Northwest Targets: Communities Threatened by Fossil Fuels

Sightline is publishing a new report, “Northwest Targets,” that provides a risk assessment for the region. The report analyzes every community in Oregon and Washington targeted by large-scale fossil fuel proposals since 2010. It reviews the history of local struggles with fossil fuel development proposals and gauges the risks of future proposals.

“Northwest Targets” identifies three places that are prime targets for future dirty energy expansion:

Lower Columbia River: A cluster of ports on the Columbia—Longview and Kalama in Washington and Port Westward in Oregon—have faced nearly a dozen fossil fuel proposals.
Tacoma, Washington: The heavily industrialized Puget Sound city is wrestling with several active fossil fuel proposals and is almost certain to be the site of future plans.
Cherry Point, Washington: Of great cultural importance to the Lummi Nation, this area is already a major center of fossil fuel activity and is at substantial risk of further development.

Northwest communities are not powerless, however. Each has at its disposal a secret weapon: fortifying local land use laws to protect themselves from coal, oil, and gas projects. By limiting the ability of dirty energy companies to build new projects, these places are protecting their residents and their local economies, even as they chart a course for other communities that face similar risks.

The risk of new fossil fuel developments in Northwest communities is hard to predict. Yet it is possible to provide a rough rank-ordering of the most threatened places based on the quantity, scale, and track record of dirty energy proposals; the existence of connected fossil fuel infrastructure; and the presence of protective land use laws.

In “Northwest Targets,” Sightline assesses the current threat to each community in Oregon and Washington that has been targeted by at least one large-scale fossil fuel proposal since 2010. Ranked from least to most threatened, these communities are the Northwest’s target communities.

Find the full report for download here.

This Is How New Zealand Fixed Its Voting System

Changing to a more representative electoral system makes so much sense, and yet it can be such a heavy lift. After even Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau backed away from a public promise to end first-past-the-post voting in Canada, Cascadian reformers may despair of ever prying the cold dead hands of 18th century voting off of our democracy.

But there is hope! Like Canada, the United States, and other former British colonies, the country of New Zealand once elected legislative representatives from single-member districts, with the expected majoritarian results: two-party politics and underrepresentation of women and people of color. But in the 1990s, voters opted to switch to a fairer electoral system called Mixed Member Proportional (MMP). Immediately, they saw a more diverse, representative parliament.

Why MMP worked for NZ

Mixed Member Proportional Voting was attractive to New Zealanders because it is a hybrid of the system they were used to (single-member districts where voters can elect a geographically local representative) and a system with regional or national representatives selected from party lists. Voters get two votes: one for their local representative, and one for their favorite party (read more about it in Sightline’s Glossary).

Mixed Member Proportional, with its familiar local representatives and simple ballot, could be attractive to Cascadians voters, too. The Kiwis did it, and so can we. British Columbians especially, now pledged to complete electoral reform, may be keen to hear how New Zealanders designed and passed theirs.

A failing system prompted a study

In the late 1970s and early ‘80s, three New Zealand elections produced unfair results. In 1978 and 1981, one party won more votes, but the other party won more seats in the legislature (sound familiar?). In 1984, a small right-wing third party ran just to pull votes away from the right-wing major party. In all three elections, voters were feeling fed up with the two major parties (sound familiar, United States?), and many voted for third parties. Voters grew even more infuriated when their votes had no effect: despite winning between 16 and 21 percent of the vote, third parties only won one or two out of 95 seats each year.

Finally, legislators agreed to set up a commission to look into the problem of their unfair electoral system. In 1985, the Royal Commission on the Electoral Systems studied many alternative ways of voting, including Preferential Voting, Single Non-Transferable Vote, Cumulative Voting, Limited Voting, Approval Voting, Mixed Member Proportional, Supplemental Member, and Single Transferable Vote. The following year, the Commission issued its report, unanimously recommending Mixed Member Proportional Voting for New Zealand.

Legislators took the public’s temperature

A whopping 85 percent of voters said they wanted to change the system.

Unsurprisingly, neither of the two major parties was excited by the idea of changing the electoral system that elected them. But with the Royal Commission’s recommendations echoing in the public sphere, each party tried to outdo the other by promising, during the 1990 campaign, to hold a referendum on electoral reform if it gained power. Once the National Party won the election, it tried to walk back its electoral reform promises (sound familiar, Canada?), but public pressure persisted and the parliament grudgingly agreed to hold an “indicative” (non-binding) referendum in 1992.

The referendum asked voters if they wanted to retain First-Past-the-Post voting or change the system. The party in power promised that, if a majority of voters wanted to change, it would put a binding referendum on the ballot the next year. A whopping 85 percent of voters said they wanted to change the system.

The non-binding referendum also asked which of four systems voters would choose to replace first-past-the-post, and the party in power agreed to put the top vote-getter on the ballot the next year. Voters trusted the Royal Commission: 65 percent chose Mixed Member Proportional voting.

Voters had their say

Having faced an increasingly frustrated public for more than a decade, elected officials could drag their feet no longer. They finally delivered on their promise of a national binding referendum on electoral reform. New Zealand, like Canada but unlike the United States, allows the legislature to refer important issues to the people for a vote. (Thanks to the Citizens Initiated Referendum Act of 1993, New Zealand is one of just three countries in the world that also allows citizen-initiated referenda. The other two are Switzerland and Italy.)

In 1993, a general election year in New Zealand, voters had the chance to vote on a binding national referendum on the voting system. Businesses poured money into a full-throated campaign against Mixed Member Proportional voting, with political and business leaders saying it would “bring chaos” and would be “a catastrophic disaster for democracy.” (The main opponents of proportional representation are typically the two major parties that benefit from winner-take-all, majoritarian elections, plus the interests—in this case, business—that benefit from their rule.) The pro-reform campaign had little cash but a populist wind at its back: voters disillusioned with the political class were ready for change (sound familiar, United States?). Eighty-five percent of voters came out to vote, and electoral reform won with 54 percent.

The National (right wing) party called another national referendum to get rid of Mixed Member Proportional voting in 2011, but 58 percent of voters wanted to keep it. Once given a taste of fairer voting, New Zealanders refused to go back.

Parties proliferated

Political scientists have known for nearly a century that plurality voting in single-member districts leads to two-party domination. They even have a name for the phenomenon—Duverger’s Law. New Zealand was no exception; the Labour (left) and National (right) parties dominated the legislature.

Original Sightline Institute graphic, available under our free use policy.

As soon as the country moved away from first-past-the-post voting, Kiwis experienced a menu of party options, as well as confidence that they could vote for a smaller party without throwing their vote away. Instead of dominating nearly 100 percent of the seats, the two large parties now win around two-thirds together. The Green Party, the Maori party, the NZ First party (right-wing nationalists), and others together win around one-third of seats.

Original Sightline Institute graphic, available under our free use policy.

Maoris win more seats

Since the Maori Representation Act of 1867, Maori—the indigenous people of New Zealand, making up about 11 percent of the population—were guaranteed four seats (out of about 90) in the Parliament. Since 1975, Maori people can choose whether to enroll to vote for the Maori seats or for the general seats. (Prior to that, they could only vote for the designated Maori seats.) Some argued that the designated Maori seats should be eliminated when New Zealand moved to proportional voting, but the Maori managed to retain them. All voters now cast one vote for their district representative and one for their preferred party, meaning voters on the Maori rolls could cast a vote for their Maori district representative and one for the Maori Party, and voters on the general rolls could cast one vote for their district representative and one for their party. Proportional voting has helped them increase their share of Parliamentary seats from 4 or 5 percent before proportional voting to between 13 and 19 percent since.

Original Sightline Institute graphic, available under our free use policy.

Women win more seats and more leadership positions

Prior to proportional voting, women won between one and 16 percent of seats, except for a high of 21 percent in 1993, the year that voters approved a change to the electoral system and adopted citizen-led initiatives. Since New Zealand instituted proportional voting, women have consistently made up about one-third of Parliament. Much of women’s gains come from the Party List seats—more than 40 percent of representatives elected from party lists are women, compared with just 15 percent from the single-member districts. One of the reasons for the discrepancy is that small, left-leaning parties tend to put women in their top spots.

Original Sightline Institute graphic, available under our free use policy.

While one-third is not gender parity, it may have brought women to the critical mass where they start to have more power. Indeed, women have expanded their role on the leadership Cabinet from zero in most years before the referendum to seven, eight, or nine of 27 in recent years.

Original Sightline Institute graphic, available under our free use policy.

What Cascadia can learn

Change is hard, especially for those who benefit from the status quo, such as parties that are able to win more seats than their votes because of a flawed electoral system. Having a trusted commission study the problem can help instill confidence that a different system could work better.

British Columbia has already conducted a citizen-led study that recommended Single Transferable Vote. Oregon or Washington could similarly assemble a group of diverse citizens to carefully consider options for the states’ electoral methods and make recommendations.

Finally, because legislators are reluctant to change the system that elected them, the path to electoral reform is likely through a referendum or initiative. Once implemented, though, voters will see both more power in their vote and more diverse representation in their legislature—and they may never look back.

Weekend Reading 6/16/17

Kristin

Another lens on the Big Sort: rural communities put a lot of resources into helping promising kids get out and fulfill their potential. Those kids get out, gain skills, experience the world. The other kids get left behind in their hometown with dwindling work opportunities and shrinking populations. As this graph from the article shows, those who leave home have more opportunities to make money than those who stay.

Tarika

A year-and-a-half ago, I wrote about how the fossil fuel industry is using your child’s classroom to indoctrinate children about their polluting products. This week the Center for Public Integrity published a full article on the industry’s push into K-12 education. Oil’s Pipeline to America’s Schools details how the industry is sending our underfunded schools free books and “educational materials,” as well as providing free teacher trainings in the name of STEM education. A first-grade classroom in Oklahoma, where a state agency funded by the oil and gas industry has spent $40 million on K-12 education materials with a pro-industry slant, embraced the indoctrination and won a visit from Republican lawmakers.

Dressed in suits, the Republican lawmakers read aloud from “Petro Pete’s Big Bad Dream,” a parable in which a Bob the Builder lookalike awakens to find his toothbrush, hardhat and even the tires on his bike missing. Abandoned by the school bus, Pete walks to Petroville Elementary in his pajamas.

“It sounds like you are missing all of your petroleum by-products today!” his teacher, Mrs. Rigwell, exclaims, extolling oil’s benefits to Pete and fellow students like Sammy Shale. Before long, Pete decides that “having no petroleum is like a nightmare!”

Oklahoma is not alone. A national energy education program funded by oil companies tells children that a little global warming “might be a good thing.” An Ohio teacher training program shows science educators how to give a lesson where they “frack” the filling out of Twinkies. I think Yale’s Anthony Leiserowirtz is right on the money about this propaganda when he says in the article that it violates a trusted relationship between teacher and student.

Here’s an update on the situation in Qatar, the world’s largest LNG exporter, for those who are watching the LNG market and LNG developments in our region:

Qatar has stopped producing helium. It’s the world’s second-largest helium exporter, producing 25% of the world’s demand.
The Pentagon just inked a $12 billion deal to sell F-15 fighter jets to Qatar but the President’s tweets side with the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Analyst Amir Madani suggests in an article over at The Huffington Post that the reason for the conflicting messages may be a back-door deal with the Saudis to get Qatar’s natural gas.
The conflict may truly be about ostracizing Iran. (More on that)
The New York Times wrote a history of the Saudi-Qatar rivalry that is a very informative read.
The most entertaining development yet: NPR reports that a Qatari businessman plans to spend $8 million to airlift 4,000 cows to the country now that its neighbors have stopped food exports to Qatar. The country currently imports 80% of its food.

Eric

Everything you always wanted to know about duck sex (but were afraid to ask) is at Der Spiegel. For example:

…we discovered that the genitalia of ducks regress and regrow each year, so that a 10- or 15-centimeter penis in the summer will reduce to less than 1 centimeter in the winter and then grow back the next year.

This is not even close to the most disturbing fact available at that link.

That murder you think you committed? Maybe you didn’t actually do it. The New Yorker takes a look at the extreme unreliability of our memories:

The situation is a study in the malleability of memory: an implausible notion, doubted at first, grows into a firmly held belief that reshapes one’s autobiography and sense of identity…

If memory is like a house, it is one that is constantly under construction. As the cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus put it, “Memory is born anew every day.” We piece together fragments of recollection, shaped by beliefs and impressions, and unwittingly embellish and invent our own pasts.

Human evolution freaks me out. This feature-length story at Vox examines what it means to be human and pays a visit to our long-lost cousins (with whom we interbred) in the forking paths of our species’ development.

Kenan Malik makes the case for cultural appropriation.

Bellingham got stinky recently. Sightline research fellow Michael Riordan explains how a “burping” oil tanker anchored offshore was the culprit.

Aven

In this week’s edition of things to be hopeful about, I present a new method for recycling plastic, using a natural reagent derived from coconut oil, a technique for converting carbon dioxide emissions into liquid fuel cheaply and efficiently, and a model for overcoming cognitive resistance to challenging facts.

The model comes from research on measles vaccination rates in California after the outbreak at Disneyland in 2014, which inspired a new law barring exemptions for children attending public schools. Anti-vaccination activists did their best to kill the bill, but the use of compelling visualizations that simulated the spread of an outbreak in people’s own towns and cities appears to have turned the tide in favor of stricter vaccination rules.

And speaking of the bill: although opponents predicted that little would change in the way of vaccination rates while public education would suffer as parents pulled their unvaccinated kids out of school, it turns out the exact opposite has happened: since the law went into effect last summer, vaccination rates have rebounded to their highest levels while school enrollment has continued to increase. I think there could be some important lessons here for other issues that involve the scientific literacy of average citizens—say, for example, climate change.

And finally, a vision for creating nature-rich cities, spawned by the author of the book Last Child in the Woods. Talking about urban planning has been a real downer for me recently, as Seattle continues to seethe and moan about HALA and skyrocketing housing prices, but I think this writer might be onto something:

The good news is that this is a vision that many people can agree on. Our children’s disconnect from nature may be the only current cultural issue that brings together people who don’t agree on much of anything else. Pediatricians, developers, urban planners, liberals, conservatives: Once they get to the same table and start talking about it—and start remembering their own childhood connections to nature—they open up to each other and to plans for change.

Could Portland Create a City Council That Looks Like Portland?

In the first article in this series, I showed that Portland city government has a dismal record of representing Portlanders. Nonpartisan elections make it hard to measure the council’s ideological representativeness, but it is easy to measure the lack of racial, ethnic, gender, and geographical diversity. For example, although nearly one-third of Portlanders are people of color, no person of color has served on the council in the past quarter-century, and not a single woman of color has ever held a seat on the council. Half of Portlanders are women, but women have served less than one-quarter of the person-years on the council in the past 25 years. In the second article, I posed seven questions (and short answers) about how Portland could better structure its city government to improve how representative it is of residents.

In this, the third and final article in the series, I lay out eight scenarios for electing the council in single-member districts with top-two voting or in multi-member districts with ranked-choice or cumulative voting. Many other factors influence representation, including money in politics, voting rights, and candidate pipelines, but this article focuses on the important puzzle pieces of election systems and district configurations. Each scenario necessarily makes some assumptions about how people vote. Assumptions underlying all scenarios are spelled out in the appendix.

Portland’s representation problem

Portland uses the least representative electoral method: at-large numbered seats and “vote for one” ballots. At-large numbered seats allow the majority of voters in the city to elect every single member of the council, leaving no room for representation of voters in any minority: racial, ideological, geographic, or otherwise. Switching to districts—the alternative commonly discussed—would prioritize geographical diversity over other kinds. It would guarantee a geographically diverse council but would not necessarily elect more people of color, more women, more renters, or more working-class representatives.

Portland uses the least representative electoral method: at-large numbered seats and “vote for one” ballots.

But if it chose to do so, Portland could become the second US city to adopt the most representative form of voting: multi-member council districts elected with ranked-choice voting. Portland could achieve a balance of geographic, racial, gender, and socioeconomic representation by expanding the council to eight members and electing them from three districts: three councillors from a west-south district, three from a north-northeast district, and two from an eastern district. Or Portland could achieve balance of representation with a slightly smaller council by adding just two council members (for a total of six) and electing three from a west-south district and three from a east-north district.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go through the options (you may click on each link to jump to its section below):

first, single-member districts,
then, multi-member districts and election methods (ranked-choice voting and cumulative or limited voting),
then, an explanation of voter thresholds to elect a councilor under different election methods,
and finally, three scenarios for single-member districts and five scenarios for multi-member districts for Portland.

Single-member districts

Single-member districts yield better geographic representation, which Portland sorely needs. However, single-member districts might do little or nothing for the Rose City’s racial, ethnic, gender, ideological, and economic representation on city council. Single-member districts drawn to create one or more majority-minority districts are a common strategy for remedying violations of the federal Voting Rights Act, which bans election practices that consistently exclude members of racial minorities from representation in elected office. To this end, single-member districts work well in places where people of the same race or ethnicity tend to live in the same neighborhood. In Portland, though, where people of color are very geographically dispersed across the city, it turns out to be impossible to draw even one majority-minority district.

To date, the US Supreme Court has only recognized districts where a single racial group is in the majority and votes together. In contrast, California courts have recognized “coalition districts” where there is evidence that more than one non-white racial groups vote together to elect the same candidate. For example, in the 2006 Democratic primaries for California State Controller and California Insurance Commissioner in San Mateo County, Latino voters overwhelmingly preferred Latino candidate Cruz Bustamante, and both Asian and Latino voters somewhat preferred Bustamante and Asian-American candidate John Chiang over white candidates John Dunn and John Kraft.

As I detail below, though, Portland has no area where people of color, much less any single non-white racial or ethnic group, make up the majority. Consequently, single-winner districts may not increase racial and ethnic representation on the council. In addition, if one district did elect, say, a Latina, she would only represent her district. Latinxs living elsewhere in Portland might feel relieved their interests and life experiences have at least some representation on council, but, especially if she was facing a tough re-election bid, the Latina councilor’s priority would be her own district.

Single-member districts can also have the drawback of promoting “pork-barreling.” Just as councilors under the Commissioner form of government sometimes focus on their own bureaus rather than the city as a whole, a district representative’s job is to represent her district. She may do so to the detriment of a city-wide view.

Finally, Portlanders might feel that a move to single-member districts takes away some of their voting power. Right now, every Portlander gets to vote for every councilor and the mayor. With single-winner districts, voters would only vote for one councilor and the mayor.

Multi-member districts

Multi-member districts elect more diverse councils. In single-member districts, a candidate must win a majority of votes in that district to win a seat on the council. Much of the time in Portland and across the United States, the majority winner is a white male homeowner, and in partisan races, he is from one of the two major parties. Repeat this process in each district, and you could end up with a council made up entirely of white male homeowners with somewhat similar ideological views.

But using ranked-choice voting or cumulative voting in a multi-member district allows a group of voters making up less than a majority in the district to elect a representative who speaks for them—a person who might never be able to win if voters were selecting just one winner. As described further below and in our other work here and here, these election methods have proven to elect more women, more people of color, and more ideologically diverse candidates.

Even in multi-member districts that use Bloc Voting (in a three-member district, voters can “vote for three”), which requires majority support, it turns out that voters seem to be more willing to cast one of several votes for a woman than in single-member (“vote for one”) races where they only have one vote to give. US states that use both single-member and multi-member districts for their state legislatures are much more likely to elect women from the multi-member districts than from the single-member. They also tend to have more women in the legislature than do states with single-member legislative districts. The improvement in female representation appears to stem from voters’ willingness to vote for at least one woman when they have the chance to vote for multiple candidates at a time. It could also be that women are more willing to run as part of a multi-winner slate than as a single-winner individual.

Germany and New Zealand both use a combination of single-member and multi-member districts, and the multi-member districts are almost three times as likely to elect women and twice as likely to elect people of color. This difference is at least partly due to political parties or other political organizers or donors seeing an advantage in a diverse slate of candidates in a multi-winner election, where they often conservatively assume that the most “broadly acceptable” candidate in a single-winner election is a white man.

Ranked-choice voting

Using ranked-choice voting in multi-member districts—a system also called “proportional single-transferable voting”—would let voters express their preference between multiple candidates, electing a city council that reflected the true diversity of Portland. If electing three councilors from a district, the ballot might look like the one below. All candidates for that district would run together in a pool, and voters would rank them in order of preference. First-choice votes would be counted first, and any candidate who reaches the winning threshold (more than 25 percent of the votes in a three-winner race) would earn a seat.

For example, if African-Americans made up 25 percent of voters and they all ranked the same candidate first, that candidate would immediately win a seat. Just so, if voters who wanted the council to prioritize affordable housing made up at least 25 percent of voters and all ranked a champion for affordable housing first, she would win a seat. If she won more than 25 percent of the vote, all of her voters would (automatically, by the vote tallying method) transfer a fraction of their unneeded votes to their next-ranked candidate. If no candidate reached the 25-percent threshold, the candidate with the fewest votes would be eliminated and his votes transferred to his voters’ next-ranked candidate. This would continue until three candidates won. (Here’s a short video that explains multi-member ranked-choice voting.) The city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, has used this method to elect its city council and school board since 1941, yielding impressive and persistent diversity in both bodies.

Cumulative or limited voting

If using a ranked-choice ballot felt too foreign to Portland voters, cumulative or limited voting could offer a more familiar-looking ballot and an improvement in representation of minority groups, though not as proportional in representation as ranked-choice voting. More than 100 cities and school boards across the United States use these methods in multi-winner elections to achieve better representation. In many cases, a court ordered the locality to switch to multi-winner elections as a remedy for a Voting Rights Act violation, especially in places where people of color are geographically dispersed, as they are in Portland.

With cumulative voting, voters have as many votes as there are seats available, but rather than giving one vote to each favored candidate, they can distribute their votes however they wish. For example, in a three-winner election, a voter would have three votes and could give two votes to one candidate and one vote to another. The “Equal & Even” cumulative voting ballot may be easier to understand, allowing the voter to give up to three votes. The difference is that if she only fills one bubble, all three of her votes go to that candidate, and if she fills two bubble, each candidate gets 1.5 of her votes.

Say, for example, Native Americans make up 30 percent of the voters in a three-member city council district. If all of them give all three votes to a candidate they feel represents them, he could win one of the seats and those voters could feel they have fair representation on the council.

In this excerpt from her book, Tyranny of the Majority, civil rights attorney and Harvard law professor Lani Guinier explains why cumulative voting in multi-winner districts may be a better civil rights remedy for people of color than “race-conscious districting” of single-winner districts.

For example, in Martin, South Dakota, Native Americans made up more than one-third of the population yet consistently won fewer than 10 percent of seats in the city’s system of at-large numbered seats (the same system Portland uses now). In 2008, a federal court ordered the city to eliminate numbered seats and instead let candidates run in a multi-winner pool for three seats at a time. Voters have three votes and can assign one, two, or all three of them to any candidate(s) in the pool. Native Americans voters can express strong support for Native American candidates and now consistently win fair representation on the council.

As another example, African-Americans were chronically under-represented in the city council of Peoria, Illinois, until a civil rights lawsuit prompted the city to switch in 1991 to multi-winner races with cumulative voting. African-Americans have consistently won representation ever since.

With limited voting, each voter gets fewer votes than there are seats available. For example, if Portland were electing all five councilors at once, voters might get two votes each. If electing three councilors at a time, each voter would get one vote among the pool of candidates.

Cumulative and limited voting are inferior substitutes for ranked-choice voting, because they are more vulnerable to vote splitting. That is, if more than one candidate of color runs and voters split their votes between the two, both could lose under cumulative or limited voting, but one would win under ranked-choice voting. Still, they are better than the status quo in Portland.

Number of voters needed to win a seat

One of the challenges with using at-large elections in a larger city like Portland is that candidates must canvass a large area and win a lot of votes to get a seat on the council. If 250,000 people vote, a city council candidate needs more than 125,000 votes to win. (For comparison, 260,448 Portlanders voted in the November 2016 city council race.)

All of the single-member and multi-member district scenarios below drastically reduce the number of votes a candidate must win to get a seat on the council. This reduced burden could open the door for new candidates to run.

In a multi-winner ranked-choice election, a candidate needs to win 1/(Number of seats + 1) of votes in the district to win a seat. If Portland expanded the council to six members and elected them in two three-member districts, each candidate would need at least 1/(3+1) = 25 percent of one-half of 250,000 = more than 31,250 votes to win a seat. If Portland expanded the council to eight members and elected them in two three-member districts and one two-member district, each candidate in a three-member district would need at least 1/(3+1) = 25 percent of three-eighths of 250,000 = at least 23,438 votes to win a seat.

The chart below shows the minimum number of votes each candidate would need to win a seat in each district scenario. In almost all district scenarios, candidates would need around 20,000 to 30,000 votes to win; that’s one-quarter or less of the minimum 125,000 votes they would need to win under current rules.

Original Sightline Institute graphic, available under our free use policy.

The lower threshold to win guarantees greater ideological diversity on the council, because candidates with minority views can win a seat by appealing to the tens of thousands of voters who share those views, rather than trying to reach more than one-hundred-thousand voters. It also might make it easier for new candidates to enter the race. A community organizer without broad name recognition or a big rolodex might be able to round up 30,000 votes in North and East Portland. Changing to any of the district options below might usher in a new crop of council candidates.

Portland scenarios

That covers the voting methods and explains the thresholds to win, now let’s map out some scenarios for Portland—specific combinations of district and election methods, and how they would affect representation of people of color, women, and East Portlanders—all groups chronically under-represented on city council. The multi-member district scenarios below all assume ranked-choice voting or cohesive cumulative voting, and all assume people of color all vote for candidates of color. While this is, of course, not necessarily true because people of color are not monolithic, using the same assumption across scenarios makes it possible to compare them against each other in terms of potential diversity of representation. Other assumptions for all scenarios are listed in the appendix. We’ll look at (here, again, you may click on each scenario to jump to its section below):

The status quo: Current council makeup of four at-large numbered seats
Single-member districts
Multi-member districts
- One city-wide four-member district
- Two districts with three members each (six councilors total)
- Two districts with four members each (eight councilors total)
- A three-member district and a five-member district (eight councilors total)
- Three districts with two or three members each

In all of the maps below, each dot equals 50 people counted in the 2010 census, color-coded by census categories of race and ethnicity:

Blue dots are non-Hispanic African-Americans;
red dots are Asians, Hawaiians, or Pacific Islanders;
yellow dots are Latinos or Hispanics;
orange dots are Native Americans; and
green dots are non-Hispanic whites.

The result is a visual depiction of where people are densely concentrated within Portland (The Pearl), which neighborhoods are mostly white (Southwest), which have a larger African-American population (North Portland), and which have larger Asian and Latino populations (East Portland).

Current council: Four at-large numbered seats

Portland uses at-large numbered seats to elect each of the four councilors. The council’s fifth member, the mayor, is also elected at-large. Voters vote for one candidate for each seat. Even though there are two council seats available in an election year, voters don’t have the option to choose their favorite two candidates, but must choose one from one list and one from the other. For example, in 2012 some voters might have wanted to vote for both the women on the ballot—Amanda Fritz and Mary Nolan. But voters were forced to choose just one because they were running for the same numbered seat.

Portland’s city council makeup doesn’t match that of its residents. For instance, although fewer than one-quarter of Portlanders live west of the Willamette River, four of five current council-members do. And although nearly one-third of Portlanders are people of color, four of five council-members live in neighborhoods that are less than one-sixth people of color. Nearly half of Portlanders rent, but four of five council-members come from neighborhoods where over 70 percent of people own their homes.

Original Sightline Institute graphic, available under our free use policy.

Current Council
	Number out of Total Council	Percent of Council	Percent of ____ with ____ representing them*
People of Color	0 of 5	0%	0%
Women	2 of 5	40%	100%
East Portlanders	0 of 5	0%	0%

*In this and all the tables below, this column means: Percent of people of color with a person of color representing them on council; percent of women with a woman representing them on council; percent of East Portlanders with an East Portlander representing them on council.

Single-member district scenarios

Four single-member districts

If Portland elected its four councilors from four single-member districts, the districts might look like the map below. The eastern district would have the most people of color: 37 percent. If we assume (as all scenarios do—see the appendix for more details) that all voters turn out in equal numbers and all voters of color prefer the same candidate of color, then to elect a person of color in that district, at least 13 percent of white voters would need to join voters of color in electing her. The northern district would have 33 percent people of color, so could elect a person of color if at least 17 percent of white voters voted for her. In other words, the odds of electing a councilor of color would be somewhat higher than in the current, all at-large situation, but not by much. Each district would have a chance of electing a woman, but, based on past Portland elections, women would likely win zero or 1 seats, possibly two. East Portlanders would be guaranteed a representative.

Original Sightline Institute graphic, available under our free use policy.

Four Single-Member Districts
	Number out of Total Council	Percent of Council	Percent of ____ with ____ representing them
People of Color -if 5% of white voters vote for PoC -if 15% of white voters vote for PoC	0 of 5 1 of 5	0% 20%	0% 34%
Women	0-2 of 5	0-40%	0-50%
East Portlanders	1 of 5	20%	100%

Six single-member districts

If Portland expanded the council from five to seven members and elected six councilors from single-member districts and the mayor city-wide, the districts might look like what’s in the map the below. The eastern and northern districts would be 38 and 36 percent people of color, allowing them each to elect a person of color if at least 12 and 14 percent, respectively, of white voters also voted for the candidates of color. Voters in the other four districts would, using these assumptions, have white representatives. Each district would have a chance of electing a woman, but, based on past Portland elections, women would likely win less than half the seats and might even win zero seats. East Portlanders would be guaranteed a representative.

Original Sightline Institute graphic, available under our free use policy.

Six Single-Member Districts
	Number out of Total Council	Percent of Council	Percent of ____ with ____ representing them
People of Color -if 5% of white voters vote for PoC -if 15% of white voters vote for PoC	0 of 7 2 of 7	0% 28%	0% 45%
Women	0-3 of 7	0-43%	0-50%
East Portlanders	1 of 7	14%	100%

Eight single-member districts

If Portland expanded the council from five to nine members and elected eight councilors from single-member districts and the mayor city-wide, the districts might look like the map below. The eastern and two northern districts would be 38, 37, and 36 percent people of color, allowing them each to elect a person of color if at least 12, 13, and 14 percent, respectively, of white voters voted for the candidates of color. In other words, even expanding to a nine-member council would not get Portland close to a majority-minority district. Each district would have a chance of electing a woman, but, based on past Portland elections, women would likely win less than half the seats and might even win zero seats. Portlanders east of 122nd would be guaranteed a representative.

Original Sightline Institute graphic, available under our free use policy.

Eight Single-Member Districts
	Number out of Total Council	Percent of Council	Percent of ____ with ____ representing them
People of Color -if 5% of white voters vote for PoC -if 15% of white voters vote for PoC	0 of 9 3 of 9	0% 33%	0% 45%
Women	0-4 of 9	0-44%	0-50%
East Portlanders	1 of 9	11%	100%

Multi-member district scenarios

One city-wide four-member district

Portland could maintain its current number of just four councilors and elect all of them in a single city-wide pool. Voters could rank their preferences or have four votes on a cumulative ballot. If the 2012 election where Portland voters were limited to choosing between Amanda Fritz and Mary Nolan had instead been a four-winner election with ranked ballots, voters would have seen all the candidates in a single list and been able to rank them: maybe Amanda Fritz first, Mary Nolan second, Jeri Williams third, Steve Novick fourth, Leah Marie Dumas fifth, and so on.

In a four-winner race, the threshold to win is 20 percent of the vote plus one. Using the same assumptions as above, people of color could easily elect one councilor, even with low turnout or un-cohesive voting. With cohesive voting plus support from 10 percent of white voters, people of color could elect two of the four councilors. In other words, assuming exactly the same voter behaviour in both scenarios, one four-member district would elect one or two (out of five total, including the mayor) councilors of color while four single-member districts would elect zero or one. In a four-winner election, women would almost certainly win at least one seat, and all Portlanders would have at least one woman representing them. If they voted together for an East Portlander, East Portlanders could also easily elect a councilor.

Further, if the election were held in a high-turnout presidential election year, it would maximize the number of Portlanders with a say in electing every councilor, because no councilors would be elected in the lower-turnout midterm years.

One District with Four Members
	Number out of Total Council	Percent of Council	Percent of ____ with ____ representing them
People of Color -if 5% of white voters vote for PoC -if 15% of white voters vote for PoC	1 of 5 2 of 5	20% 40%	100% 100%
Women	1-2 of 5	20-40%	100%
East Portlanders	1 of 5	20%	100%

Two districts with three members each

If Portland split into two districts—a west-south (W-S) district and an east-north (E-N) district—the districts might look like the below map. If the council expanded to six members, Portlanders would elect three councilors from each district, and a voting bloc making up at least one-quarter of each could elect a councilor. In other words, if at least one-quarter of W-S voters wanted a candidate who would focus on better management of the city’s infrastructure, they could elect him. If at least one-quarter of E-N voters wanted a candidate who would focus on improving the city’s treatment of homeless people, they could elect her.

Using the same assumptions as before, if 10 percent of white voters in W-S voted for a candidate of color in addition to all voters of color, the W-S would elect a representative of color. More than one-third of the people in the E-N district would be of color, so they could easily elect one representative of color, and with votes from 13 percent of white voters, they could elect two. At least half, and likely all people of color in Portland would have a representative of color they could call. In a three-winner election, women would almost certainly win at least one seat in each district. Two three-member districts would guarantee geographic balance: three councilors would have to come from the E-N part of the city, and if the 26 percent of Portlanders living east of 82nd all voted for a candidate promising to represent the concerns of east Portland, they would elect her.

Original Sightline Institute graphic, available under our free use policy.

Two Districts, Three Members Each
	Number out of Total Council	Percent of Council	Percent of ____ with ____ representing them
People of Color -if 5% of white voters vote for PoC -if 15% of white voters vote for PoC	1 of 7 3 of 7	14% 43%	67% 100%
Women	2-4 of 7	28-57%	100%
East Portlanders	1 of 7	14%	100%

Two districts with four members each

If Portland split into the same two districts as above but elected four councilors from each district, then a voting bloc making up at least one-fifth of each could elect a councilor. Using the same assumptions again, the W-S district would elect a candidate of color, and the E-N district would elect two. In a four-winner election, women would almost certainly win one or more seats in each district. This system would also guarantee geographic balance: four councilors would have to come from the E-N part of the city, and if many of the 26 percent of Portlanders living east of 82nd voted together, they would elect a councilor from east of 82nd.

Two Districts, Four Members Each
	Number out of Total Council	Percent of Council	Percent of ____ with ____ representing them
People of Color -if 5% of white voters vote for PoC -if 15% of white voters vote for PoC	3 of 9 3 of 9	33% 33%	100% 100%
Women	2-4 of 9	22-44%	100%
East Portlanders	1 of 9	11%	100%

A three-member district and a five-member district

Portland could expand the council to eight members plus the mayor and split into two uneven districts: the W-S district, electing three councillors, and the E-N district, electing five. The winning threshold in the W-S would be 25 percent, and in the E-N it would be 17 percent. This would allow for greater diversity of representation within the E-N district.

The E-N would likely elect two councilors of color and two women, while the W-S could elect one of each. East Portland would almost certainly elect a councilor: 26 percent of voters live east of 82nd, and less than half of them could come together to elect one of the five E-N councilors.

Original Sightline Institute graphic, available under our free use policy.

Two Districts, Three and Five Members
	Number out of Total Council	Percent of Council	Percent of ____ with ____ representing them
People of Color -if 5% of white voters vote for PoC -if 15% of white voters vote for PoC	2 of 9 3 of 9	22% 33%	77% 100%
Women	2-5 of 9	22-55%	100%
East Portlanders	1 of 9	11%	100%

Three districts with two or three members each

Portland could expand the council to eight members plus the mayor and split into three districts like the ones in the map below: the W-S and E-N districts, each electing three councillors, and a third East (E) district, electing two. The winning threshold in the W-S and E-N would be 25 percent, and in the E it would be 33 percent.

This arrangement would guarantee geographical diversity and would generate districts almost as geographically small as four single-member districts, possibly making it less intimidating for new candidates to run. But it would also ensure greater diversity of representation—in terms of gender, race, and ideology—within each district and on the council as a whole. Each district could elect one councilor of color, and possibly a woman. Two councilors would come from east of the 205.

Original Sightline Institute graphic, available under our free use policy.

Three Districts—Three, Three, and Two Members
	Number out of Total Council	Percent of Council	Percent of ____ with ____ representing them
People of Color -if 5% of white voters vote for PoC -if 15% of white voters vote for PoC	2 of 9 3 of 9	22% 33%	71% 100%
Women	2-5 of 9	22-55%	75-100%
East Portlanders	2 of 9	22%	100%

Conclusion

Single-member districts would improve the geographic representation of Portland’s city council. But single-member districts might do very little to improve racial, ethnic, gender, economic, or ideological representation on the council. From the voters’ perspective, single-member districts would lead to fewer Portlanders having a woman representing them on the council, and even if one single-member district elected a person of color, the majority of Portlanders of color would still be without a councilor of color actually representing them.

Multi-member districts are a proven remedy for electing more diverse representatives—in particular, more people of color and more women. Indeed, all the multi-member scenarios above make it likely Portland would see at least one and usually more people of color on the council, and that most Portlanders of color would have a councilor of color actually representing them. By letting voters choose more than one candidate from a pool, all multi-member district scenarios make it more likely that at least one and maybe more women would be elected to the council in every election. Multi-member districts also guarantee some level of geographical diversity, both by breaking the city into smaller chunks and by letting a minority of voters with a common interest—for example, making sure East Portland has a voice—band together to elect a representative.

A more diverse council would also represent more views that Portlanders hold. For example, if around one-quarter of voters thought people-friendly streets were a top priority, they could, in a multi-member district, elect a safe streets champion, or an advocate for good city management, or a councilor who would push for other particular reforms that voters wanted. Portland reformers should consider multi-member districts as a way to elect a more diverse council in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, geography, and political priorities.

Appendix: Assumptions in all scenarios

Each scenario includes a table predicting how many people of color, women, and candidates living east of 82nd might be elected. These tables don’t purport to make actual predictions. But each scenario can be compared against the other scenarios because each scenario uses the same set of assumptions. Namely:

The 2010 census is accurate. (In reality, the census often undercounts people of color. In addition, Portland’s population of color is growing, and the areas with high concentrations of people of color are shifting from North Portland to East Portland.)
All racial and ethnic groups turn out to vote in equal numbers in all elections. (In reality, white voters often turn out more heavily, especially in primary and midterm election years.)
Everyone who marked a census box for anything other than “white alone, non-Hispanic” is a person of color. (Some white Latinos or people of mixed racial or ethnic heritage might not identify as people of color.)
Everyone who marked a census box for “white alone, non-Hispanic” is white. (For example, Portland’s Coalition of Communities of Color includes Slavic people, who would be white on the census but might identify as people of color.)
All people of color vote in a bloc for any candidate of color. (People of color are not monolithic. American voters tend to vote for a candidate of their race or ethnicity, but voters of color might not vote for a candidate of color of a different race or ethnicity. In the United States, Latino voters usually strongly prefer Latino candidates, but Latino voters might not vote for an African-American candidate, and vice versa.)
All multi-member districts use ranked-choice ballots, and voters of color rank candidates of color first. Or, if using a cumulative ballot, voters of color put all their votes toward electing the same candidate of color.
Within each scenario, each table shows two cases. In the first case, 5 percent of white voters vote for the candidate of color. In the second case, 15 percent do. (All else equal, white American voters tend to vote for white candidates, so this assumes that some voters either don’t follow that trend or feel the candidate of color’s policy position hew most closely to their own views.)
Except for the five- and nine-district maps that attempt to draw a majority-minority district, most maps try to follow existing geographic or political boundaries, as required by the Oregon Secretary of State’s districting directive, with which local governments must comply when drawing districts.
In a single-winner election, women fare about as well as they have in past Portland elections, with a roughly 0-40% chance of winning. In a three-winner election, women win one seat. In a four-winner election, women win one or two seats. In a five-winner election, women win two or three seats. (US states that use multi-winner elections for their state legislatures are much more likely to elect women than in single-winner elections, likely at least in part because voters often include at least one woman when they have the chance to vote for multiple candidates at a time.)
All voters living east of 82nd vote in a bloc for a candidate living east of 82nd.
Portland elects an even number of councilors and separately elects a mayor who also has a seat on the council.

Thanks to CORE GIS for creating the maps in this article.

7 Key Questions About How to Change Portland City Government

In my previous article, I illustrated how Portland’s city council does not represent the city’s people in terms of geography, race and ethnicity, gender, wealth, and life experience. Only two people of color have ever served on the council. In 2016, the city elected Chloe Eudaly, the eighth woman ever and possibly the first renter to hold a seat on the council. Most councilors come from central North-East or Westside neighborhoods.

The Open and Accountable Elections Portland Act, supported by a diverse coalition of Portlanders, will make it easier for a more diverse group of people to run for city council in the future. However, it’s not the only reform needed, and this article details how Portland’s very form of government could change so that the city council does not continue to skew toward electing white, male, central and westside homeowners.

At least five times in the last century, disgruntled citizens launched efforts to reform city elections and make the council more representative and responsive. Many of these efforts focused on changing Portland’s quirky Commissioner form of government, switching from at-large elections to districts, and expanding the council from the current five members to seven or nine. Single-member districts would ensure councilors come from different geographical parts of the city rather than from the same few neighborhoods, an improvement over Portland’s current system. And districts might make it easier for first-time candidates to run because they only have to canvass, say, one-quarter of the city rather than the whole thing. A bigger council could potentially be more diverse as well.

But districts or a bigger council, by themselves, will not create a representative council. As I have argued extensively in Sightline’s Guide and Glossary to Electing Legislative Bodies, to transform the council into a truly representative body, Portland’s best path would be to switch to a proportional system of elections, most likely multi-member districts and ranked-choice voting. That’s a mouthful, so I’ll just call it “fair voting” for short.

In Portland’s case, changing to multi-member districts and ranked-choice voting might require making other changes, such as moving away from the Commissioner form of government and possibly expanding the council beyond five members. In fact, most reforms to Portland’s election system—such as switching to district elections for city council—would necessitate dispensing with the Commissioner form of government. When you pull on one thread in organizing city government, you find a web of connected reforms.

This article outlines seven key, intertwined questions about how to organize the city government (click on each question to jump to its section below):

What form of government should Portland have? Commissioner, Council-Manager, or Mayor-Council?
What powers and responsibilities should the mayor have? Same as now, more, or less?
How should the mayor be selected? By the voters, or by the council?
What powers and responsibilities should city councilors have? Legislative only, or also executive?
How many city councilors should Portland have?
When should Portland hold elections to maximize voter turnout?
How powerful should the primaries be?

For each question, I also offer suggestions on how to make relatively non-disruptive changes to Portland elections that would enable fair voting (multi-member districts with ranked-choice voting) and, ideally, would complement that improved election system. The next article will describe possible scenarios for electing a council through fair voting and the likely more representative results of doing so.

Question 1. What form of government should Portland have?

In some ways, this is the biggest question of all, and to answer it, we need to backtrack for a quick civics review. The legislative branch makes the laws. The executive branch implements the laws through administrative agencies. The judicial branch interprets the laws. For our purposes, we can ignore the judicial branch and focus on the others as they apply to city governments.

The big questions are how the mayor and council share legislative and executive powers. City councils always have legislative authority (the power to make laws), but will the mayor share some legislative power, for example, by having a vote on the council or veto power of council decisions? The Mayor always has executive authority (the power to implement laws), but will the council share some executive power, for example, by jointly supervising a city manager?

There are three primary ways that cities have answered these questions.

Portland’s Commissioner form of government shares legislative and executive powers evenly between the council and the mayor. But Commissioner governments are an endangered species. Portland is one of the only cities in the United States, the only city over 100,000, and one of just two Cascadian cities with a Commissioner form of government.
Most Oregon cities use the Council-Manager form of government, which also shares legislative and executive powers between the council and mayor, who jointly appoint and supervise a professional city manager.
Most big US cities use the Mayor-Council form of government, which separates legislative and executive powers, making the council the legislative body and the mayor the chief executive. Past Portland reformers have proposed moving to Council-Manager (1933, 1958) and to Mayor-Council (1961, 2002, 2007, 2016).

Let’s delve into the structures, pros, and cons of these three government forms.

Commissioner Form

Under a Commissioner form of government, voters elect city commissioners who play two roles: legislative and executive. Each commissioner, including the mayor, has a vote on the council for legislative business, such as passing budgets, laws, and regulations. Each commissioner also serves as the head (an executive branch role) of one or more city bureaus, such as public safety, parks, or transportation.

The mayor has the same power as the other commissioners, but in Portland he also has the power to assign and reassign bureaus to commissioners and to put together a budget. In January, Mayor Ted Wheeler assigned himself the Police Bureau, the Housing Bureau, and seven other bureaus, and assigned the other four councilors two or three bureaus each including Parks and recreation to Amanda Fritz, Transportation to Dan Saltzman, and Development Services to newcomer Chloe Eudaly.

In some Commissioner city governments, candidates run for specific departments. For example, in Shelton, the only city in Washington State with a Commissioner form of government, candidates can run for commissioner of public safety and mayor, for commissioner of finance and accounting, or for commissioner of public works. Proponents of Portland’s Commissioner government sometimes say that city agencies are accountable to voters because they are headed by an elected official. Shelton’s system seems to work this way: voters can choose a candidate they think would be good at running public works, call that official with complaints about public works, and in four years decide whether that person has done a good job running public works.

Accountability is harder to see in Portland, where voters don’t know who will end up running what, and they don’t necessarily know whom to call or hold accountable, because the mayor can change bureau assignments at any time. For example, Mayor Wheeler said in January his bureau assignments would be temporary, and in April he took them all back, planning to reassign them after the budget is passed.

The Commissioner form of government is sometimes called the Texas Idea because it originated in Galveston, Texas, as a response to the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. The hope was that consolidating legislative and executive power in the same small group of people would help the city respond to natural disasters more quickly. Proponents of Portland’s system sometimes claim swift and direct implementation of policy as an advantage. In practice, though, as the City Club has noted, the unique form of government often leads to gridlock as each commissioner prioritizes the narrow interests of his or her bureau, rather than prioritizing city government as a whole. Their narrow focus can lead to short-sighted city management. As former Portland Commissioner Steve Novick explains:

As soon as you assign bureaus to a commissioner, two things happen: Those bureaus become incredibly important to that commissioner, and everything else the city does becomes relatively unimportant. …

In the 1990s, Commissioner Earl Blumenauer pushed Mayor Vera Katz to spend more of the general fund on transportation. The other three commissioners could have taken Earl’s side. But why would they? Not their bureau. In fact, those with general fund bureaus would have seen Blumenauer’s request as a threat to their bureaus. …

The existence of the commission system reduced the universe of potential transportation champions by 80 percent.

Most American cities abandoned the commissioner form of government by the 1940s and moved to the Council-Manager form, discussed below.

Finally, because commissioners serve as heads of city-wide departments, Commissioner governments never elect commissioners from districts. If they did, for example, parks would likely look great in the Parks Commissioner’s district and less great elsewhere in the city.

Council-Manager Form

Most US cities, and most Oregon cities with populations over 2,500, use a Council-Manager form of government. Voters elect a council, either in districts or at-large, to serve as the legislative (law-making) body. In places such as Bend, the council members select a mayor from among themselves to head the council. In many Oregon cities, including Eugene, Hillsboro, and Salem, voters vote separately to elect the mayor to serve as head of council. Together, the council and mayor hire, supervise, and may fire a professional city manager or city administrator to manage the day-to-day administrative needs of the city and implement the policies set by the council. This form is sometimes called a “weak mayor” government because the mayor’s power does not much exceed that of regular council members.

Proponents of the Council-Manager system say cities run in an efficient, business-like manner; constituents are well-represented by the powerful council; and one reckless mayor can’t throw the city off-track. Critics worry that sharing power between council and mayor means no clear leadership from the mayor and that an appointed professional manager might try to usurp power from the elected council and mayor without being accountable to the people.

Portlanders would find the shared power between the council and mayor familiar, since that is how the Commissioner government works now. Electing the mayor individually but having him serve on the council would also be familiar to Portlanders. But the Council-Manager form could free Portland up to elect councilors from districts. The biggest substantive difference would be that, instead of being responsible for individual bureaus directly, councilors and the mayor would indirectly manage all bureaus by jointly supervising a city manager who would manage all city bureaus.

Mayor-Council Form

Most big cities in the United States—including Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle—use a Mayor-Council form of government. Voters elect a council, either in districts or at-large, to serve as the legislative body, and also elect a mayor to serve as the city’s chief executive. The mayor might supervise a professional city manager. Past Portland reform efforts have referred to this form of government as “strong mayor,” but mayors can be considered strong or weak under the Mayor-Council system, depending on how much power they have (more below).

Proponents of the Mayor-Council form praise the centralization of executive responsibilities in the mayor, giving the mayor the opportunity to exercise strong leadership. Critics worry that it gives the mayor too much power and does not give enough responsibility to the elected council.

Like Council-Manager, the Mayor-Council form would free Portland to elect councilors from districts. And voters would continue to directly elect the mayor. But Portlanders might have to accustom themselves to a stronger mayor and a weaker council.

Answer 1. Council-Manager government with bureau oversight committees

If Portlanders want to switch to fair voting (multi-member districts with ranked-choice voting) to get a more representative council, they will likely have to change the Commissioner form of government. If Portland elected all councillors from one city-wide district, it could retain the Commissioner form. But if it breaks the city into two or more districts, each councillor will only represent a slice of the city and could not serve the interests of her districts and simultaneously be the head of a city-wide bureau.

If Portlanders want to make minimally disruptive changes, they might opt for a Council-Manager form of government. Instead of having a Parks Commissioner and a Transportation Commissioner, each of whom would be in charge of a particular bureau, a few Councilors could form a Parks Committee and a few others a Transportation Committee to oversee these bureaus. This is what Seattle, Los Angeles, and many other big cities do. It would maintain a direct link from voters to elected officials to bureaus, just like with the Commissioner form of government.

Question 2. What powers and responsibilities should the Mayor have?

The difference between a “strong” and “weak” mayor is of degree, not kind. As mentioned, most “strong” mayors are found in the Mayor-Council form of government because the mayor has control over all or most executive powers, and Council-Manager cities often have “weak” mayors because they share some executive power with the council. But Mayor-Council cities can have a weaker mayor, and Council-Manager cities can have a stronger mayor. It just depends on what powers the mayor is given.

A mayor might have some or all of the following powers. More powers mean a stronger mayor.

Act as the chief executive officer, centralizing executive authority.
Appoint and remove department heads.
Assign council members to chair or serve on committees.
Appoint citizens to serve on advisory boards or commissions.
Prepare the annual budget.
Receive the annual budget developed by chief administrative official or city manager and make an annual report to the council.
Serve on the city council.
Vote in council meetings.
Have veto power over the council’s legislative decisions.
Oversee daily operations of the city, without interference from the city council or administrative boards or commissions.

Portland currently has a somewhat weak mayor, with the power to appoint and remove department heads and with a vote on council, but without veto power and without exclusive control of executive functions. In contrast, Seattle has a relatively strong mayor, serving as the chief executive officer of the city and with veto power over the council.

Answer 2. Leave the mayor’s powers unchanged

If Portlanders want to adopt fair voting but don’t want to change the balance of power between the mayor and the council, they could keep the mayor’s power about the same as now. The mayor currently assigns Commissioners to oversee bureaus, and he could still assign councilors to serve on committees overseeing bureaus—for example, the Parks Committee and the Transportation Committee. The mayor could prepare the annual budget and vote on the council, as he does now. But electing councilors through fair voting or switching to a Council-Manager form of government does not require any expansion of the mayor’s powers. He need not have veto power over the council nor centralized executive power.

Question 3. How should the mayor be selected?

In all three forms of government, voters may elect the mayor directly. In the Council-Manager form, voters can instead elect all the councilors and let the councilors choose a mayor from amongst themselves.

Letting councilors choose among themselves could yield unexpected benefits. Even though Portland’s mayor has little more power than do councilors, it costs more than four times as much to run a competitive campaign for mayor (nearly $1.5 million) as to run a competitive campaign for council (around $300,000). People of color and women who otherwise might be priced out of an expensive mayoral campaign could win a council seat and become the mayor. For example, the city of Yakima, Washington, recently elected the first three Latinas ever to serve on the city council (two from majority-Latino districts, and one from the city at-large), and the council initially unanimously selected Avina Gutierrez, a Latina, as the mayor.

If Portland moved to a Council-Manager form and selected the mayor from among the council, Portland might see a woman of color as mayor for the first time ever.

Answer 3. Leave the mayoral election unchanged

Portland could elect councilors via fair voting and still elect the mayor at-large, just like now.

Question 4. What powers and responsibilities should city councilors have?

In all forms of government, councilors are legislators with the power to pass city laws, ordinances, policies, and regulations. Councilors might also have some executive power either directly, as heads of individual bureaus in the Commissioner form, or indirectly, as joint supervisors of the city manager in the Council-Manager form. Councilors generally have no executive power in the Mayor-Council form.

Answer 4. City council keeps legislative and executive powers

By adopting the Council-Manager form of government, Portland councilors could retain the same level of executive authority they have now, just exercised by managing the city manager and managing bureaus through committees, rather than directly heading bureaus.

Question 5. How many city councilors should Portland have?

Around the United States, city councils range from 5 to 51, with an average size of 6. Portland’s council is remarkably small. Although the city is home to more than 600,000 people, Portland has just five city councilors, including the mayor, or less than one elected city official per 100,000 people. For comparison:

City	Council	+ Mayor?	Population	Electeds per 100,000 people
Portland, OR	5		620,000	0.8
Seattle, WA	9	1	650,000	1.5
Oakland, CA	9		390,000	2.3
San Francisco, CA	11	1	840,000	1.3
Eugene, OR	9		156,000	5.8
Bend, OR	7		81,200	8.6
Beaverton, OR	5	1	93,500	5.3

If the mayor is elected separately but also has a seat on council (Council-Manager or Mayor-Council), voters elect an even number of councilors (the mayor makes it odd). If the mayor is either selected from among the council (Council-Manager form) or does not have a seat on the council (Mayor-Council form), voters elect an odd number of councilors.

More councilors mean more costs for taxpayers to fund the councilors and their staff (though, in reality, the costs are miniscule compared to the overall city budget). And each councilor is less powerful. But a bigger council creates more opportunity for diverse views to be represented and for more voters to feel they have a voice in the city.

Answer 5a. Elect six councilors

Portland could switch to fair voting with just four councilors, but in order to get a reasonable cross-section of the city represented on council, it would need to elect all four councilors in the same year. The upside would be that all council and mayor elections could be held in a single high-turnout presidential election year, maximizing the number of voters who cast a vote to elect a councilor. The downside would be that many councilors could turn over all at once. However, incumbents usually run again, so it is possible, but unlikely that the entire council would ever turn over in a single election.

Expanding the council to six members plus the mayor would make Portland’s council the same size as Bend’s (which has one-seventh the population) and still smaller than Eugene’s, Seattle’s, Oakland’s, or San Francisco’s. Portland would have 1.1 elected city officials per 100,000 people, still fewer representatives than any other city on the list. With six members, Portland could elect three members at a time from two different districts, adding just two council members and electing a much more diverse council.

Answer 5b. Elect eight councilors

Alternatively, if the city opted for eight councilors plus the Mayor, Portland would have a very average-sized council for a city of its size, with just under 1.5 elected officials per 100,000 people. Portland could elect four councilors from each of two districts, or split into three districts, each electing two or three councilors. In either case, Portland would have a much more representative council.

Question 6. When should Portland hold elections to maximize voter turnout?

Voter turnout is much higher and more diverse in presidential election years. Portland is one of the few cities in the United States that takes advantage of this fact, holding mayoral and some council elections during presidential election years and yielding much higher and more representative voter turnout than in other US cities. In Oregon more broadly, around 70 percent of registered voters turn in ballots in presidential elections, compared to around 50 percent in mid-term election years. Nationwide in the United States, African-American voters turn out in presidential elections at rates equal to or rivaling whites but lag behind white turnout in midterm years.

City elections held in presidential years let more Portland citizens, possibly especially African-Americans, have a say in who gets elected to city government. Because it would be a more representative voting system in a high turnout election, electing more councilors in presidential years could lead to broader participation and potentially better representation.

Answer 6a. Elect three councilors in midterm years and three in presidential years

Electing all councilors in a presidential year could empower more Portland voters in local elections. But Portland could adopt fair voting and stick with its current scheme, electing half in the presidential year and half in midterm years. If Portland expanded to eight councilors, elected from three districts, it could elect councilors from two of the districts in presidential years, maximizing turnout, and hold elections for the third district in midterm years.

Answer 6b. Elect five councilors in presidential years and three in midterm years

If Portland expanded the council to eight members and split into three districts, it could have two districts—a two-member and a three-member—hold elections in presidential years and the other three-member district hold elections in midterm years.

Question 7. How powerful should the primaries be?

Primaries narrow the field for general election voters, but less than half as many people vote in primaries as vote in general elections. The people who do vote in primaries, moreover, tend to be older, whiter and wealthier than general election voters, meaning they may vote for older, whiter, wealthier candidates, limiting options for more diverse general election voters.

Right now, Portland council elections usually end after the primary, so candidates spend a lot of time and money trying to win the primary. By the time general election voters get their ballots, the race is usually over, or even if it isn’t, voters only have two candidates to choose between.By eliminating the primary, Portland could shorten the election season and give general election voters more options and more power.

Alternatively, Portland could make primaries less important by allowing more candidates to advance to the general. The real battle would be the general election. Candidates could focus their time and money on the general election, and general election voters would have more options to consider.

For example, if Portland expanded the council to six members and split into two districts, each district would elect three councillors in the general election. The primary, using a ranked-choice ballot, could advance seven candidates per district—a bit more than two candidates per available seat—to the general election, where voters would narrow down to three winners. The battle to be in the top seven in a district would be less fierce, so the campaign season would effectively be shorter, not starting in earnest until after the primary. General election voters would rank the seven candidates in order of preference, and the top three would win seats.

Answer 7. Make the general election more important than the primary by advancing more candidates

Portland could adopt fair voting and retain primaries, with just two changes: first, the election would never end at the primary, so general election voters would always have a say, and second, the primary could advance more candidates, somewhat shortening the campaign season and giving general election voters more options.

Many choices for Rose City reformers

Changing Portland’s government isn’t just a question of whether Portland should have a strong mayor or elect councilors from districts. Portland also has the opportunity to create a more representative council and give more Portlanders an opportunity to have a voice in city government. By adopting multi-member districts with ranked-choice voting, as discussed in my next article, Portland could become a national leader in representative city government.

Portland City Government Doesn’t Represent Portland Very Well

UPDATE June 15: The article has been updated to explain how the analysis tracks the addresses of the two council members—Charlie Hales and Nick Fish—who lived at two different addresses while in office, and to reflect the fact that Nick Fish is now a renter, after 20 years of being a homeowner in Grant Park.

Portland has a problem. By electing its councilors to at-large numbered seats, the Rose City ensures that its councilors look largely the same: white, male homeowners from the West and central parts of the city. In a city that is nearly one-third people of color, only two people of color (Charles Jordan and Dick Bogle) have ever served on the council. In a city that is one-half women, only eight women have ever served on city council (Dorothy McCullough Lee, Connie McCready, Mildred Schwab, Margaret Strachan, Gretchen Kafoury, Vera Katz, Amanda Fritz, and Chloe Eudaly), compared with more than 50 men. No woman of color has ever served on the council. In a city where more than one-third of residents rent and where rising rents are an increasingly urgent issue, the first lifelong renter—possibly ever—just joined the council in 2017.

Portland has elected councilors from at-large numbered seats for more than 100 years, but in the 21st century, the city could make a change. Other ways of electing the council can ensure that women, people of color, the East side, renters, and lower-income Portlanders get better representation. This article lays out how the city council doesn’t represent the geographical, racial, ethnic, or economic diversity of Portland. The next article will outline the choices in designing city government that could make the council more representative. A third article will document other ways of electing the Portland city council.

Southwest and Central Northeast are over-represented

Portland councilors and mayors come disproportionately from the Southwest and central Northeast parts of the city. Few representatives come from North, Southeast, and East Portland. The Oregonian mapped councilors’ addresses since 1913 and found that more than half came from a seven-square-mile box in the close-in east side. But for most of the 20th century East Portland wasn’t a part of the Rose City, so it isn’t surprising there were no East Portland councilors.

If we add up all the years each councilor served since 1993—when Portland had roughly the same boundaries it does now—through now, more than two-thirds of the years served on council were by people living in the more affluent Southwest (Charlie Hales until 2007, Dan Saltzman, Amanda Fritz, Steve Novick, Ted Wheeler, Nick Fish since 2016) and central Northeast (Gretchen Kafoury, Jim Francesconi, Erik Sten, Nick Fish) neighborhoods. Sam Adams was the only representative from North Portland. Randy Leonard was the only one from east of 82nd.

The map below shows the addresses of all city councilors from 1993 through 2016, with bigger, darker circles meaning more years on council and smaller lighter circles meaning fewer years on council. Two council members—Charlie Hales and Nick Fish—lived at two different addresses while serving in office, so they each have two dots representing their years in office while living at each address and the analysis below uses their years of service at each address. If the city were divided into four equal-population districts—West, Northeast, East, and Southeast, almost all council-years served would have come from just two districts (West and Northeast).

Original Sightline Institute graphic, available under our free use policy.

White men are over-represented

Fifty-two people have served on Portland city council from 1913 to today: 42 white men, 8 white women, and 2 men of color. There has never been a woman of color on Portland city council. In the past quarter-century, not a single person of color has served. Since 1995, eleven white men have collectively served 78 percent of the years, while four white women have collectively served 22 percent of years in office. The council has not adequately represented a city that is half women and nearly one-third people of color.

Let’s compare that with a city of similar demographics. During the same period (1995 to today) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with over one-third people of color, 17 white men (including a Muslim man whose parents were immigrants) collectively served just 57 percent of years on city council, while 8 white women served 26 percent of years, two men of color served 10 percent of years, and one woman of color has served 7 percent of years on city council. Like Portland, Cambridge elects its councilors from the city as a whole rather than from districts. But in Cambridge, all candidates run in a single pool, and voters get to rank their choices. Whereas Portland’s at-large system lets the white majority elect every single councilor, Cambridge’s fair voting system empowers people of color and women to consistently win seats on the council. Cambridge also uses multi-winner ranked-choice voting to elect its school board, which is even more diverse than the city council.

Original Sightline Institute graphic, available under our free use policy.

In Portland, not only are city councilors themselves all white, but they also tend to live in whiter neighborhoods. In the map below, the darkest green shows the neighborhoods with the most people of color. The gray circles show the home addresses of city councilors, with the bigger circles indicating more years on the council. Only three councilors—Earl Blumenauer in Buckman, Sam Adams in North Portland, and Randy Leonard in East Portland—came from neighborhoods with more than 20 percent people of color.

Original Sightline Institute graphic, available under our free use policy.

Homeowners are over-represented

Portland councilors tend to live in neighborhoods with more homeowners than other parts of the city. In the map below, the darkest green shows the neighborhoods with the most renters. The gray circles show the home addresses of city councilors. Although nearly half of Portlanders rent, only four councilors—Earl Blumenauer, Vera Katz, Sam Adams, and Tom Potter—lived in neighborhoods where more than half of households are renters. (For the past year, Nick Fish has lived in a renter-heavy neighborhood, but for the 20 years before that he lived in the Grant Park neighborhood where 90 percent of residents own their homes.)

Councilor Chloe Eudaly may be the first renter who has never owned a home to ever serve on the Portland city council. It seems likely that her status and experience as a renter, and her campaign focus on housing issues, helped sweep her to office.

Original Sightline Institute graphic, available under our free use policy.

Wealthy Portlanders are over-represented

Portland councilors tend to live in neighborhoods with higher incomes than other parts of the city. In the map below, the lightest green shows the neighborhoods with the lowest incomes.

The gray circles show the home addresses of city councilors. Although median household income in Portland is under $50,000, only three councilors—Sam Adams, Tom Potter, and Randy Leonard—lived in neighborhoods with median household incomes under $50,000. The darkest green shows the neighborhoods with the highest incomes. Five councilors—Gretchen Kafoury, Amanda Fritz, Nick Fish (while in Grant park), Charlie Hales (while in Eastmoreland) and Ted Wheeler—lived in neighborhoods with median household incomes above $120,000.

Original Sightline Institute graphic, available under our free use policy.

Conclusion

Portland’s five-member city council doesn’t reflect the geographic, racial, gender, or economic diversity of the city’s residents. Councilors disproportionately come from white, wealthy, home-owning neighborhoods and are themselves disproportionately white men. This century, Portland could do better. Open and Accountable Elections Portland, supported by a diverse coalition of Portlanders, will make it easier for a more diverse group of people to run for city council in the future. However, it’s not the only reform needed. The next article will describe choices in changing how city government is structured, and the final article will show how Portland could tweak its election methods to improve representation.

Thanks to CORE GIS for creating the maps in this article.

Listen In: Zoning’s Impact on Seattle Schools

Recently, Sightline senior research associate Margaret Morales joined KEXP’s Diane Horn to discuss her research into how Seattle’s zoning patterns exacerbate structural segregation in the city’s schools. Top findings from Margaret’s research include:

Single-family zoning restricts fully 72 percent of the land in the attendance areas around Seattle’s 13 top-rated, non-option, public elementary schools.
Home prices and even rents in these attendance areas were 20 percent higher than the entire city average.
Household income in these attendance areas averaged 25 percent higher than the city as a whole, too.
Children at these top schools are not representative of the Seattle student body as a whole: they are overwhelmingly white, not poor, and native English speakers.

Hear the full interview online, and see Margaret’s article about the issue here.

Going to Court for Housing Choices?

Might a handful of lawsuits in the Northwest states open existing bedrooms to roommates, houses to in-law apartments, and neighborhoods to new rooming houses? It’s a question Sightline has long pondered. Today, we have part of the answer, in a legal analysis of occupancy limits’ susceptibility to judicial review.

First, a review of the backstory. Skip ahead, if you’re already in the know.

In late 2012 and early 2013, one of us (Alan) made an argument (articles 4-7 of this series, later synthesized and updated in this book) for the elimination of obscure but powerful provisions in local land-use codes called “occupancy limits.” These innocuous-sounding but pernicious rules (listed here for the biggest Cascadian cities) arbitrarily cap how many roommates may share a dwelling; slow construction of in-law apartments and backyard cottages; and put a brake on development of new rooming and boarding houses. Through these effects, they close off tens of thousands of existing bedrooms—about one-third of which are empty on a typical night in the Northwest—and hobble construction of modest dwellings. They exacerbate housing shortages in cities and contribute to the increase of rents, especially for people with low and moderate incomes. In brief, the argument was:

Occupancy limits have no justification.
- They are not crowding rules, because
  - they limit only unrelated adults, not families, and
  - they are untethered to dwelling size.
  - Besides, cities have separate crowding rules, expressed as square feet or rooms per inhabitant.
- They are poorly defined and exceedingly difficult to enforce. (Who counts as family?)
- They are badly targeted and morally objectionable if justified as an antidote to crowded street parking, elevating access to free parking for some people over access to affordable housing for other people.
Because occupancy limits do not do what their proponents purport, the real motivation for occupancy limits is likely the one thing that occupancy limits do powerfully, which is to exclude low-income people from neighborhoods.
A handful of jurisdictions in Cascadia have eliminated occupancy limits or raised them to high-enough values that they are less constraining, but most cities have not. Few seem willing to even consider the issue, hidden from public view as it is in the fine print of local land-use rules.

In Unlocking Home, Sightline summarized the legal status of occupancy limits:

Occupancy limits cap roommates, not families. That’s been especially true since the mid-1970s, when two key decisions from the US Supreme Court created precedents under which occupancy limits persist. In the first, the court upheld a New York town’s authority to stop a property owner from renting a single-family house to a group of six college students. Justice William O. Douglas, a Northwesterner, wrote for the court [in a ruling known as Belle Terre], “A quiet place where yards are wide, people few, and motor vehicles restricted are legitimate guidelines in a land use project addressed to family needs…. The police power is… ample to lay out zones where family values, youth values, and the blessings of quiet seclusion and clean air make the area a sanctuary for people.”

It sounds good, but it’s a curious argument: aren’t students people? Aren’t they youth? It’s a dated argument: we know now that suppressing population density makes for more traffic and air pollution, not less. And it’s a classist argument, focused on the idyll of fortunate families raising children among other fortunate families amid “the blessings of quiet seclusion” where “yards are wide” (in other words, expensive). The ruling affirms that localities may write land-use rules to exclude people who cannot afford to live in a single-family neighborhood unless they double up with roommates. That’s not exactly “family values” or “youth values” so much as it is class values.

A year later, the Supreme Court extended its own distinction between family members and roommates. It ruled that a community could not restrict members of an extended family from sharing housing. Cities across the United States revised their occupancy limits to eliminate bans on extended family members. Canadian land-use rules now reflect the same principle.

The pro-family bias of these decisions may have reflected mainstream views in the mid-1970s; it is now an anachronism. Household structures have changed dramatically in the intervening years, with high divorce rates, delayed marriage and childbearing, extended lifespans, and the proliferation of cohabitation, melded households, domestic partnerships, and shared housing. US housing laws now make it illegal to discriminate against potential tenants or buyers on the basis of their family status, yet land-use codes persist in precisely this kind of discrimination. State courts in jurisdictions including California, Michigan, and New Jersey have since thrown out roommate caps entirely. Cascadian courts have not yet followed their example.

US Federal Courts

The crux of the legal issue in federal courts has been whether occupancy limits violate a “fundamental right.” Courts set a higher bar for laws that impinge on fundamental rights than they do for other laws. They put the burden of persuasion on the government, rather than on challengers of the law, and they expect the government to show that the law furthers an important public interest by means that are substantially or even narrowly related to the interest. For cases involving no fundamental right they use a “rational basis test,” which means they give great latitude to legislative bodies, saying, in effect, “we may or may not think your policy is a good solution to the problem you set out to solve, but we’re not going to second-guess you, because our job is to protect fundamental rights, not evaluate the effectiveness of legislation. All we ask is that the law is at least plausibly related to solving the problem.” In the critical 1970s Supreme Court decisions, the judges found a fundamental right to live with family members but not with others.

Thus, unless the US Supreme Court goes against its precedents in future cases, federal courts will be unwelcoming venues for legal challenges to occupancy rules. State courts, however, are more promising.

State Courts

As of 1999, the last time anyone did a comprehensive legal scan of state court rulings on occupancy limits, approximately 22 states had ruled on whether occupancy limits for unrelated persons are legal (see “Belle Terre and Single-Family Home Ordinances,” below in case law). While state courts interpreting their own state constitutions are under no obligation to follow the reasoning of the US Supreme Court interpreting the US Constitution, the vast majority of states have followed the lead of the Belle Terre ruling; they have upheld occupancy limits for unrelated adults.

However, California, Michigan, New Jersey, and New York have gone their own way, throwing out occupancy limits as unconstitutional. None of these states broke from the US Supreme Court by finding a fundamental right in their state constitution’s due process clause that concerns unrelated adults. Instead, Michigan, New Jersey, and New York used rational basis review but found occupancy limits to fit so badly with their purported purpose that the courts invalidated them. (It’s not hard to see why, considering all we argued above.) Indeed, one of the main differences between states that upheld occupancy limits and those that did not was that states that upheld occupancy limits gave more deference to the legislative bodies that passed them.

States that struck down occupancy limits found an inadequate relationship between the means and the end. The courts found that the occupancy limits were both over-inclusive and under-inclusive: the limits both included and excluded more people than they should have. For example, an occupancy limit is under-inclusive when an objective of an occupancy limit is to preserve ample street parking, but the law would not include a family of ten, all of whom have their own cars. The court in New Jersey remarked that more precise methods are available. A caveat: successful over-inclusivity or under-inclusivity arguments are rare because federal courts usually do not use under-inclusivity or over-inclusivity arguments when undergoing rational basis review.

Unlike the other states, the California court did not rely on the theory of fundamental rights (which stems from the due process clause). Instead, it relied on its state constitution’s explicitly stated right to privacy. It thereby triggered strict scrutiny, the highest level of scrutiny in constitutional review. To pass the strict scrutiny test, the court must find that the law furthers a compelling government interest and is narrowly tailored to achieve that interest. In Santa Barbara v. Adamson the court decided that the government may regulate uses of homes but not the occupants of a home. In short, the government has no compelling interest in deciding who may share a dwelling: whom Californians choose to live with is a private matter, protected by the state constitution from city council regulation.

Oregon and Washington

No state court in Oregon or Washington has yet ruled on occupancy limits. Among states, four out of 22 is not an encouraging win-loss ratio, but the California ruling would loom large in any legal challenge in the Northwest, not only because California is the Northwest’s coastal neighbor and the largest and most influential of all states but for three other reasons.

First, Washington’s state constitution, like California’s but unlike Oregon’s, has especially strong protections for its citizens’ right to privacy. Section Seven of the state constitution enshrines privacy rights deeply in state law. Most of the case law on Washington’s right to privacy deals with government surveillance, warrants, and other “search and seizure” issues, not with definitions of family, so no guidance is available on how state courts might respond to an argument like that in Santa Barbara v. Adamson. Still, an argument from an explicit constitutional guarantee of privacy is built on bedrock, not the shifting sands of a rational basis test.

Second, both Oregon and Washington’s Fair Housing Acts are more extensive than their federal counterpart. The federal version bans discrimination against tenants or home buyers on several bases, including race, religion, and family status (that is, having minor children) but not marital status. Oregon’s and Washington’s laws, however, do include marital status. Consequently, in both states, a landlord may not discriminate against two prospective tenants because they are unmarried, yet almost all cities in both states discriminate explicitly against unmarried adults through their occupancy limits. In Seattle, for example, an extended family of eight can share a big, old house like the drafty, seven-bedroom one where one of us (Alan) grew up in Seattle’s Denny-Blaine neighborhood. If an adult child marries, that new, ninth family member is allowed to move in. If, however, the same adult child wants her partner to move in without benefit of a marriage license—the exact same living arrangement—it would violate city law. Although localities are not covered by the Fair Housing Act, state courts might consider the act’s prohibitions in deciding whether to consider freedom from discrimination on the basis of marital status a fundamental right.

Third, Oregon and Washington, like California, have long valued tolerance and individual liberty perhaps more than most states. This West Coast culture of “live and let live” has been reinforced in recent decades by dramatic changes in household structures and social norms around what constitutes a family. Many northwesterners would object to local governments having any say in who shares their dwellings, if they knew such rules existed. Judges might defer to legislators on such matters, but they might not. They are not isolated from shifting social norms.

Suing for Housing Choices?

Legal challenges to occupancy limits in the Northwest states might fail. That risk is substantial. Only one-fifth of state court challenges have prevailed. Still, losing such challenges would leave the region’s housing shortage no worse than it already is, and even unsuccessful lawsuits might spark public debate that would stimulate reform in some cities. Occupancy limit reform is otherwise at a standstill. What do advocates for more housing, more inexpensive housing, and more compact, walkable neighborhoods have to lose?

What they have to gain—what all of Cascadia stands to gain—is tens of thousands of additional dwellings in otherwise idle bedrooms, in new in-law apartments and backyard cottages, and in new rooming houses. What other modest set of actions—a lawsuit or two each in Oregon and Washington, in this case—have even a one-in-five chance of creating tens of thousands of new, unsubsidized, affordable homes?

Appendix: Case law and other helpful sources

Here are some of the key legal rulings about occupancy limits:

Charter Township of Delta v. Dinolfo (1984, Michigan) (overturning Michigan’s occupancy limits on a rational basis test)

Gamble v. City of Escondido, 104 F.3d 300 (9th Cir. 1997) (Federal appeals court stating that preserving neighborhood character was legitimate interest in denying a group home permit).

Moore v. City of East Cleveland 431 U.S. 494 (1977) (Ruled that cities cannot restrict extended family members from sharing housing based on substantive due process violation).

Palo Alto Tenants Union v. Morgan (1970, N.D. CA) (Federal court upholding occupancy limits)

Santa Barbara v. Adamson (1980, California) (overturning California occupancy limits on a privacy argument)

State of NJ v. Baker (1979, New Jersey) (overturning New Jersey occupancy limits on a rational basis test)

Village of Belle Terre v. Boraas, 416 U.S. 1 (1974) (allowing occupancy limits for unrelated adults).

Two law review articles are especially helpful: Belle Terre and Single-Family Home Ordinances: Judicial Perceptions of Local Government and the Presumption of Validity 74 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 447, and Five is a Crowd: A Constitutional Analysis of the Boston Zoning Amendment Prohibiting More Than Four College Students From Living Together, Suffolk Law Review (2013). This site on California occupancy laws is also a good resource.

Samir Junejo, an attorney and former Sightline intern, conducted the legal research for this article.

Weekend Reading 6/9/17

Serena

Women-only co-working spaces? Or women, trans, femme, and gender-nonconforming co-working spaces? Sound like a good idea. And it’s one that’s growing in popularity as these spaces’ founders and members discover the intentional community-building opportunities that such venues offer—opportunities that have grown scarcer among young people who are less inclined to attend church or some other weekly gathering. Some spaces emphasize amenities, others programming and events, but all seem to have found this particular political moment in the US to be helping their business. The article’s author briefly addresses the potential for exclusivity based on cost or space, but it seemed most of the groups’ leadership were aware of the issue and actively addressing it.

If you don’t know the online outdoor adventure guide The Outdoor Project, you should! I’ve found great articles and trip reports from them, and I appreciate that they connect their users with opportunities to help protect the places we visit. Hot tip: Portlanders can get to know The Outdoor Project in person next weekend at its fourth annual Solstice Block Party.

Kristin

David Roberts has more masterful pieces about tribalism, making the case that democracy can only work with strong institutions and shared norms, and that in a world with global, complex problems like climate change, we’ll sink if we let tribalism and fear take the tiller. Tribalism narrows the circle of “us” and aggressively ousts the “other.” Our only chance is to extend cooperation and communion, bringing more people under the banner of “us.”

I liked these tips from a class on how to detect when big data is talking rot, including time-tested warnings against mistaking correlation for causation, and warnings that algorithms trained with human actions will reflect existing cultural biases, such as racism.

Aven

This is a re-post from the Sightline Daily, but especially in light of current events and the increasing importance of personal actions in the fight against climate chaos, everybody, everybody, everybody should read this article about the heroic valve turners who stopped the flow of Canadian tar sands oil to the US for one day last October.

Some passages to whet your appetite:

If a subject is sitting alone in a room, and the room begins filling with smoke, the subject will open the door and get out. If, however, the subject is sitting with others in the room, and they sit calmly ignoring the smoke—chances are good that he’ll sit calmly ignoring it too.

“We’re wired to take our cues from each other,” Foster concluded. “Unless we have people acting like climate change is an emergency, we’re going to keep talking about this as if it’s some kind of Al Gore political issue. And we’re going to fry our kids.”

…

But, if you’re Michael Foster, verdicts and sentences are not the most meaningful measures of victory. For him, the victory that matters is the one he’d already snatched out of the beet fields of North Dakota: raising public awareness about 350 parts per million as essential for the survival of future generations. “I made a choice to take an action that I thought was morally necessary to expose a deadly system of injustice against our kids,” he says simply.

It’s gonna suck being a little old vegan in prison,” he continues, smiling sadly. “But honestly? Living in this system of overconsumption, beside this concrete river of CO2 that is always flowing on I-5—everywhere I go in this town that I love feels like prison. So the idea of living in prison? It doesn’t bother me the way it should.”

Biggest takeaway: we should all be acting like it’s an emergency. Because it truly is. I think the only way forward in this time of government inaction is to embrace this sense of urgency, both in the decisions we make in our personal lives and in the actions we take to defend the future. The smoke is pouring in, and a few courageous souls are showing us the door.

Tarika

I’ll be keeping an eye on the political developments in Qatar for multiple reasons, including the fact that the country is the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG). Instability or uncertainty around the country’s LNG supply could cause market changes. If you’re also wondering what this means for the world LNG market (or whether it means anything just yet), below are some articles from the past week to get you started. The list is organized by date of publication.

Qatar’s Dispute With Arab States Puts LNG Market on Edge (New York Times)
A Middle East spat with an LNG twist (LNG World Shipping)
Here’s how the Qatar rift could change the LNG markets (CNBC)
Regional Rift Hits Container Shipments to Qatar, but Not LNG Exports (Wall Street Journal)
Qatar fight finally spills into global energy market (CNBC)
Gulf crisis not to affect Qatar’s LNG and oil exports: Expert (Qatari newspaper The Peninsula)

Anna

I was inspired and intrigued by the Reverend William Barber’s suggestion that politics needs religion. He reminds us there’s this little thing called morality and we could use more of it all around—conservatives who fall back on theology and progressives who’ve distanced themselves from religion alike—and he gained notoriety for the Moral Monday movement. “If your attention is not on dealing with the issues that hurt the poor, the brokenhearted, the sick the left out the least of these the stranger and all of those who are made to feel unacceptable, you don’t have…evangelicalism you have heresy, you have theological malpractice.” His interview on the New Yorker Radio Hour podcast is worth a listen.

And, a British political operative moves to California to launch a political revolution. Steve Hilton is also a newly minted talk show host at Fox News. He’s definitely conservative, but he’s critiquing elite power in politics and giving a more authentically compassionate take on what to do with the groundswell of populist politics in the US and beyond—asking what real, “positive” populism could look like:

The argument went like this: previous Conservative Party leaders had said, “The enemy is big government. We need to cut back government, to roll back the frontiers of the state, cut back the size of government, cut spending and everything will be great.” That certainly had its appeal particularly in the U.K. at the end of the 1970s, where people felt that the state had [become] way too big and out of control. But as you went through the 80s, people saw that if you cut back government and left it at that, people were often left behind and social problems were unaddressed. We tried to make a more nuanced argument than saying “smaller government.” We’d say, “Yes, the answer to our problems is not Big Government, but a Big Society.”

Here’s his whole interview on Freakonomics Radio.

Keiko

Keep your eyes peeled for THINK.urban’s Women Led Cities project launching this fall. The project aims to bring women’s voices—or to clarify, non-cis men voices—to the forefront of urban planning discussions and start conversations around how to develop feminist city policy. I’ve stumbled upon a few articles that highlight ways we can advance cities as safe and inviting places for women, such as this CityLab piece and Guardian piece. Lisa Schweitzer, associate professor of urban planning at USC’s school of public policy, also has a clever and hilarious blog where she shares her research on urban planning and public policy (among other topics, like pop tarts). Have other women-led design articles and resources to share? Add them to the comments below!

Displacement Dilemma

Cascadia’s largest city, Seattle, just released its draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on the proposed Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) program, a core part of the city’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda. (I’ve written about MHA here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

The question that looms largest for many is whether upzones proposed to allow larger buildings should be scaled back in areas with high risk of displacement, as suggested by advocates in some of Seattle’s neighborhoods historically populated by people of color. This gets at the heart of one of the most challenging aspects of the city’s quest for equity and affordability. Most everyone agrees that market-rate housing supply helps affordability at the regional and citywide scale. But do citywide trends play out at the scale of a neighborhood or city block, where conditions may be uniquely sensitive and the effects of policy changes can be unpredictable?

The EIS dissects two possible MHA scenarios. In the first alternative, MHA upzones are distributed consistently across the city. In the second, upzones are dialed back in areas the city has identified as having high displacement risk and “low opportunity” (mostly, the historical homes of communities of color) and correspondingly dialed up in areas identified as having low displacement risk and “high opportunity” (which are mostly affluent and white). That translates to fewer upzones in minority neighborhoods like Rainier Beach and more upzones in white neighborhoods like Ravenna.

To explore impacts on displacement, the EIS examined its relationship to homebuilding at the census tract level, using the change in the number of households with incomes below 50 percent of the area median as a proxy (EIS p.3.37). Between 2000 and 2011, more new housing correlates with less displacement, as shown in the graph below. That relationship also holds in high-displacement risk areas (EIS p.3.41).

Relationship between new homes built and the change in number of households with incomes below 50% area median from 2000 to 2011, by Seattle census tract. Source: City of Seattle.

These findings suggest that holding back the construction of new homes through reduced upzones would not help stem displacement but would in fact likely do the opposite. This result corroborates a similar study conducted in the San Francisco Bay area.

Surprisingly, the analysis also shows that from 2000 to 2011, displacement as measured by the EIS’s low-income household proxy was more common in neighborhoods facing low risk of displacement than in neighborhoods facing high displacement risk, as categorized by the city’s 2016 Growth and Equity analysis (EIS p.3.42). In other words, displacement appears to have happened more in affluent than in poorer neighborhoods.

The EIS also examined “physical” displacement caused when low-income residents are forced to leave when housing is slated to be demolished. (We documented how rare physical displacement is here.) Based on data from the city’s Tenant Relocation Assistance Ordinance (TRAO), the analysis projected very little difference in physical displacement among all of the EIS alternatives, including the status quo, as shown in the chart below (EIS p.3.58). Surprisingly again, TRAO data show that physical displacement caused by demolitions has been most common in “high opportunity” areas of the city, not in neighborhoods tagged by the city as facing the most risk of displacement (EIS p.3.31).

Projections of physical displacement of low-income households caused by demolitions, compared to projected affordable housing production. Source: City of Seattle.

But while the City’s displacement analysis clearly does not support a policy to reduce upzones in areas it has labeled high risk, the data don’t tell the whole story. The household income proxy is an unfortunate methodological limitation. The number of low-income households could have moved up or down due to a variety of causes unrelated to displacement, such as changes in jobs or earnings, a trend toward single-earner households, or moves having nothing to with rising rent. Displacement is notoriously difficult—some would say impossible—to track. Also, as noted in the EIS, the analysis could be improved by removing new housing units that are subsidized.

Furthermore, new housing can have localized effects on displacement not detected by study at the census tract level. For example, does a shiny new apartment building signal to wealthier home seekers that a neighborhood is newly desirable? When local businesses are disrupted by development, does it feed a chain reaction of cultural displacement? Such questions currently animate the debate around the implementation of MHA in Seattle’s Central Area and Chinatown/International District.

The unavoidable gray areas in displacement analysis raise questions. Should policymakers weigh empirical evidence, even if imperfect, against community members’ own opinions and preferences? Should local stakeholders get priority, especially in lower-income communities of color that have historically been excluded from city planning decisions?

Zoning may simply be the wrong tool for tackling displacement in high-risk communities. In neighborhoods such as the Central Area that are increasingly desirable because they are close to one of the hottest downtown job markets in North America, displacement will happen with or without upzones. What could make a difference, however, are upzones throughout the city—especially in the city’s northern expanse of wealthy, exclusive, single-family neighborhoods. Zoning changes in those places could be Seattle’s most effective strategy for taking displacement pressure off of communities of color elsewhere.

But to securely stabilize fragile communities so that they can benefit from the city’s rapid growth, targeted interventions that help establish economic and cultural anchors are the most promising solution. Currently, the city’s best example of what we need more of is the Equitable Development Initiative.

UPDATE (6/9/17): One factor absent in the draft EIS displacement analysis is the potential for MHA costs to render homebuilding projects financially infeasible. In such cases, the city’s own analysis discussed above suggests that the resultant loss of new housing would likely increase the displacement of low-income households. Proper assessment of this potential adverse impact of MHA would require a before-and-after feasibility analysis, which the city has not conducted.

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What Cascadia can learn

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Question 1. What form of government should Portland have?

Commissioner Form

Council-Manager Form

Mayor-Council Form

Answer 1. Council-Manager government with bureau oversight committees

Question 2. What powers and responsibilities should the Mayor have?

Answer 2. Leave the mayor’s powers unchanged

Question 3. How should the mayor be selected?

Answer 3. Leave the mayoral election unchanged

Question 4. What powers and responsibilities should city councilors have?

Answer 4. City council keeps legislative and executive powers

Question 5. How many city councilors should Portland have?

Answer 5a. Elect six councilors

Answer 5b. Elect eight councilors

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Answer 6a. Elect three councilors in midterm years and three in presidential years

Answer 6b. Elect five councilors in presidential years and three in midterm years

Question 7. How powerful should the primaries be?

Answer 7. Make the general election more important than the primary by advancing more candidates

Many choices for Rose City reformers

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Portland City Government Doesn’t Represent Portland Very Well

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Wealthy Portlanders are over-represented

Conclusion

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Weekend Reading 6/9/17

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