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Welcome to Sightline Institute’s redesigned website!

You’ll find our same top-notch solutions research, just with a fresh new look. Learn more here about new features, or simply browse as usual. 

Learning from the Least Housed

Inside looking out photo of a simple home made of affordable material material

This article is part of the series Legalizing Inexpensive Housing Takeaways The author’s time living on the housing margins has opened his eyes to new ways to live imperfectly but under his own control. Housing policymakers could better address the needs of the unhoused by learning from what many of them do already, when allowed. … Read more

New Washington Bill Would Legalize More Homes and Businesses by Transit

A pedestrianized commercial main street with attached one-story retail shops and a parked car outside.

Find audio versions of Sightline articles on any of your favorite podcast platforms, including Spotify, Google, and Apple. This article is part of the series Legalizing Inexpensive Housing UPDATE 2/27/23: An amended bill, which narrowed the reform to ¼ mile around transit stations, passed out of the House Local Government Committee by a 4-3 vote. … Read more

We’re Wildly Underestimating the Potential of Mobile Housing

Three eclectically designed tiny houses on wheels sit around a courtyard covered by a sun shade, atop a large smooth concrete slab that features painted polka dots, chairs and tables.

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text][takeaway_box takeaways='{“0”:{“text”:”Our housing policies rightly respect the need for stability, but they neglect mobility. In fact, in many ways they ban it. “},”1”:{“text”:”Homes on wheels can be radically inexpensive. Last year, Portland and Oakland re-legalized living in them. “},”2”:{“text”:”The author, who has no permanent home of his own, urges Cascadians not to neglect them in … Read more

Housing Is Popular, Actually

This article is part of the series Legalizing Inexpensive Housing How do people feel about politicians who vote to allow more homes to exist? If you were to ask the newsroom at KUOW, the Seattle-based NPR affiliate, apparently they’d call it undisputed empirical fact that it’s unpopular to scale back widespread bans on “missing middle … Read more

Five Lessons from California’s Big Zoning Reform

a Spanish Colonial Revival duplex in Pasadena, California

This article is part of the series Legalizing Inexpensive Housing Update 9/16: Senate Bill 9 is now law. Urban housing shortages aren’t just a cause of climate change. They’re a lot like climate change—it’s very hard to fix them unless you can get many different governments to act. That’s what we told the New York … Read more

Eight Ingredients for a State-Level Zoning Reform

Row of tan townhouses with a green manicured lawn in the foreground, Mt. Hood in the background to the right

This article is part of the series Legalizing Inexpensive Housing In 2019, Oregon passed a first-of-its-kind state law that ordered larger cities and the Portland metro area to rapidly legalize duplexes on all residential lots and fourplexes, triplexes, townhomes, and cottage clusters on more than half of lots. This is a short, reported history of … Read more

How to Tear Down the Invisible Walls in Your City’s Zoning Code

A group of more than 30 people listen to a woman on a city street in a tree-lined neighborhood

This article is part of the series Legalizing Inexpensive Housing This is a sidebar to Sightline’s history of the passage of Portland’s residential infill project. In August 2021, Oregon’s largest city legalized duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes and mixed-income sixplexes on the vast majority of residential lots for the first time since 1959, while making on-site parking … Read more

The Eight Deaths of Portland’s Residential Infill Project

Collage of profile photos from this article

This article is part of the series Legalizing Inexpensive Housing In 2021, Portland became the largest modern U.S. city to end so-called “single-family zoning.” What follows here is a history of how the residential infill project could have died but didn’t. This history was developed in partnership with Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. See also … Read more

We Ran the Rent Numbers on Portland’s 7 Newly Legal Home Options

Drawn illustration of a co-housing structure, with courtyard and many people sitting in the back porch

This article is part of the series Legalizing Inexpensive Housing After a seven-year campaign, Portland on Sunday formally lifted a series of 97-year-old bans on seven different types of homes. Becoming legal today on the vast majority of residential lots in Portland: a duplex, a triplex, a fourplex, a mixed-income or below-market sixplex, a large … Read more