved as affordable for people making 80 percent of the area median income, and applies to rehabilitated or converted existing buildings. 

Broaden the property tax exemption for affordable housing

DEAD HB 1052 expands the types of affordable housing projects eligible for a property tax exemption to include developments supported through the local option REET for affordable housing. 

Exempt affordable ADUs from property tax

PASSED SENATE AND HOUSE SB 5045 create a property tax exemption for ADUs to owners who offer them at rent affordable to people making 50 or 60 percent (respectively to each bill) of the area median income. 

Reduce utility costs for affordable housing

PASSED HOUSE AND SENATE HB 1326 authorizes local waivers of utility connection charges for affordable and supportive housing owned by nonprofits and housing authorities. 

Hey, Olympia! If You Let Them, Cities Could Double Turnout in Local Elections

Takeaways

Currently, Washington lags well behind Oregon in its turnout figures for local elections because Washington holds its local elections “off cycle” in odd years, while Oregon holds its local elections “on cycle” in even years, alongside other higher-profile races that naturally boost turnout.
A bill in the Washington legislature this session, Senate Bill 5723, would let cities choose to consolidate their elections and align them on cycle on one big election day, in November of even years, if they wished.
This would be following the example of other states like California, Nevada, and Arizona, where most cities have now chosen to consolidate their elections.
The payoffs would be significant: even-year local elections in Washington could double turnout, a bigger increase than any other reform; and synchronizing local elections would help the electorate—and those elected—to look more like the general population in terms of age, race, ethnicity, and ideology.

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

UPDATE 03/15/23: SB 5723 did not advance out of the Senate Rules Committee by the deadline. During the process, a modified version of the bill that excluded municipal court judges was approved by the Senate Committee on State Government & Elections.

Oregon and Washington have long been leaders in modernizing democracy. Both automatically register people to vote when they get a state ID, for example, and both states make voting easier by mailing ballots to every voter. In national elections, they are turnout champions: in 2020, they tied for third place among all states. Some 76 percent of eligible adults in each state cast valid ballots in the November general election that made Joe Biden president.

In one category, though, Washington trails Oregon by a mile: turnout in elections for municipal offices such as mayor and city council. In local elections, Oregon’s turnout is almost double Washington’s.

The reason has nothing to do with virtue or civic-mindedness, with voter suppression or get-out-the-vote campaigns. It’s the two states’ schedules. Oregon holds city elections at the same time as state and federal ones, in November of even years, on the election day that rules them all. In Oregon as in many states, there are a few other election days, but the state holds local elections on the day that voters think of as the real deal, as Election Day.

Washington holds city elections in November, too, but always in odd years, out of sync with state and federal races and at a time when attention is elsewhere. In fact, Washington bars cities from running elections on capital-E, capital-D Election Day. Cities do not have the right to choose when to hold their elections.

A bill in the Washington legislature, Senate Bill 5723, would lift that ban—an important measure with numerous benefits, including:

Boosting local turnout far more than any other reform available;
Improving local representation dramatically, so that the local electorate and elected officials better reflects the demographics and beliefs of the population; and
Improving accountability by better aligning local government decisions with local public opinion.

(Consolidating local elections also usually saves public money and dilutes the influence of special interests, as I’ll document in a subsequent article.)

Consolidated elections turbocharge local turnout

When Austin and Phoenix switched elections to Election Day, local turnout rose 2.5-fold. When Baltimore did so, it was 3.5-fold, and El Paso 4.5-fold. Turnout in Los Angeles city council races rose more than 3-fold. Among 54 other California cities that switched to even-year November elections in 2016, 2018, and 2020, average local turnout tripled. Professor Zoltan L. Hajnal of the University of California, San Diego, writes:

Every one of the eight published studies on local election timing finds that moving to even year elections (often called on-cycle elections) is by far the biggest thing that localities can do to increase turnout. Nationwide, local voter turnout generally doubles when elections move from off-cycle to on-cycle contests.

That’s a remarkable finding, considering that get-out-the-vote and registration drives are lucky to boost participation just by a percentage point or two. In fact, the turnout dividend of on-cycle local elections outstrips those of all other much-discussed voting-system improvements, such as automatic voter registration, election-day registration, a 15-day early voting period, universal vote by mail, and the prohibition of voter ID laws. Indeed, on-cycle elections raise local turnout more than all of these voting upgrades combined, according to the best academic analyses. (Not that officials have to choose, of course. They can implement all these reforms.)

If Washington were to let cities move their elections on cycle, those cities could reap impressive increases in turnout, too. What’s possible is vividly apparent in the contrast between Washington and Oregon, Washington’s southern neighbor and closest analog among the states. Since 1917, Oregon state law has required that all local elections take place in November of even years. Oregon has one big Election Day, where voters mark their ballots on everything from US president to town council. Consequently, almost as many Oregonians vote in local races as in presidential or gubernatorial races.

Sightline gathered data from the largest cities in Oregon and Washington, finding in each municipality the citywide race with the most votes cast in recent municipal elections. For example, in Oregon, the 2020 Portland race for mayor was a closely watched and high-stakes competition. In it, 72 percent of the adult citizens of the city cast their votes. That was Oregon’s high-water mark of turnout that year for a city election, and the low-water mark was 56 percent in Hillsboro. The average was 65 percent. Two years later, in 2022, there was no presidential election to motivate participation, and turnout in Oregon cities fell by more than 10 points. The high-water mark was 64 percent in Bend, and the low-water mark was 43 percent in Gresham, with an average of 51 percent.

Still, even the lower 2022 local turnout in Oregon towered over participation in Washington cities in their 2021 odd-year elections. Washington averaged local turnout of just 29 percent—that’s 22 points less than Oregon cities’ 2022 average and less than half of their 2020 average. Washington’s turnout leader was Seattle, where the mayor’s race drew 48 percent of eligible voters to cast a ballot; the laggard was Everett, where just 23 percent did.

Some critics of on-cycle elections worry that voters will tire when presented with a long ballot and quit before getting to the bottom. Down-ballot “drop-off” or “roll-off” happens in almost all elections, but its scale is minor—a few percentage points—compared with the boost on-cycle elections bring. In Sightline’s comparison, moreover, drop-off is irrelevant: Sightline only tallied ballots marked for local races, and even after any down-ballot roll-off, Oregon cities in our combined 2020 and 2022 samples still had 93 percent more turnout, as a share of eligible voters, than their Washington counterparts in 2021.

Consolidated elections mean winners who better reflect voters and their views

A larger electorate is also a more representative electorate; it’s one that better matches the public in its race, ethnicity, values, and—especially and above all—age. Vladimir Kogan of Ohio State University and his coauthors found that in California and Texas, for example, voters aged 65 years or more made up 37 and 39 percent respectively of the presidential-year electorate; their share rose to well over half in off-cycle elections. Among 50 US cities studied by Portland State University, off-cycle elections for mayor brought out mostly old voters; a 17-year gap separated the median age of voters from that of the public in their cities. In cities with on-cycle elections, in contrast, this age gap shrank by half.

Similarly, in Seattle, those who vote in even-year Novembers include a more representative share of young voters and voters of color, while Seattle’s odd-year electorate is much older and whiter than the population. The same pattern is evident across Washington: in odd-year elections since 2000, voters under the age of 25 made up just one-quarter their share of the voting-age population. In even-year elections, though, their turnout rate almost tripled. Washingtonians under 25 are just one-fourth as likely as seniors to cast ballots in off-cycle elections but are more than half as likely to vote on cycle.

The pattern holds across the United States, too. According to UC San Diego’s Professor Hajnal, “[O]lder voters (those aged 65 or older) tend to dominate odd-year contests. In odd-year elections around the country, working-class Americans, racial and ethnic minorities, and other disadvantaged groups are . . . underrepresented.” Writing elsewhere with Dr. Kogan of Ohio State and Agustin Markarian, also of UC San Diego, Hajnal notes, “Whites . . . are almost twice as likely as Latinos and Asian Americans to participate in local contests. The imbalance by education, income, and age is just as stark.”

On-cycle elections, in contrast, bring out an electorate that looks like the public, and those high-turnout electorates choose candidates who look like them as well: localities with high-turnout elections elect far more city councilors of color than do localities with low-turnout elections, for example.

On-cycle elections also favor candidates whose values match public opinion more closely. Researchers Michael Hartney and Sam Hayes compared school board members’ views with their constituents’ and found that school boards elected in even years match public sentiments better than do boards elected in odd years.

How to achieve consolidated elections? Let cities choose them

Election consolidation might double local turnout, yielding a more representative electorate. But what is the political path to reform?

More than a century ago, from 1894 to 1917, the Progressive movement set about breaking American cities’ “political machines,” in which local bosses used patronage networks to generate huge turnout of local voters for state and national parties. The Progressives’ motives and record were mixed: they aimed to fight corruption, it’s true. But they did it partly by disenfranchising ethnic and working-class voters. Their first tactic and one of their most successful was to disconnect local elections from state and national ones, by shunting them to springtime or to odd years. This splitting of local from state elections stuck, and a large majority of US municipalities still hold their elections off cycle.

Oregon was a hotbed of Progressivism. Its “Oregon Plan” of allowing citizens’ initiatives, referenda, and recall petitions was famous at the time and won emulation from many other states. Perhaps because it had these tools so early, it went the opposite direction from other states on local election timing. In 1917, voters in Oregon did what voters have subsequently done in many cities: they voted overwhelmingly for a citizens’ initiative to consolidate local elections. Tired of city elections that were all over the calendar, they enshrined in Oregon law a provision that is the model of simplicity: “All elections for city officers shall be held at the same time and place as elections for state and county officers.”

In Washington, in contrast, city election timing has never been on the statewide ballot. In 1921, the state legislature channeled all city elections to the spring but let cities decide which years. Subsequent laws bounced election schedules around, this way and that, and began to sort them into odd years. Finally, in 1963, the legislature asserted control over all city elections, requiring that they take place in November of odd years. There they have remained ever since.

The vintage of Washington’s election calendar is no badge of pride; being a product of the 1963 legislature might even count as a stain. According to the legislature’s own official history, the session was dominated by bitter and acrimonious infighting. Then-Governor Al Rosellini (D) called it the worst do-nothing legislature in his 25 years of public service. It barely even succeeded in adopting a budget, any legislature’s most basic duty. Apparently, the only thing legislators could agree about in 1963 was to keep cities from running high-turnout local elections.

Oregon exemplifies what turnout could be like in Washington, but it is not a good model for how to move elections on cycle in the first place. A statewide initiative, as in Oregon in 1917, would probably pass in Washington, because voters almost always approve election consolidation. But getting such a measure on the ballot would be a daunting prospect, because few people get excited about the topic. It’d be hard to recruit volunteers and contributors for a campaign.

Better models are California and Nevada. They stopped barring cities from running on-cycle elections, and cities took advantage of their new options. As I detailed in a previous article, in 1981, California began allowing all cities to consolidate elections. One by one, cities considered their options, calculated potential cost savings and turnout increases, and a steady stream of them switched over. In 2003, Nevada gave the green light to consolidation, and cities responded in the same way. Soon, a majority of California and Nevada cities had consolidated local elections. Just so, in the roughly 20 states that let cities choose even-year Novembers for their elections, the consolidation trend is unmistakable. In 2022 alone, voters in 11 cities—from St. Petersburg, Florida, to Fort Collins, Colorado—approved the switch.

In Washington, reformers led by Rep. Mia Gregerson (D–SeaTac) previously attempted to pass a bill that required on-cycle local elections, but they never got far. Cities objected, not liking to be told what to do, and few legislators or citizens cared enough to push back.

This year, Washington State Senator Javier Valdez has developed a new bill. It’s a modest reform: it allows cities to decide whether to consolidate elections. That’s all. “This is an idea we believe can garner the votes needed in the legislature to be adopted into law sooner rather than later,” said Andrew Villeneuve, executive director of the Northwest Progressive Institute, which has been a leader in the movement for on-cycle elections in Washington. Passage would likely unleash the same stream of local election consolidations that California and Nevada experienced.

SB 5723 would lift the ban on cities scheduling their elections on the highest-turnout days of each biennium. It would let them decide for themselves, after considering costs, logistics, and benefits, whether to consolidate locally on the election day that rules them all, the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November of even years. It would let cities hold elections on Election Day.

Data in support of the figure and explanation of Sightline’s method are posted here. Thanks to Senior Research Associate Jay Lee for data analysis, to volunteer Todd Newman for legal research, and to former Sightline board chair David Yaden for Oregon historical research. I am grateful to Avi Green, Zoltan Hajnal, and Neal Ubriani for critiquing an earlier draft of this article.

Yes, Oregon, There Is a Way to Build Enough Homes

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To dig out of Oregon’s housing shortages, build 36,000 homes a year for the next decade. It’s that simple.

Okay, maybe not that simple. That is, after all, a lot of homes, and land, and materials, and carpenters, and architects, and plumbers, and city permit review staff. It’s a lot more homes than the state’s been building the last few decades.

But that’s part of the problem that Oregon’s new governor, Tina Kotek, wants to address. The state hasn’t been building enough new homes to keep up with population growth over the last few decades. State analysts calculate that Oregon is 140,000 homes short of having enough for families, working people, seniors, and everybody else to find a place to live that meets their needs. And that’s not even counting the 220,000 homes needed just to keep up with future population growth and demand over the next decade.

It’s a big problem. To have a prayer of getting there, policymakers would need to swing for the fences.

So how does Oregon get there? A lot of people making small decisions, and a smaller number of people making some big decisions.

One of those big decisions could be House Bill 2889, an overhaul of state housing rules that would do two main things. First, it would set targets for housing production that are based on actual need, not just carrying forward recent patterns of homebuilding. These targets would consider price, location, and equitable outcomes, in addition to just the number of homes needed. Second, it would identify the barriers to homebuilding that state and local government can alleviate directly—everything from apartment bans to parking mandates to slow permit processing to roadway standards to environmental reviews.

Here’s the trouble: every one of those barriers exists for a reason, often a good reason. The point of HB 2889 isn’t to sweep them all away, even if that were possible. The point is to force government, at every level, to weigh the benefits of each barrier against its costs.

And what if Oregon did take on that huge task? Would it even be possible to build as many homes as Oregonians need?

It turns out that it would.

Back in the 1970s, a much smaller workforce built this many homes

The year is 1977. Bell bottoms reign, disco fever is high, the Blazers just won the NBA championship, and Oregon’s estimated 7,652¹Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, 1977. Private-sector residential construction workers, Oregon.
residential construction workers are building 33,000 new homes.

This is a big number. Oregon added almost 330,000 new homes during the 1970s, almost three times as many as it built during the 1960s or 1980s.²According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Oregon had 326,997 more homes in 1980 than in 1970. There was likely even more homebuilding than that, since some homes that existed in 1970 reached the end of their lifecycle over the next ten years.
That’s not far off from the 348,000 homes that Governor Kotek wants the state to add by 2030.

And in the 2020s, Oregon will have some new advantages. For one, Oregon now has a private residential construction workforce almost three times the size of 1977’s: 20,227, as of 2021.³Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, 2021. Private-sector residential construction workers, Oregon.
Oregon’s total population is 4.2 million, more than double the 2.1 million residents the state had fifty years ago. It’s true that a lot of work needs to be done. But if Oregon could bring the barriers to housing back down to the level of the 1970s, its current and future workforce could find the time to do the job.

Oregon also has way more homes already in place, so 348,000 new ones by 2030 would be much less of a change to the existing landscape than it was in the 1970s. Those 330,000 additional homes in the 1970s were a 44 percent increase to the 745,000 homes that already existed in 1970. But now that the state has 1.8 million homes, adding 348,000 would mean less than 20 percent growth—pretty close to the growth rate of the 1950s, 1960s, or 1990s. If you live on a block with 20 homes, that might look like your neighbor on the corner converting their garage into a granny flat and a small apartment building going up two blocks over.

Why does it take a much larger workforce today to build a smaller number of homes? Whatever the reason, it’s not unique to Oregon. Last Sunday, a New York Times column about a new academic study on this question quoted construction industry veteran Ed Zarenski:

There are so many people who want to have some say over a project…. You have to meet so many parking spaces, per unit. It needs to be this far back from the sight lines. You have to use this much reclaimed water. You didn’t have 30 people sitting in a hearing room for the approval of a permit 40 years ago….

The work we do today takes hundreds more people in the office to track and bring to completion…. The level of reporting that you have to send to the government, to the insurance companies, to the owner, to show you’re meeting all the requirements on the job site, all of that has increased. And so the number of people you need to produce that has increased.

Again: the lesson here isn’t that rules are bad. It’s that every rule has a cost.

Oregon built a lot more apartments in the 1970s

Then there’s the issue of sprawl. News coverage of Kotek’s plan last week from The Oregonian and CityCast implied that Oregon’s rapid 1970s growth had been possible only because it happened before the state’s famous urban growth boundary (UGB) law took effect around the end of the decade.

Yes, it’s likely that the state’s new anti-sprawl law slowed homebuilding somewhat. But other changes were afoot, too.

Multifamily construction in Oregon soared in the 1970s, plummeted in 1980, and has never recovered. By the 2010s, the share of net new Oregon homes in multifamily buildings hit its lowest average in 60 years.

In part, that’s because the public backlash against what former Governor Tom McCall had called “coastal condomania” had also reached far inland. For example, as part of a national trend in the ‘70s, a major downzone banned apartments from much of inner southeast Portland. City leaders said their goal was to attract middle-income families to the area. One thing the downzone definitely did was push up the price of land per home. Today, it’s common to see the price of land account for more than half the value of a single-detached house in Portland’s walkable, transit-rich inner southeast neighborhoods.

More generally, local governments were institutionalizing a new level of scrutiny on additional housing. This wasn’t unique to Oregon; in California, the scrutiny was far more intense. Still, rules kept piling up.

Meanwhile, the government, whose subsidies accounted for 28 percent of multifamily housing starts across the United States in 1970-72, was pulling back from direct construction in favor of housing vouchers that had a less direct impact on homebuilding.

Economies are big and complicated. It’s impossible to say if the planning reforms of the 1970s contributed to the rapid decline in multifamily construction in Oregon after 1980. What’s certain is that they failed to prevent it. And because three-story wood-frame buildings are generally the least expensive type of structure to build, this decline had a profound impact on the state’s housing market.

Adversaries agree on Oregon’s need for speed within urban areas

Oregon’s urban growth boundary was established by only one of 19 new planning goals created by Oregon in the 1970s. Thanks to heroic efforts at the time, one of those goals (goal 10) was to build enough housing for people of all incomes. But even in residential zones that fall within Oregon’s urban growth boundary, state law doesn’t prioritize housing over any of the other goals.

Some think that should change.

“There’s been a concerted effort in both the legislature and [the state land use commission] to acknowledge that the primary purpose of land zoned under Goals 3 and 4 is farming and forest,” Dave Hunnicutt, executive director of the Oregon Property Owners Association, said Monday. “But we don’t get that same recognition on lands inside the UGB that are zoned for residential. And we should.”

Mary Kyle McCurdy, deputy director of the pro-land-use-planning nonprofit 1000 Friends of Oregon, has a slightly different take: that Oregon can reboot apartment construction by allowing apartments and other compact, less expensive housing options on more land without de-prioritizing other goals.

“We have sufficient land inside urban growth boundaries that we are inefficiently developing,” she said Monday. “Surface parking lots, sprawling one-story office buildings with expanses of grass that nobody is using for anything.”

Though McCurdy and Hunnicutt have been adversaries for decades over the state’s urban growth boundary, both are supporting House Bill 2889 alongside affordable and for-profit housing providers, environmental justice organizations, the Fair Housing Council of Oregon, and Sightline.

“I think where Mary Kyle and I would agree is regardless of where the housing is built or how we do on land supply, if we can’t get it built in an efficient and timely and cost-effective manner, then it just doesn’t get built,” Hunnicutt said.

The first hearing for HB 2889 is today, but there are still many details to be hammered out about how to make building more efficient. Some of those details will be added to the bill soon. Many others will be worked out by the state government over the next few years, should the bill pass.

For that work to fully pay off, policymakers would need to keep focusing on a fundamental goal: making homes simpler and less expensive to build, one way or another. Making things a little more like the 1970s.

With Flexibility Over Parking, Oregon Homebuilders Get to Work

Oregon’s new governor just put her state on a mission to accelerate homebuilding by 80 percent. But her influence on housing growth began before she took office.

Starting on January 3, more than a week before Governor Tina Kotek’s inauguration, housing projects around Oregon started springing to life. Thirteen homes on an oddly shaped scrap of land near a Beaverton rail stop. Eighty-four new affordable apartments just outside Troutdale’s walkable downtown. A 12-room residential care home that’d help relieve the state’s painful hospital-bed shortage.

Was Kotek personally breaking ground on projects during her campaign stops? No. Rather, unlike both her major opponents, Kotek had pledged to uphold a policy passed by her predecessor Kate Brown: a package of climate-focused rules that reduced the number of car parking spaces new projects are legally required to build.

So when the first business day of 2023 rolled around, homes freed from that red tape were already lining up to start construction.

A new analysis for Sightline estimates that in the Portland suburbs alone, the rules stand to make about 37,000 potential new homes less expensive to develop—and therefore more likely to start construction without further increases in rents and sale prices. That alone is 20 percent of Kotek’s new homebuilding target for the Portland metro area, and 10 percent of her target for the entire state.

Meanwhile, though, a group of six state lawmakers, five of them from Kotek’s own Democratic Party, has introduced bills that would repeal the new rules, which also include many other provisions aimed at reducing climate-warming emissions and improving social equity. The group’s bills would also give a minority of affected jurisdictions veto power over future state rules to advance climate and equity goals. A group of 14 local jurisdictions is also pursuing a legal challenge in the courts, arguing that Oregon had no right to make the rules in the first place.

If these reforms were rolled back, it’d kill thousands of potential homes that would address the state’s worsening housing shortage.

These are the stories of a few of those homes.

A rendering of the proposed Pacific Avenue Apartments in Beaverton. Image by twelve-twentyfour ARCHITECTURE, founded and led by Gene Templeton. Used with permission.

A downtown apartment project, about to be scrapped, returns with 40 percent more homes

“We have to break down the barriers that are keeping housing from being built, or taking too much time,” Kotek told reporters on her first day in office, after signing an executive order intended to accelerate homebuilding, especially of less expensive homes.

That’s exactly what happened to Gene Templeton’s project, Pacific Avenue Apartments (rendering above), in the inner-ring Portland suburb of Beaverton.

Last summer, Templeton realized he had a big problem with the small apartment building he was planning to build on the edge of downtown Beaverton, whose walkability the city itself boasts. “It was not penciling out at all,” he said, because of the structural gymnastics required to accommodate the required on-site parking.

The nine-unit building was approved with seven parking spaces in the back, as mandated by Beaverton’s parking minimum. To build those seven spaces, Templeton would have to pave half of the property, creating a large hole in the building where the ground floor should be. “We would have had to put in massive concrete columns and an incredibly expensive steel package to just get the building to stand up,” said Templeton. “It did not make any sense because it was so expensive to build.”

Then Templeton got news that Oregon had adopted a new set of rules that would eliminate parking mandates starting in 2023 for properties like his, nearby a frequent bus line and a MAX light rail station. “It was actually remarkable timing.” An architect by trade, he went to work redesigning the building.

No longer constrained by mandatory parking, Templeton added four more homes to the project and diversified the mix of home sizes to include studio, one-, and two-bedroom apartments, to better serve the area’s growing number of one-person households.

Speaking by phone in January, Templeton said he had just met with the structural engineer the day prior, who called the once-complicated project now a slam dunk. “It’s just a simple wood frame building,” Tempelton said. “It should be very straightforward, and hopefully a lot cheaper to build.”

Thanks to Oregon’s parking reforms, 13 new homes will replace this decaying house with blue tarp over the roof on a dirt-road driveway. Photo by Gene Templeton.

Thanks to Oregon’s parking reforms, 13 new homes will replace this decaying house. Photo by Gene Templeton. Used with permission.

Infill projects like Templeton’s are the region’s main engine for adding housing. A 2018 report from the Metro regional government estimated 60 to 75 percent of new homes built in the Portland area in the future will be apartments or attached condos, most commonly redevelopments of existing property.

Sightline asked planner Mike Sellinger to calculate how many of those potentially buildable apartment or condo buildings would likely be close enough to transit to qualify for fully flexible parking, lowering the cost barrier to development.

Across the Portland metro, four out of every five potentially buildable apartments now have full flexibility over off-site parking because of their proximity to transit.

The answer: about 37,000 potential homes close to transit in the Portland suburbs alone. That’s about 10 percent of Gov. Kotek’s statewide housing target for the next decade. Across the Portland metro, four out of every five potentially buildable apartments now have full flexibility over off-site parking because of their proximity to transit.

Oregon adjusted its parking rules farther from transit, too. Parking is now optional for homes smaller than 750 square feet and for homes meeting affordability standards. For the remaining multifamily housing, municipalities may not mandate more than one parking space per home.

Templeton, who previously owned a car in New York City, doesn’t think parking on the street is so bad. “You may have to drive around the block one or two times, but I always found a parking space,” he said. Residents will have the option to choose for themselves how important off-street parking is, now that buildings like Templeton’s are legal again.

This affordable housing development in Troutdale has re-filed for permits after being blocked for months. Dark grey apartment building with simple garden and greenery along the sidewalk. Image by Home Forward.

This affordable housing development in Troutdale has re-filed for permits after being blocked for months. Image by Home Forward.

New state rules end stalemate over affordable apartments

Another Portland-area city, Troutdale, denied a request by affordable housing developer Home Forward last September to build 94 below-market-rate homes and 119 off-street parking spaces. Since then, the project had been stalled indefinitely.

Troutdale currently has the Portland region’s deepest shortage of affordable housing, according to a 2022 report for the Homeless Strategies and Solutions Initiative. Just 0.2 percent of its housing market is currently kept affordable to lower-income residents. That’s 98 percent behind a state target based on regional incomes.

The main issue for this project, funded by both county and regional property taxes, was a debate over how much parking was “enough.” Home Forward, the area’s largest affordable housing provider, submitted studies on actual parking use at five nearby affordable housing developments, showing that its proposed Troutdale project would have well more than the 103 parking spaces that would most likely be used by its 94 households.

But Troutdale’s zoning code includes the most stringent parking mandates in the region: two parking spaces for every home. That discrepancy stoked fears among commission members and the public that any lesser number would lead to a parking shortage, and it gave the city leverage to block the project.

Home Forward argued that building the full two parking spaces per unit would be a waste of tax dollars. Moreover, it would cut the number of homes by a quarter and add significant costs for parking they felt confident their residents would never use.

Now that the more flexible parking rules have taken effect, Troutdale is one of the 14 jurisdictions attempting to overturn them in court. Home Forward’s project was one of four examples the cities’ lawyers cited in a motion to stop the state’s new rules from going into effect while the case was pending. The motion was ultimately denied, allowing Home Forward to re-file permits for the buildings on the first business day after the rules went into effect.

Melissa Bruce, owner of Rooted Care Communities. Photo by Catie Gould.

A crisis at Oregon hospitals, worsened by local parking requirements

Melissa Bruce has seven seniors on the waitlist to move into her adult care home in Beaverton. But despite having empty rooms available, she can’t accept them. The 12-bedroom house in which she and her staff care for seniors in the last stages of their life is limited to 5 patients by the city zoning code. In August, the Beaverton Planning Commission denied the home’s application to expand to a 12-bed facility. The reason: an alleged lack of parking.

Both the city and Rooted Care Communities agreed four parking spaces would suffice, but Beaverton’s zoning code only allowed the business to count two of its five spaces because the other three back directly onto the street. The church across the street offered use of its parking lot but was too far away from the property to count.

“I didn’t realize the land use hearing was going to be such a process,” Bruce explained. “We were pretty confident someone was going to step up and do the right thing.”

Bruce’s residents are in the last stages of diseases like dementia or Parkinson’s. None of them is able to drive.

At the time of the denial, Oregon had already adopted rules that would, within a few months, fully exempt residential care facilities like hers from parking requirements. Family members who testified in support of the facility were baffled.

“It’s just mind-boggling,” Kristen Johanson said at the hearing. Her mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s, is a resident of Rooted Care. “Having her three blocks away versus getting in a car and driving is night and day,” she said. “When someone in your family needs this care, you’ll know what I’m talking about.”

Many of Rooted Care’s residents have family within walking distance, and that’s intentional. Locating care facilities in residential neighborhoods helps seniors stay in their communities, even as their medical needs increase. According to Bruce, all seven people on the waitlist are within two miles of the site.

Nancy Meyer, 82, hopes Rooted Care has room for her when the time comes. Before her husband Bill passed away, Meyer got a ride from Rooted Care staff every morning so she could eat breakfast with her husband.

Meyer herself had signed up the adjacent church as a bus park-and-ride location decades prior, when she worked for TriMet. Those same parking spaces sit available today for use by Rooted Care, but a little too far away to count towards the requirement. “I can’t understand,” Meyer told the commission. “All that time, they have had plenty of parking.”

A shortage of facilities like Rooted Care has left hundreds of Oregonians stuck in hospitals, unable to be discharged. The month after the Beaverton denied Rooted Care’s expansion, the state legislature approved a $40 million dollar package to ease hospital overcrowding. The state is currently paying out incentives of $5,000 per patient to facilities that can accept them.

An empty room at Rooted Care Communities. Single bed with white linens next to nightstands and a black armchair. Photo by Catie Gould.

An empty room at Rooted Care Communities. Photo by Catie Gould.

Bruce, who in 2019 was recognized by the Oregon Health Care Association as the nurse leader of the year, is planning to start the application process all over again, thanks to the state parking reforms.

Now the main barrier is financial. Since last year, Beaverton has doubled its planning fees. Bruce estimates it will now cost over $20,000 to go through the land use process again, on top of what they paid last year. Since taking over the facility last year, Bruce has yet to draw a salary.

A tenuous year ahead

Oregon’s example comes as other US states are also looking to simplify zoning and permitting rules, including around parking, to address their own housing crises. California passed a similar set of state parking reforms last year. Washington, New York, Utah, and Colorado are considering them, too. According to multiple sources, Beaverton is on track for a March vote to fully remove parking mandates citywide, voluntarily going beyond the state’s new requirements.

But the future is unknowable, so Templeton is trying to get his apartment building approved as quickly as possible, in case the 14 appealing jurisdictions succeed in overturning the state rules and city politics shift. “It’s certainly a concern,” Templeton said about the pending legal threats. “If there are delays in the permitting process or anything like that, there’s a lot of exposure.” Templeton is unsure what his next move would be in that scenario. “The project is basically dead in the water, if the parking regulations come back.”

It’s far too early to tell how many more buildings like Templeton’s will be permitted due to the new rules this year. But with each passing month, more homes in the pipeline will be put at risk if parking mandates are reimposed. In the years after parking became flexible in Buffalo and Seattle, studies found that buildings that were previously illegal produced more than half of all new homes.

How many homes have been going unbuilt each year in Oregon because of parking mandates? It is impossible to know. Mandatory parking kills some homes at the planning commission. It kills others on an architect’s desk. But scores of other people who want to create new homes walk away even earlier in the process without generating any public records at all. When parking is mandatory, policymakers and the public can’t even know the possibilities these rules snuff out.

But now in Oregon, for the first time in generations, it will be clearer than ever what communities were missing all along.

Voters Want Fewer Elections: Here’s How to Do That

Takeaways

Consolidating elections to even-year, or “on-cycle,” elections, when high-profile races are on the ballot, is popular with voters and boosts turnout more than any other change scholars have studied.
Unfortunately, few states run on-cycle elections, despite the voter participation and money-saving benefits that result.
Often, the block has been legislators themselves, who not only fail to pass laws to consolidate elections but outright ban cities within their states from doing so if they choose.
Three states of differing political makeup—California, Arizona, and Nevada—have all legalized and seen widespread uptake of on-cycle elections. It happened through a gradual push-pull process led by individual cities that ultimately tipped the scales at the state level. They have lessons for other states.

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

Many election reforms—gerrymandering bans, ranked choice voting, proportional representation—are controversial. Winning them is a daunting prospect. But one is snoozingly uncontroversial among US voters, even while it boosts turnout more than any other change scholars have studied.

That reform is election consolidation: rescheduling local elections to occur with national and state elections. Election consolidation is the best-kept secret of reforms, the one turnout reform that rules them all, as Sightline has argued time and again.

When this plan has come before voters, it has passed by wide margins. It has passed with little debate. To voters, synchronizing elections is a no-brainer. There should be one general Election Day, they believe, and it should be the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November of even years. The primary election should precede it by a few months.

Unfortunately, legislators do not always agree. Most state bills to put local elections “on cycle” with national ones quickly die, with little active support or debate. And in many states, including Idaho, Montana, and Washington in Cascadia, state legislatures have not only failed to consolidate elections themselves, they have also barred cities from doing it on their own. They require cities to hold their elections “off cycle” on strange dates or in odd years. Consequently, local voters are stuck with too many elections; local leaders are chosen by small, unrepresentative electorates; and local budgets bleed from churning through unnecessary ballot handling.

Is change possible? Is there a politically realistic path to election consolidation? Yes, there is. Three Western states have blazed the trail in recent decades, and Cascadian states could be next. It starts with mild reforms at the state level that merely let cities consolidate elections. It moves next to ballot measures in multiple cities. And then it returns to legislatures to finish the job.

Electoral winning streak

For the public, election consolidation sells itself, like ice cream on a summer beach. Citizens want to vote less often. They’d rather fill out one long ballot all at once than two short ballots on different days. Or three or four ballots on different days. Or, in the state of Washington, five different ballots on different days.

That’s why on almost every occasion when voters have considered consolidating elections, they have voted “yes” by large—sometimes, staggering—margins.

Consider: In 2015, some 77 percent of voters in Los Angeles approved election consolidation; as did 76 percent of voters in Takoma Park, Maryland; and 91 percent in Chandler, Arizona. In 2016, Scottsdale, Arizona, joined the trend with 90 percent of voters’ agreement. In 2018, Phoenix consolidated elections by a vote of 73 percent, while the California cities of Burbank, Inglewood, and Pasadena did so by votes of 81 percent, 74 percent, and 83 percent respectively. In 2021, some 66 percent of voters in Austin, Texas, agreed to move mayoral elections onto the presidential election cycle.

Most recently, in November 2022, voters in King County, Washington, which encompasses Seattle, approved moving county council and county executive elections on cycle by almost 70 percent (see Charter Amendment 1). (I wrote about this measure here.) The same day, voters in 11 cities considered election consolidation proposals for some or all city offices and passed every single one of them. In Boulder and Fort Collins, Colorado, voters approved consolidation by 63 and 76 percent respectively. Voters in St. Petersburg, Florida, opted to move local elections by 70 percent. In California, they did so in San Jose by 55 percent, Compton by 64 percent, Arcadia by 67 percent, Modesto by 69 percent, San Francisco by 71 percent, Long Beach by 75 percent, Pomona by 75 percent, and Redwood City by 87 percent.

This winning streak is almost unbroken because voters across the political spectrum like their elections rare. In 2008, Sarah Anzia, now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, surveyed 1,000 Americans about election timing. She found (page 88) that 70 percent of Americans favored holding local elections at the same time as national elections: some 73 percent of Democrats held this view, as did 61 percent of Republicans. Independents fell in between.

The only counterexample to this electoral winning streak that I have found came in 2018 in Tucson, Arizona, where consolidation was supported by only 42 percent of voters (Proposition 408). The reason for this anomaly is that, unlike in other cities, the Tucson ballot question came to voters wrapped in a long-running partisan feud between the progressive city council and the conservative state government. For a decade, the state had been trying to consolidate local elections, and the city council had been fighting back in public and in court. The council put the proposition to voters, and the voters of Tucson—as they saw it—stood up for their party and city. (The partisan dimensions of election consolidation are fascinating and mixed, with strong support and opposition from factions of each major party, and I will devote an entire future article to the topic.)

Even in Tucson, though, the proposition didn’t draw much discussion. In most places, the proposal is such a yawner of obviousness that hardly anyone opposes it. In November 2022, in King County, Washington, the office that oversees elections could not find anyone, in a county of 2.2 million people, who would write a statement against it for the official Voters’ Guide. (Seriously, look at page 36: it’s blank.)

Legislative losing streak

If supported by the public, though, election consolidation is few people’s priority. Most think of it as common-sense but unimportant. No politician becomes a hero by championing the rescheduling of elections, and in fact, powerful interests sometimes oppose it.

Low-turnout elections skew toward reliable voters, who tend above all to be older voters. Reliable voters also tend to be somewhat more educated and are more likely to be white and own their homes. Some researchers have suggested that off-cycle elections also favor motivated and organized constituencies, such as public-sector unions, which have much at stake in local elections and tend to be good at getting their voters to the polls. But research by Vladimir Kogan of Ohio State University and his coauthors suggests such influence is likely overstated.

Local elected officials themselves often oppose reform. They got elected with a certain set of voters. From their perspective, why mess with success? And local elected officials tend to have close ties with the state legislators who write the laws governing when localities hold elections: state law either dictates the schedule of local elections, or it hands localities a short list of options.

The net effect of this combination of forces is inertia: in the absence of public pressure, the status quo continues. Most legislative proposals die. Sarah Anzia, the UC Berkeley professor, found 219 bills in US state legislatures between 2001 and 2011 that promised to consolidate elections. Some 88 percent of them failed. Of the 25 bills that passed, almost all were weak or optional plans.

Three wins, one lesson

Since the period of Professor Anzia’s study ended in 2011, though, Arizona, California, and Nevada have passed new laws that require almost all cities to move elections to November of even years. In each case, local action started the ball rolling and a mild state reform came before a stronger one.

How California got on-cycle elections

In California, as of 1940, a sample of 77 cities studied by Professor Anzia (p. 75) showed that all but 4 percent conducted their elections out of sync with the federal government, as was normal for the time. A trickle of consolidations started among “charter cities,” those big enough to have home rule city charters. In 1981, the state legislature allowed cities without their own charters to join the trickle, and by 1986, some 34 percent of the cities in Dr. Anzia’s sample had consolidated elections. One barrier to even more conversions was that the 1981 law required cities to get approval from their county boards of supervisors, and the board in Los Angeles County—the state’s 500-pound gorilla, with a fifth of its cities and a quarter of its population—rejected every proposal that came before it.

Still, election consolidation picked up speed. By 1995, a data set covering almost all of the Golden State’s 482 cities shows that 62 percent of them, home to about half the state’s urban population, had on-cycle elections.¹These figures are estimates based on the dates of elections recorded in the California Elections Data Archive maintained by CSU Sacramento. They are not based on examining city law in these cities. California has 482 incorporated cities included in the data archive; 28 of them had inadequate data in the archive as of January 2023 to allow categorization. The percentages listed, therefore, are as a share of the 456 cities Sightline was able to categorize. Note that the CEDA data are not strictly comparable to Dr. Anzia’s, so it’s likely that the share of California cities voting on-cycle did not jump from 34 percent to 62 percent in just nine years. More likely, Dr. Anzia’s sample didn’t reflect all the cities that had already switched.
In 2015, the L.A. County logjam finally broke when the city of Los Angeles migrated to on-cycle elections by popular vote and when the legislature passed a law requiring low-turnout cities to do the same. Earlier, cities might have objected, but by then, three-quarters of cities had already converted. The remainder were no longer much of a power bloc, and their neighbors were demonstrating again and again that consolidated elections saved money and boosted participation in democracy.

Quickly, local authorities rescheduled their elections: 54 cities, most of them in L.A. County, switched in 2016, 2018, or 2020, and the surge in election consolidation had pushed the share of cities to almost 90 percent, as shown in the figure below. Those cities were home to 88 percent of the state’s urban population. Even more cities joined the parade in 2022, and eight more, including San Francisco and San Jose (and others listed above), approved future consolidation. The new additions will push the share of California cities to well above 90 percent. All but one of the state’s largest 20 cities now hold their elections on cycle.

How Arizona got on-cycle elections

In California, local action led to state action, which led to more local action, which led to more state action. In neighboring Arizona, a similar pattern emerged. From 1940 all the way through 1986, the state’s cities all voted off cycle (page 75). Then, empowered and encouraged in a series of laws, the state’s cities almost all switched. In 2000, the legislature lifted a prior ban on local elections in even-year Novembers, and a few cities began switching. In 2005, the state required localities of more than 175,000 residents to hold their general elections in November, either in even or odd years, rather than in other months, which allowed more cities to consolidate elections.

In 2012, the Arizona legislature passed a law (HB 2826) to push remaining local elections to November of even years, and by 2018, most Arizona cities had complied, including the state’s own 500-pound gorilla Phoenix, which is home to more than a fifth of Arizonans. The cities complied despite the fact that the state supreme court invalidated the 2012 law in the case of home-rule charter cities. Miffed with the court, the 2018 legislature returned to the question and revised its policy to require on-cycle election in all localities with low turnout, copying California’s legal language. A 2021 court decision knocked down the revised language, too; it exempted from the 2018 law charter cities, led by Tucson, but the ruling is largely moot. Almost all Arizona cities run consolidated elections.

How Nevada got on-cycle elections

The story in Nevada has been about the same: every city there voted off cycle before 2001, when Reno won state approval for an election-consolidation amendment to its city charter. In 2003, the legislature allowed non-charter cities to consolidate elections, and cities began to do so. In 2011, the legislature sped the process by letting charter cities make the switch without going through the nettlesome process of amending their charters. By 2019, 12 of the state’s 19 main cities were already on cycle or in the process of transitioning. That year, the legislature approved an election consolidation measure, Assembly Bill 50, that pushed remaining municipal elections onto the statewide cycle. Like the Arizona and California measures, it passed by a wide margin in each house, perhaps because so many cities had already switched.

In each of these states, a trickle of local election consolidation became a flood, and state action moved from allowing to encouraging to requiring consolidated elections. These precedents suggest that in states that currently forbid cities from conducting elections on cycle, a first step might be to advocate for state policies that let cities choose when to hold their elections.

A twisting path

Already, ten US states require on-cycle local elections in almost all cases.²The exact count of states is somewhat hard to pin down because of the complexities of state laws. Sightline is researching this question further and hopes to publish a definitive tally and dataset this year.
In Cascadia, they include Oregon and, at the region’s southern edge, California. In about 20 US states, localities may already set their elections to align with national ones, and in these states, the trend is unmistakably toward consolidation. For example, Wyoming, at Cascadia’s eastern edge, began letting cities decide some years ago, and most have now aligned with national elections.

Unfortunately, in the remaining states—about 20 of them—law still bans election consolidation, and four of Cascadia’s states fall in this category: Alaska³Alaska is unusual. Its local officials serve three-year, rather than four-year, terms. Consolidating Alaskan elections would require not just moving local election day but also extending terms.
, Idaho, Montana, and Washington. In these states, reformers will need to convince legislators to let cities move their elections to when the voters are: in November of even years. Already, Washington State Senator Javier Valdez has introduced SB 5723 to do that. To many legislators and to all cities, it should seem a modest and reasonable proposal, simply to allow cities to decide whether to consolidate elections or not.

If legislators give cities the option, reformers will only need to get the question before voters. Then will come the easy part: voters will say “yes” by crushing margins. To them, election consolidation is, if nothing to get excited about, nonetheless a no-brainer.

After enough cities have consolidated so that opposition has dissipated, legislators can return to the question and finish the work of moving local elections to November of even years. They can boost turnout dramatically, improve representation in local democracy, enhance the accountability of local governments to the public, and save money.

All that is within grasp, if advocates follow the zig-zagging path to election consolidation mapped by Arizona, California, and Nevada.

Thanks to senior research associate Jay Lee for analysis of the California Elections Data Archive, volunteer Todd Newman for research about laws in various states, and University of California, San Diego Professor Zoltan Hajnal for helpful review comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Washington Lot Split Bills Would Create Starter Homes, Support Community Stability

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UPDATE 3/28/23: The Senate Local Government Committee declined to bring HB 1245 to a vote, thereby killing it.

UPDATE 3/1/23: The House voted 94 -2 to pass HB 1245. The bill was amended to legalize lot splits down to 2,000 square feet, up from 1,500 square feet in the original bill. Previously, HB 1245 and its Senate companion (SB 5364) were both passed out of their policy committees on unanimous bipartisan votes.

A severe lack of modestly priced “starter homes” is shutting out more and more Washingtonians from homeownership. As the New York Times observed, “nationwide, the small detached house has all but vanished from new construction.”

One of the main reasons is no mystery: zoning laws that require every house to have a large lot. When there’s a shortage of homes, land prices go up, which makes it financially infeasible to build anything but a big, expensive house if it has to occupy a big, expensive piece of land. And in a double-whammy, large lot requirements themselves restrict the supply of homes, unleashing a vicious cycle of spiraling prices.

The solution couldn’t be any more obvious: legalize smaller house lots. And that’s what Washington bill HB 1245 (and its companion SB 5364) would do.

And it would do so in an incremental, locally controlled way, by allowing homeowners to split their lots into smaller parcels—if they want to. HB 1245 is not a mandated blanket rezone for smaller lots. Small house lots would be created only when the owner of a lot decides to split it.

What WASHINGTON’s HB 1245 would do

HB 1245 is simple. It grants owners the authority to split their house lot once, into two pieces. For size, each piece can’t be less than 1,500 square feet and can’t be less than 40 percent of the size of the original lot. These lower size limits are intended to keep adjacent lots from becoming too dissimilar. They supersede local minimum lot size requirements.

As a tenant protection measure, the bill prohibits lot splits that would involve demolition of any housing that is rent-restricted or rent-subsidized, or that has been occupied by a tenant paying market-rate rent within the preceding 12 months.

Because it can be difficult to fit parking on small lots, the bill caps parking mandates at one off-street space per split lot. It also establishes a few guardrails for design standards.

Lessons from California’s lot splitting bill: Gradual uptake

Washington’s HB 1245 was modeled after the 2021 California’s SB 9 that legalized lot splits on all single-family parcels statewide. California went smaller on lot size, though, allowing splits down to 1,200 square feet. SB 9 also legalized duplexes on every lot, so in combination with lot splitting, every house lot in California now has the potential to hold four homes.

A new study on SB 9 demonstrates the incremental, gentle rate of change we can expect if Washington legalizes lot splitting by passing HB 1245. A year after California’s law went into effect, the study finds, “some of the state’s largest cities reported that they have received just a handful of applications for either lot splits or new units, while other cities reported none.”

It’s too soon to nail down why uptake has been so low, but one theory is that in some places California’s liberal accessory dwelling unit (ADU) laws make backyard cottages a more attractive option than splitting a lot to add a new house.

The benefits of lot splitting: From starter homes to community stability

Allowing lot splitting would provide a second major benefit aside from the starter homes discussed above. It would create options for homeowners who want to downsize but also stay in their neighborhoods and communities.

Some owners may not want a big backyard and would prefer to see another family living in a house there. Others may want to build a smaller house for themselves on a split lot and sell the original main house to a larger family that needs more space. Others may opt to split their lot to create a home for extended family to live next door. Owners on fixed incomes who are house-rich but cash-poor could sell part of their land to give themselves a financial cushion.

In light of the ownership opportunities and owner flexibility offered by lot splitting, the Black Home Initiative, a new regional effort that targets the racial inequities at the core of the housing ecosystem in an effort to increase homeownership among Black households, has made HB 1245 one of its legislative priorities. Read more about its reasons in this policy brief.

To summarize, legalizing lot splitting:

Creates more homes, and less expensive homes
Increases homeownership opportunities at lower price points
Generates starter homes to get people on the ladder of intergenerational wealth-building
Increases housing options for families with children
Creates lower-priced options in neighborhoods with good schools, parks, and amenities
Enables infill home-building that’s locally controlled, incremental, and low-impact
Gives cash-poor, house-rich owners a way to stay in their homes and communities
Creates options for multigenerational households to live next door to each other
Reduces demolition of modest houses to make way for McMansions
Enables fee-simple ownership and standard mortgage financing, unlike the more complicated process of selling a backyard cottage through a condo agreement

What Washington currently has on the books regarding lot splitting is, effectively, a government mandate for one luxury house per lot. What HB 1245 would deliver, in a nutshell, is the option for two smaller, less expensive houses on a lot, if an owner wishes. That means more starter homes or options to downsize or host loved ones nearby or increase one’s financial security.

In short, these bills to legalize lot splitting are one piece of the solutions puzzle to address the state’s massive housing shortage—and open the doors for a diverse mix of Washingtonians in all types of communities to find the right home for them.

Washington Bill Would Boost In-law Apartments Throughout the State

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UPDATE 05/08/23: HB 1337 passed and was signed into law by Governor Jay Inslee on May 8! The House concurred on Senate amendments on April 14, the Speaker signed on April 17, and the President of the Senate, Lieutenant Governor Denny Heck, signed on April 18.

UPDATE 04/06/23: HB 1337 passed the Senate on a bipartisan vote of 39-7 (all 7 nays were Rs). Next steps are concurrence with the House, and then the Governor’s desk. The bill was amended on the floor with the parking provisions noted below. Here’s what the passed version does:

prohibits owner occupancy requirements (a.k.a. renter bans)
legalizes two ADUs per lot in any configuration of attached/detached
caps impact fees at 50% of those charged on houses
legalizes an ADU on any lot size that’s legal for a house
lifts parking mandates < 1/2-mile of 15-min. transit stop; otherwise capped at 1 per ADU on lots < 6,000 sf
legalizes ADU size up to at least 1,000 sq.ft.
legalizes ADU height up to 24 feet (or the max. height for houses if < 24 feet)
prohibits design standards or other restrictions that are more stringent than what applies to the main house
legalizes ADUs to abutting property lines on alleys
legalizes ADUs in existing structures that violate current rules for setbacks or lot coverage
prohibits requirements for public right of way improvements
legalizes the sale of ADUs as condominiums

UPDATE 03/28/23: The Senate Local Gov’t Committee passed HB 1337 after amending it to remove the parking provision and make the three remaining three of the most important reforms mandatory (see article below).

UPDATE 03/14/23: HB 1337 passed the House 81-15, without any significant amendments.

UPDATE 03/02/23: HB 1337 passed out of the House Housing Committee on a 11 – 2 bipartisan vote.

Washington’s severe statewide housing shortage calls for statewide action to reform all manner and form of rules that are needlessly impeding the construction of new homes of all shapes and sizes in our cities. On the most modest end of that spectrum are accessory dwelling units (ADUs), or more familiarly, granny flats and backyard cottages. These are modest-sized—and most often more modestly-priced—homes that can be tucked into existing buildings, homes, yards, and neighborhoods.

This year Washington lawmakers will have a chance to pass a set of statewide standards for ADU rules that are proven effective to boost the production of ADUs. Representative Mia Gregerson’s (D-33) HB 1337 would remove the biggest regulatory barriers commonly imposed by cities, making it easier for homeowners to add ADUs to their properties.

Legislators are also considering a weaker ADU bill, HB 1276, that lacks several of the important reforms in HB 1337. Passing HB 1276 would be progress, but falls short of an appropriate response to the state’s housing affordability crisis. HB 1337 would deliver the reforms necessary to achieve the full potential of ADUs to deliver desperately needed housing choices in communities all across Washington.

It’s time to end the delay on statewide ADU reform

All the reasons ADUs are a wonderful type of home, and all the policies that would maximize the creation of new ADUs, have not changed since 2019 when Washington first took up statewide ADU reform. Read all about it here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

One thing that definitely has changed over the past four years, though, is that Washington’s shortage of homes and resulting housing crisis has gotten progressively worse. And thousands of Washington families have lost out on the opportunity to live in an ADU because the state has repeatedly punted on setting statewide ADU standards.

ADUs permitted and completed statewide in California, illustrating the powerful effect of statewide ADU reforms similar to those proposed in Washinton’s HB 1337. Source: California Dept. of Housing and Community Development.

The debate is over: ADU reform works

If you’re looking for proof, consider California. After the state passed statewide ADU reforms similar to those proposed in HB 1337, ADUs took off. As of last year, roughly one in seven new homes permitted in the entire state of California were ADUs. In Los Angeles the number is even more eye-popping: one in every four new homes was an ADU. The big ADU numbers in California put the lie to the common assumption that ADUs will never put much of a dent in the housing shortage.

Seattle provides another striking example of effective ADU reform. In mid-2019 the city adopted a set of ADU reforms similar to those proposed in HB 1337. By 2022 permit volumes had risen to more than three times the typical rate prior to the reforms.

What Washington’s ADU bill would do

There is widespread agreement among ADU policy researchers that the four most important ADU reforms are:

Lifting parking mandates
Ending requirements for the owner to live on site
Reducing or eliminating impact fees
Legalizing two ADUs per lot, including detached ADUs (backyard cottages)

To provide flexibility, HB 1337 allows local governments to pick three out of the above four key reforms to adopt. It would also set the following standards:

Attached or detached ADUs allowed on any size lot that allows a detached house
Minimum ADU size of no less than 1,000 sq.ft.
Maximum height limit of no less than 24 feet (or the max. height for houses if less than 24 feet)
No design standards or other restrictions that are more stringent than what applies to the main house

In comparison, the weaker ADU bill, HB 1276:

Does nothing to reduce parking mandates
Does nothing to limit impact fees
Allows enforcement of anti-renter owner occupancy rules if ADUs are used for short-term rentals
Lets cities ban detached ADUs and two ADUs per lot on lots less than 4,500 sq.ft.
Sets no floor on the limits cities can place on ADU size and height
Limits cities’ autonomy by requiring them to ban short-term rentals if they offer any ADU incentives

HB 1276 includes some good reforms but would leave too many regulatory barriers in place. In contrast, HB 1337 is the comprehensive ADU solution the state needs. It aligns well with nationally accepted best practice, with the statewide reforms passed by California and Oregon, and with reforms in the handful of cities that have become leaders on ADU policy.

Detailed comparison of HB 1276 and HB 1337

Parking

HB 1276: Does not address parking mandates.

HB 1337: Prohibits parking mandates (if selected by the local government as one of the three out of four key reforms the bill requires).

Parking mandates are one of the biggest barriers to ADUs (see AARP’s policy guidance) because constructing it is often expensive and sometimes impossible to fit on a lot.
In 2020, SB 6617 lifted parking mandates on ADUs within a quarter mile of frequent transit, but that’s a tiny fraction of the state’s house lots.
Oregon prohibits parking mandates for ADUs in all cases.
California prohibits parking mandates for ADUs in most cases.

Owner Occupancy Rules

HB 1276: Prohibits owner occupancy rules unless the ADU is used for short-term rental, or the owner accepts a fee reduction in exchange for offering the ADU at affordable rent.

HB 1337: Prohibits owner occupancy rules in all cases (if selected by the local government as one of the three out of four key reforms the bill requires).

Requiring the property owner to live on site is one of the biggest barriers to ADUs (see AARP’s policy guidance) because the restriction on use discourages owners from taking the financial risk to invest in an ADU; it also prevents the addition of ADUs to rental houses.
Owner occupancy rules discriminate against renters by banning them from living on lots with ADUs.
Local governments do not impose owner occupancy rules on any other housing type. There are no laws requiring the owner of a duplex, for example, to live on site—why is a house with an ADU any different?
Owner occupancy rules may be at risk of being struck down by a legal challenge.
Holding a harmful law (owner occupancy) hostage to get compliance on a different issue (short-term rentals) is dysfunctional public policy. Short-term rentals can be regulated separately by cities.
Oregon prohibits owner occupancy rules for ADUs in all cases.
California prohibits owner occupancy rules for the first ADU on a lot but not for the second one.

Two ADUs Per Lot

HB 1276: Allows one attached and one detached ADU per lot, but only on lots 4,500 sq.ft. or larger.

HB 1337: Allows two ADUs per lot in any combination of attached or detached on any lot that allows a detached house (if selected by the local gov’t as one of the three out of four key reforms the bill requires).

Oregon does not explicitly allow two ADUs per lot, but that’s a moot point for most of the state’s residents because the state legalized fourplexes on urban lots statewide in 2019.
California allows two ADUs per lot, but one of them must be no larger than 500 sq.ft.

Impact Fees

HB 1276: Does not limit impact fees, and prohibits cities from reducing impact fees unless the owner signs “binding commitments” that the ADU will not be used for short-term rental.

HB 1337: Caps impact fees at half of what’s charged for a detached house (if selected by the local government as one of the three out of four key reforms the bill requires).

Impact fees are one of the biggest barriers to ADUs (see AARP’s policy guidance) because they are typically a huge upfront cost that’s hard for many homeowners to come up with.
ADUs are typically smaller than detached houses, so lower impact fees are justified.
When Portland reinstated ADU impact fees unless owners made a legal commitment to not use them for short-term rentals, ADU production dropped significantly.

Minimum Lot Size

HB 1276: Allows cities to impose a minimum lot size of up to 4,500 sq.ft. for detached ADUs and for two ADUs on one lot.

HB 1337: Allows two ADUs per lot on any lot that allows a detached house.

Cities have other restrictions such as setbacks and lot coverage limits that preclude detached ADUs as lots get small, so there is no need to set a special minimum lot size for detached ADUs. A small lot with a small main house may have plenty of room for a detached ADU, so why prohibit that?
Both Oregon and California allow ADUs on all lots that allow detached houses, with no minimum lot size limit.

Maximum ADU Size

HB 1276: Does not address ADU size, and allows cities to impose a limit as small as they desire.

HB 1337: Prohibits a maximum ADU size of less than 1,000 sq.ft.

ADUs less than around 1,000 sq.ft. become too small to accommodate families.
California mandates an allowance for at least 1,000 sq.ft. for two-bedroom ADUs.

Maximum Detached ADU Height

HB 1276: Does not address ADU height, and allows cities to impose a limit as low as they desire, which could preclude two-story ADUs.

HB 1337: Prohibits a maximum ADU height of less than 24 feet, or no less the height limit that applies to the main house, if that limit is less than 24 feet (ensures that detached ADUs won’t be taller than the main house).

A height limit of 24 feet allows for a two-story detached ADU with a peaked roof.
California mandates an allowance for at least 16 feet of height, which is barely enough for two-stories.

Restrictions on Short-Term Rentals

HB 1276: Prohibits local government ADU incentives of any kind unless owner signs “binding commitments” that the units will not be used for short-term rental. It also allows local governments to discriminate against long-term renters by imposing owner occupancy rules if the unit is used for short-term rental.

HB 1337: Does not require any ADU-specific restrictions, but does allow local governments to regulate short-term rentals in ADUs in any way they wish.

Local governments already have authority to regulate short-term rentals for any housing type.
Regulation of short-term rentals is best left to local control, as local conditions regarding short-term rentals and housing markets vary widely in different cities.
There is no reason to single out ADUs for short-term rental restrictions that don’t apply to other housing types. What justification is there for banning short-term rentals in ADUs if they’re allowed in detached houses in the same neighborhood?
Limiting owners’ option to earn income from short-term rental increases financial risk to homeowners investing in ADU construction, which reduces the production of ADUs.
Owners may decide to convert ADUs from short-term to long-term rental, increasing housing supply.
HB 1276 would limit local governments’ autonomy to reduce financial barriers to ADU construction by requiring them to ban short-term rentals if they offer any ADU incentives.
A survey in California found that only 8 percent of ADUs in the state were used for short-term rental.

Public Improvement Requirements

HB 1276: Does not limit any local government requirements for owners to pay for public improvements when they construct an ADU.

HB 1337: Prohibits local government requirements for owners to pay for public improvements when they construct an ADU.

Local requirements for improvements such as sidewalk construction with the addition of an ADU can make ADUs cost prohibitive for homeowners.

HB 1337 and HB 1276 are similar on the following policies, with minor exceptions as noted:

Both bills prohibit setbacks requirements for ADUs that are larger than those that apply to detached houses on the lot, but HB 1337 provides an additional allowance for zero setbacks on lots that abut alleys.
Both bills prohibit design standards that are more restrictive than those that apply to detached houses on the lot, but HB 1337 explicitly prohibits requirements that the ADU matches the main house aesthetically. Such requirements can preclude low cost pre-manufactured ADUs.
Both bills would supersede any covenants restricting ADUs enacted after the bill’s passage.
Both bills would make it explicit that local governments must allow ADUs to be sold separately via condoization.

The Vast Potential of Pairing Transit and Homes in Washington State

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

UPDATE 3/1/23: The Senate passed SB 5466 on a 40 – 8 vote. The most significant amendment reduced the applicable area around frequent transit stops (at least three stops per hour) from a three-quarter mile walking distance to a half-mile walking distance.

UPDATE 2/23/23: A slightly amended version of the Senate TOD bill, SB 5466, passed out of the Senate Transportation Committee on a 15 – 1 bipartisan vote.

Housing and transit belong together in cities. And this year, Washington lawmakers will take up a bill to help that happen in urban communities throughout the state. If passed, it would be a first for Washington, and the strongest statewide policy of its kind in North America.

The timing is opportune. Last year, Washington passed a transportation funding package that included $3 billion for public transit, by far its biggest investment ever. The state now has a responsibility to get the most out of that investment, and the way to do that is to have more people living and working near transit stops. In urban planning-speak, that’s called transit-oriented development, or TOD.

Sponsored by Senator Marko Liias (D-21), SB 5466 would create flexible standards for cities to allow mid-sized apartment buildings within three-quarters of a mile of transit stops with frequent service, and larger buildings within a quarter-mile of light rail stations. Update: Representative Julia Reed (D- is sponsoring the House companion, HB 1517.

The bill reflects a growing consensus that transit-oriented development is a key solution to the Washington’s massive shortage of housing that’s driving up rents and prices and harming Washingtonians with the least, the most. And this consensus crosses the aisle, even in this era of polarization: Both SB 5466 and HB 1517 have three Republican cosponsors.

A new report from Challenge Seattle, an alliance of business leaders, calls for “[mandating] local jurisdictions to encourage and accelerate [upzoning in] areas near transit hubs to incentivize TOD.”

A new Urban Institute study on transit and zoning in the Puget Sound region concluded that “reforms allowing high-density housing near transit would be most effective overall” to “meet increased demand for housing.”

And that unmet demand for homes is a statewide problem that bleeds across city boundaries, afflicting residents in communities throughout the state, and demanding a state-level response. The best way to add new homes is through the construction of multifamily buildings, and the most sustainable place to put those homes is near transit. And that’s what Washington’s TOD bill would do.

What is transit-oriented development?

TOD is a long-established pillar of urban planning. Think early railroad towns or streetcar suburbs. In more recent decades, cities throughout North America have strived to build housing around new transit investments such as Sound Transit’s Link light rail system. There’s a ginormous inventory of literature on TOD, so I may as well quote from a report I co-wrote in 2009:

New transit investments offer more than a means of moving people from one point to another; they can also be an opportunity to support, and in some cases, create communities by opening up new opportunities for people to gain access to, from, and within the neighborhood. By integrating land use, transportation, and housing policies to foster vibrant and safe mixed-use communities where residents, employees, and visitors can walk, bicycle, or take transit to reach their destinations, cities can continue to grow in a manner that is healthy for both people and the planet.

In 2009, the Washington legislature considered HB 1490, a bill way ahead of its time that included a TOD provision requiring cities to adopt zoning that would allow a housing density of 50 units per acre within a half-mile of light rail stations. (It became a lightning rod for controversy, but the bill died for bigger reasons.) Washington’s only other try on TOD since then was a 2019 bill, SB 5424, that was only intended as a conversation starter and died quickly in committee.

California tried and failed for three years running to pass SB 50, which would have legalized up to six-floor apartment buildings near transit. Though the state did succeed last summer in passing a bill that lifts parking mandates within a half-mile of transit stops.

With its 2021 MBTA Communities zoning law, Massachusetts became the first state to pass strong statewide TOD legislation. The law requires cities and towns to allow multifamily housing around transit stops throughout the Boston metro. Unfortunately, it appears to leave substantial leeway to game the system with zoning changes that wouldn’t actually result in much new housing created. The law is just starting to get implemented, so it’s too soon to assess its impact.

What’s in Washington’s transit-oriented development bill, SB 5466?

Maximum flexibility for cities

Boiled down, Senator Marko Liias’ TOD bill, SB 5466, says that cities must make it possible to construct large buildings near major transit stops. And it’s designed to give local governments maximum flexibility on how they achieve that. It sets a minimum standard for allowing TOD but lets cities tailor the rules to suit the local context.

The bill grants local flexibility in two key ways:

First, the bill’s building capacity allowances are based on floor-area-ratio, or FAR. More below on FAR, but the gist is that it regulates the overall size, but not the shape, of buildings, and it doesn’t regulate the use of buildings.
Second, the bill only requires an average allowed FAR near transit. That means a city could opt to restrict selected parts of the TOD area to smaller buildings, as long as it makes up for that with an allowance for larger buildings elsewhere within the TOD area.

What is floor-area ratio? It’s the total floor area of a building divided by the area of the parcel of land it’s built on. A one-story building that completely covers its lot has a FAR of one. A four-story building that only covers half of its lot has a FAR of two. So the higher the FAR, generally the more homes we’re talking.

You can see how it allows for flexibility in building design: a short, building and a tall, skinny one could both have the same FAR. Local governments could set height limits, for example, to get the building shape that best fits the community.

Illustration of floor-area ratio (FAR), image source: City of St. Paul.

Another flexible facet of FAR is that it says nothing about the use of the floorspace in the building, leaving the decision to builders or owners. Nor does the TOD bill itself dictate any requirements on use, which is intentional, to flexibly allow a mix of uses that works best for each unique place.

Although the bill’s primary goal is to create housing, jobs are also a strong driver of transit ridership. Not only residential, but also office, retail, and even industrial uses can be appropriate for TOD, and it’s normal for the mix of uses to vary in different station areas (see page 34 of this report for a station area typology).

The TOD bill’s second big flexibility feature is that it allows FAR averaging. That is, the required minimum allowed FAR (we’ll get to that next) applies to the entire station area on average, not to every parcel separately. This gives cities the option to reduce the building intensity in places where that might be appropriate for all sorts of local context reasons, as long as they boost the allowed intensity in enough other places to keep the average allowed FAR at or above the minimum requirement.

Different rules for different distances from transit

So, what does the TOD bill currently in the Washington legislature specifically require for FAR? It establishes two tiers:

A transit station hub is a quarter-mile radius circle around fixed rail stations. In station hubs, the bill requires a minimum average allowed FAR of 6.0. That FAR is typical for an eight- or nine-story apartment building.
A transit station area is a three-quarter-mile radius circle around fixed rail stations, bus-rapid transit stations, bus stops with seven-day service, and ferry terminals. In station areas, the bill requires a minimum average allowed FAR of 4.0, which is typical for a five-story apartment building.

Washington’s Department of Transportation recently published a report that inventories transit stops statewide. The map below shows transit stops meeting their “Level 3” definition of 30-minute service frequency during peak times, and at least 60-minute service seven days week. Though subject to change, that is the TOD bill’s proposed threshold for a “transit station area.”

WSDOT map of transit stops (in green) with “Level 3” service: 30-minute headways at peak times and 60-minute service seven days a week. Image source: WSDOT.

As noted above, the allowed FAR could be lower or higher on lots in different places, as long the average across those lots hits the minimum requirement. The bill prohibits local governments from imposing restrictions such as height limits or setbacks that would make it impossible to construct a real building with the allowed FAR. For a guard rail, it sets a minimum allowed FAR of 1.0 at the individual lot level. And to maximize the creation of new homes, it also prohibits caps on housing unit density.

Releasing builders from onerous parking mandates

The bill’s second critical component for enabling TOD is its removal of parking mandates. It would prohibit local requirements for off-street parking for all building types and uses within the three-quarter-mile radius transit station areas.

Challenge Seattle’s housing affordability report recommends that:

If areas around transit hubs are up-zoned to incentivize development in areas close to cities/job centers, a complementary policy would be to decrease or waive parking requirements, which would reduce construction costs and encourage more development (and drive a positive climate impact through transit-oriented development).

To be clear: the bill would not ban parking. It would only say that developers don’t have to build it if they think their future tenants won’t need it. The intent is to prevent arbitrary government mandates from causing wasteful and costly overbuilding of parking. In North American cities that have ended parking mandates, new housing still usually comes with some parking.

But there’s no better place for ending parking mandates than near transit, because transit makes it easier for residents to meet their daily needs without at car. And that saves them a ton of money, while it also helps the state meet its climate pollution reduction goals (Washington lawmakers will also consider a stand-alone parking bill to lift mandates near transit).

Affordability incentives, technical supports, and other benefits

Other good stuff in the bill:

To incentivize affordable housing development, the bill offers an automatic 50 percent increase in allowed FAR for housing affordable to people earning 60 percent of area median income (AMI).
To incentivize child care, small businesses, and three-bedroom homes, the bill excludes building floor area reserved for those uses from FAR limits.
To protect communities from displacement pressures that could be exacerbated by the bill’s FAR allowances, it would require that cities preemptively take the actions defined by a 2021 bill that established new anti-displacement standards for local planning. Note also that recent academic studies show that constructing new housing has a rent lowering effect within the same neighborhood, and also opens up lower-cost homes in surrounding neighborhoods.
To help keep land available for affordable housing development, the bill is intended to work in harmony with the Housing Benefit District scheme proposed in HB 1111.
To incentivize apartment developments that offer 20 percent of their homes at rents affordable to people earning 80 percent of AMI, the bill establishes a competitive grant program.
To provide support for local governments to implement the bill’s requirements, it instructs WSDOT to create a new program offering technical assistance and planning grants, administered through WSDOT to reinforce the connections between land use and transportation.
To streamline permitting, the bill exempts from SEPA review most development projects in transit station hubs and transit station areas as long as they are consistent with local comprehensive plans.

What TOD could deliver for Washington

The Urban Institute TOD study noted above projected that loosening zoning within a half-mile of the Puget Sound region’s light rail and bus rapid transit stops could increase the number of homes in those areas “by about 70 percent over the next decade, adding more than 60,000 units compared with the status quo.”

Washington’s TOD bill would require zoning increases at least as big as those considered in the Urban Institute study, and those changes would apply statewide to a greater number of transit stops and larger surrounding areas. So, for a back-of-the-envelope guess, the TOD bill has the potential boost production by a few hundred thousand homes over the next decade or two.

And that’s a few hundred thousand more families and individuals who will be able to find homes they can afford near the jobs and schools and services they love, all across Washington state.

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Poll: Washington Voters Out Ahead Of Local Leaders On Zoning Reforms

Support to allow more homes, lifting single-family zoning rules, ballooned in the last year alone

Washingtonians want more homes near transit and jobs, support multifamily options

Washingtonians see housing shortage as top cause of high prices, prefer affordability solutions over “local control”

Washingtonians favor range of options, from zoning for ADUs to small and medium-sized apartment buildings

Beyond the shortage and zoning, real families and faces

Video: Zoning for All Kinds of Affordable Homes

Blame the shortage. Blame the bans. Fix the zoning.

UPDATED: 50 Housing Bills and How They Fared in Olympia

1. Supply Bills

A. Zoning Reform

Legalize middle housing in residential neighborhoods

Make it easier for homeowners to add ADUs (three bills)

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

Legalize more homes and jobs near transit

Make parking optional near transit

Loosen restrictions on adding housing to existing buildings

Legalize single-stair apartment buildings up to six stories

Reform various codes for small-scale multifamily housing

Create special regulations for middle housing

Reform regulations for small-scale condominiums (two bills)

Reduce conflict between homebuilding and tree preservation

Establish permitting targets for new housing and penalties for failure to meet them

Allow more housing as a climate strategy

B. Permit Streamlining

End design review of housing by volunteer boards

Reform the environmental review process

Streamline local design review

Support local governments in streamlining their permit processes for new housing

Establish permit approval deadlines and penalties for failure to meet them (three bills)

Require reporting on housing permit approvals that exceed 120 days

Ease impact fee deferrals

2. Stability bills

A. Renter protections

Lengthen notice requirements for rent increases and limit fees

Limit rent increases

Limit rent increases and fees through the landlord-tenant act

Limit landlord withholding of damage deposits

Strengthen tenant rights in eviction processes

Establish a rental assistance voucher program

Monitor rents and vacancy

B. Homeownership support

Support first-time homebuyers harmed by historical discriminatory covenants

Support homeownership for essential workers

Update the state property tax exemption on homes owned by low-income seniors and disabled veterans (two bills)

Increase housing security for mobile home owners (three bills)

3. Subsidy bills

A. Funding for housing construction and land

Fund affordable housing through the Capital Budget

Increase the REET to fund affordable housing

Boost bonding capacity to fund affordable housing

Tax short-term rentals to fund affordable housing

Secure land for affordable housing near transit

Facilitate the use of surplus property for affordable housing

Improve affordable housing program management

B. Tax exemptions and fee waivers

Expand the MFTE (three bills)

Broaden the property tax exemption for affordable housing

Exempt affordable ADUs from property tax

Reduce utility costs for affordable housing

Hey, Olympia! If You Let Them, Cities Could Double Turnout in Local Elections

Consolidated elections turbocharge local turnout

Consolidated elections mean winners who better reflect voters and their views

How to achieve consolidated elections? Let cities choose them

Yes, Oregon, There Is a Way to Build Enough Homes

Back in the 1970s, a much smaller workforce built this many homes

Oregon built a lot more apartments in the 1970s

Adversaries agree on Oregon’s need for speed within urban areas

With Flexibility Over Parking, Oregon Homebuilders Get to Work

A downtown apartment project, about to be scrapped, returns with 40 percent more homes

New state rules end stalemate over affordable apartments

A crisis at Oregon hospitals, worsened by local parking requirements

A tenuous year ahead

Voters Want Fewer Elections: Here’s How to Do That

Electoral winning streak

Legislative losing streak

Three wins, one lesson

How California got on-cycle elections

How Arizona got on-cycle elections

How Nevada got on-cycle elections

Reform regulations for small-scale condominiums (two bills)