California, Arizona, and Nevada have shifted to even-year elections, boosting turnout and saving money—with lessons for other states.

Many election reforms---gerrymandering bans, ranked choice voting, proportional representation---are controversial. Winning them is a daunting prospect. But one is snoozingly uncontroversial among US voters, even while it boosts turnout more than any other change scholars have studied.

That reform is election consolidation: rescheduling local elections to occur with national and state elections. Election consolidation is the best-kept secret of reforms, the one turnout reform that rules them all, as Sightline has argued time and again.

When this plan has come before voters, it has passed by wide margins. It has passed with little debate. To voters, synchronizing elections is a no-brainer. There should be one general Election Day, they believe, and it should be the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November of even years. The primary election should precede it by a few months.

Unfortunately, legislators do not always agree. Most state bills to put local elections “on cycle” with national ones quickly die, with little active support or debate. And in many states, including Idaho, Montana, and Washington in Cascadia, state legislatures have not only failed to consolidate elections themselves, they have also barred cities from doing it on their own. They require cities to hold their elections “off cycle” on strange dates or in odd years. Consequently, local voters are stuck with too many elections; local leaders are chosen by small, unrepresentative electorates; and local budgets bleed from churning through unnecessary ballot handling.

Is change possible? Is there a politically realistic path to election consolidation? Yes, there is. Three Western states have blazed the trail in recent decades, and Cascadian states could be next. It starts with mild reforms at the state level that merely let cities consolidate elections. It moves next to ballot measures in multiple cities. And then it returns to legislatures to finish the job.

Electoral winning streak

For the public, election consolidation sells itself, like ice cream on a summer beach. Citizens want to vote less often. They’d rather fill out one long ballot all at once than two short ballots on different days. Or three or four ballots on different days. Or, in the state of Washington, five different ballots on different days.

That’s why on almost every occasion when voters have considered consolidating elections, they have voted “yes” by large---sometimes, staggering---margins.

Consider: In 2015, some 77 percent of voters in Los Angeles approved election consolidation; as did 76 percent of voters in Takoma Park, Maryland; and 91 percent in Chandler, Arizona. In 2016, Scottsdale, Arizona, joined the trend with 90 percent of voters’ agreement. In 2018, Phoenix consolidated elections by a vote of 73 percent, while the California cities of Burbank, Inglewood, and Pasadena did so by votes of 81 percent, 74 percent, and 83 percent respectively. In 2021, some 66 percent of voters in Austin, Texas, agreed to move mayoral elections onto the presidential election cycle.

Most recently, in November 2022, voters in King County, Washington, which encompasses Seattle, approved moving county council and county executive elections on cycle by almost 70 percent (see Charter Amendment 1). The same day, voters in 11 cities considered election consolidation proposals for some or all city offices and passed every single one of them. In Boulder and Fort Collins, Colorado, voters approved consolidation by 63 and 76 percent respectively. Voters in St. Petersburg, Florida, opted to move local elections by 70 percent. In California, they did so in San Jose by 55 percent, Compton by 64 percent, Arcadia by 67 percent, Modesto by 69 percent, San Francisco by 71 percent, Long Beach by 75 percent, Pomona by 75 percent, and Redwood City by 87 percent.

This winning streak ...

HB 1245 and SB 5364 advance affordability, financial security, wealth-building, and other benefits for Washingtonians in all kinds of communities.

A severe lack of modestly priced “starter homes” is shutting out more and more Washingtonians from homeownership. As the New York Times observed, “nationwide, the small detached house has all but vanished from new construction.”

One of the main reasons is no mystery: zoning laws that require every house to have a large lot. When there’s a shortage of homes, land prices go up, which makes it financially infeasible to build anything but a big, expensive house if it has to occupy a big, expensive piece of land. And in a double-whammy, large lot requirements themselves restrict the supply of homes, unleashing a vicious cycle of spiraling prices.

The solution couldn’t be any more obvious: legalize smaller house lots. And that’s what Washington bill HB 1245 (and its companion SB 5364) would do.

And it would do so in an incremental, locally controlled way, by allowing homeowners to split their lots into smaller parcels—if they want to. HB 1245 is not a mandated blanket rezone for smaller lots. Small house lots would be created only when the owner of a lot decides to split it.

WHAT WASHINGTON’S HB 1245 WOULD DO

HB 1245 is simple. It grants owners the authority to split their house lot once, into two pieces. For size, each piece can’t be less than 1,500 square feet and can’t be less than 40 percent of the size of the original lot. These lower size limits are intended to keep adjacent lots from becoming too dissimilar. They supersede local minimum lot size requirements.

As a tenant protection measure, the bill prohibits lot splits that would involve demolition of any housing that is rent-restricted or rent-subsidized, or that has been occupied by a tenant paying market-rate rent within the preceding 12 months.

Because it can be difficult to fit parking on small lots, the bill caps parking mandates at one off-street space per split lot. It also establishes a few guardrails for design standards.

LESSONS FROM CALIFORNIA’S LOT SPLITTING BILL: GRADUAL UPTAKE

Washington’s HB 1245 was modeled after the 2021 California’s SB 9 that legalized lot splits on all single-family parcels statewide. California went smaller on lot size, though, allowing splits down to 1,200 square feet. SB 9 also legalized duplexes on every lot, so in combination with lot splitting, every house lot in California now has the potential to hold four homes.

A new study on SB 9 demonstrates the incremental, gentle rate of change we can expect if Washington legalizes lot splitting by passing HB 1245. A year after California’s law went into effect, the study finds, “some of the state’s largest cities reported that they have received just a handful of applications for either lot splits or new units, while other cities reported none.”

It’s too soon to nail down why uptake has been so low, but one theory is that in some places California’s liberal accessory dwelling unit (ADU) laws make backyard cottages a more attractive option than splitting a lot to add a new house.

THE BENEFITS OF LOT SPLITTING: FROM STARTER HOMES TO COMMUNITY STABILITY

Allowing lot splitting would provide a second major benefit aside from the starter homes discussed above. It would create options for homeowners who want to downsize but also stay in their neighborhoods and communities.

Some owners may not want a big backyard and would prefer see another family living in a house there. Others may want to build a smaller house for themselves on a split lot and sell the original main house to a larger family that needs more space. Others may opt to split their lot to create a home for extended family to live next door. Owners on fixed incomes who are house-rich but cash-poor could sell part of their land to give themselves a financial cushion.

In light of the ownership opportunities and owner flexibility offered by lot splitting, the Black Home Initiative, a new reg...

Evidence is more conclusive than ever that the reforms proposed in HB 1337 are effective.

Washington’s severe statewide housing shortage calls for statewide action to reform all manner and form of rules that are needlessly impeding the construction of new homes of all shapes and sizes in our cities. On the most modest end of that spectrum are accessory dwelling units (ADUs), or more familiarly, granny flats and backyard cottages. These are modest-sized—and most often more modestly-priced—homes that can be tucked into existing buildings, homes, yards, and neighborhoods.

This year Washington lawmakers will have a chance to pass a set of statewide standards for ADU rules that are proven effective to boost the production of ADUs. Representative Mia Gregerson’s (D-33) HB 1337 would remove the biggest regulatory barriers commonly imposed by cities, making it easier for homeowners to add ADUs to their properties.

Legislators are also considering a weaker ADU bill, HB 1276, that lacks several of the important reforms in HB 1337. Passing HB 1276 would be progress, but falls short of an appropriate response to the state’s housing affordability crisis. HB 1337 would deliver the reforms necessary to achieve the full potential of ADUs to deliver desperately needed housing choices in communities all across Washington.

IT’S TIME TO END THE DELAY ON STATEWIDE ADU REFORM

All the reasons ADUs are a wonderful type of home, and all the policies that would maximize the creation of new ADUs, have not changed since 2019 when Washington first took up statewide ADU reform. Read all about it on Sightline, where we've written on this many, many, many times..

One thing that definitely has changed over the past four years, though, is that Washington’s shortage of homes and resulting housing crisis has gotten progressively worse. And thousands of Washington families have lost out on the opportunity to live in an ADU because the state has repeatedly punted on setting statewide ADU standards.

THE DEBATE IS OVER: ADU REFORM WORKS

If you’re looking for proof, consider California. After the state passed statewide ADU reforms similar to those proposed in HB 1337, ADUs took off. As of last year, roughly one in seven new homes permitted in the entire state of California were ADUs. In Los Angeles the number is even more eye-popping: one in every four new homes was an ADU. The big ADU numbers in California put the lie to the common assumption that ADUs will never put much of a dent in the housing shortage.

Seattle provides another striking example of effective ADU reform. In mid-2019 the city adopted a set of ADU reforms similar to those proposed in HB 1337. By 2022 permit volumes had risen to more than three times the typical rate prior to the reforms.

WHAT WASHINGTON’S ADU BILL WOULD DO

There is widespread agreement among ADU policy researchers that the four most important ADU reforms are:

Lifting parking mandates

Ending requirements for the owner to live on site

Reducing or eliminating impact fees

Legalizing two ADUs per lot, including detached ADUs (backyard cottages)

To provide flexibility, HB 1337 allows local governments to pick three out of the above four key reforms to adopt. It would also set the following standards:

Attached or detached ADUs allowed on any size lot that allows a detached house

Minimum ADU size of no less than 1,000 sq.ft.

Maximum height limit of no less than 24 feet (or the max. height for houses if less than 24 feet)

No design standards or other restrictions that are more stringent than what applies to the main house

In comparison, the weaker ADU bill, HB 1276:

Does nothing to reduce parking mandates

Does nothing to limit impact fees

Allows enforcement of anti-renter owner occupancy rules if ADUs are used for short-term rentals

Lets cities ban detached ADUs and two ADUs per lot on lots less than 4,500 sq.ft.

Sets no floor on the limits cities can place on ADU size and height

Limits cities’ autonomy by requiring them to ban short-term ...

SB 5466 could support hundreds of thousands of needed new homes closer to where residents work, learn, and recreate.

Housing and transit belong together in cities. And this year, Washington lawmakers will take up a bill to help that happen in urban communities throughout the state. If passed, it would be a first for Washington, and the strongest statewide policy of its kind in North America.

The timing is opportune. Last year, Washington passed a transportation funding package that included $3 billion for public transit, by far its biggest investment ever. The state now has a responsibility to get the most out of that investment, and the way to do that is to have more people living and working near transit stops. In urban planning-speak, that’s called transit-oriented development, or TOD.

Sponsored by Senator Marko Liias (D-21), SB 5466 would create flexible standards for cities to allow mid-sized apartment buildings within three-quarters of a mile of transit stops with frequent service, and larger buildings within a quarter-mile of light rail stations.

The bill reflects a growing consensus that transit-oriented development is a key solution to the Washington’s massive shortage of housing that’s driving up rents and prices and harming Washingtonians with the least, the most. And this consensus crosses the aisle, even in this era of polarization: out of the gate, SB 5466 has five Democratic and three Republican sponsors.

A new report from Challenge Seattle, an alliance of business leaders, calls for “[mandating] local jurisdictions to encourage and accelerate [upzoning in] areas near transit hubs to incentivize TOD.”

A new Urban Institute study on transit and zoning in the Puget Sound region concluded that “reforms allowing high-density housing near transit would be most effective overall” to “meet increased demand for housing.”

And that unmet demand for homes is a statewide problem that bleeds across city boundaries, afflicting residents in communities throughout the state, and demanding a state-level response. The best way to add new homes is through the construction of multifamily buildings, and the most sustainable place to put those homes is near transit. And that’s what Washington’s TOD bill would do.

WHAT IS TRANSIT-ORIENTED DEVELOPMENT?

TOD is a long-established pillar of urban planning. Think early railroad towns or streetcar suburbs. In more recent decades, cities throughout North America have strived to build housing around new transit investments such as Sound Transit’s Link light rail system. There’s a ginormous inventory of literature on TOD, so I may as well quote from a report I co-wrote in 2009:

New transit investments offer more than a means of moving people from one point to another; they can also be an opportunity to support, and in some cases, create communities by opening up new opportunities for people to gain access to, from, and within the neighborhood. By integrating land use, transportation, and housing policies to foster vibrant and safe mixed-use communities where residents, employees, and visitors can walk, bicycle, or take transit to reach their destinations, cities can continue to grow in a manner that is healthy for both people and the planet.

In 2009, the Washington legislature considered HB 1490, a bill way ahead of its time that included a TOD provision requiring cities to adopt zoning that would allow a housing density of 50 units per acre within a half-mile of light rail stations. (It became a lightning rod for controversy, but the bill died for bigger reasons.) Washington’s only other try on TOD since then was a 2019 bill, SB 5424, that was only intended as a conversation starter and died quickly in committee.

California tried and failed for three years running to pass SB 50, which would have legalized up to six-floor apartment buildings near transit. Though the state did succeed last summer in passing a bill that lifts parking mandates within a half-mile of transit stops.

With its 2021...

Eliminating parking mandates is a simple solution to a big problem.

Washington could be next to join Oregon and California in re-legalizing homes and business located in transit-rich areas, regardless of how many parking spots they have.

HB 1351 is the first bill introduced in Washington to focus specifically on reducing parking mandates—local rules that force every new building to include particular amounts of parking, regardless of how much residents and visitors use. The increased flexibility would let areas well-served by transit to add more housing choices and business opportunities, allowing cities to grow more like they used to.

The bill would strike down local parking mandates across the state for properties that are within a half-mile of stations served by transit that operates every 15 minutes at peak weekday hours, and a quarter-mile from stations with 30-minute peak service. The bill was introduced in the state House on Friday by freshman Rep. Julia Reed (D-36).

The reform builds on Washington’s HB 2343, which in 2020 imposed caps on parking requirements for senior, multifamily, and affordable housing developments near frequent transit. Since then, both Oregon and California have begun statewide rollbacks of parking mandates along transit lines. Those states’ reforms took effect on January 1.

A poll about Washington’s housing crisis, conducted by Lake Research Partners last year, found that 55 percent of Washington voters would favor such a measure. (Another 22 percent opposed.)

Washington cities would still be able to impose parking requirements on a case-by-case basis, subject to a few conditions.

ROLLING BACK PARKING MANDATES WOULD ADDRESS HOUSING SHORTAGE

Even as Washington’s housing shortage doubled in the past 7 years from 64,000 needed homes in 2012 to 140,000 in 2019, most communities have continued to require that every new home have a certain number of parking spots, no matter how many residents will actually use.

In the Seattle Metro area, almost half the land within a half-mile of existing or planned rail and bus rapid transit stations still requires at least one parking spot for every home, even a studio apartment. Nearly half of that, 24 percent of the total land studied, mandated two parking spaces or more, according to a new housing report by the Urban Institute.

Unused parking created by these mandates has huge costs. King County estimated in 2015 that parking in multifamily buildings costs between $20,000 to $40,000 per stall. Builders in the area say costs today are far higher, coming in at $50,000 to $80,000 per space. At 350 square feet per car, space for parking takes away from buildable land that could otherwise be used to house Washingtonians.

“It holds us back from building as much as housing as we could,”

said architect Cary Westerbeck of Bothell, WA. In the course of his work, parking minimums regularly prevent building as many homes on a property as could otherwise fit.

“It’s the tail that wags the dog,”

he said.

“You figure out what you can park, then you figure out what you can build.”

A fourplex he built in downtown Bothell easily could have had twelve homes, he said, if it had not been for the parking requirements. There was plenty of height to build additional stories because of the downtown location, but the small 2,600-square-foot lot could only accommodate four parking spaces. Because every apartment legally required a parking spot to exist, eight homes ultimately went unbuilt.

That same building Westerbeck dreamed of building in Bothell would have been legal to build in Seattle. That city eliminated parking mandates in central and transit-adjacent neighborhoods back in 2012. In the five years that followed, a study found that 59 percent of the homes permitted since would have been illegal under the old rules, even though 70 percent of new buildings still chose to provide parking.

Other Washington bills to increase housing supply include reductions of parking requirements to g...

Regulators across Cascadia should end line extension allowances, the subsidies ratepayers finance that expand utilities’ pipeline infrastructure.

To meet climate commitments, the natural gas system across Cascadia must begin to shrink. Even sooner, it must plateau. But a widely used regulatory policy called “line extension allowances” (or “line extension subsidies”) authorizes gas utilities to promote just the opposite. These allowances, offered by gas utilities and paid for by current gas customers, encourage steady growth of the polluting system by subsidizing the cost of fossil fuel infrastructure build-out.

In 2023, California will become the first state in the United States to eliminate line extension allowances because of their harmful climate, economic, and health impacts. Some regulators in Cascadia have taken steps to reduce the subsidies, but they remain on the books throughout most of the region. Regulators in the Northwest would be smart to follow their California counterparts’ lead and eliminate these counterproductive subsidies entirely.

Line extension allowances perversely incentivize gas system growth

Without any subsidies, a developer or homeowner could expect to pay thousands of dollars to hook up a building to a gas distribution pipeline. This hefty price could encourage homeowners or developers to forgo polluting gas appliances (like gas furnaces) and instead opt for cleaner electric alternatives (like heat pumps).

But in a perverse incentive for the climate, regulators allow gas utilities to eliminate some or all of the cost of new gas connections through line extension subsidies. Even worse, existing gas customers (ratepayers) foot the bill for the subsidies, most likely without knowing it.

All gas utilities in Cascadia offer line extension allowances of varying amounts and with different structures. Say a developer needs to hook up a new home or business to gas service, and it’s going to cost $5,000. The chart below shows the estimated percentage of this cost that each gas utility in the region would subsidize under its current policies. The percentage subsidized is in blue, and the percentage the new gas customer or developer would pay out of pocket is in orange. Most Cascadian utilities would subsidize at least half of a $5,000 hook-up. Five, including Avista and Cascade in Oregon, would fully cover it through ratepayer dollars.

Due to line extension subsidies, Cascadian gas pipes continue to proliferate, adding thousands of new customers every year. Utilities in Oregon and Washington alone connected 61,000 residential customers to the gas system in 2020 and 2021, a roughly 3 percent increase from 2019 customer counts. Ratepayers in these states likely paid more than $100 million a year to cover the cost of the subsidies that made those new connections possible---and further entrenched the gas industry in our energy future.

The arguments for line extension allowances are stale

While justifications for the subsidies vary by region and utility, the typical economic rationale is that connecting more customers to the gas network is better and cheaper for everyone. That’s because utilities can spread fixed costs for the entire system over more households, thereby lowering rates for all and more than offsetting the price existing customers pay to subsidize new ones. State utility commissions have also touted the subsidies as necessary to boost “economic development” and “promote equitable access among residential ratepayers” to the gas system.

But the arguments supporting line extension allowances crumble in light of growing knowledge about the health and climate hazards of gas and corresponding anticipated declines in its use. As gas utilities’ customer base shrinks, which it will with widespread electrification, the costs of maintaining and operating a larger gas footprint will drive rates higher for those still connected to the system. That means line extension allowances incentivize customers to conne...

"GeoNetworks" are being piloted in New York and Massachusetts. Cascadia should be next.

To meet Cascadia’s climate goals, we will need to stop burning natural gas to warm our homes, cook our food, dry our clothes, and heat our water. Buildings emit the second-highest level of greenhouse gas emissions of any sector in both Oregon and Washington and the third-highest in British Columbia, in large part because they burn so much gas. As a result, policymakers across Cascadia are increasingly requiring that new buildings be gas-free.

But two major questions loom: how do we transition the more than 2 million homes in Cascadia that are already connected to the gas system? Just as crucially, what is a realistic decarbonized future—if there is one—for gas utilities?

Today, in the absence of a plan, politically powerful, deep-pocketed utilities are spending billions of dollars to prolong the lifespan of their gas infrastructure. They are spreading climate falsehoods and trumpeting faux decarbonization ideas like hydrogen for home heating and “renewable natural gas.”

In a small but growing number of communities across North America, though, gas utilities, labor groups, and climate hawks together are exploring an idea that could answer both of these questions: networked ground source heat pumps (I’ll call the idea “GeoNetworks” for short).

Such networks hold great appeal. They rely on tried-and-true technology. They are enviably efficient and emit zero pollution. They leverage gas utilities’ massive scale, existing footprints across entire cities, and access to deep pools of investment capital. They could smooth an otherwise bumpy transition off gas that would penalize low-income families. And they could keep utility workers employed for a generation.

So far, only a few states on the US East Coast are exploring this transformation of gas utilities. In Cascadia, no utility has yet tested GeoNetworks. And only British Columbia even has the legal framework that would allow utilities to do so under a regulated model; an affiliate of the province’s main gas utility, FortisBC, could immediately break ground on the idea. Meanwhile, leaders in Oregon, Washington, and other Cascadian states would be smart to remove regulatory obstacles and allow utilities to pilot GeoNetworks in those states, too.

NORTHWEST GAS UTILITIES ARE HYPING FALSE DECARBONIZATION SOLUTIONS WHILE SPENDING MORE THAN $1 BILLION TO REPLACE AGING GAS PIPES

Gas utilities across Cascadia are hard at work touting purported climate solutions that are dangerous, unrealistic, and expensive. They are promoting hydrogen for home heating, a hazardous and inefficient solution. They are promising to replace gas with “renewable natural gas”—methane that leaks from landfills or industrial agriculture—at likely impossible volumes. They are challenging climate laws in court and using ratepayer money to spread misinformation about gas, including to Oregon schoolchildren.

In other words, gas utilities are fighting climate progress like their lives depend on it. Which of course, they do, barring a new business model. Gas-only utilities like Cascade Natural Gas (Cascade) and NW Natural are staring down an especially precarious future. Unlike combination gas-and-electric utilities like Puget Sound Energy (PSE) or Avista, which will grow their electric businesses as electrification takes off, gas-only companies stand only to lose.

On top of their climate obstructionism, Northwest gas utilities are spending big to replace aging gas pipes. Indeed, they are planning to replace hundreds of miles of pipes, and ratepayers will need to pay for it. Avista, Cascade, and PSE combined plan to spend at least $1 billion to install more than 700 miles of new gas pipes in Oregon and Washington over the next decade (see table 1 below for details).

These replacement pipes will last for at least 50 years, according to gas utility depreciation studies. That means gas utilities are continuing to install infrastructu...

Because housing solutions are solutions for homelessness, jobs, equity, climate, and conservation.

Each year, Washington state’s worsening housing shortage means that more families struggle to pay rising rents or find homes they can afford to purchase. More people face homelessness. Young people move away or can’t move back because they can’t find apartments they can afford. The self-inflicted shortage of housing inside cities puts pressure outside cities, forcing more development to sprawl into the state’s forested areas, agricultural land, and wildlife habitat. Employees at growing companies can’t find housing they can afford. Local businesses, big and small, can’t find workers. And city-level leaders are hamstrung in the face of a statewide problem that spans outside their jurisdictions.

The core reason more and more Washingtonians cannot find homes they can afford is that there aren’t enough homes to go around. And a big reason for that is widespread local bans on everything but stand-alone houses on large lots, the most expensive and resource-intensive kind of housing there is.

This shortage can’t be solved by any one city or county alone. It requires elected officials working together at the state level. Fortunately, the Washington state legislature will soon have a chance to establish statewide standards for homes like triplexes and rowhouses in our job centers—state leadership much like that of our neighbors Oregon and California.

The 2023 middle housing companion bills HB 1110 and SB 5190, sponsored by Rep. Jessica Bateman (D-22) and Rep. Andrew Barkis (R-2) and Senator Yasmin Trudeau (D-27), would legalize “middle housing” in cities throughout the state. That is, the spectrum of housing options that exist between detached, stand-alone houses and large apartment buildings: modest-sized options that serve a broader range of people and families. For details on the bill, see this explainer article. In brief, the bill would legalize:

Up to six homes per residential lot within a half-mile of frequent transit and

Up to four homes per lot in cities with a population of 6,000 or more, or cities of any size within the contiguous urban growth areas surrounding Seattle or Spokane.

Washingtonians can’t wait, and their leaders can’t either. They should make 2023 the year of affordable housing, lifting exclusionary zoning laws by passing HB 1110 and SB 5190. Here’s why:

AFFORDABLE HOME OPTIONS AND ECONOMIC SECURITY FOR WASHINGTONIANS

A family spending more than 30 percent of its household income on housing is considered “cost-burdened.” In Washington state, nearly half of all households statewide had unaffordable housing costs in 2019, and 47 percent of renters at all income levels are cost-burdened, leaving too many perilously close to eviction and houselessness. Every additional dollar those families and individuals spend on their housing costs is money they can’t spend on other things, like food, medicine, education, or recreation.

Re-legalizing middle housing will help fix the root cause of Washington’s housing affordability crisis: a shortage of homes. A primary cause of the shortage is exclusionary zoning laws that ban middle housing options from some three-quarters of residential land in Washington’s cities.

Middle housing is inherently less expensive than stand-alone houses because the homes are generally modest in size and the cost of land is split between a few households—a triplex, for example, puts three homes on a city lot where only one is typically allowed, often under one roof. In contrast, detached-house zoning guarantees that only the most expensive kind of homes can ever get built in most residential neighborhoods.

Middle housing types such as townhouses and rowhouses boost homeownership options. Washington has an especially acute shortage of affordable for-sale homes because the vast majority are detached houses on large lots, as mandated by current one-size-only zoning laws. Re-legalizing middle housing will...

HB 1110 addresses the state’s acute housing shortage, opening up affordable options for families, workers, and elderly and young home seekers.

Will 2023 be the year that Washington state opens up more housing options for families and individuals here? The year it joins other West Coast states to end widespread bans on every kind of home except detached houses with big yards?

Legislators tried last year, and this year are back with another bill, HB 1110, to lift local zoning laws that ban multi-dwelling homes like duplexes and townhouses. It would open the doors to “middle housing” options for hundreds of thousands of families, legalizing up to fourplexes all on residential lots in most cities, and sixplexes near transit stops.

By legalizing more housing options in neighborhoods throughout the state, the bill would not only help correct the historic injustice of restrictive zoning originally enacted to exclude Black families, but also relieve the root cause of Washington’s housing crisis: a shortage of homes.

More middle housing means more affordable home choices near jobs, schools, and transit, and more options for first-time homebuyers. It also means a wide range of other benefits to Washingtonians, including less sprawl into our farmland and forests, more walkable communities, reduced home energy use, lower municipal infrastructure costs, jobs for small, local builders, and increased local tax revenue.

HOW MIDDLE HOUSING CAN EASE THE HOUSING SHORTAGE

Washington officials project that the state will need roughly one million new homes by 2044. The pro-housing nonprofit group Up for Growth estimates the state’s shortage of homes rose from 64,000 in 2012 to 140,000 in 2019—more than doubling in just 7 years.

Compared with typical apartment buildings, middle housing yields fewer homes per lot, but there’s power in numbers: Washington has about 1.8 million detached houses occupying roughly three-quarters of the state’s residential land. If middle housing were legalized, only a fraction of those house lots would gain new homes, but that small share would still be enough to help pull Washington out of its housing shortage.

Extrapolating from a California study, legalizing fourplexes throughout Washington could make more than 200,000 more homes not only legal, but also financially feasible for builders to construct.

A University of Washington report estimated that legalizing fourplexes within a quarter-mile of transit stations would create capacity for nearly half a million more homes in the Puget Sound region, which houses 4.3 million of the state’s 7.6 million residents. If even a fifth of that capacity eventually saw construction, that’s 100,000 more homes in the Puget Sound region alone.

Detailed projections are not available for the 2023 middle housing bill, but we know that it will legalize the potential for hundreds of thousands more homes for individuals and families that need them all across the state.

Fourplex with two-bedroom units that fits on a typical 50 x 120-foot single-family lot, designed by Cast Architecture.

BREAKING DOWN HB 1110, WA’S 2023 MIDDLE HOUSING BILL

Continuing her strong leadership on housing, Representative Jessica Bateman is the prime sponsor of this year’s bill, HB 1110, that would legalize middle housing in two tiers:

Within a half-mile of frequent transit, up to six homes per lot

In cities with a population of 6,000 or more, or cities of any size within the contiguous urban growth areas surrounding Seattle or Spokane, up to four homes per lot

Applies to small cities located within major metros

A key change from the 2022 bill is that fewer cities would be exempted based on population. The bill applies to cities as small as 6,000 (the cutoff in last year’s bill was 20,000).

In addition, cities smaller than 6,000 will not be exempt if they lie within an urban growth area contiguous with a city that has population of at least 200,000, which translates to the Seattle and Spokane metros. This would en...

Why communities are eliminating off-street parking requirements—and what comes next.

The following is an excerpt from an article originally commissioned and published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Columbus, Ohio, invented the first known off-street parking requirement for an apartment building in 1923. After nearly a hundred years, the results are in, and they’re not good.

Last year, an assessment of the local zoning code—commissioned by the city as part of a comprehensive code revision process—concluded that off-street parking requirements were “not effective” and “often poorly matched to true parking demand.”

That mismatch has gotten worse over time. Today’s parking requirements in Columbus are far higher than their cousins from the city’s midcentury zoning code. In 1954, an apartment building with 100 one-bedroom units was required to have 100 parking spaces; today it has to have 150. For a 2,500-square-foot restaurant, nine required parking spaces became 34, in the 90 percent of the city not covered by special overlay districts. These ratios are out of step with the local market, leading builders to request parking reductions more than any other type of zoning variance. City and regional plans have recommended reducing parking requirements and making them more consistent.

Columbus is not alone. Across the United States, decades of similar parking requirements have led to a glut: researchers estimate that for every car in the country, there are at least three parking spaces—and some have suggested the number is closer to eight spaces.

This oversupply has created a host of problems: parking requirements can inflate housing costs, block buildings from being adapted to new uses, and contribute to sprawl, making additional driving (and parking) necessary. They create an administrative burden. And the impervious surfaces of parking lots increase the risk of flooding and contribute to the urban heat island effect.

But there is good news: of all the harms traditional zoning has inflicted on communities, parking requirements are the easiest to fix, said Sara Bronin, former chair of the Hartford, Connecticut, Planning and Zoning Commission. Bronin was at the helm in 2017, when Hartford became one of the first cities in the United States to eliminate residential and commercial parking mandates. The year before, city leaders had tested the waters by eliminating requirements in the downtown area, a move that yielded new development projects and new proposals for reuse.

“Every community should be eliminating their parking requirements,”

Bronin said.

Each year, more cities are eliminating or reducing such mandates. In 2021, cities from Minneapolis to Jackson, Tennessee, eliminated minimum parking requirements from their zoning codes. In the week that this article was drafted alone, cities from Spokane to Chicago to Burlington, Vermont, rolled back parking mandates.

Communities might reduce their parking requirements because they are trying to reinvent themselves by attracting new businesses and development, accommodate population growth with space-efficient infill, or focus more on transit and walkability. Regardless of the reason, parking reform advocates say this land use regulation could finally be on its way out.

“We’re going to look back at this as just this weird, late-20th century aberration,”

predicts Patrick Siegman, an economist and planner who has been studying parking since 1992, including as a partner at the national transportation planning firm Nelson Nygaard.

“We created something wildly inefficient.”

The above is an excerpt from an article originally commissioned and published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.