Search Results
-
Nine Reasons to End Exclusionary Zoning
Most North American cities have outlawed everything except stand-alone houses on large lots on three-quarters or more of their residential land. These zoning rules shut out all but the wealthy in two ways: they quash the number of homes allowed, and they mandate that the few homes which can be built are expensive. Efforts to revoke exclusionary zoning laws have been gaining momentum at the local, state, and federal levels....Read more » -
The Case for Retiring Northwest Oil Refineries
-
Five Lessons from California’s Big Zoning Reform
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 Times this week when they asked for Sightline’s take on California’s proposed state-level legalization of duplexes and lot splits on most low-density residential lots. Cities...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 » -
Do We Already Have the Money for a Guaranteed Income?
In a moment when his country seemed awash in both progress and mounting peril, Martin Luther King Jr. embraced one of the world’s oldest policy ideas. It was January 1967. Leaders of the Civil Rights Movement were navigating new political schisms and a backlash from some working-class white voters in the 1966 midterm elections. King, his wife, Coretta Scott King, and two employees flew to a small town on the...Read more » -
Racial Bias in North Carolina’s Absentee Ballot Witness Requirement
Some counties overcome the cumbersome North Carolina absentee ballot witness requirement for with voter education. Others don’t.Read more » -
The Presidency Could Hang on North Carolina’s Absentee Cure Process
If rejection rates hold steady in North Carolina, the Electoral College–and the presidency–could hang on the state’s absentee cure process.Read more » -
Cover Crops: Let’s Pay Farmers to Protect Our Water
Across the United States, nearly six million people drink from water systems with elevated nitrate levels, a number which does not include households on private well water, for which there is no consistent testing standard. Latino residents living in rural areas disproportionately bear the exposure to this toxic discharge. Cover crops interrupt the pollution pathway, transforming the typically slick sheets of bare winter fields into obstacle courses that slow the water’s...Read more » -
Things I Hope Never Come Back After the Pandemic: #4. Cheap Beef
Will cheap beef go the way of handshakes and junk mail, among the COVID-19 losses to celebrate rather than mourn? The pandemic is knocking this climate-killing food down a notch.Read more » -
A Federal One-Two Punch to Protect Renters—Pandemic and Beyond
Together, these two strategies can turn around the coronavirus housing emergency, and set the course for long-term housing abundance and affordability.Read more »
