Search Results
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What Do Georgia’s Senate Runoffs Mean for Federal Action on Housing?
Update January 6, 2021: Victories for Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in yesterday’s Georgia Senate runoff election will hand over control of the US Senate to Democrats in the next Congress. It’s a critical step toward realizing President-elect Joe Biden’s exemplary housing proposals. However, Senate Republicans can obstruct federal action on housing with the filibuster. To boost funding for Section 8 vouchers or the Housing Trust Fund, Democrats can bypass...Read more » -
Oregon Just Ended Excessive Parking Mandates On Most Urban Lots
The movement to prioritize housing for people over storage for cars has reached a new high point in the Pacific Northwest. In the first action of this kind by any US state, Oregon’s state land use board voted unanimously last week to sharply downsize dozens of local parking mandates on duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, townhomes, and cottages. Many cities have reduced or eliminated parking mandates in recent years, including Oregon’s largest...Read more » -
Biden-Harris Win Opens Path to Federal Action on Housing
Biden wins! Good news is the Biden-Harris ticket has a great plan for federal action on housing. Bad news is continued obstructionism in a Republican-controlled Senate will stall affordability and housing security for Americans.Read more » -
A Green Voter’s Guide to Cascadia’s 2020 Election Results
Perhaps you’ve heard that the United States held an election recently. As the dust clears and local, state, and federal ballots are counted, Sightline’s team of researchers is using this page to tell you how the results matter to sustainability issues here in the Pacific Northwest. Seattle bus service was on the ballot; it won. Housing reform in Portland got a mixed result at city council. Montana took a rightward...Read more » -
Welcome: Green Urbanism and Abundant, Affordable Housing
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The Path to Good Local Zoning Reform is State and Federal Zoning Reform
Should pro-housing advocates focus on making bad cities less bad, or on making good cities better? Here in Cascadia, we’ve just seen some interesting evidence that relatively modest state laws actually do both. That’s because state (and federal) laws that force anti-housing cities to welcome a bit more housing can also open up useful new debates in pro-housing cities. The trick is to override the universal bias toward the status...Read more » -
Good News! Vancouver’s Six-Homes-per-Lot Proposal Could Work
Can Vancouver BC’s six-homes-per-lot plan work? Re-legalizing smallplexes takes on expensive housing, segregation, and climate chaos. Ironically, sky-high land values make it possible to cap the price of two homes in a smallplex—if it’s built big enough.Read more » -
California’s Home Shortage is Making Everyone Else’s Worse
California’s repeated failure to strike down local bans on close-in housing has an incalculable number of victims. But 13 million of them live in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Year after year, through booms and busts, California sends a one-way jet stream of people moving north to Cascadia. If comparable numbers of people were instead able to flow in both directions, those Northwest states would find it much easier to build...Read more » -
Portland just passed the best low-density zoning reform in US history
Portland’s city council set a new bar for North American housing reform Wednesday by legalizing up to four homes on almost any residential lot. Portland’s new rules will also offer a “deeper affordability” option: four to six homes on any lot if at least half are available to low-income Portlanders at regulated, affordable prices. The measure will make it viable for nonprofits to intersperse below-market housing anywhere in the city...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 »