How a flexible “plex” design could add lower-cost homes, green space, and walkable, vibrant neighborhoods—fast—across housing-strapped cities.

As people across Cascadia buckle under soaring home prices and rents, leaders are scrambling to legalize, or try to legalize, more “middle housing” options amid their single-detached-dominated stock. While options like laneway homes and backyard cottages, duplexes and triplexes, may get the job done in some locales, bigger cities will need bigger solutions—and fast.

Vancouver, British Columbia, has perhaps an over-lauded reputation for transit-oriented development, given its mere handful of tall neighborhoods. The city was early to legalize laneway homes in 2009, seen then as an incremental way to add more compact, environmentally friendly housing “without incurring the wrath of. wealthy homeowner groups,” some of whom expressed shock that a person might be able to look from a modest laneway home balcony into the primary home’s garden. About 4,500 laneway homes have been built there since, with another 4,000 planned by 2028. They’re popular, and as of 2018, fully 45 percent of newly constructed houses included a laneway home, and many of them also incorporated attached mother-in-law suites.

Fourteen years later, Vancouver planning staff have now proposed legalizing four and sixplexes across the city, including in areas currently restricted to single-detached houses. The new proposal would allow a modest 16 percent increase in building size across the city’s low-density zones. It would also permit more units: four or six homes would be allowed, depending on the lot size. Right now, only three units are allowed in most detached house areas (the main house, plus an attached in-law suite and a laneway house).

The proposed 16 percent increase in housing density is not enough to make up for decades of inaction. Detached home prices in the once-affordable East Vancouver have increased 100 percent in just the past ten years. Yet nothing but these homes is permitted on 81 percent of Vancouver’s residential land, effectively excluding anyone who can’t afford the high price of a stand-alone house and freezing even a relatively dense city like Vancouver in a predominantly suburban state.

The results aren’t surprising: Vancouver’s population has grown more slowly than that of its surrounding suburbs, with detached home prices ballooning to $3.3 million on the city’s west side, well out of reach for most families.

If we faced a less daunting housing challenge, then this 16 percent increase in allowable density might make sense. But our problems are bigger than that, and our solutions are going to have to be, too. It’s time to end detached-house zoning—and give Vancouverites more ways to call the city home.

INTRODUCING “THE PLEX”

Fourteen years after laneway homes were legalized, the results are in, and prices are way, way up. Whatever we do next, let’s not make the same mistake of doing too little, too late. In the spirit of doing enough, and fast enough, we set out the following goals, looking to bridge the gap between the city’s towers and its single-detached-dominated neighborhoods:

Make it dense—and build up, not out.

Make it affordable.

Make it fast.

Do it everywhere.

Make it accessible.

What would a new housing form that does all of these things look like? We propose: “the Plex,” a modular, repeatable apartment building of six, eight, or ten homes.

The Plex is a place for people to raise families, meet friends, and live their lives on quiet streets in the neighborhoods they love. They combine the large units and yard space that people associate with detached homes, with the walkability and affordability of apartments.

Include a shared rooftop patio and solar panels, plus front and rear balconies to liven the streetscape and allow neighbors to mingle. Ensure full accessibility for residents of all abilities, design to energy-efficient passive house standards, and preserve or even add tree can...

Early efforts in California, Colorado, and New York offer lessons to get started.

Cascadians are swapping gas furnaces for heat pumps, gas stoves for induction cooktops, and gas dryers for electric ones. The “electrify everything” movement is accelerating, spurred by new federal, state, and local incentives.

But when and how are we going to start pruning the gas system accordingly? Without shutting down gas infrastructure in tandem with electrification, an ever-shrinking number of gas customers will face ever-ratcheting costs to maintain a bloated gas system. Renters and low-income people who face the greatest hurdles to electrify are at the most risk of this so-called “death spiral.”

Thankfully, there is a better way: strategic gas decommissioning paired with neighborhood electrification. In this world, all the buildings in a neighborhood or area electrify, as opposed to today’s scattershot approach. Then, the gas utility shuts off that part of the system, rightsizing its infrastructure to fit the new, smaller number of gas customers.

Cascadia has yet to start decommissioning gas infrastructure or electrifying whole neighborhoods, but early work underway in California, Colorado, and New York offer some insights to get going. At a minimum, leaders in Cascadia who are committed to clean, healthy buildings and an equitable transition off of gas would be smart to:

Clarify or eliminate gas utilities’ “obligation to serve,”

Require gas utilities to propose areas ripe for decommissioning and neighborhood electrification instead of replacing gas pipes,

Incentivize decommissioning and neighborhood electrification while protecting ratepayers, and

Shield gas customers from future stranded gas assets.

Let’s take these steps in turn.

1. CLARIFY OR ELIMINATE GAS UTILITIES’ “OBLIGATION TO SERVE”

All states and provinces of Cascadia (and all 50 US states) require gas utilities to provide service to any customer in their territory who wants it. These “obligation to serve” laws used to make sense. They prevented monopoly utilities from discriminating against customers who were not profitable to serve, like people in low-density areas or those who use only small amounts of gas. And they helped lower gas customers’ bills by spreading fixed infrastructure costs over more households over decades, a model possible for a gas system that exists in perpetuity.

But we no longer live in a world where the gas system can last forever. And electric alternatives abound for every residential need currently met by gas. The obligation to serve—or, at least, regulators’ interpretation of it—is getting in the way of strategic gas decommissioning.

“A single customer can tank a project,”

explained David Sawaya, Senior Manager of Decarbonization Strategies at Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), California’s largest utility, at a 2021 webinar organized by the California Energy Commission (CEC). CEC is funding a roughly $2 million, two-year body of research to identify potential pilot sites in northern and southern California for strategic gas decommissioning and neighborhood electrification. Given the obligation to serve, “every single customer has to agree to electrify” for decommissioning at the neighborhood scale to be possible, Sawaya continued. With recent uproar over an imaginary US ban on gas stoves, it’s not hard to conceive of a single gas system hold-out.

Obligation-to-serve laws are nebulous enough that the issue could be resolved through regulation alone, Professor Heather Payne, an expert on regulatory policy at Seton Hall University School of Law, told Sightline. Payne argues that a state’s Public Utility Commission (PUC) could do away with the obligation to serve simply by shrinking gas utilities’ service territory once the PUC identifies an area ripe for strategic decommissioning and neighborhood electrification.

“Regulators gave service territories and they can take them away,”

she emphasized.

But legal challenges from utilities or consumers could fol...

To reduce housing shortages, small doses of cash could get many projects built. A bill introduced in Oregon this year suggests a clever place to find it.

Oregon’s housing catastrophe comes down to this: Alongside every home built in the state since the Great Recession is the ghost of another home that never was.

Cottages that might have slipped into backyards if they’d been able to cover the sewer connection fee. Apartment buildings that might have filled up with nursing assistants and preschool teachers if they’d qualified for a slightly larger loan. Would-be projects across the state that, for one of a thousand reasons, came up a little short on cash and never left the drawing board.

Economists calculate that it’s added up to the country’s fourth-worst housing shortage. When there aren’t enough new homes, bidding wars begin for the old ones. Since 2010, untold thousands of these price battles across Oregon have driven up home prices more than 60 percent.

A grizzled squad of the state’s housing nerds says they have a “big idea” that could help end these bidding wars by bringing these ghost homes to life, especially in smaller cities where low wages and decrepit infrastructure keep much of anything from being built. They calculate that a $300 million investment could produce 12,000 mid-price homes around the state within several years.

That’d be enough to meet several years’ worth of the state’s new production goal for that price category.

Then, like blueberry bushes, the seeds planted would bear fiscal fruit year after year. Even without further funding, a revolving housing loan fund seeded by a one-time state investment would produce thousands more homes over the decades to come, bringing the total public cost to $10,000 per home created.

The catch is that it’d cost money up front. But the concept’s backers say that if Gov. Kotek hopes to come anywhere close to her high-profile goal of nearly doubling housing production, there’s no more cost-efficient way to push up the numbers.

The idea for making more of Oregon’s ghost homes exist was captured this year in House Bill 2980. On Friday, the Portland Business Journal reported that that bill appears dead for this year; its backers aim to keep developing it and introduce it again.

Its concept is simple. The money comes from the future.

HAPPY HOMES AND GHOST HOMES

In a state with too few happy stories about housing, Mieko Frederick’s sidewalk-level apartment in Newberg, Oregon, might be home to one of the happiest.

Sitting at the little wooden table outside the door to Unit 103, a few blocks from downtown, Frederick cheerfully counted the ways she loves her new place, built in 2020.

“The grocery store is there, the library is there,”

said Frederick, 83, gesturing this way and that from the makeshift patio she set up after moving into the three-story building a year-and-a-half ago.

“I can walk and go everywhere.”

Then there are the stories like the one about the 8th Avenue Garden Cottages.

That was the name Dirk Knudsen gave his plan to add eight 250-square-foot freestanding homes to an oversized backyard just southeast of downtown Hillsboro, a booming tech hub north of Newberg. Within three blocks were a hospital, a university campus, a grocery store, and a light rail stop.

“We were looking for students, lower-income people in the service sector, and also seniors looking to move down out of their existing homes,”

Knudsen recalled.

But between construction costs and the $34,000 per new home that Hillsboro charges to finance new roads, pipes, and parks, Knudsen calculated that he couldn’t bring the cottages to market for less than $260,000 each—and he estimated that nobody would be willing to pay that much to live in one. So he pulled the plug. Today, the backyard is still sitting mostly empty, and the eight households that might have lived there are instead competing for housing with everyone else in Hillsboro.

“WE CAN’T SOLVE THE AFFORDABLE CRISIS IF WE DON’T SOLVE THE HOUSING...

Three ways to curb the sprawl that traps us on a wildfire treadmill.

It’s time to address the elephant in the room: the best and possibly only practical way to protect homes from fire is to stop building so many of them in places that are primed to burn. According to Dr. Jon Keeley, a fire ecologist with the United States Geological Survey,

“People are so fixated on climate change, which is a very real concern, but the bigger driver of accelerating wildfire damage is building houses in the WUI.”

The wildland-urban interface (WUI) is the area where houses are built in or near natural areas—either through urban sprawl or when satellite developments or individual houses spring up in the midst of forest, shrublands, or grasslands.

This concern is urgent. Wildfires are bigger than ever. Many are impossible to fight. Yet people are flocking towards fire-prone lands and populating the wildland-urban interface faster than any other area in the United States. Some developers are building new homes in the very footprint of recent wildfires. It’s worth emphasizing the obvious: without costly firefighting, these homes will burn down.

These houses trap us on a wildfire treadmill by impeding efforts to restore wildlands to health through “beneficial fire.” They also ensure the diversion of billions of tax dollars to an expanding arsenal of bulldozers, aircraft, and firefighters.

We can’t stop population growth. Cascadia is and will likely remain a major receiving zone for people who appreciate its natural wonders and for climate migrants. What we can do is guide this growth away from fire danger.

According to Tim Trohimovich, Director of Planning and Law at the growth management advocacy nonprofit Futurewise:

“There’s no doubt that the cities and towns and their environs where it makes sense to grow are big enough to accommodate all of the population increase in Washington, Oregon, Montana, and Idaho. We don’t need to build on forestland, grasslands, or farmland.”

In a true meritocracy, the 2023 firefighter of the year award would go to city infill because new construction within existing urban areas is the most effective way to lower our collective fire risk. Runner-up would be compact development contiguous with existing city limits. If past fires are any indication, compactness is the single most important protection against wildfire damage.

Fire-hardening communities against inevitable wildfire is important, but preventing development in fire hazard zones is how we solve the wildfire crisis.

FLOCKING TO FIREPLAINS IGNITES FIRES AND FIREFIGHTING COSTS

Between 1990 and 2010, the number of new houses in or near wildlands in the United States grew by 41 percent. Even more surprising, the number of new homes where fires have recently burned grew by over 60 percent.

Just as it has maps of floodplains, the United States maintains maps of wildfire hazard that chart where fires frequently burn. You can think of these areas as “fireplains.” But unlike floodplains, construction in fireplains is not regulated. And fireplains are expanding as the atmosphere warms.

People are moving into fiery rural places primarily for the amenities. This has become possible with improvements in the communication infrastructure, expansion of the service economy, and the ability to work from home. And, of course, free wildland fire suppression. About 15 percent of WUI houses in the West are second homes. Of course, plenty of people are moving to the WUI to afford a home.

WUI growth tends to follow the riskiest patterns: dispersed, detached housing and isolated clusters of houses surrounded by open space. Planners call the latter “leapfrog development” because developers hop over land close to a city or town and instead erect structures farther away, leaving forest, grassland, or shrubland between clusters of buildings.

Constructing residences near forests and other wildlands in fireplains poses four main problems.

More homes—and the people they house—tremendously ...

A quarter-million-dollar budget proviso will fund a study to map opportunities beyond oil.

Within Washington state’s newly released 2023 operating budget for the biennium is a nation-leading step toward oil refinery transition planning. Over the next two years, Washington will devote a quarter-million dollars to analyzing the future of the state’s refineries, laying the groundwork for a clean energy transition that supports workers, safeguards communities, and protects the environment.

There are five oil refineries on Puget Sound---in Pierce, Skagit, and Whatcom counties. But as Sightline has highlighted previously, the state lacks a roadmap to protect workers and communities dependent on these facilities as the region shifts off of oil. That’s a risky bet when experts project oil demand will peak and then continuously decline over coming decades and when, from 2019 through 2022 alone, seven oil refineries across the United States shut down operations without warning. These abrupt closures resulted in more than 3,400 layoffs, millions in lost local tax revenue, polluted land without a cleanup plan, and minimal community say over future redevelopment of the sites.

Washington is now embarking on a different, forward-looking path.

The new $250,000 budget proviso tasks the Washington State Department of Commerce with assessing the future of the state’s refineries. Though an initial budget request of $750,000 submitted to the Senate would have allowed for a fuller analysis, this more modest investment is an important first step. The Department of Commerce will contract with a consulting or research firm to implement the project.

Thanks to this investment, Washington and its refinery communities will gain important information they’ve been lacking to prompt future planning and to guide a thoughtful, inclusive process, including:

1: A transparent picture of both the feasibility and desirability of refinery conversion to alternative fuels. Oil refineries globally are touting conversion to alternative fuels like “renewable diesel” as the way of the future. Renewable diesel is chemically identical to petroleum diesel but produced from vegetable oil (primarily soybean and corn oil) or animal fats instead of from crude oil. Washington’s BP refinery already produces renewable diesel, and it is a much-discussed option for the other facilities in the state. But several US refineries that recently converted to this fuel laid off most of their workers and cut their tax payments significantly.

Plus, biofuels like renewable diesel are coming under increasing scrutiny for their environmental hazards, including using prime farmland or forests to grow their soy or corn fuel feedstocks. Rather than relying solely on industry assurances, Washington will now gain a clear-eyed assessment of this oil industry proposal and its likely impacts on employment, local taxes, and the environment.

2: An understanding of options for workers and communities currently dependent on refineries. More than 4,400 people---2,000 employees and approximately 2,400 contractors---work in the Washington refineries, many unionized and earning well above area median income. In addition, the local governments that house the refineries currently collect from them more than $24 million in property taxes that pay for critical local community services like schools, fire departments, and libraries.

To the first point, this proviso will fund the inaugural proactive assessment in Washington of refinery workers’ skillsets against alternative local industries, looking for transferability. To the second, it will forecast how local tax revenues may fall with reduced refinery output. With this information, Washington leaders will have a clearer view of needed investments to support refinery workers through the energy transition (see some ideas from a recent report on layoffs at a former Marathon refinery in California). And state and local leaders can use this information to start shorin...

And to escape, we need more fire, not less.

More low-intensity fires could have prevented the megafires that turned 700,000 acres of forest into a “moonscape” and incinerated more than one billion board feet of timber. That is what the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation claim in their lawsuit against the US government. There is good evidence backing them up.

Even with more flexible policy and some redistribution in funding, federal and state wildfire response still does not follow science-based recommendations to allow wildfires to burn when conditions are low-risk and to use intentional controlled fires to restore forest health and climate resiliency.

Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to our wildfire problem. As William Bagley, a seasoned fire professional and emergency manager for the Klamath Tribes, told me,

“Fire’s not rocket science. It’s a lot more complex.”

Still, it’s clear—especially in seasonally dry inland ecosystems—that forests need more fire, not less.

CASCADIA IS STUCK ON A WILDFIRE TREADMILL

Cascadia, along with the rest of the West, is caught in a vicious circle: the more we suppress fires, the worse they get; and the worse fires get, the more we suppress them. It’s such a ubiquitous pattern, and such an entrenched and difficult problem, that it deserves naming. Let’s call it the wildfire treadmill. (Sightline has illustrated the concept above. A higher-resolution version is available for download)

Wildfires have become larger and more ferocious than previously imaginable, and we are seeing more of the megafires that destroy communities and that no amount of firefighting can contain. As the planet warms, most areas in western North America will experience a doubling or more of their fire risk.

The three culprits that put us on the wildfire treadmill are:

Climate change and the accompanying increase in those hot and dry days with strong winds that spread fire rapidly and make fire extinction very difficult, called “fire weather”;

The buildup of “fuels” in the forest: small trees, shrubs, debris, and dead wood; and

The expansion of the wildland–urban interface (WUI), where houses meet or intermingle with undeveloped wildland vegetation.

Ironically, the accumulation of forest fuels is a direct consequence of state and federal policies that since the 1600s in one Canadian province and the early 1900s nationwide in the United States have mandated the immediate suppression of all wildland ignitions. For decades, indigenous Americans caught using cultural fire were often jailed or worse.

Now we face a daunting predicament: having snuffed out nearly every ignition for over a century, we’ve suppressed ourselves into a corner where even a small and innocuous flame can explode into an uncontrollable megafire. So, we continue to fight nearly every fire.

A FIRE IN TIME SAVES NINE

Small, low-intensity fires now, while unpleasant and dangerous, mean fewer large, high-intensity fires later. It’s when a fire is hot enough to burn the entirety of mature trees, called crowning or torching, that higher-intensity fire can take off. At this point, the fire can spread embers across long distances and can become a “crown fire” that spreads from treetop to treetop.

Historically, smaller and patchier fires frequently swept through Cascadia’s seasonally dry forests, clearing out forest fuels. Indeed, throughout the bioregion, much of this fire was intentionally started by indigenous people who used it to prevent more dangerous fires, stimulate seed germination, recycle nutrients, and create open habitats for the plants and animals they relied on for food and fiber.

These lower-intensity fires travel along the ground, fueled by grasses, fine fuels, and small trees. Fire-adapted species, such as the ponderosa pine, with its thick fire-resistant bark, can survive low- and mixed-intensity fires. And these fires, every 15 to 20 years, make it unlikely for any one ignition to grow into a high-intensity fire. Th...

Open primaries and ranked choice voting likely led to greater political diversity in the Alaska legislature, while their effect on age, gender, and race was less apparent.

The demographics of the Alaska Legislature looked slightly different after the 2022 election. Alaskans sent more Independents to Juneau than ever before. More Millennials won office as the years-long retirement trend among Baby Boomers continued. The share of women legislators held about steady. Racial diversity ticked up modestly.

We wanted to know whether Alaska’s first-time use of open primaries and ranked choice general elections affected any of these demographic changes. Given the multiple factors involved and the very small sample size of one set of election results, the job seemed futile. The exceptionality of 2022 showed itself early with the unexpected death of Alaska’s longest-serving Congressman, and it persisted for reasons other than the debut of Alaska’s election system. The 10-year redistricting process reshaped legislative boundaries and put 19 of 20 Senate seats, along with all House seats, on the ballot (normally, Senators serve staggered 4-year terms and House members serve 2-year terms). The open seat in Congress triggered a special election. And a record number of incumbents chose not to run again. Attributing all the new faces and dynamics in Juneau to the election system would overlook these and a host of other factors that influenced who ran and how voters made their selections.

Still, we decided to check out the data. We found open primaries combined with the ranked choice general election most obviously influenced political diversity in the legislature. But when it came to age, gender, and race, nationwide demographic shifts toward greater diversity that predated the system appeared to exert more significant effects. The system probably didn’t do much to improve diversity in these cases but also did not appear to disrupt preexisting trends. Nor did it significantly alter the Independent/right-leaning dynamic of the House and the Senate. Its virtue lay in providing Alaska’s many Independent-minded voters a way to express their nuanced, non-binary political views.

HOW WE DID OUR ANALYSIS

To measure diversity in the Alaska legislature, we gathered data in four demographic categories tracked by the National Council of State Legislatures. They were political party, age, gender, and race. We then analyzed legislative classes from 2008 to 2022 and the factors most likely to have shaped their demographic makeup, including the following:

The debut of Alaska’s voter-approved election system of open primaries and ranked choice voting;

New political boundaries from the latest round of redistricting changing the constituencies of some seats;

An unusually high number of veteran legislators choosing not to run for a variety of reasons (e.g., family considerations, health issues), making way for an unusually large freshman class;

Normal generational turnover;

Shifts in political culture and societal norms;

Quality of candidates and campaigns; and

Buzzworthiness of candidates at the top of the ticket.

INDEPENDENTS HAVE MORE REPRESENTATION THAN EVER

More Independents serve in the Alaska legislature today than at any point in the state’s history, with six members of the House eschewing party labels. The growth in representation by Independents did not meaningfully alter the longstanding political order. In both chambers, Republicans maintained the majority they’ve held since the 1990s, and no Independents won seats in the Senate.

Nearly 60 percent of Alaska voters are Independents, meaning they self-identified as “nonpartisan” or “undeclared” or opted not to choose any political affiliation when signing up to vote. The Independent identity of Alaska voters takes many forms: the pro-oil development Democrat is no anomaly here; nor is the Republican pushing to spend billions in state budget dollars on the Permanent Fund Dividend (or the “PFD,” which ...

While distributed solar can’t solve the region’s transmission woes alone, Idaho and Washington would be smart to follow Oregon’s lead in boosting it for a cleaner future.

To meet climate targets, the Northwest needs to build unprecedented amounts of wind and solar power and the electric transmission lines to carry it. Easier said than done.

Utility-scale renewable projects—like acres-large solar installations or miles-long corridors of wind turbines—and the electric wires that connect them to cities and towns increasingly inspire opposition. They can require vast tracts of land, and, if not planned responsibly, can threaten sensitive habitats, prime farmland, and tribal rights.

In light of these challenges, some advocates argue that the region could avoid building transmission lines and large renewable projects if it instead dramatically scaled up what is known as “distributed solar.” Unlike their utility-scale counterparts, distributed solar projects generate electricity close to where it is consumed—say, on home and business rooftops, over parking lots, on small, unused fields—and bypass the transmission grid altogether. Distributed solar typically ranges in size from small, 0.001 megawatt (1 kilowatt) projects to medium, roughly 5-megawatt (MW) projects. For comparison, utility-scale solar farms in the United States tend to have installed capacities of 100 to 200 MW. The biggest farms in the country top 500 MW.

Unlike other parts of the United States, though, distributed solar has limited potential to offset the need for new transmission capacity in Cascadia. That’s in large part because most places in the region that are on the receiving end of transmission constraints need most of their power in the winter, when the sun is weakest. The biggest exception is southern Idaho, which, with its strong sun and high demand for summer power to irrigate farms, could be a prime candidate for scaling up distributed solar.

Even so, distributed solar, especially when combined with storage, can help decarbonize Cascadia. Local generation helps the region hedge against the risk that we simply won’t build new transmission lines and utility-scale renewable projects fast enough. But the Northwest is lagging in installing the most promising type of distributed solar infrastructure: midsize projects in the range of 1–5 MW. Idaho and Washington are especially behind. Policymakers in these states would be smart to lift project size limits to net metering and look closely at community solar, which has catalyzed midsize solar growth in other states, including Oregon.

DISTRIBUTED SOLAR HOLDS THE MOST POTENTIAL FOR OFFSETTING TRANSMISSION BUILDOUT IN THE FEW “SUMMER PEAKING” PARTS OF CASCADIA

In the Pacific Northwest, as elsewhere, more transmission capacity is needed to 1) meet rising electricity demand associated with electrifying everything from cars to stoves and 2) replace the supply of power that today comes from burning gas or coal. We’re especially short of transmission lines to bring clean power to cities and towns in western Oregon and Washington and southern Idaho. The argument that distributed solar can prevent transmission buildout is that by producing more power close to the people who use it, you won’t need to generate as much far away and thus won’t need to build transmission lines. Plus, you’ll lose less electricity in transit.

Indeed, in 2018, California’s independent grid operator recommended canceling 18 transmission expansion projects to save $2.6 billion. It cited reductions in projected electricity demand thanks to increasing levels of rooftop solar and energy efficiency. (And note that distributed solar isn’t the only way some places could prevent or defer building transmission lines. Others include upgrading existing lines, increasing energy efficiency, rolling out demand response programs, and installing distributed storage—all with different potential in different locales. These are not the focus of this article but are...

Amid the US’s second-worst price spikes and shortage of homes, a broad coalition unified to find solutions.

In the last three weeks, Montana rocketed through a housing agenda that would give most US states a nosebleed.

Duplexes: legal. Backyard cottages: legal. Discretionary design review: ended. Residential parking: optional after the first space. Commercial zones: they're also apartment zones now.

How'd it happen? A bipartisan coalition united around a simple idea: when in a housing shortage, let cities build like they used to.

A series of housing supply bills, expected to be signed by Governor Greg Gianforte, would restore the ability to build accessory dwelling units (ADUs) and duplexes in cities across Montana as well as permit multifamily housing in commercial zones. Other bills shielded new housing from “not in my backyard" challenges and delays. All these bills gained wide bipartisan support in the Republican supermajority legislature.

Combined, the adopted policies will change how Montana grows for decades to come. Currently 70 percent of residential land prohibits or penalizes multifamily dwellings in Montana’s 13 most populous cities. These exclusionary zoning laws were commonly adopted during the last century, restricting less expensive types of homes like middle housing and ADUs, and pushing new construction to the outskirts of cities---to sprawl.

It wasn’t always that way. Senator Greg Hertz (R) recounted that there used to be more housing types when he was growing up, from apartments above the garage to triplexes.

“It was all over the place,”

he said.

“We don’t have that anymore. Local governments zoned all that out.”

Regulatory reform efforts have most commonly been fought in blue states with rapidly growing metro areas. But Montana is showing that, when a housing crisis looms and affects community members of all political stripes, victories can come from anywhere.

BILLS THAT DIED IN 2021 CAME BACK, WITH MORE FRIENDS AND HIGHER STAKES

2023 had already been such a success for housing reform in Montana that when CityLab’s How YIMBYs Won Montana was published at the end of April and two major housing supply bills had run into hurdles, the writer still dubbed the state’s overall pro-housing policy successes a “Montana miracle.” By now, even those two bills have sailed through the legislature. A miracle indeed. But it took both an intensified crisis of affordability and a careful cross-partisan collaboration.

This is a 180-degree turn from the last legislative session in 2021, when these same ideas quickly were shot down. Just two short years ago, bills to allow ADUs and middle housing options never made it out of their first committees.

What changed? First, the housing crisis in Montana has soared to new heights. In the past five years the average home price in the state has nearly doubled, increasing from about $239,000 in 2018 to $428,000 today, according to Zillow. That is the second highest price spike in the United States, after neighboring Idaho. The state legislature in Montana only meets every other year, adding to the pressure for action to head off the affordability crisis.

“We can’t afford to wait any longer,”

Sen. Hertz testified on the ADU bill he brought back after failing to get support 2021. But this year, the same committee that had killed the bill voted 7-2 in support.

Another shift: a well-organized set of stakeholders respected by both parties. The driving force behind the year of housing was a strong bipartisan coalition of advocates, first convened by the Governor on a housing task force. Hertz had served on it, as well as pro-housing Missoula Democrat Danny Tenenbaum. Nonprofit organizations like Habitat for Humanity and Shelter Whitefish sat next to free-market driven think tanks like the Frontier Institute and Mercatus Center. A few months before the 2023 legislative session started, the unlikely bedfellows published a report recommending regulatory changes to boost housing affordability...

Making 2023 the year of reform.

Washingtonians just won big on home choices. In a landmark session, lawmakers passed a suite of bills to create more homes, at more affordable prices, in communities all across the state. These measures, large and small, get at the core problem: the acute shortage of homes that has blown up prices and rents and caused a statewide affordability crisis. To make it official, Governor Inslee will sign the bills at a ceremony today in Seattle.

Thanks to these new laws, over the decades ahead, tens or even hundreds of thousands of people will be able to live in more walkable, lower-carbon neighborhoods, in homes they can afford, close to opportunity, close to jobs, schools, transit, and parks—close to each other. Washington just took a big step away from sprawl and segregation and toward compact communities that welcome more neighbors of all ages, races, ethnicities, and incomes, where cars are an accessory to life and not its organizing principle.

The biggest win is HB 1110, which legalizes fourplexes or duplexes in most cities. Close behind is HB 1337, legalizing two accessory dwelling units per lot and lifting numerous restrictions.

On top of those two biggies, bills passed that:

legalize adding housing to existing buildings,

develop building code for single-stair apartments,

prevent abuse of environmental review that blocks housing,

help cities streamline permitting,

put guardrails on onerous local design review, and

lower regulatory barriers to condo construction.

Below we describe how we got here and what these measures’ impact could be. Then we discuss each bill in detail.

HOW 2023 BECAME THE “YEAR OF HOUSING”: COALITIONS, CHAMPIONS, AND GREATER PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING

dt’s no small task to pass state bills that defy typical local zoning, the rules that have for nearly a century codified the “American dream” of a big house with a lawn and driveway. Up until this year, only Oregon and California had pulled it off. Washington can now join that elite club. Montana, of all places, earned membership this year, too. And Colorado currently has strong bill in play. Meanwhile, statewide zoning reform has stalled in New York and Arizona.

In the previous four years Washington only managed to pass a few narrow bills, no matter the good efforts of a handful of pro-housing legislators. This year, the dam finally burst under compounding pressure from multiple factors:

More constituents seeing or personally experiencing the worsening crises of housing affordability and homelessness;

Increasing consensus that the core problem is a housing shortage and that restrictive zoning is the main culprit;

Superhero champions, notably Rep. Jessica Bateman on the middle housing bill and Rep. Mia Gregerson on the ADU bill;

Bipartisanship: All of the above-named bills passed with strong bipartisan votes and could have died without Republican support, notably led by Rep. Andrew Barkis (Republican opposition was a big factor in the recent failure of New York’s big housing bill, for example);

A pro-housing coalition that was stronger and broader than ever before (see for example this coalition letter organized by Senator Yasmin Trudeau and Lt. Governor Denny Heck); and

Last but not least, the legislature’s always capricious swirl of internal process and politics.

IMPACT: HELPING TO CLOSE THE HOMEBUILDING GAP

Washington’s housing abundance wins couldn’t come soon enough. Over the past few decades the state has dug itself into a deeper and deeper hole on housing, and it will take all these actions and more to get out of it. By one estimate, the deficit rose from 64,000 homes in 2012 to 140,000 in 2019.

Officials project that Washington needs to add an average of 55,000 more homes per year over the next 20 years. In recent years, the state has been permitting around 45,000 homes per year, give or take. So if the status quo continued, the state still would fall behind by roughly 10,000 homes per year.

The lack of precedent for stat...