In the month since news broke that Oregon’s legislature will consider a bill to strike down 60-year-old bans on “middle housing,” some battle lines have emerged.
The Oregonian‘s editorial board is for it; the Bend Bulletin‘s is against. Habitat for Humanity of Oregon is excited; the Oregon Republican Party’s Twitter account is dubious.
But another group of people has been enthusiastically discussing the proposal, House Bill 2001, which would re-legalize duplexes, triplexes, quads and cottage clusters in all neighborhoods of the state’s larger cities, towns and unincorporated suburbs. They’re a loose network of housing advocates who’ve spent 45 years immersed in the successes and failures of one of Oregon’s proudest legislative achievements: its first-in-the-nation statewide land-use planning law.
Championed and signed in 1973 by the liberal Republican Gov. Tom McCall, Senate Bill 100 (as its acolytes still call it, the way basketball fans remember Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s jersey number) is best known today as an anti-sprawl measure. It created the “urban growth boundaries” that prevent endless strip-mall exurbs from hopscotching their way down the Willamette Valley or up the Rogue River.
But there was a different, extremely important effect of that law that few people remember today: In the 10 years after its passage, McCall’s bill forced Oregon’s cities to zone for much denser housing. In the Portland metro area, housing capacity doubled in four years. The remarkably compact Portland region we know today is the result.
Senate Bill 100 didn’t just limit Oregon’s urban sprawl. It was also the most important state-led upzone in the history of Cascadia, and maybe also of the United States.
To understand the importance of this year’s HB 2001, you have to know a little bit about the ways SB 100, since 1973, both has and hasn’t worked.
Oregon started rethinking zoning just as people were discussing its role in segregation
A freshly remodeled one-unit building in Portland’s Montavilla neighborhood. Remodeling it into a duplex instead would have been illegal. Photo by Michael Andersen, used with permission.
Oregon first attempted state-level zoning reform 50 years ago this spring, in March 1969, when it became the first US state to require that all its land be zoned as part of comprehensive plans.
Zoning wasn’t a new idea. By 1969, it had been growing in popularity for 50 years. In Oregon, the most exclusive neighborhoods of Portland—Laurelhurst, Irvington, the West Hills—had been among the first to embrace laws that set a minimum yard size for every home within a certain area. The rules weren’t always written with hostile intent. But one effect was to block low-wealth families, including most immigrants and most descendents of enslaved people, from buying into those neighborhoods.
And by the late 1960s, this side effect of banning attached homes from much of the city—the fact that such bans seemed to lead inexorably to deep segregation by wealth and race, and thereby transmit prejudice and disadvantage from generation to generation—was a major topic of national legislation and debate.
In April 1969, UCLA law professor Lawrence Sager helped popularize a new term for this phenomenon: “exclusionary zoning.”
Banning small and mid-sized homes from an area “strongly reinforces the social propensity to form tight little islands of residential exclusivity,” Sager wrote at the time. “Exclusionary zoning may bar not only the poor or near poor, but a fairly substantial segment of the middle class as well.”
A few months later, in Connecticut, a young journalist named Al Johnson chose a harsher phrase in a newspaper editorial: “American apartheid.”
“Town after town has decided that low-income housing will have to be someone else’s responsibility,” he wrote. “The result of this widespread refusal to accept responsibility has been the exclusion of low-income groups from town after town.”
“The new planner,” a 1969 article in the professional magazine Planning declared, sees “exclusionary practices in zoning and subdivision control as serving to contain less-favored population in the central city slums [and] relates the lily white (or token integrated) suburban school system to the desperate problem of maintaining racial balance in the central city’s schools.”
This was the world into which Oregon’s state-level land-use planning regime was born.
Oregon’s statewide zoning law introduced an idea: Requiring every city to make room for people of every income
Oregon housing advocate Betty Niven with her husband, Ivan. Photo from Paul R. Halmos Photograph Collection, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.
Despite this national conversation, Senate Bill 100—the 1973 law intended to add teeth to Oregon’s 1969 zoning mandate—nearly failed to force local zoning to allow more diversity of housing.
The fact that it ultimately did was thanks in large part to a woman named Betty Niven, a Eugene-based advocate for housing people of low and moderate wealth. A volunteer member of the Eugene Planning Commission and later the chair of the State Housing Council, Niven (who held a degree in business from the University of Chicago) became nationally known for a “groundbreaking” 1980 report showing that mobile home parks were not a financial burden on local governments.
As recounted by two Portland State University historians in a 2010 paper, Niven had by then already been a key force behind Oregon’s decision to include, among the regulations the state put on local zoning plans, this crucial clause:
Plans shall encourage the availability of adequate numbers of housing units at price ranges and rent levels which are commensurate with the financial capabilities of Oregon households and allow for flexibility of housing location, type and density.
Those words became known as Oregon’s “housing goal,” also called “Goal 10.” They meant the state was forbidding its cities and counties from using zoning to permanently wall themselves off from poor or middle-income people who might want to live there.
In a memo supporting the housing goal, Niven explained her motivation: “to ensure that fulfilling the other goals of the statewide land use plan will not unreasonably impact the supply of modestly priced housing.”
Niven had perfectly anticipated the debate that would dominate the next half-century of Oregon housing politics: whether an urban growth boundary in a growing region drives up housing costs. And she’d also arrived at an answer: no, it doesn’t have to—but only if every community keeps adjusting its zoning code to let all sorts of people live in it if they want to.
Oregon’s suburbs allow more homes than many suburbs do—because they were required to
45 Degrees Central, a few blocks from Nike’s world headquarters in Beaverton. Image courtesy of Google Maps.
The moment Oregon attempted to ban exclusionary zoning, jurisdictions started looking for ways to get around it.
Among them:
- Durham, a tiny city in Portland’s comfortable southwest suburbs, which in 1977 tried to double its minimum lot size in order to (in the quoted words of the planning director and city council member John Sattler) discourage “transient” residents.
- Multnomah County, which in 1980 passed a law allowing new mobile home parks but creating what regional government Metro called “vague and discretionary criteria that allow for their exclusion.”
- King City, required by Metro in 1997 to legalize small accessory cottages on all residential lots. The city legalized them only on lots of at least 7,500 square feet—of which King City has almost none.
- The City of Lake Oswego, a well-off suburb of 38,000. Its land is dedicated overwhelmingly to large lots and freestanding homes, but as of 2013 the city claims to be in compliance with a state mandate to allow half its future homes to be “attached.” The city’s excuse: It’s given every owner of a one-unit lot the option to build all the way to the edge of their land, technically legalizing duplexes … while ensuring that duplex homes would cost just as much as detached ones.
So, starting in the 1970s, Oregon recruited a team of regulators to enforce its new land-use laws: the cats to local jurisdictions’ mice.
One of them turned out to be Al Johnson, the former journalist who’d written the “American apartheid” editorial years before. Inspired by his reporting on Connecticut’s exclusionary zoning, Johnson had gone to law school; now, as an administrative hearing officer, he was helping enforce one of the nation’s most ambitious state laws against economic segregation.
“The housing goal clearly says that municipalities are not going to be able to do what they have done in metropolitan areas in the rest of the country,” Johnson wrote in his opinion for Seaman v. Durham, a landmark administrative-law decision that rejected Durham’s 1977 rezoning and set the tone for Oregon zoning politics in the late 70s. “They are not going to be able to pass the housing buck to their neighbors on the assumption that some other community will open wide its doors and take in the teachers, police, firemen, clerks, secretaries and other ordinary folk who can’t afford homes in the towns where they work.”
Empowered by decisions like that one, Johnson and his peers eventually established specific mandates for the Portland metro area, requiring each of the area’s significant cities to allow certain numbers of homes per acre.
It was that rule, backed up by legal action from the anti-sprawl group 1000 Friends of Oregon, that achieved what Johnson called a “very, very significant reduction in average lot sizes” across the suburbs between 1978 and 1982—the state-led upzone that doubled the metro area’s housing capacity in an era when some other metros were rapidly downzoning.
“Right from the beginning, the proponents of the housing goal knew there was a problem of local control over residential zoning,” said Robert Liberty, who joined 1000 Friends as a staff attorney in 1981 and later led the organization from 1994 to 2002 before serving as a three-term Metro councilor. “That is why they wrote Goal 10 to try to break exclusionary zoning. We made great strides in the 1980s and 1990s. But progress has stalled.”
Oregon doesn’t enforce its state housing laws like it used to
The Bull Mountain area of Tigard, Oregon, is almost entirely big houses on 10,000-square-foot lots. Prices range from $400,000 to more than $700,000. Photo by Michael Andersen, used with permission.
Many people share Liberty’s opinion: Oregon has grown much less ambitious in the last 20 years about requiring exclusively wealthy, overwhelmingly white areas to allow more diversity.
They say that’s the case both at the state’s Land Conservation and Development Commission and at Metro, the Portland-area regional government.
“Goal 10 supports really effective land use planning for housing,” said Lisa Bates, a planning professor at Portland State University who studies housing choices and displacement. “But it hasn’t yet required really effective land use planning for housing, because the enforcement of it has been limited.”
“I don’t know that the commitment to enforcing Goal 10 is strong enough at the state, regional level, however you want to slice it,” said Allan Lazo, executive director of the Fair Housing Council of Oregon, which works against segregation and housing discrimination.
“LCDC doesn’t have any guts,” said Ed Sullivan, a former 1000 Friends attorney and co-founder of Housing Land Advocates, a group that opposes exclusionary zoning in Oregon.
Johnson, the former state hearing officer, said Oregon cities have tried to meet density requirements mostly by concentrating major growth along big streets rather than letting small attached homes fill gently into well-off low-density areas.
“Metro, very early on as part of a sop to the various jurisdictions, basically said, ‘We’re not going to have any impact on your existing neighborhoods,'” Johnson said. “‘Single-family neighborhoods can continue to be sanctuaries; we’re going to string these housing types all along the transit corridors and collectors and arterials and places like that.’”
Mary Kyle McCurdy, deputy director for 1000 Friends, said she doubts any city in Oregon could show that it has built enough “middle housing” types to meet demand.
“If your choice is to live in a six-story apartment … or a single-family structure, you’re just not meeting the needs of all,” she said.
HB 2001 would likely be the Oregon legislature’s strongest action against economic segregation in 35 years
A duplex in southeast Portland, built before their 1959 ban from most of the city. Photo by Michael Andersen, used with permission.
Bates, the displacement and housing choice scholar, called HB 2001, the middle-housing re-legalization proposed by Oregon House Speaker Tina Kotek, “great.”
Zones that ban attached housing “create and maintain class and race segregation to the benefit of (almost always) white homeowners,” Bates said. “Localities are very averse to changing this pattern of housing, even when it demonstrably causes not only social inequality but also economic inefficiencies and environmental harms.”
Lazo, the fair housing advocate, said a mere legalization bill couldn’t, on its own, fix centuries of racism in housing. And he emphasized the need for more Oregonians of color to weigh in directly on the specifics of HB 2001.
But he also said it’d be good to strike down the concept that buildings shared by more than one family are somehow inherently incompatible with certain neighborhoods in Oregon.
“It’s part of the institutionalization of segregation,” Lazo said. “The reason single-family zoning came into play in the early part of the 20th century was to exclude people of different races, different income levels. … I’ve lived in this community for a long time, and that’s not who I think we are. And I don’t think continuing to maintain that system reflects these values.”
Juan Carlos González, a newly-elected Metro councilor from Portland’s western suburbs, said his support for more “workforce housing” options like duplexes, triplexes and quads was rooted first in their general benefits to the economy and environment.
But, he added, “Any strategy like this needs to have a racial equity component. Re-grounding the conversation on the history of zoning … I think it’s a big part of economic justice.”
Quoting US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, González said removing bans on middle housing was a way to fight the “ZIP-code destiny” that perpetuates economic inequality.
Liberty, the former 1000 Friends director and Metro councilor, said strong legislative action against exclusionary zoning—as written, Kotek’s bill would likely be the strongest since the early 1980s—would renew state regulators’ sense that their own, related work is part of a noble and important tradition.
“I think that’s just what happens over time: a loss of a sense of mission,” Liberty said.
“A sense of mission”—if someone can learn anything from a few weeks reading and talking to people who steered Oregon housing policy through the 1970s and 1980s, it’s how powerful their sense of mission remains, deeply imprinted 40 years later. If it hadn’t been so strong, it’s hard to imagine McCall’s quixotic land-use law would have turned out nearly so well.
And if someone can learn two things, it’s that the battle lines through this debate were already drawn long, long ago. For Oregonians and others who care about these issues, the most pressing question isn’t whether a new battle is coming. It’s which side you’re going to be on.
soren impey
“Those words became known as Oregon’s “housing goal,” also called “Goal 10.” They meant the state was forbidding its cities and counties from using zoning to permanently wall themselves off from poor or middle-income people who might want to live there.”
In much of Oregon today, there is a surplus of housing affordable to middle income folk. Thus, the focus of goal 10 and zoning reform should be on ensuring ample supply of housing affordable to housing insecure communities. For the most part, this means rental housing.
Sadly, some of the zoning reforms favored by “missing middle advocates” focus on “green” density and, therefore, impose draconian limits on rental unit size. Ending racist and classist restrictions on multifamily housing is laudable but some “missing middle” reforms may also be creating new exclusionary barriers to rental housing.
Michael Andersen
Soren, I don’t know if this is the source what you say about a seeming “surplus,” but if it is, that caught my eye too. I asked around about it until someone helped me figure out what the data is saying.
Lorelei Juntenen, an economics consultant who oversees a firm (EcoNW) that independently came across the same finding, said:
– Just about every US metro shows the exact same pattern: lots of homes priced such that they’d be affordable to the median household, but a shortage of homes priced to be affordable to the poorest third of the popuation. This doesn’t make it a good situation but it’s not a Portland thing.
– The problem here is not that middle-income people have too many homes to choose among. The problem here is that poor people are being forced to overspend on housing.
Translation: In a saner world, housing that is priced to be affordable to people that 50%-80% MFI range would also be *inhabited* by people in that income range. But it’s not. Instead, the deep deep shortage of housing affordable to people in the 0%-50% MFI range means that people in that income range are instead living in housing priced for the 50%-80% affordability range. So the “surplus” of homes in that moderately low 80% range doesn’t mean the private sector has oversupplied homes for moderately low income people, it means the public and private sectors have greatly undersupplied homes for very-low-income people.
Paul Conte
@Michael Andersen
OK. Now “connect the dots” in your post: “public and private sectors have greatly undersupplied homes for very-low-income people.”
And, HB 2001 would not change that at all! The private sector is going to go where the market offers a satisfactory risk/return potential, and that’s not going to be in low-cost triplexes and fourplexes.
If you have real-world evidence otherwise, I’d love to see it.
Michael Andersen
Paul, I think the article above makes fairly clear that we are talking here about a long-term plan that would help solve some problems slowly, not all problems quickly.
If your alternative long-term policy proposal for low-density zones is the status quo, whereby home prices rise indefinitely *without* creating any more housing and small one-unit homes can be replaced only by big one-unit homes, I don’t think that’s going to change the market’s failure either.
Also, in the future I’d ask that you bring your language down a notch, and to choose some comments to respond to rather than all of them. Disagreement is welcome; monopolizing the conversation, especially with invective, isn’t.
Paul Conte
@Michael Andersen
You continually knock down a “straw man” by claiming my alternative is the “status quo.” Yet, I’ve repeatedly pointed out two parallel alternatives: a) Local development of context-appropriate zoning, as I and my neighbors have done; and b) Put the focus on medium- and high-density apartments and mixed-use development on well-served corridors.
Whether or not you can provide credible evidence that in Portland the future of single-family neighborhoods inexorably leads to larger houses replacing smaller houses, the evidence contradicts your sweeping assumption. My modest “working-man’s” house is among many around me that are nearing their centennial mark. This is just more evidence of why the global (and ill-conceived), top-down dictates are counterproductive — they appear to be based on Portland experiences (and superficial analysis, at that). And, of course, you seem to have overlooked the role of CC&Rs … again.
I’ll dull the edge on my comments when you agree to cease using “NIMBY.” “NIMBY” is code for calling people racist, classist, and elitist. It implies mercenary self-interest at the expense of others who are often less fortunate. “NIMBY” is a pejorative used to trivialize and discount the concerns of others, including decent people who would bear the brunt of any development impacts. Tossing “NIMBY” out serves no substantive purpose in presenting your point of view and has no apparent purpose other than to ply an ad hominem attack on those who oppose your agenda. Reading back over your blog, I find that I and many good neighbors are slammed by your comments. Will you agree to stop?
Michael Andersen
You got a deal, Paul – I’ve never used the word “nimby” in a post on this site, and don’t plan to.
Paul Conte
@Michael Anderson
“You got a deal, Paul – I’ve never used the word “nimby” in a post on this site, and don’t plan to.”
Thank you Michael. I also want to correct my misimpression that you personally had used “NIMBY.” This was a result of my quick search for the term on your site and incorrectly assuming the many “hits” included your own comments. On looking into the instances, I found that all the ones in the past two years appear to have been in articles you posted by other authors or in blog comments by others. (See samples below.)
So, I would ask that you not implicitly endorse and promulgate the slur by publishing articles that denigrate homeowners, and that you also admonish others who post to “bring your language down a notch, disagreement is welcome; invective isn’t.” That would certainly help keep the tenor respectful in both directions.
* * * * * *
“Almost no one, save for a few extreme NIMBYs who want to freeze their neighborhoods in amber, or who care more about street parking than welcoming new neighbors.”
https://www.sightline.org/2017/04/20/not-in-your-backyard-cottages-in-law-apartments-and-the-predatory-delay-of-halas-adu-rules/
Lack of housing is a humanitarian crisis largely caused by economically privileged NIMBYist bent on preserving their property values and the luxury of living in a neighborhood with their preferred superficial values.”
https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-way-to-affordable-housing/
“Therefore one must surmise that the opposition is not to the unit, but to its purpose, and specifically, to its inhabitant. … It’s not NIMBY, it’s KOTRR (keep out the riff-raff.)”
https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-way-to-affordable-housing/
“This thinking dilutes messages about the shared benefits of diversity and inclusion and bolsters community opposition (NIMBY) to housing solutions.”
https://www.sightline.org/2017/04/05/a-blueprint-for-better-housing-messages/
“it didn’t offer anything to win over what I’d call ‘soft NIMBYs.'”
https://www.sightline.org/2018/01/18/every-month-portlands-infill-rules-arent-changed-the-city-looks-more-like-this/
“homeowners have more than enough say in planning decisions, and they tend to not be representative of the overall population, as described here, for example:” [citing]
https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/09/nimbys-dominate-local-zoning-meetings/569440/
J. Petrillo
Soren,
Along the lines of Michael’s comment, I have trouble with the statement that the metro area has a surplus of affordable housing for middle income households. Recently, I have been compiling data regarding the supply of housing in Portland , and nearly all of the research is showing that there is a shortage of affordable housing units (both SF owned & Rental) for households earning between 60% and 125% AMI. Only 35% of the current homes for sale in the PDX market are affordable to households earning the area median income. And that is only one of many similar findings.
Paul Conte
@J. Petrillo
Two questions I hope your research can address:
1. Do your stats just use the typical census household income data versus AMI, or do you go deeper to look at other sources of rent or ownership? (E.g., older couples who have low income but own a home without a new mortgage; student households, etc.) Several of us have looked at the stats that are being tossed around in Eugene and found they are very far from presenting the true picture.
2. Have you derived figures for all the subpopulations, based on their HH Income categories (e.g., “Extreme low-income”, “very low income”, etc.)?
I imagine Portland is different in degree, but in Eugene the burning problem is in the lowest income categories and no one has yet provided evidence that anything but subsidized housing (either new or through rent assistance) can help these households.
Evan
Until and unless we can control for the high cost of new construction – hovering at $150-200 per square foot right now, exclusive of land costs – HB2001 will do little to solve Oregon’s affordable housing problem. All HB2001 will do is allow higher density homes that are still financially out of reach of the people who need them.
HB2001 also does nothing to address the issue of construction financing for multifamily projects, which is an important factor.
I support the intent of this effort but unless all of the other inputs that contribute to the high cost of new housing are addressed it’s about as effective as an umbrella in a wind storm.
Michael Andersen
Several replies, Evan:
– I couldn’t agree more on the need to bring down development costs per square foot. I actually did a huge project about that here.
– a duplex, triplex or quad (not in the Lake Oswego sense, in the real sense) is generally going to cut development costs because it splits the land & effectively the land cost among several paying households.
– The story above is mostly about long-term integration, not our immediate & urgent price crisis. The solution above (missing middle re-legalization) is a long-term strategy & would change things only slowly.
Paul Conte
@ Michael Andersen
“a duplex, triplex or quad (not in the Lake Oswego sense, in the real sense) is generally going to cut development costs because it splits the land & effectively the land cost among several paying households”
An absolutely perfect example of flawed logic.
The flaw is in one simple word “is” instead of “could.”
Recall that the problem with HB 2001 is not about new greenfield subdivisions. If HB 2001 were limited to that scope, there would be few serious objections, and it would allow some additional options. In many cases, of course, a developer of a subdivision for the “single-family” market is likely to have CC&Rs to restrict future infill and redevelopment. HB 2001 doesn’t do anything to prevent that.
HB 2001 wouldn’t even be so harmful if it were limited to never-developed, vacant lots in older, mostly built-out neighborhoods. There aren’t many, and developing a vacant lot doesn’t remove any affordable housing from the inventory.
The harm is in the redevelopment that HB 2001 incentivizes in older neighborhoods not protected by CC&Rs. While a new triplex might be less costly per equivalent configuration of a new single-family detached house (on the same sized lot), experience in Eugene (and Portland) demonstrates that the best payoff for a developer may be to scrape an older home off the lot and replace it with two or more dwellings that each cost more than the original. HB 2001 is so obviously deficient in that it doesn’t address the demolition of less expensive housing and replacing with more expensive housing.
Without that provision, the market is not going to deliver your imagined cost savings from triplexes. It’s pure fantasy and the result will hurt working family neighborhoods.
When are you and the other “missing middle housing” zealots going to put forward some real world data to back up your dream world statements?
Michael Andersen
The status quo you’re arguing on behalf of also fails to address the demolition of less expensive housing and replacing with more expensive housing.
If cities are concerned about this (and I agree that they should be) they can take steps to reduce it. Portland, for example, is proposing to set lower size caps for buildings with fewer homes inside them. The projected result is a steep drop in the average price of newly built homes in the high-amenity neighborhoods where redevelopments pencil, because it gives developers an incentive to divvy their land costs among several smaller homes. (As well as a general mandate to build relatively small buildings.) This approach would be fully consistent with HB 2001. I’m sure there are others.
PortlandTimbo
Not sure which post of yours best to make this response as there are many. Why does the word NIMBY get used so much an in a derogatory way? It is because the arguments made by a certain group of people are fairly consistent and can be picked apart in 5 minutes by an amateur urbanist.
-not to scale! First off, prior to streetcars and cars building were mostly larger and multi-family. So we can scale down but now when economic and climate drivers demand we scale up we can’t.
-character! aside from the subjectiveness of character most neighborhoods do not have an underlying character. They are a blended mix of different styles and generations, unfortunately, because of zoning they are not a blend of incomes and races. (maybe this explains why racism is associated with NIMBYism)
-preserve property values! of course, allowing for more uses will make a property more valuable.
-privacy! So having a single home 15 ft from yours with a large family of 8 is more private than a duplex with two couples? I have stayed in many courtyard apartments in extremely dense European cities that felt more private than my single-family detached home. The reason being is units are attached so you don’t have those ridiculous gaps between houses where people could stare into the next door house. Which if anyone is honest will recognize that most people have blinds and curtains always blocking windows on the sides of their homes.
-noise! People are not loud generally speaking. It is the stuff that we use that is. Cars, trucks, lawnmowers, and leaf blowers are all the most annoying and loud things we deal with in a modern world. There are also primarily associated with low-density development. Large apartments do not need lawn mowers and leaf blowers. European level density does not require cars in remotely the same way as low-density suburban America. I found myself sleeping in till 11:00 am in Paris despite being in the thick of their central city just a hundred feet from stores and restaurants because it was so dang quiet.
-parking! You made a somewhat suspect comment about finding parking as being worse for the environment than maintaining low-density housing. Parking problem is so easy to solve. dynamic paid parking that is priced to allow for whatever quantity deemed appropriate within a certain area. Let’s say two spots for each block as an example. Now people don’t drive around.
-authoritarian rules! allowing for more development does not demand more development. this bill increases choice and moderately liberates the housing market from authoritarian control. Local control should in the case of housing be limited to the owner of the land, not the neighbors.
The reality is this bill does not go far enough. If we are going to meet the Paris Climate goals of zero emissions by 2050 fourplexes will not be enough and banning detached single-family homes will need to be considered. Some dream that electric cars, renewable energy, and shooting some chemical into our atmosphere will slow and reverse climate change. I find that laughable. How long has it taken to get to the small percentage of our grid to be renewable? The little we have has been gobbled up by bitcoin mining. Then to convert oil consumption in cars to electric means we will have an incredible increase in electricity demand. Meanwhile, we still have republicans denying the problem exists and fleeing the state to avoid doing anything about it. Also, our homes are simply too large demanding large heating and cooling needs. They require filling unneeded space with junk that requires a bunch of energy to create and transport. We need to stop asking what do we want but rather what do we need. Once that is solved we can begin to deal with wants. We sort of have an upside down Maslow Hierarchy of needs in the housing market.
Another point someone made is important to recognize. One major problem is construction costs are too expensive. SDC and permit costs are insane. Delays in permitting and neighborhood appeals are costly. Design commission and overlays add to the costs. It is time to stop charging new developments for the operation budgets of jurisdictions. If people want a property tax freeze then the government should give them the city that pays for. Little services, crappy infrastructure, and increased poverty as well as crime. And we need to direct more people into the trades. Labor shortages cost a ton of money for new homes.
I will stop now despite having way more I think needs to be said.
Paul Conte
@Evan
Heavens! Don’t post evidence regarding the actualimpact of HB 2001.
What I find bizarre is that all of the serious national experts and organizations dealing with “housing affordability” recognize that: a) The largest and most serious problem is for “Extreme low income” and “Very low income” households; and b) The only viable solutions require subsidized housing. I think most, if not all, also agree that multi-family apartments provide the best “bang for the buck.”
It seems to have escaped notice of the “missing middle housing” true believers that the reason new development is producing very little “middle housing” is that there’s a risk/return “gap” between single-family housing (including attached, e.g., townhome condos) and apartments of a certain scale (way above 4 units).
All HB 2001 would do is allow some “bottom-feeding” off lower-cost, single-family lots. Not much good, and plenty of potential for harm.
J. Petrillo
Excellent article, Michael. This work is a public service. I serve on one of the metro-area planning commissions and intend to share this with staff and fellow commissioners.
Paul Conte
Boy, have you gone “bonkers” with this “erudition”!
Tom McCall is rolling over in his grave with the degree to which HB 2001 (and SB 1051) is subverting what McCall supported as “Goal One — Citizen Involvement.
But to the substantive elements. Re-read your own lengthy tome — it’s all about one side of the reality — extreme zoning requirements that do operate as “exclusionary,” the main impact being minimum lot size for a single-family detached dwelling. Where that needs to be addressed, fine.
But the actual HB 2001 provisions are “feel good” items for “fuax”gressives, and are based on no substantial evidence or depth of analysis. In fact, if adopted, HB 2001 will worsen equitability, worsen housing affordability and exacerbate climate change.
* * * At this point all the folks who are “true believers” and would rather not actually consider facts can stop reading. * * *
First and foremost, HB 2001 simply rewards and encourages CC&Rs that are “exclusionary.” Many (most?) recent single-family subdivisions have CC&Rs that limit development to one SF-D dwelling per lot. In some case, with a small “granny cottage” (ADU). You can bet that every new subdivision for well-off households is not going to tell prospective buyers: “Your next door neighbor could convert to a triplex.”
Furthermore, many (most?) wealthy neighorhoods, even older ones, also had and still have CC&Rs that insulate those neighborhoods against higher density. If you had dealt with such neighborhoods (as I have) you’d be surprised at how extensive they are. Many of these even explicitly excluded non-whites, a provision that was struck down as unconstitutional. Don’t expect limits on lot size and dwellings per lot to be similarly struck down. (Even 1000 “Fiends” of Oregon understands this because they are deteremined to have a future statute outlaw such provisions, which I might even support.)
So, what neighborhoods is HB 2001 actually going to impact? That’s the other side of the reality. Not every single-family neighborhood was platted for or inhabited by the wealthy. My neighborhood was strictly what would now be called “workforce” housing, at the time a “working man’s neighborhood.” Very modest, small houses, packed close together on small or modest-sized lots. Some compatible duplexes and a few reasonably-scaled apartments.
So in the “golden era” of the 1960’s — as you portray it — Eugene planners decided that my neighborhood should be “stealth” upzoned to allow 2- and 3 story multi-plexes in typical small backyards, five feet from a working families semi-private backyard. Privacy lost; a sense of being “jammed in; and the flight of economically mobile households. My neighbors and I collected on-the-ground statistics — very few actual additional dwellings, statistically insignificant to address Eugene’s population increase; but significant degradation and destabilization of a close-in, walkable neighborhood. Don’t misconstrue this as “anti-renter” – some renters have been key participants in our attempt to address the crisis. But renters jammed into a triplex with access only from the alley simply do not hope to stay in that situation and the physical development form diminishes their engagement with their neighbors.
Ahh, but the zealots who think HB 2001 is a wonderous solution have no clue about reality in these relatively affordable neighborhoods.
In short — Dispersing low-density forms of housing will not result in significant increase in the number of units, and the impact of these additional units will not be an adequate market force to reduce housing prices or rents in the same areas. Instead, developers (the only true beneficieries of HB 2001) will make the obvious calculation that buying a low-cost SF-D house and lot; demolishing that structure; and building a 2- or 3-unit, more expensive per unit, condo is the best way to maximize profit. (Forget “cottage clusters” — a terrific concept, but there is compelling evidence they don’t pencil out at market rate.
Do any of you fans of HB 2001 have a clue about the history of “urban renewal”? Yeah, that was an inspired idea from “visionary” planners and screwed a whole bunch of lower-wealth people, including people of color and immigrants.
So, all net reduction in houses that are more affordable.
Similarly, this bone-headed statute would exacerbate inequity. If the “diverisity” of housing (what a joke) results in expensive, out-of-scale condos that degrade the character of the neighborhood, economically mobile households will simply leave. There’s more to this issue, but I’ll move on to …
Climate change. Increasing the number of dwellings in these older, already compact neighborhoods and the idiocy of prohibiting the off-street parking space for an ADU will have the effect that we’ve already witnessed in Eugene’s West University neighborhood — the residents still own cars and there’s insufficient on-street and off-street parking, so car circulate slowly searching for a spot.
Net result: Greate gross Vehicle Miles Travelled and more congestion = greater emissions that exacerbate climate change.
Truly, only a planner living in a fantasy world woul fail to see that large numbers of additional dwellings must be located near good mass transit so the occcupants can reduce car use, and in some cases reduce car ownership.
Let me close by saying that I led a neighborhood-community process to develop and get adopted Eugene’s “Jefferson-Westside Special Area Zone,” which allows medium density development an all housing forms: ADUs, duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, multi-unit apartments and cottage cluster. But the code has context-based standards that prevent the kind of destabilizing development that had occurred in previous years when the neighborhoods zoning was as ill-considered as HB 2001.
Ask yourself: WWTMD? What Would Tom McCall Do? I don’t think he would have distrusted local communities to craft the best solutions or to have come up with a proposal as counterproductive as HB 2001.
Tom Happy
My uncle, the honorable Judge Richard D. Barber, was a circuit court judge in Marion County for more than 4 decades. Upon his retirement, he served as a volunteer, modern-day “circuit rider,” wherein he managed to accomplish his goal of presiding over at least one circuit court case in every single Oregon county courthouse, the only person to ever do so.
During Uncle Dick’s long judicial service, he made the acquaintance of, and developed lasting friendships with, many of the judicial, legislative, and executive luminaries in Oregon history. One of these luminaries was governor Tom McCall. My family joined my uncle and his family and many friends at the beach each July for his birthday bash. At the party in 1975, I met former governor McCall, the visionary who led the charge in the creation of our land use planning laws (SB100). (Note: I met former UO track coach Bill Bowerman at around the same time, and was struck by the similarity between him and Tom McCall, both being tall, imposing, somewhat gruff in demeanor, and with iron grip handshakes)
I had learned about SB100 in my high school social studies class, and I engaged the governor on the topic. He was pleased that a teenager had interest in his work, and expounded upon the central tenets of: a.) the preservation of Oregon’s “world class” forest and farm lands, and b.) giving the citizenry a key role in the creation of local code.
I told him about my summer job of moving irrigation pipe and bucking hay on a Willamette Valley farm, and of my appreciation of our beautiful forests in the Coast and Cascade ranges. I was also curious about his regard for the citizen voice, especially given his well-known, though not necessarily understood as tongue-in-cheek, comment to out-of-staters: “I urge them to come and come many, many times to enjoy the beauty of Oregon. But I also ask them, for heaven’s sake, don’t move here to live.”
He laughed heartily at my question, stating that yes, he would like to see Oregon remain much as it was in 1975, but that he knew change was coming. He emphasized that this reality is exactly why he wanted the citizens to have a voice in how things change as we grow. He noted that SB100 was intended to create the structure within which the people could work to develop code in their individual municipalities, but that the process must necessarily be set up to thoroughly engage those who will have to live with the changes. To me, at age 16, this seemed like a no-brainer. I naively assumed that, this being a democracy, of course we individual citizens would have a strong voice in our governance. Silly, ignorant kid was I.
This story outlines why I am reasonably convinced that the senseless, one-size-fits-all-and-benefits-none approach of Bill 2001 would be fiercely opposed by Tom McCall, NOT supported as preposterously posited in this article.
Tom Happy
Michael Andersen
The bill gives lots of latitude to cities to keep writing code as they see fit. There are lots of different ways (size, form, etc) to re-legalize middle housing! As in the 70s, though, it doesn’t allow cities to opt out of the need to integrate economically.
David Sweet
Michael, Thank you, as always, for your thorough research and this enlightening history.
The problem with this discussion, and many others on this topic, is that “affordability,” like “beauty,” is in the eye of the beholder. What people often mean by it is, “affordable to me.” We cannot expect market rate builders to develop housing that is affordable to families earning less than 100% MFI. That’s not what new housing is. But as you and others point out, more abundant housing will, in the long run, create greater affordability.
More abundant housing in our most desirable, walkable neighborhoods will create opportunities for people at a variety of income levels to share in the advantages of those places. The attached housing built prior to 1959 in Portland’s close-in east-side neighborhoods is the most affordable housing in those areas, although it can’t be built under today’s exclusionary zoning code. Relegalizing those housing types will create a more diverse future for all our neighborhoods. Continuing the status quo will not.
Adam
Great review of the history of Oregon land use and zoning laws to provide context for HB 2001.
It’s important to realize and note that fundamentally there is no market failure here, other than the one created by local government exclusionary zoning. If missing middle housing types had always been allowed in all residential areas, we wouldn’t be in the situation we are in today, either in Oregon or other metro areas. The market didn’t outlaw missing middle housing or create exclusionary zoning. Local governments did.
It’s funny and frustrating to see language like,
“Oregon’s suburbs allow more homes than many suburbs do—because they were required to.”
And
“Oregon doesn’t enforce its state housing laws like it used to.”
This makes it sound like strict regulatory requirements and strong enforcement are riding to the rescue to correct a market failure.
When in reality with HB 2001, the state is not trying to regulate the market, it is trying to reign in local governments from over-regulating the market; by not allowing them to make some housing types illegal, or not allowing exclusionary single family zoning. It’s regulating other governments, not the private sector market.
Similarly if we say, “HB 2001 bans single family zoning!”
It makes it sound like a regulation or prohibition. When in fact it’s not a prohibition on a market activity, product, or practice, it’s a prohibition on a local government regulation.
In other words, HB 2001 is a de-regulation bill. When you de-regulate and allow things, that’s called a market liberalization.
Michael Andersen
I think these are all fair points, Adam. However, I think the difference between Oregon’s suburbs and most other suburbs is due to the state-level regulation that resulted in local deregulation. As you say, we shouldn’t fool ourselves that local housing markets are currently unregulated, and therefore we also shouldn’t fool ourselves that this can be solved by a mere absence of additional state-level regulation … in this case, regulation of local governments themselves.
Paul Conte
With apologies for another post that provides additional facts for the folks who believe in basing policy on evidence, but which may be “TMI” for others. … From an exceptionally thorough and solid analysis by the Montgomery County Planning Department, the following excerpt explains why “Middle Housing” may be “missing” in some jurisdictions. Preview — it’s the “Barbell” economics of risk-versus-return in housing development. The full report is worth reading at:
http://montgomeryplanning.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/MissingMiddleHousingStudy_9-2018.pdf
“The importance of parcel size & understanding the role of the market barbell
“Single-family home developments on smaller parcels tend to be low risk/low return investments. The perceived risk of building single-family homes is relatively low because the single-family development market is well established, the construction process is relatively predictable, and initial costs/investment requirements are lower than that of larger, more complicated development projects. That said, the revenue potential of a single-family home development is limited due to its single-use and small lot size.
“Multi-family developments on large parcels or large single-family subdivisions tend to be high-risk/high-return investments. A high-density development is riskier because it is much more complicated to build than a single-family home; there are more opportunities for market forces to interfere with long-term revenue potential, and the initial investment required for a high-density development project is much higher than that of a single-family development project. That said, the potential gains from a high-density housing development project are significantly and exponentially higher than that of a single-family home.
“As a result, developers will most often gravitate toward single- family home development projects on small parcels or multi-family development projects on large parcels as a means of either minimizing risks or maximizing gains in their proforma. This “barbell effect” is a major market driver and is the primary reason for why intermediately-sized housing projects or Missing Middle housing is pursued much less frequently than single-family or high-density development projects. Missing Middle housing is often just as risky as high-density development projects to build and maintain, yet these projects yield much lower returns over the long run, limiting the competitiveness of the Missing Middle proforma and/or making them altogether infeasible.”
Nerdletta.
The Anti-sprawl measures championed by McCall certainly don’t imply that his legacy would delight in incentivizing the wholesale redevelopment of existing low-income communities and throwing millions of tons of demolition debris to the landfill in favor of market-rate new construction. I’m pretty certain that his legacy was also a deep commitment to actively resisting and refusing to be intoxicated by the dollar signs that accompany gentrification schemes and land grabs.
Painting the present with the broad strokes of the past is tricky business, even more worrisome when promoting increasing the speculative value of the land underneath the homes of low-income renters without any anti-displacement countermeasures on the table.
I proffer that McCall would be rolling over in his grave at the knowledge that 1000 Friends is now being funded by Blackstone partner and Trump Victory Fund billionaire financier Clyde Holland.
I’m just going to leave these here:
“The interests of Oregon for today and in the future must be protected from the grasping wastrels of the land. We must respect another truism – that unlimited and unregulated growth leads inexorably to a lowered quality of life.”
“Oregon is demure and lovely, and it ought to play a little hard to get. And I think you’ll be just as sick as I am if you find it is nothing but a hungry hussy, throwing herself at every stinking smokestack that’s offered.”
Michael Andersen
What anti-displacement countermeasures would you propose, Nerdletta?
Robert B. Bernstein
..stumbled by here..basic rule..so long as there are people with bigger bucks than you wanting to live here, they will get the house and the house will be priced to the highest level developers can sell at….quit pimping Portland and it’s neighborhoods..
Michael Andersen
The exception being if those people instead find a nice new house to live in that didn’t previously exist.