Search Results
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Fairer Elections in Portland
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Yes, Other Countries Are Making More Progress on Housing, Case 4: The United Kingdom and New Zealand
Last time, I chronicled France’s success at boosting homebuilding in greater Paris. This time, I look at the industrial world’s laggards in abundant housing. Might the boldest new examples of leadership for abundant, low-carbon housing come from two of the worst places in the world at providing it—and from opposite ends of the political spectrum? By one measure, the United Kingdom and its former colony New Zealand have the worst...Read more » -
Washington’s Shortage of Homes is Squeezing Communities Throughout the State
Soaring home prices in the tech-booming Seattle metro have been the stuff of headlines for decades. But recently, cities of all sizes throughout Washington state are feeling the pain of a statewide shortage of homes. Over the past few years, price increases in Seattle have been dwarfed by those in smaller cities near and far. The state’s current runaway price champ? Spokane, where from 2017 to 2021, home values rose...Read more » -
Five Lessons from California’s Big Zoning Reform
Update 9/16: Senate Bill 9 is now law. Urban housing shortages aren’t just a cause of climate change. They’re a lot like climate change—it’s very hard to fix them unless you can get many different governments to act. That’s what we told the New York Times this week when they asked for Sightline’s take on California’s proposed state-level legalization of duplexes and lot splits on most low-density residential lots. Cities...Read more » -
Eight Ingredients for a State-Level Zoning Reform
In 2019, Oregon passed a first-of-its-kind state law that ordered larger cities and the Portland metro area to rapidly legalize duplexes on all residential lots and fourplexes, triplexes, townhomes, and cottage clusters on more than half of lots. This is a short, reported history of how that law was passed in the face of fierce opposition. It was created in partnership with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, its first...Read more » -
How to Tear Down the Invisible Walls in Your City’s Zoning Code
This is a sidebar to Sightline’s history of the passage of Portland’s residential infill project. In August 2021, Oregon’s largest city legalized duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes and mixed-income sixplexes on the vast majority of residential lots for the first time since 1959, while making on-site parking spaces optional citywide for the first time since 1973. The history was created in partnership with its first publisher, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy....Read more » -
The Eight Deaths of Portland’s Residential Infill Project
In 2021, Portland became the largest modern U.S. city to end so-called “single-family zoning.” What follows here is a history of how the residential infill project could have died but didn’t. This history was developed in partnership with Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. See also our 10 tips for zoning reformers, which serve as a short summary of the narrative below. It was January 2020. One of Oregon’s most respected...Read more » -
States Must Reform Zoning Because No City Can End a Shortage Alone
After decades of impasse in a thousand city halls, housing advocates are looking to statehouses for zoning reform. Many now think state, provincial, and even federal reforms may pass more easily than local ones. I don’t think that’s because the politicians who lead larger governments are more likely than local officials to want the zoning reform desperately needed by our society, economy, and planet. It’s because larger-scale zoning reforms might...Read more » -
A New Idea for State-Led Upzoning: Letting Cities Opt Out
As more and more states look for politically feasible ways to legalize housing amid an alarming new spike in home prices, new ideas keep emerging. This year, Washington state introduced one such concept: local fiscal incentives. Three state bills there would have given cities extra chunks of tax money for legalizing greener, less expensive housing options like ADUs, fourplexes and apartments near transit. Though they didn’t pass, they did win...Read more » -
Good Transit Is Pointless When People Can’t Live Near It
If the government pays hundreds of millions of dollars to help build and operate a high-quality transit line, people should generally be allowed to live near it if they want to. You’d think this would be uncontroversial. Especially among people who run public transit agencies. Unfortunately, some transit leaders here in Oregon seem to be distracted by the exciting goal of building high-capacity bus and rail lines, or at least...Read more »