The city can make three critical fixes to its 20-year growth plan: Let middle housing be bigger, allow apartment buildings in more places, and legalize car-free homes everywhere.

Seattle is in the process of updating its Comprehensive Plan, its 20-year roadmap for growth. Chief among the policies it charts is, of course, housing. Seattle's chronic shortage of homes and the harm that has done to lower-income residents and communities is no secret to anyone.

Unfortunately, the draft plan falls far short of what's necessary to create a Seattle that welcomes households of all incomes. In short, it doesn't make enough room for more homes.

If adopted as proposed, more and more people will continue to be priced out of the city for decades to come. And the city will also fall further behind on goals to reduce climate pollution and sprawl.

The critical fix is straightforward: loosen zoning rules to allow more homes of all shapes and sizes. And Seattle can improve its draft Comprehensive Plan to make that happen in three key ways. (I cover them briefly in the numbered sections below, then expand on each in the rest of the article.)

1. LET MIDDLE HOUSING WITH MORE HOMES BE BIGGER

Allowing middle housing - small-scale homes like fourplexes - in places once reserved for detached houses is an imperative for creating more homes that more people can afford in lower-density neighborhoods.

The good news is that the 2023's Washington state bill HB 1110 requires Seattle to legalize middle housing in areas currently reserved for single-detached houses. Three-quarters of Seattle's residential land will be opened up to more housing, creating the potential for tens of thousands of new homes.

The bad news is that just allowing more homes per lot doesn't by itself guarantee anything will get built. That's because middle housing construction is usually not financially feasible unless zoning rules allow the buildings to add indoor space as their unit count goes up. Seattle's proposed Comprehensive Plan (Comp Plan, for short) doesn't do that, and instead would impose the same cap on buildable capacity as what currently applies to single-detached houses with accessory dwellings. This limitation would not only suppress the construction of middle housing but would also prevent any feasible projects from having family-sized homes.

The solution is to emulate Spokane's best-in-the-US middle housing zoning, which grants generous development capacity and flexibility. Or, at minimum, implement the middle housing capacity recommendations of Washington's Department of Commerce, which stipulate workable increases in capacity.

2. ALLOW LARGER APARTMENT BUILDINGS IN MORE OF THE CITY

Apartment buildings five stories and up, near job centers, transit hubs, mixed-used nodes, schools, and parks, are essential for providing the level of density that both reduces cost and adds homes at the scale needed to address Seattle's shortage. Large multifamily buildings in compact, walkable, low-carbon neighborhoods also yield the biggest dividends on reducing climate pollution and sprawl.

Seattle's draft Comp Plan proposes only a modest amount of upzoning for apartment buildings. It recommends four- to six-story buildings in 24 newly designated "neighborhood centers" confined to just an 800-foot radius, and eight stories in a new urban center at the 130th Street light rail station. Otherwise, it proposes no apartment upzones anywhere else, excepting some slivers of land currently zoned for low density in designated centers, and possibly some 1/2-block strips along arterials.

Seattle's plan could rise to the moment by allowing highrise towers in all regional centers and near all light rail stations, eight-story buildings in all urban centers, and six-story buildings near frequent transit stops and other community amenities like parks. It could also designate more and larger neighborhood centers with apartment zoning.

That may sound like a lot of change, but it's still not European-...

Adapting communities to better serve growing elderly populations also makes those places more climate-resilient. A new book charts the path to making this connection.

When climate disasters like wildfires, flooding, heat waves, or polar vortexes grip communities, they hold a sharper threat for older adults, whose numbers in the US and Canada are growing. And even beyond these more headline-grabbing events are the everyday activities that may prove more challenging for older adults to perform independently in a warmer world. In Cascadia, that might look like being able to afford air conditioning to keep cool as the summers get hotter. Or so one can close the windows against wildfire smoke to keep indoor air safer for breathing, especially for those with respiratory ailments.

Housing expert and community resilience advocate Danielle Arigoni argues in her new book that adapting our communities to better serve the needs of older adults - generally defined as those 65 and older - in fact makes our communities safer, more livable, and more climate-resilient for everyone. Climate Resilience for an Aging Nation draws on her long experience in urban planning and community development to offer a new process and framework for how towns and cities can approach both disaster recovery as well as everyday decisions about how they'll build and change.

Sightline interviewed Danielle about her findings. Her book is available from publisher Island Press and other places books are sold.

YOU'VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT AND WORKING ON THESE ISSUES FOR DECADES. WHAT PROMPTED YOU TO START WRITING THIS BOOK?

I was compelled to dive into this topic after seeing some statistics that showed older adults dying at much higher rates than the rest of the population in a slew of disasters: Hurricanes Katrina, Florence, Maria, Ian, and Ida. But also in Winter Storm Uri, the California Camp Fire, and then again in the Pacific Northwest heat waves of 2021 and 2022. In all these cases (and more), older adults represented upwards of 50 percent, two-thirds, or even 85 percent of the people who died. When you think about the fact that Katrina was nearly 20 years ago - when 70 percent of the people who died were over 65 - and that the rate of fatalities for older adults is virtually unchanged since that time, it's pretty sobering. And maddening.

I have to credit AARP for really helping me to understand the impacts of our built environment on older adults, which invariably fuels the disaster rates we see here. I am an urban planner and have worked at the intersection of housing, transportation, and infrastructure for 20-plus years - always with an eye to ensuring that it could be improved to deliver better environmental and social outcomes - but I confess that I had some blind spots about the needs of older adults and people with disabilities. My five-year tenure as Director of Livable Communities at AARP really opened my eyes and helped me recognize the connections between the climate resilience work I had done previously at EPA and HUD, and the opportunities to better align that work with the needs of older adults.

I realized that there was virtually no information out there that connected the dots between two massive trends: climate change and our rapidly aging population. My hope was that I could start to create a common understanding of those connections in ways that would compel work in both the aging and climate fields. That is the gap that I hoped to fill with this book.

HOW DO CLIMATE IMPACTS ESPECIALLY AFFECT OLDER PEOPLE IN OUR COMMUNITIES?

Climate impacts older adults in so many ways, some of which are unique to them, but many of which are shared with people with disabilities, low-income people, and disinvested communities.

For example, extreme heat impacts everyone, but for older adults it is especially deadly. 2023 was the hottest year on record on Earth so far, which of course affects everyone - but not equally. Extreme heat is now the leading cause of we...

Rules about who can live in them and where they can park were key barriers to backyard cottages.

Removing regulatory barriers to building small homes drives new construction, but it can take years to see the full impact. For example, after Seattle adopted a new zoning code removing regulatory barriers to accessory dwelling units, ADU production doubled in year two, tripled in year three, and quadrupled the original baseline in years four and five. Yet Seattle's success with ADU reform since 2019 may be outpaced by another city in Cascadia that has just unleashed a surge of permits for relatively inexpensive infill housing.

In the three-and-a-half months since its own new zoning code took effect on December 1, 2023, the City of Boise had 27 people per month apply for permits to build accessory dwelling units (ADUs) on their property - also known as backyard cottages, granny flats, or in-law apartments. That compares to a permit rate of just over 3 per month in the 12 months before the new code took effect. The rate of permit applications for ADUs under the new code is nearly nine times the rate of approvals in the year before the new code took effect.

For comparison's sake, Boise's 95 ADU permit applications since December put it on track to exceed Seattle's ADU production in 2019, even though Boise has barely a third of Seattle's population.

Some pent-up ADU projects may have waited for the new code to submit their permits, so it is still too early to estimate the full scale of the effects of the zoning changes. A year or two of permit data will allow meaningful comparisons in the actual construction of ADUs before and after the change in Boise's zoning code. But whatever the final magnitude of the increase, the recent jump in permit applications shows that the new zoning code made production of these small infill homes much more attractive for homeowners.

Byron Folwell is a Boise architect whose practice includes providing owners feasibility assessments for building ADUs on their lots. After meeting with over a hundred owners interested in adding them, Folwell believes three key changes in the new code spurred the increase in permit applications.

THE 3 CHANGES THAT UNLOCKED BOISE'S ADUS

1. Removing bans on renters

Boise's prior zoning code barred owners from renting out both the main house and the rental unit together. This rule prevented all existing landlords from adding a backyard cottage to an existing rental even though these owners had experience renting and managing rental housing. The rule also created risk for current owner-occupants who might need to leave their home for an extended period and need rental income to help cover the mortgage.

2. Removing off-street parking requirements

Under the old code, a home had to have two off-street parking spaces, which made ADUs infeasible on many of the city's smaller lots. Either there was no place to put the two parking spots, or creating them would add costs that made the project too expensive.

One of Folwell's clients had to get a special decision from the city planning director to build an ADU. While the lot had two parking spaces, one space was in front of the garage and therefore didn't count under the old rules. No special pleading would be required for this project under the new code.

3. Alignment among elected officials, planning and permitting staff, and most Boise citizens on a shared vision for infill development

The new zoning code was the result of a multi-year public process followed immediately by elections for the city council and mayor. The pro-housing forces won the day. With clear direction in the new code, planning staff are now empowered to process permits efficiently and make timely approvals.

Boise had made an initial step towards easing the barriers to ADUs in 2019 but maintained parking and residency requirements that blocked many projects. This earlier, more timid effort to embrace granny flats helped prime the market. So when those barriers fell...

Another piece of the puzzle to make housing more affordable in the province - and keep up with southern neighbors Washington and Oregon.

In 2018, University of Victoria student Emma Edwards and her six roommates were evicted from their Saanich home. Their offense? Seven of them were living together under one roof, and the local government had a legal limit of four unrelated people per house. This house had seven bedrooms and plenty of space, but the law was the law. Saanich mayor Fred Haynes explained the move at the time, saying that "Neighborhoods are concerned about the impacts on the qualities of their lives."

So these seven young women had to scramble and find new accommodations in a municipality with a minuscule 1.6 percent rental vacancy rate, in the middle of the school semester. This was, according to the mayor, all in the name of safeguarding quality of life in Saanich.

Since then, Saanich has increased the legal limit on roommates to six---progress, but too little too late for Ms. Edwards and her roommates.

Their story illustrates the need for British Columbia to follow the examples of Washington and Oregon and remove roommate caps provincewide (those states did so in 2021). As Sightline Institute has written previously, roommate caps are "tools that privileged people use to exclude from their neighborhoods people without much money, such as immigrants and students."

In November 2022, on just his fourth day in office, BC premier David Eby removed rental restrictions in condominium buildings, opening up thousands of homes to renters. In the same spirit, British Columbia can remove roommate caps province-wide. This, too, could create or preserve homes for thousands by simply allowing the use of bedrooms currently sitting empty. And it would also put an end to the cruel, discriminatory practice of evicting people just because they want to share a big house with roommates to whom they aren't legally related. The Province advanced housing policy in late 2023, permitting fourplexes Province-wide, and up to 20-storeys near transit, making it possible to build a lot more bedrooms. Simply allowing people to make full use of existing bedrooms, then, should be a no-brainer.

ROOMMATE CAPS DISCRIMINATE AGAINST NON-TRADITIONAL HOUSEHOLDS

Why did cities restrict occupancy to related people in the first place? The historical reason was a core goal of zoning: enshrining the nuclear family in law. The Bartholomew Plan, Vancouver's very first land use plan from nearly a century ago, states in its introduction, "The retention of Vancouver as a city of single family homes has always been close to the heart of those engaged in the preparation of this plan."

Banning diverse and unconventional households and setting aside vast swaths of land for conventionally defined nuclear families has long been a priority of North American land use policymakers. In 1976, in Gross Point, Michigan, for example, a rule against unrelated people living together was used to evict two gay men.

It is hardly different in British Columbia today. As in Saanich, neighbors can wield the complaint-driven process to target for eviction people like students, economically sharing a house. Same goes for a group with any characteristic that you (or your nosiest neighbor) might find objectionable. This selective enforcement of roommate caps facilitates discrimination not just based on family status, but also on whatever quality (race, age, gender, sexual orientation, political belief) any concerned neighbor might personally dislike.

BLAME THE LANDLORDS, EVICT THE TENANTS

Policymakers have offered a wide range of rationales to justify roommate caps: safety, traffic, noise, moral uprightness, neighborhood character, the prevention of crowding, and the protection of tenants from slumlords.

Protecting vulnerable tenants from unscrupulous landlords who overcrowd their rentals may sound legitimate. But scratch the surface, and this stated concern often masks the customary gr...

Lessons from the Karuk Tribe.

"The piece that is misunderstood about Indigenous cultural fire is sovereignty."

That was one of the first things Bill Tripp, director of Natural Resources and Environmental Policy for the Karuk Tribe, said to me when I interviewed him for Sightline's research series on wildfire solutions.

Each year, wildfires cost the United States tens to hundreds of billions of dollars. Policymakers are finally acknowledging what Indigenous peoples have been saying for decades: most forests need more fire, not less. Government agencies are scrambling to reverse the dominant paradigm of aggressively suppressing wildfire and its legacy of fuel-choked forests primed to burn. This includes recognizing the role of Indigenous land stewardship and extensive burning. Importantly, this shift is also a doorway to that larger issue Tripp named: sovereignty.

This article explains the relationship between cultural burning and Tribal sovereignty for the Karuk Tribe, whose homelands straddle the California-Oregon border. It describes recent wins in their struggle for others to understand and recognize their sovereignty - specifically new policy in the California Legislature and agreements with the US Forest Service that clarify who has a right to burn and where. Interviews with Tripp heavily informed the discussion below.

KARUK FIRE TRADITIONS UNDERGIRD THEIR SOVEREIGNTY

For millennia, like other Native Americans across the United States and Canada, Karuk people have used fire to tend their homelands as an abundant garden landscape. They burn to cultivate tanoaks, acorns, mushrooms, hazel, and elk habitat, to name just a few of the hundreds of species that together support Karuk ways of life. And, along with lightning-sparked ignitions, their low-intensity fires clear out understory ladder fuels that could otherwise kindle severe wildfires that could wipe out their communities.

Colonization, genocide, and ensuing assimilation as well as forest management policies, however, shifted the forest from being productive for people and wildlife to being productive for timber. For more than a century, state and federal laws essentially outlawed Indigenous burning and mandated immediate suppression of natural ignitions. Law enforcement could jail Native people caught burning. Many people still hunt, fish, and gather, but without fire, the habitats and species that are central to Karuk ways of life have significantly diminished.

Hence, even to the degree that the Tribe can make and enforce its own laws and take other actions of self-governance (legal sovereignty), repressing fire has significantly impacted their cultural sovereignty and forced many to assimilate into store-bought foods and Western culture. Karuk cultural biologist Ron Reed explained that

"without fire, the landscape changes dramatically. And in that process, the traditional foods that we need for a sustainable lifestyle become unavailable…so we're not getting the nutrition that we need. We're not getting the exercise that we need."

For food, health, and spiritual connection

Huckleberries, for example, are a first food whose phytochemicals and micronutrients may help prevent cancer and diabetes and may aid eye, heart, and cognitive health. Regular burns boost huckleberry productivity by clearing competing vegetation, opening the canopy to let in more sunlight, releasing nutrients into the soil, removing overgrown branches, and spurring the growth of new shoots. In the past, regular cycles of burning yielded bountiful harvests of two to eight gallons of berries per person per day.

But stewarding first foods and fibers yields more than nutrition and exercise; it also nourishes the spirit and community. As Reed articulated,

[Without fire,] the reason we are going back to that landscape is no longer there. So the spiritual connection to the landscape is altered significantly. …When we don't go back to the places that we are used to, accustomed to, part of our lifestyle is...

But neighboring Wyoming offers a solution.

The eastern Cascadian states of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming are about as similar as any three states can be. They are neighboring, lightly populated states in the Rocky Mountains, with major agriculture, energy, mining, and tourism industries. Among the reddest of red states, they have Republicans in every state executive office, Republican supermajorities in every legislative chamber, huge majorities for Republican presidential candidates every four years, and, with the sole exception of US Senator Jon Tester (D-Montana), Republicans in all their Congressional seats.

But on one measure of politics, the three states diverge. Montana and, especially, Idaho lag Wyoming badly in voter turnout in local elections.

The reason has little to do with voter ID laws or get-out-the-vote campaigns, with electronic voting machines or any of the other hot-button topics that fuel partisan controversy and distrust about American elections. The reason is much more prosaic: the states' election calendars.

Idaho and Montana conduct municipal elections in November of odd-numbered years, separate from state and federal elections. Wyoming lets its cities choose when to conduct their elections, and most of them do it on the same ballots they use for federal and state elections, on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November in even-numbered years. That is, on the date that voters think of as capital-E, capital-D Election Day.

Simply by consolidating elections, Wyoming dramatically boosts turnout. And the consequences include better representation by age; strengthened government accountability to mainstream voters; and saved public funds.

Consolidated elections deliver nearly double the voter turnout

Sightline gathered data from the largest cities in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, finding in each municipality the citywide race with the most votes cast in recent municipal elections. Wyoming voters cast far more ballots in their 2022 municipal elections, which coincided with state and federal elections, than did their Idaho counterparts in 2021 off-cycle elections, when little else was on the ballot. On average, the Wyoming cities listed in the figure drew 37.3 percent of voting-age citizens to the polls to vote in 2022. In Idaho, meanwhile, the comparable figure was 19.5 percent. In other words, Wyoming's turnout was almost double Idaho's, a neighboring state that is otherwise a political twin.

Just so, Wyoming's municipal voting turnout is substantially higher than Montana's. Montana's odd-year elections brought out more voters than did Idaho's, but that's because Montana voters are routinely more active, across the board. In fact, Montana ranks sixth among all US states for its presidential turnout since 1976. Given the much higher voting baseline in Montana generally, you would expect Montana's municipal turnout to be at least 6 percentage points higher than Wyoming's. That's the average gap in presidential elections between the states. Instead, Wyomingites outvoted Montanans by 4.3 points in municipal elections, averaging 37.3 percent turnout to Montanans' 33 percent. By running local elections with national ones, in other words, Wyoming closes the deficit and goes far beyond.

Another way to see the Montana gap between on-cycle and off-cycle voting is to look at the two Montana communities that vote on cycle. By law, all counties in Montana---as in 40 states---vote on-cycle, so the two Montana cities that are run by consolidated city-county governments, Anaconda (Deer Lodge County) and Butte (Silver Bow County), are natural tests of what happens with on-cycle municipal elections. The on-cycle cities boast almost twice the turnout of their off-cycle peers. Average turnout per citizen of voting age in the highest turnout municipal race in each city in the seven off-cycle Montana cities was 33 percent; turnout in the two on-cycle city/county elections was 62 percent.

Still another way to see the imm...

More than half of voters in the 2022 midterm primaries split their tickets between candidates from across the political spectrum.

In 2022, Alaska voters for the first time used nonpartisan open primaries to choose candidates for the general election. Every voter, regardless of political registration, received the same ballot. And every ballot listed every candidate in every race.

In this style of primary, voters could support a mix of Republicans, Democrats, independents, and third-party candidates, or they could vote along party lines. Our analysis of 2022 primary election data found slightly more than half of Alaska's 192,061 voters opted to split their tickets in the races for US Senate, US House, governor, and state legislative offices.

The combinations of candidates spanned the political spectrum, which was unsurprising given that Alaska has the highest percentage of independent voters in the nation. The cast vote record from the Alaska Division of Elections shows what combination of candidates each Alaska primary voter chose. From this data, we cross-referenced candidates' self-described political affiliations to determine how many Alaskans split their ticket between candidates of different parties.

One of the more popular multipartisan combos, chosen by 24,350 voters, was an independent gubernatorial candidate, a Republican for US Senate, and a Democrat for US House. Less conventional combinations also surfaced. For instance, 5,606 Alaskans voted for Republicans in the three statewide races and chose at least one Democrat to serve in the legislature.

And very small numbers of voters simultaneously supported conservative and progressive candidates whose platforms appear to have little overlap. The debut in August 2022 of nonpartisan open primaries brought voters unaffiliated with either party closer to squaring their numbers with their political clout. Lawmakers from the two major parties dominate Alaska's political scene, yet only 37 percent of registered voters in the 2022 primary belonged to the Democratic or Republican parties.

Nearly two-thirds of Alaska voters were (and continue to be) independents, a combination of nonpartisan and undeclared voters. The chance to express independent political preferences is a defining feature of Alaska's open primary system. All Alaskans, whether party-registered or not, are free to look beyond party when deciding which candidates they want to see in the general election.

ALASKA'S PRIMARY ELECTION RULES HAVE A HISTORY OF CHANGE

Since statehood, Alaska has vacillated between so-called "blanket" primaries and semi-closed primaries. From 2004-2020, the two major parties settled into a pattern for organizing their primaries. Republicans held semi-closed primaries, meaning only Republican and independent voters could participate, but not Democrats. Democrats and third parties offered a combined ballot open to all registered voters. In Alaska's 2022 nonpartisan open primaries, though, all candidates appeared on a single ballot available to all voters, regardless of party.

Allowing all voters the chance to vet all candidates in a state-funded election made sense. Voters could pick one candidate per race to advance to the general election. The top four vote-getters in each race then moved on to the ranked choice general election. The open primaries apply to races for governor, US Senate, US House, and both chambers of the Alaska legislature. They do not apply to the presidential primaries, which are funded by political parties.

Notably, 49 percent of all voters chose a Republican in at least one race and a candidate of a different party in another contest. The old Republican primary rules forced voters to choose from a menu of Republican candidates only, making such combinations impossible.

When given the chance to choose candidates freely, tens of thousands of Alaska primary voters did just that.

A MAJORITY OF ALASKA'S PRIMARY VOTERS CHOSE A MIX OF CANDIDATES FROM DIFFERENT PARTIES

Ab...

Three innovative bills carry forward the momentum of 2023 and complement its measures to legalize less expensive housing.

Washington lawmakers racked up some solid wins for housing abundance this year, passing bills to legalize co-living homes, increase parking flexibility, and revamp building codes for middle housing.

These wins overcame the challenges of both a "short session" (only two-months long) and the risk of complacency following 2023, which became known as Washington's "year of housing" in recognition of all the bills passed to help reduce the state's housing shortage.

Indeed, 2024 was not without casualties. Three bills to boost housing supply that didn't survive: HB 1245 to legalize house lot splitting, HB 2160 to allow more homes near transit, and HB 2113 to establish local accountability for housing production. And the legislature still has much work to do on the other two pillars of housing policy: stability for tenants and subsidy for below-market rate homes.

Still, in 2024, Washington achieved more on zoning reform bills than in any previous year other than 2023. And the debate and coalition building around the bills that died will create a more solid foundation for progress on them next year.

Here's a cheat sheet for the three key bills that passed, followed by sections digging into the details on each.

HB 1998 establishes a new best-in-the-US standard for statewide zoning reform to allow co-living homes, which are small apartments with shared kitchens. Co-living is a low-cost housing option requiring no public subsidy that most cities have all but regulated out of existence.

SB 6015 creates new statewide standards to give builders more flexibility in complying with local parking mandates. The first stand-alone parking bill ever passed in Washington, its reforms will make homebuilding easier and less expensive - especially for middle housing and accessory dwellings.

HB 2071 sets in motion a process to modify the residential building codes so that it can apply to the construction of middle housing projects up to six units. It's a critical cost-saving follow-up to 2023's HB 1110 that legalized middle housing.

CO-LIVING HOMES: NATURALLY AFFORDABLE, FLEXIBLE, AND COMMUNITY-FORWARD

Co-living homes are a low-cost, multifamily housing option in which each resident has a small, private room and shares with other building residents a common kitchen and other spaces. Policymakers also refer to it as single-room occupancy (SRO), congregate housing, or rooming houses. Rents in newly constructed, market-rate co-living homes in the Puget Sound region can be affordable to people earning as low as 50 percent of area median income, without any public subsidy.

Co-living was once far more common. In the 1950s, it accounted for up to 10 percent of the rental stock in some US cities. Soon after that, however, local governments began adopting restrictive zoning and other rules that increasingly banned co-living, both new and old, and its numbers plummeted.

In a first for any US state, last year Oregon passed legislation to legalize co-living homes on all residential lots in urban areas. A weakness in Oregon's bill, though, is that it doesn't apply a co-living-specific method for counting its units - i.e., counting their "sleeping units" as fractions of standard "dwelling unit" apartments that they are so as to fit well within designated residential zones.

Washington's co-living bill, HB 1998, raises the bar by establishing this better-suited unit-counting method and by establishing other guardrails to prevent cities from indirectly preventing co-living development. Here's what it does:

Requires cities and counties to allow co-living homes everywhere that they allow multifamily housing with six or more units per lot on land inside urban growth areas (the six units aligns with the middle housing bill HB 1110)

Prohibits a sleeping unit from counting as more than one-quarter of a dwelling unit for density limits

Eliminates parking ...

HB 2131, to allow thermal energy networks, unanimously passed in the 2024 legislative session. It's a win for consumers, the climate, pipeline workers, and electric grids.

The possibility of connecting your home or business to a clean heating and cooling network could be coming to your neighborhood soon.

Washington lawmakers have opened up a new realm of climate-friendly business opportunities for the state's energy utilities. With the unanimous passage of House Bill 2131, introduced by Representative Alex Ramel (D-40), electric and gas utilities may now sell thermal energy, delivered via a thermal energy network (TEN); gas utilities can win grants for the first TENs pilots; and neighborhood-wide decarbonization with TENs can take off. (Note: this policy is not to be confused with geothermal energy, which the state will also be exploring thanks to Senate Bill 6039.)

"The innovation proposed in this bill is to work with gas utilities - companies that already install pipe, manage rights of way, distribute energy to buildings, and work under the regulatory authority of the UTC,"

said Rep. Ramel.

"The skill sets and talents of those trained workforces can have an important role to play in decarbonizing our building energy system."

In line with Washington's 2023 Biennial Energy Report, which recommended that natural gas utilities plan for the long-term transition to clean heat, this new law will smooth the way for transitioning buildings across the state off of fossil fuels and onto highly efficient, zero-carbon, thermal energy networks. Washington is now the fifth state to pass legislation to allow or mandate that utilities pilot thermal energy networks, and it's the first to remove legal barriers for neighborhood-wide decarbonization.

Thermal energy networks use a network of water pipes and ground-source heat pumps to transfer heat in and out of buildings to provide heating, cooling, and often, domestic hot water. Buildings on the network can exchange heat with a number of hyper-local, non-combusting, non-emitting energy sources - whatever is available nearby. Sources could include lakes and rivers, energy-intensive buildings like data centers, wastewater systems, or the stable temperature of the ground just a few yards down. And these networks can be designed for any size and can scale up over time, starting as small as two buildings sharing thermal energy and growing to full community-sized or regional-sized systems.

THERMAL ENERGY NETWORKS ARE A WIN FOR THE CLIMATE, ELECTRIC GRIDS, PIPELINE WORKERS, AND WASHINGTON FAMILIES

Thermal energy networks can solve some thorny challenges of the clean energy transition: electric grid expansion, gas pipeline workforce redeployment, and equitable access to clean energy. Which helps explain why some unusual bedfellows - building and construction unions, environmental nonprofits, gas utilities, and grassroots activists - all advocated for advancing this policy in Olympia this year.

One of the most striking benefits of TENs is their modest impact on the electric grid due to their ultra-high efficiency. Washington already faces a formidable challenge in trying to build enough electric transmission and generation to power its clean energy transition.

A recent US Department of Energy study examined the electric grid impacts of various decarbonization approaches and found that decarbonizing with ground-source heat pumps was the best electric grid cost reduction strategy, reducing transmission line expansion requirements by over a third and generation requirements by 13 percent. An earlier study examined the impact to electricity demand of various building electrification scenarios for space conditioning and found that TENs using ground-source heat pumps were the best option for minimizing demand on the electric grid.

Gas workers and their labor unions have been worried about how electrification efforts could eliminate their high-quality, living-wage jobs. Yet TENs offer a pathway for these wo...

As long as parking is required, smaller, lower-cost homes are still illegal.

In January 2024, the Washington Department of Commerce published model ordinances for cities that will be updating their zoning codes to include new state-legalized "middle housing," from duplexes to sixplexes to cottages clustered around a shared courtyard. But when it came to parking minimums, the model ordinances sidestepped best-in-class policies to defer to status quo politics. In other words, unless your property is near a major transit stop, the state still recommends one or two parking spaces for every new home.

That's a problem, because between small lot sizes or navigating around an existing house, even one more parking spot is a bar that many middle housing projects just can't clear.

Daniel Parolek, who coined the term "missing middle housing," has been saying this for years.

"Requiring off-street parking has the biggest impact on small-lot residential infill,"

Parolek wrote in his book Missing Middle Housing. It's no surprise, then, that it's the jurisdictions where off-street parking is voluntary for new backyard cottages that they're sprouting up left and right.

To truly restore the right to build a diversity of housing options, from duplexes to a mother-in-law apartment over the garage, cities need to free these future homes from the tangle of regulations governing parking spaces.

ON SMALL LOTS, PARKING CAN BE A BIG PROBLEM

The problem with mandating off-street parking comes down to basic geometry. Cars take up a lot of space.

For lots 7,500 square feet or smaller, Parolek writes,

"the space needed to fit off-street parking on the site typically makes it physically impossible to provide the required amount of parking and get multiple units on the site. If an architect can make the parking fit, oftentimes there is not enough development potential to make the financial sense to pursue."

Parolek illustrates the difference. To make way for four parking spots, a future fourplex would need a parcel of land twice as large as the same fourplex without any off-street parking.

The real estate needed to park a car far exceeds the asphalt it sits atop. Driveways and additional space for a car to turn around on-site take can cover a large fraction of a lot's buildable area. David Foster, an architect in Tacoma, Washington, illustrated how just reducing driveway widths from 20 feet to 10 feet could grow a housing project from three homes to four, even while maintaining a parking space for each one.

When designing around an existing home, even finding room for one more parking space can be an impossible task. Last year, when Kent, Washington, was updating its zoning codes for accessory dwelling units (ADUs, a.k.a. backyard cottages or granny flats), it made a startling discovery. Eighty-five percent1 of single detached homes couldn't build an ADU because of the additional parking space required - one reason why less than 30 of these lower-cost housing options have been built there since 1995. Regulations on parking location, driveway widths, and curb cuts all ate away at possible parking options until they devoured the feasibility of a new home.

With most homeowners unable to physically add parking, the city changed course instead. By reversing a policy of not counting garage spaces towards the parking requirement, homeowners found themselves with double the number of legal parking spots overnight. No bulldozers required.

THE SECRET INGREDIENT TO ABUNDANT BACKYARD COTTAGES? PARKING FLEXIBILITY

In place after place that has granted flexibility over parking, property owners have taken up the opportunity with gusto. For instance, since Seattle eliminated parking mandates for backyard cottages in 2019, permit applications have more than tripled.

Meanwhile in California, one in seven new homes is now an ADU. Between 2016, the last year Golden State cities could require parking for all ADUs, and 2022, permits for these more budget-friendly dwellings incr...