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Collection: Making Sustainability Legal

Bring Back the Boarding House

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Tiny backyard cottages, micro-apartments, the revival of boarding houses and in-law dwellings—Cascadia is on the bleeding edge of these emerging trends, which reintroduce housing forms of a century ago.

Today, Sightline is releasing a short book on the gigantic opportunities cities have to make urban living quarters greener, cheaper, and more abundant by eliminating a few municipal rules.

Hidden in city regulations are a set of simple but powerful barriers to affordable housing for all. These rules criminalize history’s answers to affordable dwellings: the boarding or rooming house, the roommate, the in-law apartment and the backyard cottage. In effect, cities have banned what used to be the bottom end of the private housing market.

Unlocking Home: Three Keys to Affordable Community details how to revive inexpensive housing in walkable neighborhoods—at no cost to the public—by striking a few lines of municipal law.

What’s in Your Garage?

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One car and lots of stuff in a two-car garage.
Alan's single-family home with single-car garage.
Photo by Alan Durning.

I have not owned a car in seven years, but I do own a garage. It’s pictured above. In fact, I am legally required to own an off-street parking space; that’s written in the land-use code for my city, Seattle, as for virtually every city. The driveway that leads to my garage, meanwhile, eliminates almost exactly one parking space from my street. Parking in front of a driveway is illegal, and a regular curb cut is almost exactly the size of a parking space, as illustrated below.

Driveway curb cut blocking street parking space.
Photo by Alan Durning.

The net effect—one mandatory off-street parking space plus one car-less household—is a one-space reduction of parking supply on my block. Repeat: my obligatory driveway and garage deprive the universe of one on-street slot. This is ironic, but it’s only the tip of the irony iceberg where car-storage is concerned.

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WSJ on Vancouver’s add-on dwellings

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Today’s Wall Street Journal includes a front-page feature on Vancouver, BC’s secondary suites and laneway houses and a video interview with Conor Dougherty, the author. The piece includes a nice Sightline quote; we were a major source for it. (Unfortunately, the full article is behind a pay wall.) To get a sense of how America … Read more

Natural Hair Care Act Passes in Oregon

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Hair braiding

In a win for fairness and common sense, the state of Oregon will no longer subject people who practice African-style hair braiding (and other forms of natural hair care) to a bizarrely burdensome licensing process that’s more lengthy than what’s required for someone to fight fires or give lifesaving medical care in ambulances.

As Sightline first highlighted in our Making Sustainability Legal series, Oregon State law previously required anyone who wished to braid, cornrow, twist, lace, wrap, or weave extensions or decorative elements into hair to undergo 1500 hours of cosmetology coursework and training (compared to 130 hours to become an Emergency Medical Technician and a minimum of 385 hours to become a firefighter in some states). This was particularly unhelpful since natural hair care practitioners don’t cut, color, perm, or straighten hair, the basic skills taught in cosmetology school.

The regulations were arguably racist, since they prevented hair braiders—most of whom are African immigrants or African-American women—from earning a living without undergoing largely irrelevant training that can cost up to $17,000.

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The End of Mandatory White Pages

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It’s been almost two years since we first wrote about the minor plague of the white pages. Customers don’t use them and phone companies don’t want to distribute them. Although almost no one wanted more printed white pages, an outdated law in Washington required their delivery every fifteen months, like it or not.

It was a colossal waste, a perfect example of sustainability made illegal. It was absurd.

Last week, however, state regulators finally agreed to change the law.

No longer will state residents hear the annoying thud of unwanted white pages, and no longer will state law mandate pointless waste. Under the new regulations, phone companies are free to not deliver physical phone books. Since the telecoms already don’t want to print and deliver them in metropolitan areas, they won’t. In rural areas, where white and yellow page directories are typically co-bound and much slimmer, the phone companies will likely continue to deliver phone books, but they are now required to provide an “opt-out” mechanism for customers who want to avoid automatic delivery. Washington will now join at least 18 other states where white pages directories are not delivered by legal mandate.

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Neighborhood Safe Streets Passes in WA (Finally)

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It’s been nearly two years since we started getting exercised about this: It shouldn’t take expensive engineering studies for city hall to lower speed limits. Then we made the argument again. And again. Last week, Washington State relented, becoming one of the last in the Northwest to remove what had been a serious roadblock for cities and towns that sought to calm traffic, make neighborhoods safer, and reduce speed limits on residential and business non-arterial streets.

It’s a big win for anyone who finds themselves (as I have) standing in the middle of a narrow street, daring the driver (who is too important or in too much of a hurry to wait at the light one block away) to run you over as you attempt to fish a kid’s lunchbox from the back seat of your own parked car.

The Neighborhood Safe Streets Bill (HB 1045) passed the state Senate in the last minute before a cutoff deadline that would have killed it for the third year in a row. It required a special order of business led by Sen. Andy Billig (D-Spokane) to bring the vote to the floor. The bill simply allows cities to reduce speed limits to 20 mph on side streets without having to do expensive traffic engineering studies. This frees up money and capacity to make real safety improvements that reduce speeding, cut-through traffic, and possibly the chances that a Seattle mom, a 10-day old baby and grandparents would be mowed down in afternoon traffic.

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What Corporate Free Speech Means for Yellow Pages in Seattle

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There was disappointing news a couple of months ago on Seattle residents’ right to say no to yellow pages directories. As reported in the Seattle Times, the city settled a lawsuit over an enormously popular law that created an “opt-out” system for phone books.

While the newspaper headline focused on the cost of the settlement, the real story is that so many people opted out in 2011. The first year the ordinance was in effect, phone book deliveries were down by 1 million from the prior year.

People were happy to have a choice, to finally be able to say “no thanks” to phone books they didn’t want, rather than tossing them into their recycling bins. By fining directory companies who failed to comply, the city’s law made choice a reality. That’s why it’s frustrating that the city gave up the fight.

When phone book companies sued Seattle over the ordinance, the US District Court sided with the city, saying government had a legitimate interest in reducing waste and preventing unwanted books from being deposited on private property. The court reasoned that yellow pages are “commercial speech,” which has less protection under the First Amendment than other forms of speech. Its decision stated, “There is no fundamental right to deliver yellow pages directories to the doorsteps of residents who do not want them.”

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The Biggest Blind Spot of Urban Greens?

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I have written in recent months about some of the land-use rules that make inexpensive housing uncommon or illegal: roommate caps, accessory dwelling unit rules, minimum apartment sizes and other rooming-house restrictions. What I haven’t discussed is the towering central obstacle to inexpensive housing—the elephant in the living room.

Fortunately, Slate blogger Matt Yglesias has done the job well. His concise e-book The Rent Is Too Damn High explains how tight land-use restrictions on urban density are a major ill of the contemporary United States. Enforced single-family and other low-rise neighborhoods in close-in urban zones jacks up real-estate prices, hobbles service economies’ prosperity, and turbocharges sprawl, which multiplies driving and oil consumption and carbon pollution.

ADUs and Don’ts

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Last time, we reviewed accessory dwelling units’ (ADUs’) paucity and slow pace of development in most of the Northwest outside of Vancouver, BC. This time: the constraints that bind them.

Why are accessory apartments and cottages so rare? One reason, no doubt, is that many homeowners do not want to host an ADU. But a more pernicious reason is that winning approval to rent out an ADU in most cities requires running a harrowing gauntlet of rules. For every decision that Vancouver, BC, has made to welcome secondary suites and laneway houses, other cities have made the opposite decision.

To map the restrictions on ADUs, Sightline assembled a table of ADU rules called The ADU Gauntlet that you can download and review here (or by clicking below).

The ADU Gauntlet - Scores for Cascadian Cities. Click here for full table.
ADU Gauntlet – Scores for Cascadian Cities. Click here for full table.

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Nothing ADU-ing

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Last time, we defined accessory dwelling units and told their story — how they spread so far and wide in Vancouver, BC. This time: their near-absence elsewhere in Cascadia.

Most other Cascadian cities appear to trail behind Vancouver, BC, in the ADU leagues. In British Columbia, Abbotsford, Kelowna and other cities have embraced ADUs with at least a portion of Vancouver’s conviction. The mid-sized city of New Westminster stands out in particular: it already had more than 2,400 ADUs a decade ago.

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