A string of mistakes in one city shows how easily local rules can turn arbitrary and destructive.

The trouble all started at a city council meeting in August 2022.

An affordable housing developer was unveiling a potential project.

It was happening in Washougal, a town of about 17,000 in housing-strapped southwest Washington. In the chain of events that followed, the city lost roughly 40 future affordable homes and may have accidentally blocked any future downtown apartments from being built under the new code.

"It will make future projects incredibly difficult, if not impossible,"

said Matt Edlen, whose firm is in the midst of constructing a six-story building that will add 46 new homes to Main Street. It'll be one of the last projects built under the old rules.

"Anything like that just stops."

Local zoning codes, the thick binders of monospaced text that shape how modern cities are allowed to evolve, are often thought to be carefully crafted regulations that are uniquely tailored to each town's history and needs.

But Washougal's story shows what often happens instead. Key regulations that limit how many homes can be built on any given lot are simply copy-pasted from one place to the next based off of what feels right, with scant research into the origins of those numbers or how they fit into the local context.

When this mood board regulating new construction becomes too prescriptive, one false move by people with the best intentions can do dire economic damage. The rules can also become so complicated that even a trained city planner can easily misinterpret them. That's exactly what happened in Washougal.

HOW A PARKING MANDATE IS BORN

"Council really liked the project, but the question of parking came up during part of that presentation,"

recounted Mitch Kneipp, Washougal's community development director. It was still early in the process, and the Vancouver Housing Authority (VHA) hadn't yet finalized exactly how many subsidized homes or parking spaces it planned to build.

But if it went forward with 80 new homes, council members learned, Washougal zoning code required only 40 off-street parking spaces. Nobody had ever built to that ratio. Since Washougal had set that parking minimum in 2006, every downtown developer had voluntarily provided at least one space for every home. But if someone actually were to build to that minimum allowed ratio of 0.5 spaces per home,

"that's going to create a demand for parking that is - in their opinion, not acceptable for the city,"

described Kneipp. The council tasked Kneipp with increasing the parking requirements.

"So that's what we did."

Washougal, like most cities, started by looking at its neighbors around the county. Ridgefield mandated at least 1 parking space per home. Battle Ground required 1.5, like Washougal did in areas outside of its downtown core. Out of the other cities in Clark County, only the much larger city of Vancouver, Washington, gave more flexibility over parking spaces.

Not wanting to be an outlier, in August 2023 the Washougal city council voted to increase residential parking mandates in its downtown to match those of neighboring Camas: 1 space per studio, 1.5 spaces per one-bedroom, and 2 spaces for homes with two or more bedrooms. Unfortunately, Washougal officials had failed to notice a snippet of code that relaxed these mandates for multifamily housing projects - provisions that were critical to making apartments financially feasible.

PARKING FLEXIBILITY WAS CRITICAL FOR NEW HOUSING IN DOWNTOWN CAMAS

It's easy to see why any town would want to copy what Camas is doing. The former mill town of 27,000 has reinvented itself in recent decades, attracting new businesses and the highly paid workers that come with them. This October, Camas was selected as one of eight semi-finalists for the national Great American Main Street award, recognizing the Downtown Camas Association for its work reducing commercial vacancy rates from 60 percent in 2009 to less than 1 perc...