Search Results
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A Green Voter’s Guide to Cascadia’s 2020 Election Results
Perhaps you’ve heard that the United States held an election recently. As the dust clears and local, state, and federal ballots are counted, Sightline’s team of researchers is using this page to tell you how the results matter to sustainability issues here in the Pacific Northwest. Seattle bus service was on the ballot; it won. Housing reform in Portland got a mixed result at city council. Montana took a rightward...Read more » -
Welcome: Green Urbanism and Abundant, Affordable Housing
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The Path to Good Local Zoning Reform is State and Federal Zoning Reform
Should pro-housing advocates focus on making bad cities less bad, or on making good cities better? Here in Cascadia, we’ve just seen some interesting evidence that relatively modest state laws actually do both. That’s because state (and federal) laws that force anti-housing cities to welcome a bit more housing can also open up useful new debates in pro-housing cities. The trick is to override the universal bias toward the status...Read more » -
Good News! Vancouver’s Six-Homes-per-Lot Proposal Could Work
Can Vancouver BC’s six-homes-per-lot plan work? Re-legalizing smallplexes takes on expensive housing, segregation, and climate chaos. Ironically, sky-high land values make it possible to cap the price of two homes in a smallplex—if it’s built big enough.Read more » -
California’s Home Shortage is Making Everyone Else’s Worse
California’s repeated failure to strike down local bans on close-in housing has an incalculable number of victims. But 13 million of them live in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Year after year, through booms and busts, California sends a one-way jet stream of people moving north to Cascadia. If comparable numbers of people were instead able to flow in both directions, those Northwest states would find it much easier to build...Read more » -
Portland just passed the best low-density zoning reform in US history
Portland’s city council set a new bar for North American housing reform Wednesday by legalizing up to four homes on almost any residential lot. Portland’s new rules will also offer a “deeper affordability” option: four to six homes on any lot if at least half are available to low-income Portlanders at regulated, affordable prices. The measure will make it viable for nonprofits to intersperse below-market housing anywhere in the city...Read more » -
A Federal One-Two Punch to Protect Renters—Pandemic and Beyond
Together, these two strategies can turn around the coronavirus housing emergency, and set the course for long-term housing abundance and affordability.Read more » -
UPDATED: Fifteen Thoughts on the Coronavirus and Cities
UPDATE 4/17/20: Since publishing this I’ve been trying to keep up with the ongoing firehose of related stories and happenings in a big bad Twitter thread (click “show this thread” once it opens on Twitter): What did I get right? What did I get wrong? What did I miss? Threading through the 15 things…https://t.co/0ht4s9x14H — Dan Bertolet (@danbertolet) April 9, 2020 Here’s a cheat sheet to navigate the thread: 1....Read more » -
One of North America’s Boldest Housing Initiatives Has Reached Its End: Did It Work?
Last time, I mapped the political battleground of metropolitan housing shortages. This time, I draw lessons from an attempt to unleash abundant housing by assembling a different coalition. In the summer of 2015, long before the US national media noticed that something called the YIMBY movement had been born, before Minneapolis’s bold move allowing triplexes in its tree-lined neighborhoods of detached houses with yards and driveways, and before US presidential...Read more » -
Housing Policy Is… Salmon Policy?
Across the Pacific Northwest, urban sprawl is decimating salmon habitat. Fish scientists who study the effects of urbanization on salmon, steelhead and orcas are unanimous: To save these iconic and vital species we must prevent sprawling development from ruining the sensitive watersheds they depend on. And this realization leads to an inescapable conclusion: Limiting further sprawl means we must provide more homes for more people in already-developed parts of our...Read more »