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How to Tear Down the Invisible Walls in Your City’s Zoning Code
This is a sidebar to Sightline’s history of the passage of Portland’s residential infill project. In August 2021, Oregon’s largest city legalized duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes and mixed-income sixplexes on the vast majority of residential lots for the first time since 1959, while making on-site parking spaces optional citywide for the first time since 1973. The history was created in partnership with its first publisher, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy....Read more » -
The Eight Deaths of Portland’s Residential Infill Project
In 2021, Portland became the largest modern U.S. city to end so-called “single-family zoning.” What follows here is a history of how the residential infill project could have died but didn’t. This history was developed in partnership with Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. See also our 10 tips for zoning reformers, which serve as a short summary of the narrative below. It was January 2020. One of Oregon’s most respected...Read more » -
States Must Reform Zoning Because No City Can End a Shortage Alone
After decades of impasse in a thousand city halls, housing advocates are looking to statehouses for zoning reform. Many now think state, provincial, and even federal reforms may pass more easily than local ones. I don’t think that’s because the politicians who lead larger governments are more likely than local officials to want the zoning reform desperately needed by our society, economy, and planet. It’s because larger-scale zoning reforms might...Read more » -
A New Idea for State-Led Upzoning: Letting Cities Opt Out
As more and more states look for politically feasible ways to legalize housing amid an alarming new spike in home prices, new ideas keep emerging. This year, Washington state introduced one such concept: local fiscal incentives. Three state bills there would have given cities extra chunks of tax money for legalizing greener, less expensive housing options like ADUs, fourplexes and apartments near transit. Though they didn’t pass, they did win...Read more » -
Good Transit Is Pointless When People Can’t Live Near It
If the government pays hundreds of millions of dollars to help build and operate a high-quality transit line, people should generally be allowed to live near it if they want to. You’d think this would be uncontroversial. Especially among people who run public transit agencies. Unfortunately, some transit leaders here in Oregon seem to be distracted by the exciting goal of building high-capacity bus and rail lines, or at least...Read more » -
Zoning Reformer in Chief
It’s happening. Five years after the Obama White House released a memo endorsing local zoning reforms as a way to fight displacement and boost the economy, three years after the Trump White House did essentially the same, and one year after Donald Trump himself took an interest in the issue long enough to flip-flop on it and spend several ill-fated weeks making the case for neighborhood segregation, US President Joseph...Read more » -
YIMBYism Means Legalizing Very Cheap Homes, Too
The recipe for solving a housing crisis has various ingredients. But one essential ingredient is simple: Housing has to be legal. The modern urban pro-housing movement—the YIMBY movement, as it’s sometimes known—spends a lot of effort trying to lift our cities’ widespread bans on mid-cost homes like fourplexes, backyard cottages, and apartments. This movement is increasingly successful, which is great. Legalizing homes of all shapes and sizes in all neighborhoods...Read more » -
Anchorage Needs More Moderately Priced Homes: Let’s Start With ADUs
In Anchorage, there are lots of rules about what you can do with buildings on your private property. Most make sense, like mandating earthquake-resistant structures and preventing properties from becoming junkyards. But the city’s zoning code still contains regulations that can do more harm than good by deterring homebuilding and limiting housing choices. Take regulations that impose limits on building an accessory dwelling unit (ADU), also known as a garden...Read more » -
Two Paths Emerge for Washington to Legalize More Granny Flats
Washington State lawmakers could clear a path in neighborhoods across the state for more granny flats and basement apartments.Read more » -
UPDATED: State Incentives for Local Abundant Housing Policy
Washington state legislators eye three new state-wide strategies to incentivize cities to adopt local abundant housing rules and tackle the state’s affordability crisis by addressing the home shortage.Read more »