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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 » -
Where Do You Go to Find Community?
Why do we love cities? For all their stresses and shortcomings, cities hold unfathomable promise for intersecting lives and friendships, experiences and cultures. In cities—big and small—we find our communities! At their best, cities are beacons of innovation and progress. But even our most prosperous cities are far from urban utopias. Economic inequality and residential segregation run rampant, excluding poor people and communities of color from sharing in the prosperity...Read more » -
End Apartment Bans to Save the Planet, UN Climate Report Says
Local bans on attached homes in cities are driving up energy use and helping cook the climate, the United Nations Environment Program wrote in a report published Tuesday. “In some locations, spatial planning prevents the construction of multifamily residences and locks in suburban forms at high social and environmental costs,” the report’s authors wrote. They suggest a 20 percent cut to average floor area per person by 2050. UN institutions...Read more »