The multibillion-dollar question that Senator Maria Cantwell, Governor Jay Inslee, and other Northwest leaders can help answer.

Editor's note: This is the second of three articles discussing the major challenges - planning, paying for it, and permitting - to building the transmission lines needed to transition to a cleaner energy future.

Transmission lines cost a pretty penny. Take for example the only new regional transmission project that will break ground in the Northwest anytime soon. Idaho Power and PacifiCorp's 290-mile Boardman to Hemingway line will cost more than $4 million per mile, for a total of $1.2 billion. And that's hardly the steepest line in the works in the United States right now; developers anticipate footing multibillion-dollar bills for several large transmission projects outside Cascadia.

Most incumbent transmission developers in the Northwest, namely the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) and investor-owned utilities (IOUs), balk at building projects sporting these price tags. BPA shies away from large investments that would require it to raise rates on its public power customers and assume additional federal debt. And most IOUs fear tying up billions of dollars for years or even decades only to risk state regulators ultimately not allowing them to recoup their investment. As a result, neither BPA nor IOUs are investing in the grid infrastructure Cascadia desperately needs to decarbonize.

But if building transmission lines is expensive, not building them is exorbitant. Total decarbonization costs could rise by up to $13 billion if the Northwest does not expand transmission capacity. And unless Cascadia builds a grid that can support the end of climate-destroying fossil fuels, we will pay the highest price of all in the form of more devastating wildfires, oppressive heatwaves, and dangerous droughts.

All Northwest leaders can help untangle the financial impediments to building new lines. Washington senator Maria Cantwell and the Northwest congressional delegation can pressure BPA to deploy more low-cost federal debt to the cause. The Oregon and Washington state legislatures can set up state entities to partner with private non-utility transmission developers. Oregon governor Tina Kotek and Washington governor Jay Inslee can initiate the development of a multistate cost allocation agreement to offer IOUs greater assurance that they will earn back their transmission investments. The best and least expensive options are those that leverage low-cost public financing so as to maintain to the extent possible the Northwest's relatively low electricity prices. Still, given the dire urgency of the climate crisis, all options are worth pursuing. Otherwise, Cascadians will be left holding the bag, coughing up for expensive and inefficient infrastructure projects while the planet burns.

BPA'S PRIORITIES: LOW DEBT, LOW RATES, FEW BUILDS

BPA is, as Sightline has written about extensively, the Northwest's transmission giant. And it looks flush with cash to pay for new wires: it has only tapped $5.7 billion of the $17.7 billion Congress authorizes it to borrow from the US Department of the Treasury.

But BPA doesn't see it that way. Understanding why requires looking back at the agency's foundational statutes, which direct it to sell power from US government dams on the Columbia River to "public bodies and cooperatives" at "the lowest possible rates." These "preference customers," as they are known, include municipal utilities like Seattle City Light, public utility districts (PUDs) like Snohomish County PUD, consumer-owned cooperatives like Umatilla Electric Cooperative, and tribal utilities like Yakama Power. Just as these preference customers depend on BPA for power and transmission service, so too does BPA depend on them. US federal statute requires BPA to recover its costs, including debt repayment and interest, by selling power and transmission service; BPA does not receive annual Congressional appropriation...

Small changes could fully fund the program and produce many more affordable homes in desirable areas.

In 2016, when Portland's city council voted to start requiring a share of homes in new buildings to be made affordable to lower-income Portlanders, some predicted disaster.

"Could well make the city's housing affordability problems demonstrably worse,"

urban economist Joe Cortright warned.

Others rejoiced.

"Would harvest the windfall profits that our wildly inflated housing prices are creating,"

John Mulvey, a housing advocate with the East Portland Action Plan, predicted.

Others said that it might need to be adjusted in the future.

"At the earliest possible stage, if there is a need for us to reconvene and rethink any part of it. I want to make sure that that's baked into our policy,"

City Commissioner Nick Fish said.

Well, it took six years for the city to get around to it, but that self-assessment is finally underway - and it points the way to a handful of relatively modest changes that could mend (and not end) a program that looks like a pretty good deal for both tenants and taxpayers.

Since last fall, I've been honored to serve among 10 fellow Portlanders on the city's volunteer "inclusionary housing calibration work group" that has teamed with the city's staff and consultants to dig into the program's numbers, goals, outcomes, and future. Though there have been a few moments of healthy tension, the process left me impressed by the city staff's interest in getting the details of this policy right.

In that time, I've also learned just how unusual Portland's program is among similar "inclusionary zoning" programs. The key difference: unlike almost all similar programs in the United States but like more productive flavors of inclusionary zoning such as this one in France, Portland's program is at least partially funded.

In Portland, the public pays for the program in the gentlest of ways: by waiving some taxes and fees on buildings that comply with it. And as the city's contractor found, that waiver can potentially be enough to make the program work. The catch: if the program will both maximize the number of below-market homes and avoid driving up market prices, it needs full funding.

With just a few tweaks, criticism of Portland's program would likely recede. In fact, it can become a model for other North American cities that want to mandate mixed-income homes in new buildings.

Here's what that would take.

1. DEFINE SUCCESS

Portland's program has an essentially qualitative purpose statement: the program should "increase" the number of less expensive homes available in areas with "superior access to quality schools, services, amenities and transportation," especially affordable to households making less than 60 percent of the city's median income. (For a one-person household, that's $47,400; for a three-person household, it's $60,960. At those incomes, federally defined "affordable" rents, including utilities, are capped at $1,185 for a studio, $1,524 for a two-bedroom, and so on.)

Having a purpose is good. But Portland hasn't actually set any quantitative criteria for the city to judge this program's success or failure. This is bad.

Here's one simple figure that could be used to evaluate the success of the program: not just to "increase" but to maximize, given available public resources, the number of new homes in desirable areas that are affordable to Portlanders making 60 percent of the median income.

This is a crucial difference. Any construction at all under a mandatory inclusionary housing program will "increase" the number of below-market homes built, compared to a city with no such program. Someday, Portland might mandate that 40 percent of homes in new buildings have regulated affordability, with no public funding to offset those costs. If that set of rules resulted in a single 100-unit building each year, the current program language would count those 40 homes as a sign of success.

But in a city of 600,000, just...

Bend residents have shown us how.

William Kuhn, who lost his Bend, Oregon, home in the Awbrey Hall Fire, has a warning:

"Anyone who decides to live on the edge of the forest risks losing their homes. We know that."

Once considered rare, the "fire weather" that fueled the 1990 Awbrey Hall Fire is now a fixture of Cascadia's climate.

"It's not a question of if, but when fires come through,"

said Boone Zimmerlee, Deschutes County's fire-adapted communities coordinator.

Building wildfire-resilient communities is key for climate adaptation. As I recently documented, the best tool for the job is guiding growth away from areas of fire hazard, which I call fireplains. Building new homes within existing urban areas, or "infill," is the safest solution, followed by compact development contiguous with existing city limits.

This is exactly what the residents of Bend, Oregon, did circa 2009, when they invoked the state's landmark 1973 land use law and prevented houses from being built in a fireplain by instead directing growth inside city limits.

Across the state, Oregon's land use law has been silently protecting life and property from wildfire. As Rory Isbell of Central Oregon LandWatch noted,

"If you think of where the Labor Day fires burned a few years ago, up and down the Santiam, the McKenzie, and the Clackamas, if they'd had big, sprawling residential suburbs, the fires would have been a heck of a lot worse."

Bend's case shows how growth management policies can empower Cascadians to build wildfire-resilient communities. It also offers correctives to upgrade Oregon's land use law, or at least to improve how it is used.

GROWTH IS COMING

Along with the rest of the West, Cascadia's population is growing. To keep up with the influx, by 2040, Idaho needs to build about 660,000 new dwellings, and Washington will need an additional three million.

Population is growing fastest in areas abutting or intermixing with wildlands, called the wildland-urban interface (WUI). Specifically, people are flocking to fireplains, where wildfires naturally return every few decades.

Cascadians face a choice: continue to grow fastest in places that inherently require millions of dollars of firefighting every year, or direct growth into compact communities.

As a "nature lover's dream," the city of Bend, Oregon, is among the fastest growing cities in the United States. Over the next 50 years, the city will likely more than double its population, welcoming 120,000 new residents.

The big question: where will they live?

PUSHING MORE HOUSES INTO A FIREPLAIN: AN ILL-ADVISED SOLUTION

Bend sits directly east of the seasonally dry Deschutes National Forest, putting it at the edge of a "frequent fire" zone, where wildfires naturally return every 35 years or earlier.

In 2009 the city of Bend and Deschutes County announced plans to expand Bend's urban growth boundary and add as many as 5,000 new dwellings in this fireplain.

To the west of Bend, this proposed expansion overlapped with the footprint of the Awbrey Hall Fire that had burned homes and forced the evacuation of hundreds of people less than 20 years prior. The wind-whipped fire rebuffed the attack of fire crews fighting the main blaze's 150-foot flames and the exponentially expanding spot fires ignited by flying embers. Within ten hours, the fire spread six miles, jumping over three major roadways and the Deschutes River.

The Awbrey Hall Fire would have been catastrophic had the wind shifted slightly and blown the wildfire head-on into downtown Bend, which could have caused a domino effect of house-to-house ignitions. But to the relief of residents and drivers idling in the backup of fleeing vehicles, a quirk in the weather saved the city. In the end, only 22 homes were destroyed, no lives were lost, and all fire crews came out safely.

RESIDENTS REDIRECT NEW CONSTRUCTION TO SAFETY

When Bend and Deschutes County proposed expanding the city's urban growth boundary into this fireplain, residents objected. Not onl...

Proposals to reduce overbuilt parking lots are popping up across the United States.

In the 2023 legislative session, more than a dozen US states have proposed legislation to reduce or eliminate parking minimums.

"It's exciting,"

said Tony Jordan, founder of the national Parking Reform Network, which connects advocates and policymakers with resources. To Jordan, the number of state bills introduced signal a quietly growing number of people working on the issue.

"It's becoming very popular."

For decades, nearly every town across North America has required all new homes and businesses to have a pre-determined number of parking spaces. But as widespread housing shortages and empty office buildings multiply, states are increasingly taking up the effort to roll back parking mandates instead of waiting for cities to adopt new codes one by one. Last year, Oregon and California both adopted policies that struck down parking mandates at the state level.

Widespread parking reform proposals have yet to be as successful in other states, but the number of bills popping up in states across the political spectrum illustrates the movement's growing influence.

Reducing parking minimums is most commonly found as one part of a larger reform package to increase housing supply, like in Colorado's comprehensive More Housing Now bill. Legislators from multiple states, though, have begun to address parking minimums directly with simple bills only a few pages long. In Oklahoma, a bill was introduced that would have ended parking minimums outright. Washington attempted to eliminate mandatory parking near frequent transit stations. Another transit-oriented measure in New Jersey would cut parking minimums near transit in half; that bill is still alive, having passed the state senate in May.

Parking reformers' biggest 2023 wins so far have come in Vermont and Montana. Despite very different political majorities, both states legalized more housing while capping local parking mandates at one parking space per home through much of the state. Other successful housing supply bills, like ones that legalized accessory dwelling units, included pre-emptions of parking requirements.

These efforts were buoyed by 2022 breakthroughs in state-level parking reform. Both Oregon and California adopted policies to make parking fully optional for properties near transit service, and for certain uses in Oregon. The new policies went into effect in both states on January 1, 2023.

Oregon's parking reform survived the legislative session intact. The sole public hearing on a bill that would have nullified the state's new land use and transportation rules was canceled after more than 140 Oregon residents and organizations submitted testimony to oppose it. It was never rescheduled.

In May, California Representative Robert Garcia broke another barrier, elevating the issue to the federal level by introducing the People Over Parking Act in Congress. Modeled after California's state law, the bill would eliminate parking requirements within a half-mile of transit service. He was joined by Representatives Earl Blumenauer (OR), Greg Casar (TX), and Seth Moulton (MA).

The shifting Overton window is a welcome development to advocates like Jordan, who first got involved with parking reform a decade ago. He described the phases of policy change like steps on a ladder.

"First, they cap what you can do. Then you legalize certain kinds of housing without it. And then maybe you go for the transit stations,"

he said.

"Eventually someone's going to do the whole thing."

The day when parking minimums are wholly relegated to the past might be a ways off yet, but it's clear that interest in removing them isn't going away anytime soon.

Did we miss one? Let us know about your statewide parking reform at [email protected]

For the full state-by-state breakdown, please visit/

For starters, Cascadia has no plan.

Editor's note: This is the first of three articles discussing the major challenges - planning, permitting, and paying for it - to building out the transmission lines needed to transition to a cleaner energy future.

Electric transmission lines - those giant high-voltage wires that zap electricity across long distances - recently graduated from a fringe topic to a core challenge in the quest to decarbonize Cascadia. More leaders and climate hawks now recognize the centrality of transmission capacity to meeting climate goals, but that recognition has yet to yield action. The Northwest grid is jammed, and hundreds of wind and solar projects are languishing as a result. Neither the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) nor Northwest utilities - nor anyone else, for that matter - is building the new transmission lines necessary to power millions of households and businesses in Cascadia with clean electricity. Why?

Much of the national conversation diagnosing impediments to new wires in the United States focuses on complex and lengthy permitting processes and their adjacent challenge: local communities' opposition to new energy projects in their backyards. But a smooth permitting process is only one leg of the three-legged stool that successful transmission projects rest on. The other two are adequate planning and the right incentives for paying for the expensive lines.

Sightline looked into each of these three barriers in the unique context of Cascadia. This article, part of a series investigating the challenges of building transmission lines, focuses on planning.

If transmission lines aren't planned, they aren't built. And if transmission lines aren't built, neither are new wind turbines or solar farms, prolonging our dependence on planet-destroying, war-fueling oil, coal, and gas. But the organizations that plan Cascadia's future wires (largely, BPA and utilities) are plodding along the same way they have for years, ticking boxes and averting their gaze from the impending new demands on the grid. Meanwhile, Cascadia is on fire, and heatwaves are shattering temperature records around the world.

A different way forward is both imperative and entirely possible. Instead of betting our future on outdated, fractured, and myopic planning processes, Northwest leaders could establish a new regional transmission planning entity with the authority and resources to shepherd the region's grid into the twenty-first century. Until they do, Cascadia's climate ambitions grow more precarious by the year.

CASCADIA'S TRANSMISSION PLANNING PROCESS: FRACTURED, SHORTSIGHTED, AND PERPETUALLY BEHIND THE TIMES

"A goal without a plan is just a wish," author and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is said to have written. If you ask anyone at BPA or a Northwest utility whether they are planning the grid for the future, they will assure you that they are. But plunge into the murky depths of transmission planning processes yourself and you will quickly become alarmed that Cascadia's audacious climate goals may turn out to be mere wishes unless we chart a different course.

Since 2011 the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has required all utilities that own transmission wires to participate in regional planning processes. In the Northwest, NorthernGrid leads that process. The group counts 16 members, including BPA, the region's investor-owned utilities (e.g., Portland General Electric [PGE], Puget Sound Energy [PSE]), and some municipal utilities (e.g., Seattle City Light).

But NorthernGrid is ill prepared for the task at hand: ushering the Northwest's grid into an entirely new era dominated by climate change. The association has no full-time staff, no independent leadership, and is not accountable to state regulators or policymakers. It is essentially a small club of BPA and the biggest power utilities in the region that meets the letter, but not the spirit, of FERC's planning requirements.

For evidence of these def...

Several examples exist, and Cascadian policymakers can encourage shifts while setting guardrails to protect customers.

Between 2003 and 2018, about 55 percent of adults in the United States abandoned their landline telephones in favor of wireless ones. Phone companies that rode the wave of innovation and diversification reaped financial rewards, while those that stuck with the outmoded landline strategy faced demise.

Like landline telephones, Cascadia's gas utilities' main business is quickly becoming obsolete. Gas companies are reckoning with disruption from all angles: consumers are buying electric heat pumps instead of gas furnaces, federal laws are boosting electric appliances, and new regulation is constraining gas customer growth. To survive, gas utilities will need to transform into enterprises that advance, rather than obstruct, the clean energy transition.

The decarbonization solutions of hydrogen and renewable natural gas (RNG) that most gas utilities favor are unrealistic, dangerous, and expensive, and only in a few cases can they compete economically with electrification. But a few gas companies are experimenting with novel, climate-friendly ventures, including clean heat and electrification products and services.

Some of these ideas, namely infrastructure-intensive heating investments like GeoNetworks and district energy, meet the traditional criteria for regulated utility businesses and merit active support from lawmakers and regulators. Indeed, leaders might do well to even require that utilities pilot them. Many other ideas do not meet these criteria, but they are still worth exploring for their potential to speed climate progress and to interrupt utilities' continuing climate obstructionism. Policymakers considering the gas industry's nontraditional reinvention proposals will need to take care to protect ratepayers, which will include extracting concessions from gas companies to shrink the gas system, and to shield smaller market competitors from economic injury.

Why keep gas companies in business?

For climate hawks, putting gas utilities out of business might seem like a top priority. However, it may be worthwhile to keep the industry solvent---in a reimagined, climate-friendly form---not only both during the decarbonization transition and well into the future.

Here are four reasons gas business diversification is even worth considering:

Preventing climate obstructionism. With dimming prospects, gas utilities have been using their clout in policy and regulatory forums to mislead the public and forecast doomsday scenarios about a world without gas. For example, NW Natural, Oregon's largest gas utility, has been bankrolling a referendum campaign to reverse Eugene's gas ban in new homes and has pumped more than $1 million into a front group fighting the city's policy. If gas utilities could reinvent themselves as decarbonization enterprises that earn lucrative returns, not only might they stop fighting against climate action but they might also begin fighting for it.

Leveraging scale. Decarbonization solutions will have a tough time scaling up fast enough without some coordinated roll-out across blocks, neighborhoods, and cities. Gas utilities might be up to the task. They already operate across large territories, with thousands of miles of pipes snaking under Cascadia's cities and towns. Today these utilities count more than 4 million gas customers in the region. Leveraging gas utilities' broad reach and expertise in the energy sector to advance building electrification could speed climate action.

Protecting retirees' savings. Utilities provide a steady income for millions of investors, most of whom are institutional investors focused in part on dependable returns for retirees. For example, investors in Puget Sound Energy, Washington's largest utility, include four large Canadian pension holding companies charged with managing the pensions for public sector employees in Canada, and institutional investors ho...

A preliminary estimate of potential cost savings from municipal election consolidation.

In 2019 Wayne Thorley, then Nevada’s Deputy Secretary of State for Elections, promised a state legislative committee that Nevada taxpayers could “save a lot of money.” The trick, Thorley said, was to pass a low-profile bill to reschedule local elections so that they would be on the same ballots as federal ones. Millions of dollars of savings, he claimed, were there for the taking through election consolidation.

Thorley’s argument was not unusual. Cost savings are a routine refrain in legislative discussions of consolidation. I have heard them invoked repeatedly, like a mantra, in election rescheduling hearings in Arizona, California, Montana, Nevada, and Washington. Over and over, from the left and the right, proponents point out that synchronizing elections not only commands overwhelming popular support, boosts turnout, improves government accountability, and brings out a more representative electorate but also saves money.

How much money, though? Thorley didn’t say, and few others have offered estimates.

The potential economies are large, no doubt. The cost of running local elections at off-cycle times (that is, at times other than Election Day in November of even-numbered years) runs to tens of millions of dollars a year in Cascadia. In the United States, it amounts to perhaps $2--$5 billion per year nationwide.

An elections-cost calculation usable for any city or state

As far as I can tell, though, no one has ever conducted a meticulous, CPA-proof before-and-after study on how much money election consolidation would save. And no one has documented the change in spending in cities that have moved their local elections to align with federal ones.

That is surprising, given the near-violent controversy over the fairness and security of voting systems in the United States. You might assume that every aspect of the country’s elections would have been audited in excruciating detail. Instead, the question of voting schedules is a weird, neglected backwater of election debate and its costs little attended.

Election budgets are buried in larger budgets for county clerks or auditors and for various city or state bureaus, and they are rarely analyzed separately. These budgets are also dwarfed by other spending categories and therefore draw little scrutiny. Charles Steward III, a political scientist at MIT, wrote, “The estimated cost of conducting elections on an annual basis is roughly what local governments spend managing public parking facilities.”

In other words, it’s crumbs.

In this article, I offer a back-of-the-digital-envelope estimate for three Cascadian states that hold off-cycle elections and their main cities. The analysis method I use is admittedly crude; I based it on all the data points I could assemble, though I could not find many data points. However, the method allows anyone anywhere to estimate potential savings for their own off-cycle city or state elections, and it’s simple and transparent enough to allow for quick upgrades as data improve.

Examples of elections-cost savings from Idaho, Montana, and Washington

Sightline estimates potential savings in Idaho, Montana, and Washington, the three Cascadian states that could easily move their municipal elections to Election Day, to be more than $30 million per two-year election cycle.

The method used to determine these savings, detailed in the appendix, is simple and built from real-world examples. First, I estimated the range of total Cascadian spending for off-cycle elections based on expenditure data from two local examples: King County, Washington, and Anchorage, Alaska. Second, I estimated potential savings from two other local examples: a set of on-cycle and off-cycle elections in Nevada cities and a before-and-after estimate from the city of Concord, California. And third, I reality- checked each of these examples against other data points I could find.

From these examples,...

Six months into the pioneering state policy, regulatory costs are falling and projects are springing to life.

In cities across Oregon, parking mandates are going out not with a bang, but a whimper.

“It’s sort of been a sleeper issue here”,

said Anne Catlin, the comprehensive planning manager for Albany, Oregon. When Albany repealed minimum parking requirements citywide earlier this June, not a single person from the public testified. Catlin didn’t recall the topic even making the newspaper.

Normally parking is one of the most contentious issues for local governments, making any relaxation of parking mandates – rules that prescribe a minimum number of parking spaces needed for any new home or business – a political hot potato. But new state parking rules have taken the status quo off the table, and turned what could be a big debate into a boring compliance exercise.

“There really isn't much to provide input on, we're just going to comply with the rules,”

said Sandy Belson from the city of Springfield.

By June 30th, affected jurisdictions could choose to either eliminate all parking mandates, or enact a host of more complicated regulations if they wish to retain minimums in some instances. The two other compliance paths include regulations ranging from pricing one in ten on-street parking spaces, to separating the cost of parking from rent to creating parking benefits districts. All of which would take additional staff time and oversight.

At least seven cities have voted to go the simpler route: Portland, Salem, Corvallis, Tigard, Bend, Albany, and Central Point. Now over a million people live in communities where parking is fully voluntary. More cities are poised to join them the next year, after using a deadline extension granted by the state.

Transit proximity already removed parking mandates from majority of lots

Removing all parking minimums wasn’t the dramatic leap it would have been a year ago. Last January, state rules lifted parking mandates for all properties within a half mile of frequent transit corridors, and within three-quarters mile of rail stations. City generated maps have revealed that those areas constitute the majority of lots in many cities. In Corvallis, those transit adjacent areas covered 65 percent of the city. For Gresham, 53 percent. In Tigard, 62 percent.

The slivers of city not included were likely to be low-density residential neighborhoods, industrial land, or open space.

“Most of our city falls within a half mile of our transportation corridor,”

Catlin said.

“It was an easy decision.”

In Corvallis, city planners recommended removing all minimums because bus service can change over time. If transit service were downgraded, building owners might suddenly find themselves needing to add more parking to stay legal. Service-dependent rules could also give residents who like parking mandates a reason to oppose transit upgrades, thereby deepening transportation inequities.

Transit service changes are already putting zoning maps in flux. A planned improvement to bus line 71 in Milwaukie this upcoming September would have increased the fraction of the city without minimum parking requirements from 78 percent to 95 percent. They plan to fully eliminate parking mandates later this year.

In addition to areas near transit, the state has also done away with parking mandates for long list of uses for equity reasons, including for affordable housing, small residences, and childcare facilities and more. Those rules will give more flexibility to housing projects like a senior care facility that had their expansion plans scuttled over two parking spaces last year.

State rules reduce barriers to new businesses

Local governments are often well aware of the specific sites, like oddly shaped lots or old buildings, where parking minimums pose barriers to redevelopment. But before Oregon’s state rules, they didn’t have a lot of options for reforming those counterproductive codes without an arduous political process.

On...

City Councilor Burhan Azeem shares his experiences from Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Thanks to the charter change ballot measure voters approved in November 2022, Portlanders will see a few changes to the city’s election method and governance in the coming years. One of the first will be the November 2024 election, when voters will choose 12 councilors in 4 districts using proportional ranked choice voting.

Under the new system, Portlanders will be able to rank multiple candidates on their ballot, bubbling in their first choice, second choice, and so on. Instead of a single candidate winning one seat with more than 50 percent of the vote, 3 candidates in each district will win seats with more than 25 percent of the vote each. Ballots are counted in rounds until these 3 candidates come out on top. Losing candidates in each round are eliminated, and their votes are transferred to the voters’ next-choice candidates. Candidates who pass that 25 percent threshold during counting will win a seat, and any votes above that threshold will be transferred to the voters’ next-choice candidates.

To get some ideas about what voters can expect from the new system, I talked to Cambridge, Massachusetts, City Councilor Burhan Azeem. Azeem is serving his first term on the council and is the youngest councilor in the history of Cambridge, home to the United States’ longest-running proportional election system. Since 1941, Cambridge voters have selected nine citywide councilors using proportional ranked choice voting. While Portland’s experience won’t look exactly the same as Cambridge’s, Rose City residents can learn a lot from the practices and results they’ve had over the last 80 years. Here are excerpts, edited for brevity and clarity, from my conversation with Councilor Azeem.

Why did you run for office?

There’s all sorts of political causes and stuff I really care a lot about: housing and transportation policy, as well as other things. But my first real call was showing up to City Hall and thinking, “This is not the city I see right outside the doors.” Cambridge is a very young city, even without counting kids. And especially when I first got involved in politics, everyone was fairly old.

Besides our mayor, all my other colleagues currently on the city council are between 50 and 80. They’re all great people, but it was just very different than the city that was represented. Some of my main issues as a candidate were topics related to the universities we have in town, and I ended up getting lots of votes in areas where lots of students live. So I think the message you generate resonates with people.

How do Cambridge voters understand the proportional ranked choice system? Do you find yourself doing lots of voter education?

As a baseline, we have a good political culture, there’s really good explainers and other materials, Cambridge residents are extremely well educated, and enough people get it to explain it to other people who don’t. The government and council actually do a lot of voter education on top of that, because the median length of residency of a voter in Cambridge is so low that for a lot of people it’s their first time doing ranked choice voting.

One trade-off of our system of doing everything at-large is that we have almost 20 candidates run, and getting voters to understand the comprehensive differences between 20 candidates is really, really difficult.

Cambridge voters tend to have a good understanding of who’s likely to win a seat and who the marginal candidates are that don’t really have a shot, but even the short list can still be a lot of candidates to sort through. So what the benefit might be of Portland having smaller districts is that you might have more like six candidates running. Six is a much more understandable number for most people; they’ll be able to get a sense of what’s going on in each district.

How do voters decide between all those candidates?

In Cambridge we tend to see slates, groups of candidates you’re ...

The new zoning code legalizes more types of housing but creates new barriers to abundance.

The rising tide of pro-housing policy in the Pacific Northwest is about to reach up to the popular mountain town of Boise, Idaho.

The city’s new zoning code, scheduled for a final vote by the city council this month, will legalize more types of housing in residential neighborhoods creating more affordable choices for the area’s growing population. While removing key barriers to increasing the supply of housing, the code also introduces some new ones. A full-strength embrace of abundant housing may require another round of reform.

Boise’s existing zoning code dates to the 1960s, when the city abandoned the flexible rules of the early 20th century in favor of exclusionary codes that limited residential neighborhoods to single-family detached homes on their own lot. The new code’s improvements to what’s allowed in residential zones include:

Decreasing the minimum lot size from 5,000 square feet to 3,500 square feet;

Simplifying the permitting process to lower the risk and costs for developers to gain approval from the city to build more housing;

Increasing the maximum size of backyard cottages and basement apartments from 700 to 900 square feet and ending city discrimination against renters in the primary house;

Allowing triplexes and fourplexes that were previously banned; and

Reducing off-street parking requirements for multiplexes by 50 percent.

Unfortunately, the last three points come with new conditions: many of the newly allowed housing units will be subject to rent control through deed restrictions and incur higher costs due to requirements to meet sustainability goals.

An earlier version of the zoning rewrite, released in 2022, would have allowed construction of fourplexes by right in all residential zones. City planning officials later backed away from that idea and added new requirements that fourplexes must exceed the building code on energy efficiency and water use and must limit rents on some units with deed restrictions. These new requirements along with limits on the demolition of existing buildings included in the new code will ultimately constrain the production of this infill-friendly housing.

These late-arriving provisions of the new zoning code have a plausible logic: the city grants permission for more units per residential lot but in return developers must make the units sustainable and affordable through rent control. The problem is that these requirements don’t apply to single-family homes, so given the choice of redeveloping a lot with a large single-family home or, say, a fourplex, these added costs and conditions will push developers toward building familiar single-family homes.

Boise’s proposed zoning code embodies a skepticism that relaxing the existing barriers to building more units per lot will actually promote enough new supply to hold down prices. This distrust that the laws of supply and demand actually apply to housing resulted in the imposition of rent control on many of the smaller new units in residential zones. The experience of other cities shows that if the problem is high rental prices due to inadequate housing supply, then rent control makes it worse and more new construction makes it better.

It’s difficult to know exactly how infill developers will respond to Boise’s new code. Meaningful improvements in allowing smaller lots and more forms of housing could unleash a wave of new construction given the strong market for rental housing in Boise. But it is more likely given the new rules in the code that not much will change in the residential zones.

Boise’s new zoning code is 611 pages long; no one knows exactly how it will work in practice. Should the city council pass it into law this month, staff plan to work with the new code for one year to better understand its strengths and weaknesses. They will have an opportunity to revisit what’s successful and what’s not in the second half of 2024.

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