In 2024 Alaska Democrats were understandably incensed when Eric Hafner, a convict who had never lived in their state, ran for Alaska's US House seat as a Democrat. State and federal law allowed Hafner to seek the office, and state law let him register with the party he preferred.

The state Democratic Party, for its part, could do nothing. It had no way to disavow him or indicate on the ballot its endorsement of incumbent Representative Mary Peltola. Come election day, Hafner got more than 3,500 first-choice votes from Alaskans who saw his name and party on the ballot but presumably had no idea that if elected, he would represent them from a New York prison where he was serving 20 years.

Two years earlier, the state Republican Party was the one fuming. Sarah Palin and Nick Begich III, registered Republicans, both on the top-four general election ballot, were feuding on the campaign trail, refusing to cross-endorse each other as co-partisans typically do in ranked choice elections. The state GOP endorsed Begich early and never endorsed Palin. In the general election, Palin and Begich split Republican votes, as expected, pushing the election to Mary Peltola, who became the first Democrat in the seat in 49 years. (Two years later, with Palin out of the picture and New York prisoner Hafner siphoning off Democratic votes from Peltola, Begich reclaimed the post for the GOP.)

Now both Republicans and Democrats in Alaska have a beef with a minor flaw in their state's ballot rules that lets candidates claim a party but doesn't let parties claim candidates. The same flaw fusses California and Washington, the two other states that use unified all-candidate primaries.

In short, any candidate in these three states can claim any party, potentially confusing voters as to who really represents their values. And political parties can do nothing to stop them.

The fix to this problem in all three states is easy: let parties indicate their endorsement of a candidate with two words: "[Democratic or Republican] Nominee."

North Americans hate political parties (often including their own), and anti-party sentiment has been prevalent since the Progressive movement more than a hundred years ago. But political scientists concur that for all their disrepute, political parties are the essential intermediaries of democracies everywhere. They aggregate like-minded voters, assemble coalitions that can win, mediate disputes among coalition factions, articulate visions and platforms, and serve as shorthand identifiers on the ballot for time-strapped voters. Indeed, party identification is so valuable that in its absence, many voters lean on unreliable markers such as gender or surname to try to guess which right candidate is right for them.

Giving parties space to claim their nominees on ballots in Alaska, California, or Washington would not change the states' election system in fundamental ways, but it would provide voters with more reliable information.

Research by political scientist Cheryl Boudreau and her colleagues at the University of California, Davis, shows that informing voters of candidates' party endorsements helps them correctly identify candidates whom they agree with. In an experiment with voters in a nonpartisan mayoral election in which political parties had made endorsements, informing voters of candidates' party endorsements let voters find their best-matched candidate 59 percent of the time, compared to 53 percent of the time when they don't know the parties' endorsements. And that improvement came not with putting the party labels on the ballot but with a mailing sent to voters. A six-point gain in voters' alignment is modest, but in close races it could be decisive.

Alaska already sends more information to voters than most states do. The state's Division of Elections prints and mails official voters' guides to all. These guides feature candidates' statements and often include the endorsements they have won from party organizations and w...

A surplus of candidates can ruin any political campaign, and it's happened twice in recent groundbreaking elections in Cascadia. Fortunately, neighboring jurisdictions have demonstrated the solution to this problem: raise filing fees.

Alaska and Portland each recently debuted a new, much-anticipated ranked choice voting method. In both places, the trouble was that putting your name on the ballot was so easy (costing less than a tank of gas for a Ford F-150) that the elections were flooded with candidates.

The result, in both Alaska and Portland, was an inaugural campaign that tried voters' patience with teeming lists of candidates, many of them narcissistic dreamers with no intention of campaigning, no support from key constituencies, and no chance of winning.

One fix to this surplus is simple: charge candidates a filing fee large enough to dissuade dilettantes without deterring contenders. Montana, Alaska's closest cousin among the states, and Portland's urban counterparts in neighboring Washington charge filing fees more than ten times as high. That's why these Cascadian jurisdictions do not attract candidates like fishing derbies draw anglers.

Alaska's 2022 inaugural election was run under its top-four law. In top-four, voters choose four finalists in a primary election and then pick among them in a ranked choice voting general election. Voters for an open US House seat confronted a ballot overloaded with 48 candidates (pictured on the website). The state's new election plan was supposed to make things better; instead, voters got a ballot as daunting as The Cheesecake Factory's menu.

This race was a special election for the state's sole US House seat, unexpectedly vacated by the death of Rep. Don Young after 49 years in office. The absence of an incumbent and the novelty of the new rules recruited a bumper crop of candidates, and the nominal filing fee of just $100 did nothing to separate the chaff from the grain. For one Benjamin Franklin, you could get your name on every ballot and in every voters' guide in the state and - who knows? - maybe your candidacy would catch fire.

However, most did not catch even a spark, and few candidates raised money or ran actual campaigns. Just one-fifth of candidates cracked 2 percent of the vote. At the bottom of the pack, some 19 candidates won fewer than 100 votes each.

The same pattern emerged in Portland. The city 's 2024 election was the inaugural run of its new election system, which uses a single round of ranked choice voting for all races. Some 118 candidates surged into municipal contests. City Council Districts 3 and 4 each had 30 candidates for their three seats. (See sample ballots in the online version of this article.) Such races make voting a morass and campaigning a Black Friday crowd scene. At some debates, each candidate got speaking time measured in seconds.

In the end, as in Alaska, voters ignored most candidates. In District 4, for example, only 11 voters picked L Christopher Regis. He had enough support to field a kickball team in one of Portland's adult co-ed leagues but fell 11,251 votes short of winning a council seat. Regis was not alone. In Districts 3 and 4 combined, only a quarter of candidates crossed the 2 percent threshold. Most of the also-rans did not actually run. They just made the process of voting feel like scrolling through the dross on Netflix.

The sudden opening of every elected office in the city, all at the same time, brought the crush of candidates. Empty chairs attract aspirants. What's more, excitement about the new system itself drew participation, making more candidates believe they could compete. But the fact that securing a spot on the ballot cost nothing but $75 for council or $100 for mayor amplified the gold rush spirit.

Low filing fees for open seats elsewhere have also attracted swollen fields of candidates. In 2003, for example, a special election recalled the sitting governor of California, Gray Davis, and voters' plurality winne...

When six-term US Senator Patty Murray is up for reelection in 2028, the Washington state leader will be 78 years old. If she does not retire on her own, she may well find herself challenged by younger Democrats, as is now happening to 79-year-old Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts. Gerontocracy is out of vogue among Democrats; many blame their party's loss of the presidency on 81-year-old Joe Biden's delay in stepping aside.

If Murray forgoes the race, expect a stampede of eager Democrats hoping to succeed her. Her seat has not been vacant since 1992, so every ambitious politician in the Evergreen State will be eyeing it. Indeed, during her 2022 run for reelection, when no other big-name Democrats entered the race, Murray still drew 17 primary challengers. In Alaska that same year, when a US House seat opened for the first time in decades upon the death of Rep. Don Young, who held the office for 49 years, some 48 candidates threw their hats into the ring. Imagine how many will file if (and when) Murray steps aside. The line of Democratic contenders could resemble the throngs of hikers on the trail to Camp Muir on a summer weekend. In other words, it will practically be a mob scene.

Unlike in Alaska's pioneering election system, though, platoons of candidates can be a problem in Washington - a big problem. That's because Washington's unusual top-two elections are haunted by a mathematical anomaly that could hand Murray's seat to a Republican, even in deep-blue Washington.

Fortunately there are fixes, and one of them is about to debut in Seattle: unaltered top-two in general elections combined with a targeted occasional use of ranked choice voting in certain overcrowded primary elections. (For brevity, we'll call it "ranked top-two.") If the state legislature adopts this Seattle plan in 2026, it could be up and running statewide in time for the August 2028 US Senate primary.

To understand ranked top-two, you need to understand the anomaly, in which top-two misfires and elects a less-popular candidate over a more-popular one. The easiest way to understand it is through the 2024 election of Dave Upthegrove, a veteran Democrat, to the state's public lands commissioner post.

In that race, Upthegrove came within a hair's breadth of losing the primary, in which two Republicans and five Democrats faced off. The five Democrats gained 57 percent of the 1.9 million votes cast, but they divided their share many ways. During most of the vote-counting process, the two Republicans led, with 22 percent for Jaime Herrera Beutler and 21 percent for Sue Kuehl Pederson.

Only when the final batch of ballots was tallied, days after the election, did Upthegrove's count exceed Pederson's - and by only 49 votes. Had he fallen short, the general election would have been between Republicans Beutler and Pederson, and one of them would be holding the office now. Instead, after clearing the primary, Upthegrove quickly consolidated Democrats' support and won the general with a five-point margin.

A similar scenario unfolded in 2016, when three Democrats split the field for state treasurer, two Republicans advanced to the general election, and the state elected one of them, Duane Davidson. What's more, Davidson, who ended up being a one-term office holder, was the only Republican in that seat in six decades.

The same thing could happen in an open US Senate race in 2028: a huge field of Democrats could hand the race to two Republicans.

The Upthegrove anomaly in top-two is specific and mathematical. It's not just that both finalists are from the same party. That's normal in districts that lean red or blue. For instance, of the nine races for open congressional seats in Washington since the advent of top-two in 2008, three of them have paired two members of the same party. Most recently, in 2020, Marilyn Strickland and Beth Doglio, both Democrats, competed for the US House seat in District 10. Indeed, such same-party runoffs are a feature of top-two, not a bug...

If you had a chance to overhaul your government, where would you begin? Last year, 38 Yukoners from every corner of the territory stepped up to answer that question in a citizens' assembly on electoral reform. Their recommendation? Upgrade the Yukon Legislative Assembly's first-past-the-post elections to ranked voting, much like Alaskans did in 2020.

Voting is already underway for a statewide plebiscite on the assembly's reform of choice. Though the vote is advisory, two of the Yukon's three major parties have committed to respecting the will of the voters if they win control of the assembly this year.

So, will the reform that let Alaskans vote their values and produced a more politically diverse and functional legislature inspire a similar change in the Yukon? Residents will know more after polls close at 8:00 p.m. on November 3.

In general elections, rather than filling in a single ballot bubble for a candidate for member of the legislative assembly (MLA) in their district, voters could rank party nominees in order of preference, starting with their first choice for MLA, then second, and so on.

If no candidate were to win a majority in the first round of tallying, officials would eliminate the lowest-performing candidate, redistributing their votes to voters' second choices.

The process would continue until a candidate won a majority, or as close to a majority as possible. (Elections Yukon has an overview on their website.)

In general elections, rather than filling in a single ballot bubble for a candidate for member of the legislative assembly (MLA) in their district, voters could rank party nominees in order of preference, starting with their first choice for MLA, then second, and so on.2

If no candidate were to win a majority in the first round of tallying, officials would eliminate the lowest-performing candidate, redistributing their votes to voters' second choices.

The process would continue until a candidate won a majority, or as close to a majority as possible. Elections Yukon has published an overview here.

In Alaska, the ranked voting upgrade has prevented "spoiled" elections, given voters more viable choices, encouraged candidates to work toward common goals, and created a cross-partisan, solutions-focused legislature. Though the Yukon's governmental structure and political makeup differ from Alaska, similar dynamics and incentives would likely carry over.

In general elections, the Yukon's single-member electoral districts are prone to the same plurality winner problem that prompted Alaskans to adopt ranked voting in the first place.

When there are more than two candidates in the running, as has been the case in 94 percent of general election assembly contests since 2000, voting blocs may fracture. If like-minded voters split their vote between two similar candidates, a conservative district can send a liberal MLA to office (or vice versa) with only plurality support - more votes than anyone else, but not reflective of majority preference. As such, voters may feel compelled to vote strategically, rather than for their favorite candidate, to avoid splitting the vote.

At its most extreme, vote-splitting can deliver one party a number of seats that is vastly out of line with what the voters wanted. Take for example the 2001 British Columbia general election. BC Liberals won 97 percent of seats in the provincial assembly with only 58 percent of the popular vote, all because the NDP and Green Party divvied up a similar voter base.

Could the same thing happen in the Yukon? To some degree, it already does; just not to the benefit of any one party. For the last three elections, MLAs who got less than 50 percent of the vote in their district won well over half of assembly seats: 12 members in the 2021 election, 17 members in 2016, and 16 in 2011.

In other words, it's possible for every riding to go the way of Kluane, where MLA Wade Istchenko has won three consecutive elections even though most voters preferred other can...

Speed matters. And to people looking for a home today, it matters a great deal whether that home is built next year, or in ten. If Cascadia's leaders really believed in speed, then they would focus more on re-legalizing small, neighborhood-size buildings with 6 to 12 homes each. But despite recent reforms, small apartment buildings remain illegal almost everywhere in Cascadian cities and across North America.

Meanwhile, advocates and leaders in the region have legalized medium-sized and large apartment buildings via transit-oriented development, which smartly co-locates new apartment homes alongside transit infrastructure. California now allows up to 9 stories next to major transit stops, Washington up to 6, and British Columbia up to 20. This is praiseworthy progress, but it's limited to larger buildings that will take many years to plan and build.

An example from our pro-housing forbearers illustrates just how long we might wait for larger projects to materialize: in 2014, 31-year-old Graham Jones spoke hopefully to Vancouver City Council and then-Mayor Gregor Robertson, pleading for more homes at the old Oakridge Mall site. Jones asked council to, quote "please consider that this project will be phased in over the next 10-15 years. It will represent current city residents, but also many who are not represented today," endquote. That was 11 years ago; Robertson is now the federal housing minister; and no one has yet moved into the Oakridge development.

The fastest way - the only fast way - to build a lot of homes is simple: re-legalize small apartment buildings, generally no taller than a mature tree, in all neighborhoods, just like they used to be. All other solutions ask today's beleaguered 31-year-olds to wait many years to see results. For politicians working within four-year electoral windows, moving fast means thinking small. It's the only way to deliver the new homes their constituents need within a single term of office.

Small apartment buildings have been all but illegal to build here in Vancouver for nearly a century. City leaders began implementing zoning restrictions in the 1920s

"largely to prevent the intrusion of apartment houses in single- or two-family areas,"

wrote Harland Bartholomew, who drew Vancouver's first zoning map. In the US, the Supreme Court justified zoning regulations in 1926, writing:

"the apartment house is a mere parasite."

As a result, much of Vancouver's planning energy has gone into transit-oriented towers, often on old industrial sites, limiting new homes to fewer centralized nodes. This political compromise has been in place locally for decades, known as The Grand Bargain: exclusively zoned land remains so, while towers on busy streets accommodate some growth, aka "high-rise density, low-scale suburbia, little in between."

The Grand Bargain promises new homes. Just not built quickly, or in the nicest places, or at the lowest cost. It's an attempted sleight of hand by civic leaders: they promise greater access to nice homes in desirable neighborhoods, but they deliver large apartment buildings, slowly, on just 10 percent of the city's land.

Large apartment buildings on busy streets are wonderful; this article was written in one. But zoning that proscribes the housing types between towers and single-detached homes leaves much of the land in our cities off-limits - and many residents or would-be residents without affordable options to call home.

The redevelopment of False Creek's north shore by Concord Pacific is Vancouver's largest and most significant example of Grand Bargain planning. It was a visionary project that reshaped the city for the better and gave Vancouver its iconic skyline. But this project also underlines how long even successful megaprojects can take to deliver the full measure of homes they promise. At the site's eastern end, fully 40 years after it broke ground, 380,000 square feet of prime, waterfront land still sit barren and undeveloped.

A similar story has played...

On September 4, 2024, Democrats across Washington State let out a collective sigh of relief. A recount of the primary election finally confirmed that one of their own, then-King County Councilor Dave Upthegrove, would appear on the November ballot. Even though Democrats had won 270,000 more votes than Republicans in the primary for Commissioner of Public Lands, Upthegrove squeaked into second place by just 49 votes.

This math story problem gone awry is a hiccup of Washington's top-two primaries, in which the two candidates with the most votes, regardless of party, square off in the general election. Democratic voters split their majority five ways, allowing two Republicans to float toward the top of the pool with a combined 43 percent of the vote. Only the narrowest of margins spared blue-leaning Washington an all-Republican ticket in the general election. (It wouldn't have been the first time.)

So do Washington's nonpartisan top-two primaries need to go? Certainly not. Two decades of research point to their overall positive impact on elections and governance. Compared with the 47 states that use partisan primaries, the top-two model has a depolarizing effect on lawmakers, gives candidates an incentive to appeal to wider audiences, and turns out a more representative electorate.

But while Washingtonians could claim for years to be leading the pack on primary reform, the top-two model has also stumbled, occasionally producing backward results and unfavorable conditions for third parties. Since 2020, Alaska's top-four primaries and ranked choice general elections have avoided top-two's tripping points while still retaining and building on its positive qualities.

Washington's not down and out by any means; with a simple top-four (or top-five) tune-up, Evergreen state voters could get the same results.

In 2004, Washington voters approved Initiative 872, which created top-two unified (or nonpartisan) primaries. In these races, all candidates appear on the ballot together and the top two vote-getters (of any party) advance to the general election. California adopted the model six years later.

Most states hold partisan primaries, which are exclusive to candidates of a given major party and tend to produce combative campaigns and extreme legislators. But reformers theorized that unifying the races - i.e., making them nonpartisan and allowing all voters to participate - would produce more moderate legislators who better represented the majority of voters.

They were right. Political polarization stabilized in the California and Washington legislatures post-reform while the problem worsened in most states with partisan primaries.

Why such a dramatic difference? For one thing, unified primaries tend to turn out more voters that better represent the overall electorate than partisan primaries, which skew older, whiter, wealthier, and, some researchers suggest, more ideologically extreme than those who show up for general elections. Because Washington's unified primary voters look more like the general voting public than most other states, candidates and lawmakers have cause to court voters from all sides (not just a narrow base) to secure one of the top two spots.

Another key element is that the top two candidates regardless of party advance out of the primary. Two Democrats or two Republicans can face off in the general election if an area skews heavily toward either party. Voters of the dominant party get more options in the general election, while voters in the political minority can sometimes "play kingmaker," putting a more moderate candidate over the top.

There's no better illustration of the dynamics top-two has introduced than Washington's Fourth Congressional District. About 60 percent of voters in the district backed Donald Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024. But Rep. Dan Newhouse, one of only two US House Republicans to vote to impeach Donald Trump and win reelection in 2022, has won out over a more conservative fellow Republican i...

In 2024, Democrat-endorsed candidates swept all seven seats on the Bend Oregon, city council - even though city elections are technically nonpartisan. Democrats certainly outnumber Republicans in Bend, but 20 percent of city voters are registered with the G.O.P., and many more are not affiliated or are registered with smaller parties. Those voters don't get their views represented in their city government.

In southern Oregon's Jackson County, the representation failure is reversed. Democratic or Independent candidates have won more than 40 percent of the vote for every county commissioner contest over the last five general elections - but Republicans consistently hold all three seats. Even though county voters are split between the two major parties, Democrats are locked out of county policy decisions.

Sightline catalogued voting methods in all Oregon counties and the 50 most populous cities (view and download the list here). The findings: Almost all of Oregon's cities and counties operate with election methods that tend to fall into the same pattern of misrepresentation. These local governments use outdated, easily gamed voting methods.

Fortunately, Oregon's constitution, unlike those of neighboring states, enables localities to choose a more effective path: proportional representation.

Nearly all local governments in Oregon - every county and all but one of the state's 50 largest cities - use one of three methods of electing councils and commissions, or some combination. While each of them can, and often does, achieve adequate representation for residents, all three are susceptible to political manipulation and to oscillation between political extremes.

Bloc voting can shift governing bodies wholesale based on whatever group turns out the most voters.

At-large positions similarly give majority viewpoints unfair sway and set up additional avenues for political gamesmanship.

And single-winner wards (or districts) put voters at the mercy of artificial lines, including gerrymandering.

Voters in more than one-third of Oregon's 50 largest cities and many more smaller towns, from Baker City to Yachats and Lake Oswego to Redmond, are familiar with bloc voting, even if they don't know it by name; it's a common method for electing multiple people to city council at once. But those candidates are not assured to reflect the diversity of public preferences.

With bloc voting, voters get the same number of votes as there are council seats up for election. In a three-seat election, for example, voters pick their three choices from the list of all candidates, and the three with the most votes win spots on the council. Some cities use bloc voting for all seats at once, while others elect some of their members in midterm years and the rest in presidential years.

Bloc voting might seem like a simple method - choose three, elect three - but the outcomes can belie what voting is supposed to achieve. Instead of electing a council that can represent everyone, whichever group or faction gets the most votes can easily win all the seats. In partisan elections, bloc voting frequently means that the party with the most votes sweeps the board; in nonpartisan elections, candidates on either side of local wedge issues (like police funding or low-income housing) might win every single position even if voters are closely divided. A small shift in voter preference can flip half or all of a local council, so residents might have to endure dramatic policy swings; a policing or housing ordinance adopted one year could be reversed the next.

Plus, when votes are close, there's no guarantee that the top vote-getters are actually the most popular candidates. Take the city of Forest Grove, for example. In 2024, six candidates ran for the three open seats in a bloc voting election, and all received between 12 and 19 percent of the vote. The third-place winner, Brian Schimmel, beat out next-place runner-up, Peter Truax, by less than half a percentage point. With few...

The Maine family needed a cheaper place for one of them to live. And quickly.

It was 2024. Synia Maine, 56, had just developed a back injury so severe that she had to retire from her career as a hairstylist a decade earlier than planned. Suddenly, she had increased medical bills and no income.

Her daughter-in-law, Ember DeVaul, recounted that they'd explored multiple options to try to keep Synia in Arizona, where she lived. Even the lowest-cost housing option, manufactured homes, required a permanent foundation and tens of thousands of dollars in permitting costs.

Ember and her husband, who live in East Portland, looked into converting their own garage into housing. Only one contractor bothered to reply to them after they stated their budget was just $100,000. The verdict? It would take $150,000 minimum to convert the garage, but the resale value of the property would only increase by half that amount. Another issue was the estimated six months to get through design and permitting.

"We didn't have time to wait,"

Ember said. Because Synia was an independent contractor, she didn't have health insurance, and she had used up her savings just to keep up with the bills.

"It's crazy how fast everything can change,"

said Ember.

Kol Peterson, the sole contractor who showed up at Ember's home, proposed another idea: a tiny home on wheels.

Unlike a traditional backyard cottage, tiny homes on wheels and recreational vehicles (RVs) are legally considered vehicles. This means that they aren't subject to the building permit process and its associated fees. All that the city requires is an additional utility connection, or access to the main house if the external dwelling doesn't have internal plumbing.

"It ended up being realistically our only option, other than her being homeless, really,"

said Ember.

Synia ended up settling on a park model RV, which is larger and designed as a long-term residence rather than for cross-country voyages. Even with upgrades like four-season insulation and a 35-year warranty on the roof, the total cost came to $104,000. Adding the water and sewer connection only cost another $5,000.

The new home is being delivered in mid-September. Though it's intended to be permanent, the fact that it could move elsewhere in the future made everyone more comfortable. Ember recalled,

"She is just so scared of being a burden. If she doesn't want to live with us anymore, she can take it somewhere else and not feel indebted to us."

Synia is lucky that her son and daughter-in-law moved to Portland five years ago. It's possibly the only city in the United States that has fully legalized living in wheeled dwellings on residential lots instead of just within commercial RV parks. In both of the Arizona cities where Synia's other daughters live, Synia's new living arrangement would be illegal, as it is in the vast majority of North American jurisdictions.

Portland first started creating a legal pathway to this low-cost shelter option in 2017, after Luz Gomez, an immigrant from Honduras, brought a spotlight to the issue alongside the Leaven Community, a faith group in NE Portland she was involved with. At the time it was estimated that at least 100 of these homes already existed illegally, and their residents could lose their homes if neighbors reported them. City Commissioner Eudaly, elected to city council as a housing advocate, directed the Bureau of Development Services to stop enforcing prohibitions against them in 2017. Four years later, Portland passed an ordinance fully legalizing tiny homes on wheels and RVs as permanent housing options on residential lots with an existing home.

Because so little paperwork is required, there is no official count of how many Portlanders live in homes on wheels. But it's likely more common than people realize. Peterson, the contractor who worked on Synia's project, counted more tiny homes on wheels and occupied RVs in his neighborhood than traditional ADUs on foundations back in 2020. In other ...

Meeting Cascadia's climate goals will require millions of households to stop burning fossil fuels for warmth. In Oregon and Washington, buildings emit more pollution than any other sector besides transportation. (The building sector is the third highest emitting in British Columbia and Idaho, and fifth in Montana.)

Heat pumps powered by renewable electricity are what the International Energy Agency calls the "proven technology of choice to decarbonize heating," and several Cascadian jurisdictions are working hard to expand access to the technology. Oregon, for example, set itself a goal of heat pumps accounting for 65 percent of new residential heating, cooling, and water heating equipment sales by 2030. British Columbia resolved for all new space and water heating equipment sales and installations to be at least 100 percent efficient by 2030, a standard that favors heat pumps, which can exceed this threshold. Heat pumps have now outsold gas furnaces and central air conditioners for two consecutive years in Cascadia; nearly three heat pumps sold for every two gas furnaces in 2023.

Still, heat pumps are prohibitively expensive in upfront costs, and that fact, coupled with tightening public budgets, could threaten their rapid scale-up, especially among low-income families.

In this challenging context, leaders in Cascadia would do well to direct their limited treasuries of funds for public subsidies toward low-income households for whom heat pumps offer the biggest reductions in both utility bills and greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, policymakers can support creative funding models, such as tariffed on-bill investments and green banks, to help more households get heat pumps installed. They can also strengthen building codes to ensure heat pumps are installed in new homes, avoiding costly future retrofits. This multi-pronged approach stretches scarce public dollars, while still reaching families that stand to benefit most from these clean, cost-saving, and comfortable systems.

Many families, particularly those with low incomes, cannot afford heat pumps. A medium-efficiency heat pump can cost between $14,000 and $22,000 in Cascadian states. The median heat pump costs $8,200 more than installing fossil-fuel heating equipment (such as a gas boiler) and air conditioning in Oregon; in Montana, that figure is $16,200. Steep costs stem from expensive manufacturing and labor, installer shortages and inexperience, the need for electrical upgrades in some homes, and the added cost of backup heating systems where required.

Governments have stepped in to help. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) provides rebates of up to $8,000 for low-income households purchasing medium- or high-efficiency heat pumps. These rebates have so far withstood roll-back attempts by the Trump administration; Oregon and Washington have already secured hundreds of millions of federal dollars to launch their rebate programs. (Montana has paused its rebate rollout, while Idaho has provided no public timeline.) But the IRA rebates are a one-time, capped allocation, and the Trump administration eliminated tax incentives for energy-efficient home improvements in July 2025, including heat pumps.

States and provinces also subsidize heat pumps, but tight budgets have led to substantial cutbacks. Washington scaled back funding for heat pump programs from $80 million in the 2023 budget cycle to $30 million in 2025. Oregon lawmakers appropriated $25 million to heat pump rebates in 2022 and added another $4 million in 2024, but allocated no new funds in 2025. British Columbia lowered its heat pump program budget from Can$150 million in 2024 to Can$50 million in 2025. (Idaho and Montana do not offer any state-funded heat pump rebates.)

Several utilities in the region chip in heat pump rebates of their own, though amounts tend to be modest. For example, Puget Sound Energy offers $3,900 rebates to low-income households, and Idaho Power offers $500.

Crucial as they a...

Cascadia's transition to safe, healthy, gas-free homes and businesses is not moving quickly enough, and the region's gas utilities bear much of the blame.

Consider a few recent examples: In 2022 Oregon's gas utilities sued the state over its landmark Climate Protection Program, setting back implementation by at least a year. In 2023 NW Natural funded a campaign in Eugene, Oregon, to repeal the city's ban on gas hookups in new residential buildings. In 2024 Cascade Natural Gas and NW Natural supported ballot initiative 2066 to keep Washington state hooked on gas, including by restricting the state's ability to incentivize electric heat pumps in new construction. The measure may now be headed to the state supreme court, after voters narrowly approved it and then the King County Superior Court overturned it.

Allowing gas utilities to explore new climate-friendly business models such as thermal energy networks (TENs) could soften their stance on decarbonization. But here, too, momentum has been halting. An Oregon bill to establish TENs pilot projects stalled in the Joint Ways and Means committee this year.

The gas sector's slow-walk on climate progress demands more transformative ideas. One that surfaces from time to time among advocates is transferring gas utilities to public ownership. It's a common model in Cascadia for electric utilities, and one that could theoretically speed electrification by removing utilities' profit motive and making companies more accountable to the public.

What we found, though, is that publicly owned gas utilities in the United States aren't moving faster toward decarbonization than their privately owned counterparts. That's likely because they face many of the same misaligned incentives and lax climate policies as their for-profit counterparts. In much of Cascadia, too, public gas utilities (there are a few) do not serve customers that want to shut them down. That's to say nothing of the practical and financial challenges of transferring aging fossil fuel infrastructure to government ownership

The good news, though, is that both those ingredients - the policy context in which they operate and the desires of the public they serve - can change, and they don't depend on first altering gas utility ownership structure. A slew of effective policies is already at work and available to copy-paste from more climate-forward places, namely the Netherlands and Denmark. Those countries do own their gas utilities, but that's not a prerequisite when it comes to decarbonization. Rather, it's their exceptionally strong gas transition policies that can apply to any type of utility, including the investor-owned companies prevalent in Cascadia today.

The takeaway: Cascadians can spare themselves the immensely challenging campaign of trying to take over the region's investor-owned companies and instead focus on pushing the measures that are already succeeding elsewhere. Which of course means a faster path off gas and toward the cleaner, healthier homes and businesses.

Government ownership of utilities is nothing new to Cascadia. More than 110 publicly owned electric utilities dot the region, ranging from the tiny City of Rupert Electric in Idaho, with 3,200 customers, to the gargantuan HydroBC in British Columbia, which serves more than 2.2 million customers (95 percent of provincial residents). Customers of publicly owned electric utilities in the United States tend to enjoy lower rates and more reliable electricity than customers of other types of utilities, according to US Energy Information Agency data analyzed by the American Public Power Association.

For these reasons and more, community members and activists have pushed for public takeover of privately owned electric companies in the Northwest and beyond. Cascadia added two publicly owned electric utilities in the past 25 years: Jefferson County Public Utility District, which split from Puget Sound Energy (PSE) in 2008, in northwest Washington, and Hermiston En...