How updating a few musty housing laws can promote the smart, affordable housing options we need across fast-growing Northwest towns and cities.
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Affordable housing is lacking across the Northwest, with housing policy here effectively excluding from the market many lower-cost options for low-income families and individuals. A raft of outdated laws bans the types of residential arrangements that once housed most of the North American working class and prohibits modest home options near jobs, transit, schools, and neighborhood centers—from mother-in-law apartments and triplexes to rooms that were safe, comfortable, and convenient but small and basic.
As a result, families may scrimp on food or heat to be sure they can pay rent each month; they may opt for black-market housing; or they may even go homeless. Everyone deserves a clean, safe place to live; but beyond safety regulations, the floor plans mandated by current housing rules aren’t affordable for everyone. In this series, Sightline researchers explore the key laws that prevent smart, affordable housing arrangements of the past from getting to market today, and look to a Northwest revival of inexpensive housing options.
This article is part of the series Legalizing Inexpensive Housing Takeaways The author’s time living on the housing margins has opened his eyes to new ways to live imperfectly but under his own control. Housing policymakers could better address the needs of the unhoused by learning from what many of them do already, when allowed. … Read more
Find audio versions of Sightline articles on any of your favorite podcast platforms, including Spotify, Google, and Apple. This article is part of the series Legalizing Inexpensive Housing UPDATE 2/27/23: An amended bill, which narrowed the reform to ¼ mile around transit stations, passed out of the House Local Government Committee by a 4-3 vote. … Read more
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text][takeaway_box takeaways='{“0”:{“text”:”Our housing policies rightly respect the need for stability, but they neglect mobility. In fact, in many ways they ban it. “},”1”:{“text”:”Homes on wheels can be radically inexpensive. Last year, Portland and Oakland re-legalized living in them. “},”2”:{“text”:”The author, who has no permanent home of his own, urges Cascadians not to neglect them in … Read more
This article is part of the series Legalizing Inexpensive Housing How do people feel about politicians who vote to allow more homes to exist? If you were to ask the newsroom at KUOW, the Seattle-based NPR affiliate, apparently they’d call it undisputed empirical fact that it’s unpopular to scale back widespread bans on “missing middle … Read more
Boosting backyard and basement homes—accessory dwellings or ADUs—does two good things to rein in home prices in Washington state communities: it increases the number of homes available, and those additional homes are more affordable than a typical stand-alone house.
This article is part of the series Legalizing Inexpensive Housing 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 … Read more
This article is part of the series Legalizing Inexpensive Housing In 2019, Oregon passed a first-of-its-kind state law that ordered larger cities and the Portland metro area to rapidly legalize duplexes on all residential lots and fourplexes, triplexes, townhomes, and cottage clusters on more than half of lots. This is a short, reported history of … Read more
This article is part of the series Legalizing Inexpensive Housing 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 … Read more
This article is part of the series Legalizing Inexpensive Housing 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 … Read more
This article is part of the series Legalizing Inexpensive Housing After a seven-year campaign, Portland on Sunday formally lifted a series of 97-year-old bans on seven different types of homes. Becoming legal today on the vast majority of residential lots in Portland: a duplex, a triplex, a fourplex, a mixed-income or below-market sixplex, a large … Read more
