State legislators can support local jurisdictions with streamlined implementation guidelines.

The time has come for the Washington legislature to act on ranked choice voting.

Washington lawmakers are just making their way back to Olympia for this year's legislative session. And though they've explored ranked choice voting before, they now face a different opportunity than they did in years past. The question is no longer if Washington will use ranked choice voting, but rather how the state will use it. Will it be inconsistent, varying from one county to the next? Or will it follow choreographed steps based on what we've learned works well?

Whether or not the legislature steps in this year, people across the state are pursuing ranked choice voting (RCV) for the many benefits it offers communities. Back in 2020, plaintiffs in Yakima requested that their county implement RCV under the Washington Voting Rights Act (WVRA), and in June 2023 a state Supreme Court case explicitly named RCV as a legal remedy for voting rights violations. Charter counties and charter cities can switch to the voting method anytime they like, and Seattle voters took advantage of the opportunity in a 2022 ballot measure.

In addition, the upcoming implementation of RCV in Portland, Oregon, which partners with the same voting equipment vendor as many counties throughout the Pacific Northwest, means that voting equipment across Washington will also soon be capable of tabulating RCV, clearing a major technical hurdle.

While RCV is clearly on its way, statewide legislation could still help clarify standards for local governments and smooth the path for county auditors and administrators who might have to manage conflicting rules, ballot design, and reporting requirements across cities, ports, and school districts as more and more places look to adopt the electoral method.

For years, lawmakers have considered a "Local Options Bill," which would allow all local jurisdictions to choose to use RCV, even without a potential voting rights violation. Last year they also took up the idea of using RCV for presidential primaries. Legislation relating to RCV has not yet made it across the finish line in Olympia, but this year the need for legislative guidance is much more urgent.

THE WASHINGTON VOTING RIGHTS ACT GREENLIGHTS RCV

Ranked choice voting, particularly the multi-winner proportional form, has been shown to improve representation of community interests. Acknowledging this benefit, a recent Washington State court case lit the way for any local government to employ RCV in the interest of voting rights.

Passed in 2018, the Washington Voting Rights Act (WVRA) expands on the protections of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, intending to prevent voter exclusion in the face of polarized voting (when voters in a "protected class" - members of a race, color, or language minority group - prefer different candidates or election outcomes than the rest of the electorate). The law empowers a county, city, or special district to change its electoral method to respond to a violation or a potential violation of the law, superseding other state laws that would otherwise prevent that shift. Notably, under the WVRA, jurisdictions don't need to be sued to implement an electoral change; they are permitted to institute a remedy even for a potential violation, in collaboration with affected community members.

In other words, a town council could proactively change from an at-large, plurality, winner-take-all election to another form of voting without going through an extensive court battle if they found that another method would improve voter representation.

And RCV is recognized as a method that would achieve that goal.

In 2020 plaintiffs in Yakima County filed suit under the WVRA and requested that the county switch to RCV to elect members of the Board of Commissioners. While their court case eventually settled with single-member districts, replacing the previous at-large repres...

Co-living is an affordable, flexible, community-forward type of housing that serves diverse needs for people in all stages of life.

The remedy for Washington's dire housing shortage is more homes of all shapes and sizes. Co-living homes - small apartments with shared kitchens - are a low-cost housing option that most communities lack because local zoning laws make them illegal or otherwise impractical to build. A new Washington bill, HB 1998, aims to fix that by setting standards to legalize co-living homes statewide.

The potential affordability payoff is big. 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. From 2014 to 2016 in Seattle, co-living accounted for fully 1 in 11 of total new homes built, before the city's ill-advised raft of new restrictions all but killed off co-housing construction. We can learn a lot from that instance - and apply the lessons statewide in a way that's right for the variety of Washington communities.

In this article, Sightline lays out:

What co-living homes are (and aren't);

Their benefits of co-living homes for residents, local businesses, affordability, community-building, and the environment;

Why Washington doesn't see as many of these homes on the market as it historically enjoyed;

The current obstacles to building more of this flexible, affordable housing option;

Examples of the wildly variable restrictions on co-living homes from one city to another;

A breakdown of legislation introduced for the 2024 session to unlock co-living homes for Washington, plus a comparison with co-living laws passed in Oregon last year;

A back-of-the-envelope calculation of how many co-living homes the Washington legislation could open up; and

How we get it passed.

WHAT ARE CO-LIVING HOMES?

Co-living homes are a low-cost, multifamily housing option in which each resident has a small, private living and sleeping room and shares with other building residents a common kitchen and other spaces. The housing type is also known as single-room occupancy (SRO), congregate housing, rooming houses, micro-housing, or residential suites.

Technically, the defining feature of co-living homes is that individual rooms - "sleeping units," in building code-speak - do not have full kitchens (but often have their own "kitchenette," with a mini-fridge, double burner, and/or microwave). In co-living homes built within the past couple decades, the sleeping units almost always include their own full bathroom, though historically, shared bathrooms were not uncommon. Modern buildings often also have shared recreational spaces. The private sleeping rooms are typically 150 to 230 square feet.

Over recent years in Washington, what little new construction of co-living homes that has occurred has been in Seattle, along with a sprinkling in a few nearby cities. The buildings can be large, with up to a few hundred sleeping units, but more commonly fall in the range of 20 to 40, built on small infill lots. Occupancy rates tend to be similar to standard apartments. See examples in Seattle (here and here), Kirkland, Redmond, and Shoreline.

CO-LIVING HOMES: GOOD FOR PEOPLE, POCKETBOOKS, AND THE PLANET

Co-living homes are a housing choice that's desirable for people in a variety of stages of work and life, like:

Renters who want a small, low-cost rental, possibly while saving to purchase a home;

Residents who wish to trade off square footage for location in a neighborhood they couldn't otherwise afford;

People who like shared community spaces, like courtyards, kitchens, and lounges, that facilitate social connections;

Single seniors who want to downsize and appreciate the alternative mobility options often available near co-living homes (AARP, for one, also supports Washington's co-living bill); and

Individuals who want a more private alternative to living with roommates in a traditional rental, which frees u...

The region has a lot more cleaning up to do, even in its greenest corners.

Cascadia chalked up major climate wins in 2023, from Washington's renewed commitment to eliminating gas appliances in new buildings to Montana youth's historic court win for a clean and healthy climate. At the same time, many Northwest climate hawks are gearing up for new challenges in 2024, including a likely bitter fight to defend Washington's landmark climate law, the Climate Commitment Act, from a rightwing repeal effort.

Still, as policy debates rage, it can be easy to forget that every day, scores of huge polluters continue to dirty Cascadia's air, making the worst effects of climate change ever more difficult to stave off. Cascadia counts 180 stationary facilities that each spew more than 100,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) into the atmosphere every year.

(For the purposes of this article, Cascadia refers to Alaska, British Columbia, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington. The analysis covers the entirety of the states and province for data simplicity, not only the Cascadian bioregion.) The biggest emitters range from coal-fired power plants to sugar processing plants, from electronics manufacturers to pulp and paper mills, from landfills to oil refineries to zinc mines.

Across the region, power plants, oil and gas facilities, and the forest products industry top the list of biggest stationary polluters, as shown by the charts below, the first broken by down state and industry, the second simply by industry, and the following broken out for each state or province.

Collectively, these establishments emit roughly 80 million metric tons of carbon pollution annually from fossil fuels, about a quarter of Cascadia's total greenhouse gas emissions. These facilities' emissions rise to more than 103 million metric tons of carbon pollution annually - more than comes from driving 23 million gasoline-powered cars in a year - when biogenic emissions are included.

(For context, the United States counts 278 million registered vehicles.) Nearly half that carbon comes from just 20 facilities in Cascadia, indicated by the boxes at right in the chart below.

Cleaning up these institutions is no simple task. Few can easily decarbonize with current technology. Some employ hundreds or even thousands of people. Still, policymakers can't afford to ignore them in their efforts to address climate change and improve air quality.

That's especially important in British Columbia, Oregon, and Washington, which many consider to be the greenest jurisdictions in Cascadia yet are home to 120 of the region's 180 top polluters. While all three state or provincial governments have passed policies to reduce emissions from big stationary sources, notable loopholes remain. The first step, though, is understanding who the top polluters are and what exceptions to climate laws they enjoy today. With that in mind, Sightline offers four takeaways for Cascadian policymakers.

1. COAL MAY NOT POWER OREGON OR WASHINGTON FOR LONG, BUT IT COULD DIRTY CASCADIA FOR DECADES

Far and away Cascadia's biggest polluter is the gargantuan coal-fired power plant in Colstrip, Montana. Emitting more than 10 million metric tons of carbon annually, it spews nearly three times as much CO2e as the next biggest polluter on the list. In fact, it releases so much carbon from burning coal to make electricity that it carries the dubious distinction of being one of the top emitters in the entire United States.

Today, six utilities across the Northwest - Avista, NorthWestern Energy, PacifiCorp, Portland General Electric (PGE), Puget Sound Energy (PSE), and Talen Energy - co-own the plant. But Washington and Oregon passed laws requiring utilities in these states to remove coal from their portfolios by 2025 and 2030, respectively. PGE demolished Oregon's last coal-fired plant near Boardman in 2022, and TransAlta will shutter Washington's last coal-fired plant by 2025. As such, residents in western Cas...

For followers of democracy reform, Portland offers a rough blueprint.

It's been just over a year since Portland voters approved Ballot Measure 26-228 to completely revise the city charter. And we're now less than a year away from the first time residents will exercise the city's new proportional ranked choice voting (RCV) system to elect their new government. What do Portland voters and democracy reformers around the country need to know about the ongoing construction of this pioneering model?

In brief, the city's transition is on track, and Portland's transition team and leadership have (mostly) been looking for the most effective pathways to implement the will of the voters. With the help of independent commissions and many partnerships, the city has crafted new districts, revised election rules, planned for voter education, and designed a new organizational structure. Candidates are already lining up to represent their communities.

While the city's transition team still has more to build, Portland's progress so far demonstrates that intentional processes and continuous community involvement can create a solid foundation for a representative and effective government.

BACKGROUND: AN OPPORTUNITY FOR CHANGE BUT NO GUARANTEE

Every ten years, the city of Portland reexamines its charter, the document that lays out how city leadership is structured and how it gets elected. The city council appoints a Charter Commission composed of volunteers from across the city to research and recommend changes to city voters.

Many Portlanders have long been interested in change (and indeed advocated to institute regular charter review, which began in 2010), knowing that city council is not representative of residents' diverse interests and that the current form of government impedes effective governance across the city, from trash to parking. Advocates for change paid close attention to opportunities for involvement in the Charter Commission, and many commission members (whom the city selected from a record-breaking pool of almost 300 applicants) hoped to use the process to forge a more representative government.

In 2022, after more than a year of research and hundreds of hours of public comments, the commission recommended a suite of reforms (many of which Sightline previewed in 2017), including allowing voters to rank candidates, creating four new districts that will each elect three council members (aka proportional multi-winner districts), and replacing the commission form of government with a city council that sets policy and a city administrator who, along with the mayor, runs the city's day-to-day operations. These changes, collected into Ballot Measure 26-228, passed in November 2022 with 58 percent of the vote.

BIG CHANGES IN GOVERNMENT STRUCTURE MOVE FORWARD

City staff started planning implementation of the reforms almost immediately after the measure passed and published an annual report in November 2023 of progress thus far. A city transition team is managing the project, and a Government Transition Advisory Committee (GTAC) comprising community members advises the overall process. The city created a webpage and newsletter that tracks the transition and, in July 2023, published a full work plan that includes specific opportunities for public input and feedback.

To guard against potential bias within controversial elements of the revisioning process, the charter amendments directed the city to appoint an Independent District Commission to draw the four new geographic districts and an Independent Salary Commission to establish salaries for the new officeholders. Both commissions prioritized input and representation from historically underrepresented groups, including communities of color and East Portland residents.

This past July, the Salary Commission finalized the new councilors' salaries, based on the thriving wage calculator from MIT and market data so that leaders will be fairly compensated for their service. Then in August, th...

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...

Analyzing three common claims of malfunction, plus proposing a new, faster way forward for the Northwest.

Permitting reform is the topic du jour in US climate circles. Renewable energy advocates and fossil fuel boosters alike are rallying to speed governmental approval of energy projects. At the same time, some progressives decry this effort as a misguided ruse to dismantle bedrock environmental and community protections.

How should climate leaders make sense of these debates? Just how big a barrier is permitting, really, to building the electric power grid Cascadia needs to decarbonize its economy? In short, how much should we worry about permitting?

At first glance, permitting transmission facilities in the Northwest looks like a hot mess. The only new regional line, the Boardman to Hemingway (B2H) project, crawled through federal and state approval processes for 14 years. Idaho Power and PacifiCorp, the line's sponsors, still have not broken ground. B2H being the only new big wires project that is even close to construction in the Northwest may be further evidence that permitting is broken.

However, future transmission projects in the region could have it easier. Recent federal policy and regulatory efforts to shorten review processes and improve permitting coordination may lower some of the hurdles B2H faced. And Oregon's state-level review, which B2H underwent, is among the most complex in the region; projects routed through other states might start moving dirt more quickly.

Still, the mounting climate crisis demands that Northwest policymakers do more than wait for the next transmission project to come up and hope for the best. They can bulk up staff capacity at regulatory agencies and tribes, which must review unprecedented volumes of new clean energy projects. They can immediately identify high-priority routes for new transmission lines and conduct preemptive environmental reviews and tribal consultations. They can enable - or better yet, require - tight alignment between state and federal review processes. None of these actions would mean jettisoning bedrock environmental protections or trampling on tribal and community rights.

With 2023 on track to become the hottest year on record, the Northwest needs to move fast to approve critical transmission projects, without surrendering its tools to block dirty or unjust energy proposals.

WHAT IS PERMITTING, AND HOW DOES IT WORK IN THE NORTHWEST?

Permitting is the process of federal, state, and/or local governmental agencies granting a developer the necessary approvals to build, upgrade, or operate a transmission line. The types of permits a transmission facility needs depend largely on where developers site the project and who owns the land it will traverse.

In the Northwest, as in the West writ large, the high percentage of land the federal government owns almost guarantees that interstate transmission lines require federal permits. One-third of the B2H route, for example, runs across federal land. The map below shows the federal land in the United States, with different colors identifying which federal agencies have jurisdiction; areas shaded pink and labeled as Bureau of Indian Affairs are tribal reservations.

If a project crosses federal land, it will trigger review under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and likely several other laws, such as the Endangered Species Act, the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act. The National Historic Preservation Act requires government-to-government consultation with federally recognized tribes the project could affect, whether because it crosses tribal land or because the land it traverses holds tribal religious or cultural significance.

In addition, transmission line developers are likely to need state and/or local approval. In Montana, Oregon, and Washington, the state holds the ultimate authority for permitting most big transmission lines. Before state agencies can issue permit...

And state law keeps it that way.

In every city in Washington, a 60-year-old state law suppresses voter turnout. It prevents municipal governments from doing the one thing that would reliably boost citizens' participation in elections - a single change that would increase voter turnout by, conservatively estimated, 62 percent. The one thing in question would be to let cities and towns move their elections to the same date and the same ballots as state and federal elections. Doing so would allow localities to ride the turnout coattails of presidential and Congressional elections.

Consolidating local with federal elections, a growing trend in US cities, is immensely popular with voters of every political stripe, enhances the representativeness of the local electorate, holds local leaders more accountable to local values and policy preferences, and can save millions of dollars of public funds. But the principal benefit of election consolidation is none of these things. The principal benefit is that it increases voter participation, giving many more residents a say in how their lives are governed. Election consolidation does so dramatically, and it does so ubiquitously. To quantify these effects, Sightline developed a new method for estimating the turnout penalty for cities' off-cycle elections and the turnout bonus for legislative races' on-cycle schedule.

EVERY CITY SUFFERED AN OFF-CYCLE TURNOUT PENALTY

Specifically, Sightline calculated the turnout penalty of off-cycle elections in all of Washington's cities and towns with populations of 10,000 or greater and found a turnout penalty in every single one for which data are available. The "turnout penalty" is the difference in turnout in a city between the 2021 general election and the 2022 general election.

For example, the city of Seattle had 267,414 ballots cast in its November 2021 municipal election, when the mayor, city attorney, and two at-large city council members were elected. The following year, in the November 2022 general election, when Congressional and state legislative seats were decided, the city's voters turned in 333,912 ballots. The off-cycle city races had about 66,500 fewer ballots, which is 20 percent lower than the on-cycle turnout.

The turnout penalty of holding its municipal election off cycle was therefore 20 percent. Seattle's penalty was relatively small. Spokane had a turnout penalty of 39 percent, and Tacoma's was 43 percent. Lumping together all mid-sized and large municipalities, defined as those with 10,000 or more residents of voting age, the turnout penalty in the 2021 off-cycle election was 37 percent of all voters - more than 582,000 ballots not cast that year. That turnout differential is many multiples the size that get-out-the-vote drives ever achieve; indeed, no other election reform promises comparable gains in participation. All cities took an off-cycle hit, no matter size, urban or rural location, demographics As remarkable as the size of the penalty was its universality.

Not a single mid-sized or large municipality came close to matching its 2022 turnout in 2021. Even the smallest penalty was fully 18 percent, in Anacortes in Skagit County. The largest penalty was a whopping 53 percent, in southern King County's Covington. Stated in the inverse, Covington's 2022 turnout was more than twice its 2021 turnout. (A complete list of Washington's large and mid-sized cities with all their relevant data is in the appendix of this report, along with details of the methods Sightline used to compile and calculate them.) The size of the turnout penalty showed no pattern among cities.

It doesn't scale with city size. Sightline tested for correlation with race or ethnicity and again found nothing.

A small overstatement: Not accounting for down-ballot drop-off

The turnout penalties overstate in a small way and understate in a large way the potential increase in turnout that would come from election consolidation. They overstate because they are base...

And the National Healthy Housing Standard agrees

I've spent much of the last decade designing and developing micro-housing projects in Seattle. I've also become deeply involved in local and state policy debates around regulating this type of housing. During this time, I've witnessed a shift in how micro-housing is viewed and managed: beginning as a novelty and quickly evolving from a developer's workaround to the neighborhood advocates' nightmare, to the politicians' headache and the bureaucrats' bogeyman, all the while being slowly driven towards extinction by over-regulation.

Despite this, and over the din of the loudest voices at the political extremes, I've seen a consensus emerge in policy circles recognizing that micro-housing is one of the simplest and most straightforward ways to put more homes into a housing market that is simply starving for them. It's also one of the most effective ways to give people of modest means the opportunity to live in desirable neighborhoods with access to jobs, services, education, amenities, arts, culture, and an overall high quality of life.

At all levels of government, politicians and policymakers are looking for ways to promote more of this type of housing. But they stumble on the question of "how small is too small," where to look for guidance, and how to develop appropriate regulations that govern the size of micro-housing. Below I share key resources to inform this conversation, as well as a number of designs to help leaders envision how these homes could look and feel for the many neighbors who need them. Spoiler alert: A well designed studio apartment can be a lot smaller than most people think.

BUILDING CODES OVER ZONING CODES; OR, HEALTH AND SAFETY OVER OPINIONS

First things first: it's important to differentiate between building codes and zoning codes. Building codes regulate unit size by directly specifying minimum square footage of the floor area. Zoning codes take a more circumspect approach, using density limits, parking requirements, and per unit amenities that indirectly govern housing size.

For the purposes of this article, we will ignore zoning codes, which are inherently political documents that vary from city to city. Instead, we'll focus on the International Building Code (IBC), which is used in all 50 US states. It has a narrower mandate, which is simply (but importantly) to protect public health and safety and to safeguard against hazards in the built environment. While in practice, the ultimate rationale for a zoning code provision can be merely "because I said so," the building code is supposed to have an empirical justification and so can be evaluated on that basis.

The IBC regulates housing size by dictating the minimum size of "habitable" rooms. For instance, a studio apartment requires a 190-square-foot living room. Additionally, the IBC mandates that a kitchen, a bathroom, and a storage closet be provided. Combining those elements with the code-required circulation and accessibility clearances, a studio apartment's minimum size usually ends up at about 300 square feet.

A 300-square-foot studio apartment is by no means luxurious, but smaller apartments are quite common, and I would guess that most of us have lived in smaller spaces at one time or another. In Seattle, a 300-square-foot studio rents for approximately $1,600 per month, making it affordable for people earning around $64,000 annually. That's fine if you can afford it, but nearly half of Seattle's renters can't afford to pay that much for rent.

To serve these neighbors, either we need to build housing that is smaller and more affordable than what conventional development can deliver, or we need to provide subsidized housing to a large percentage of our population. Realistically, our present social safety net can't even provide for our most vulnerable populations, let alone people who are fully employed but simply earn a modest salary. This is where micro-housing can play a crucial role.

IMAGININ...

A vibrant downtown needs residents. And residents need housing. Convenience stores wouldn't hurt either.

Anchorage is exceptional. You can be neighbors with moose and see the aurora from your deck. But on housing policy, Anchorage conforms to the Anytown, USA model of zoning rules that stock neighborhoods with a generic product: suburban one-unit homes. The intentions behind the code weren't necessarily nefarious, but the effects certainly are. Anchorage zoning code limits market choice, contributing to a shortage of homes across the price spectrum, and weakens Alaskans' spending power by flooding the state's economic hub with the priciest of housing types.

The severity of Anchorage's housing shortage has brought Anchorage's conservative mayor and majority-progressive Assembly into agreement on reforms to help expand housing choice. In the past year, they have made accessory dwelling units easier to build, repealed parking mandates, which can block housing and business development, and introduced a potentially game-changing rezoning ordinance that put a spotlight on the concept of middle housing. In a unanimous vote in April, the Assembly updated downtown zoning code to encourage more housing development on the acres of parking lots and other underused properties in the city center.

The downtown reforms were a necessary step toward unlocking millions of square feet for housing and the businesses that support car-optional downtown neighborhoods. Adding more units downtown could help stabilize prices city-wide, provide more apartment-style living options, and achieve the city's longtime goal of keeping downtown's vibrant summer economy alive year-round. Downtown businesses need customers after the tourists leave in the fall. With remote work likely here to stay, Anchorage's office workers aren't enough. The only way to create a permanent pool of customers is to turn downtown into a place for locals to live.

SCANT HOUSING IN ANCHORAGE'S "MOST DESIRABLE NEIGHBORHOOD"

Most Anchorage residents live in suburban neighborhoods that look like countless others across America. But many would happily move to a more urban setting if the market produced the type of housing they truly preferred. Household sizes have shrunk in the last two decades, both in Anchorage and nationwide, and cross-generational competition for more compact housing is fierce. A downtown flat can fit the lifestyles and budgets of these smaller households - empty nesters, retirees, young professionals, and single parents - better than an overlarge single-unit home. In a 2018 Anchorage Economic Development Corporation housing survey, nearly one-third of 1,110 respondents ranked downtown as one of their top three neighborhoods. The city's Downtown District Plan calls it "the most desirable neighborhood in Anchorage."

There's a huge disconnect between demand and supply. Between 2000 and 2020, the share of one- and two-person households in Anchorage grew. At the same time, the share of households with three or more people shrank. And yet, Anchorage's housing market prioritizes the one-unit-per-lot model - the largest, most expensive housing type. In 2000, 46 percent of occupied homes were single detached houses. Twenty years later, the market share of these houses had swelled to 58 percent. Adding more housing units downtown can help correct the imbalance in the market.

Only 614 units exist in the downtown core, according to municipal data. In producing its 2021 Downtown District Plan, the city began exploring ways to add another 1,400 housing units and envision what they might look like. But the architecture firm contracted to produce viable designs came back with bad news. The city's own zoning code, written years earlier, discouraged attractive, modern residential developments.

"They hired us to do the renderings, and we found we couldn't do much because a lot of these newer residential building types were not allowed,"

said Mélisa Babb, a landscape architect who mana...

A case for agile, self-build and bottom-up options to unlock housing choice . by many means necessary.

Governments rule and fund from the center, and markets typically build for the top down. How, then, do those on unserved fringes adapt and house themselves? To find out, look around. As Cascadians scramble for solutions to our housing crises, we could all gain some new ideas by observing the innovations of those already on the edges.

For the last decade I have taken a deep interest in - and it has taken me into - researching and living on the housing periphery. I've lived in warehouses, across a wide archipelago of house-sits and couch-surfs, and on rural sojourns off grid. I've lived in backyards, houseless villages, parking spaces, and prototype structures and vehicles. Living on these ever-shifting social shorelines, I am increasingly convinced that if we are all to survive and thrive, we must let the edges teach us.

Living in more "makeshift" housing has taught me to make and shift my own ways of living. It's about playing the cards in hand, deftly. Surprisingly often, I discover unexpected ways it sharpens my game: I've learned that sleeping under a cloth roof gives me soft illumination in the morning and an energetic wake-up. I've learned that hot water bottles aren't merely more efficient than hot air; they're also cozier. Cascadian housing policy can sharpen its game, too. Drawn from my experiences and research, I'll discuss here three related housing approaches for radical agility and affordability.

1. Create evolvable housing, not temporary shelter: "New Starter Homes"

2. Facilitate self-building: Let people define, design for, and build for their own needs

3. Roll out the ultimate scalable infill: The "Wheeler House" vehicle dwelling

1) CREATE EVOLVABLE HOUSING, NOT TEMPORARY SHELTER: "NEW STARTER HOMES"

In recent years, US governments have invested a lot of money and focus in "pods" (temporary, free-standing, typically pre-fab structures) for unhoused people. In many cases, I believe, a better response would be quickly available housing that can evolve into permanent housing. A recurring priority in disaster and homelessness response is reconnecting people with a regular, sustainable life as soon as possible, minimizing limbo. That sense of living in suspension, including the use of temporary housing forms, can inhibit recovery and redevelopment.

Ian Davis's 1978 classic, Shelter After Disaster, argued this point, and it's a key part of the "Housing First" homelessness response philosophy. A "sustainable life," however, is not the same as getting to a permanent situation, conventional housing, or restoring the former state of someone's affairs. Placement into something termed "permanent" might not be someone's goal, could prove a dead end, or could soon become unsuited to a person's or family's evolving needs.

Instead, to rebuild lives, people need to see they are on a sustainable path, one on which they can step forward and self-determine rather than dwell in stasis or feel themselves as just a service recipient. People also generally want options to stay in, design, build, adapt, expand, and control or own their own homes. By contrast, pods and leased motel rooms don't offer long-term and self-determined paths, nor is it sustainable to "reintegrate" people into conventional housing they can't see a path towards affording.

So, what exactly are pod shelter sites usually missing? A direct, self-determining path to sustainable housing. Pod structures are typically temporary and non-durable, and residents aren't allowed to stay on. Even the site itself is usually only temporarily permitted and planned for its location, even as subsequent housing options are by no means assured. Sites are also typically run by organizations that don't themselves provide long-term housing. Likewise, as recently reported by The Oregonian, other common approaches such as rent assistance and hotel or motel stays often come with looming...