Surprise! For millions, state laws hang community rules out to dry.

As we and others have reported, hundreds of thousands of people across Cascadia—and tens of millions across the United States—live where homeowners associations (HOAs) or apartment or condo rules ban clotheslines. Clotheslines are a quintessentially sustainable tool that saves money, prolongs clothes’ lifespan, and reduces pollution. A “right-to-dry” movement has sprung up and won laws in six states (Florida, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, and Vermont) to render these bans void and unenforceable. In another 13 states, I have discovered to my surprise and delight that solar access laws already on the books appear to protect solar drying.

Yet in 19 of these states, illegal bans persist in community rule books such as HOA Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions (CC&Rs) and a number that likely runs into the millions of residents do not know they have a right to dry. Solar access laws, many of them from the 1970s, and obscure amendments to state property law hardly fall in the category of common knowledge. When Sightline asked people to let us know about bans where they live, over a third of responses came from these 19 states.

Consider one example: The Forest Heights neighborhood, Oregon’s largest-ever new-home community, is located in Portland’s posh West Hills. The community boasts more than 1,600 single-family homes and covers 600 acres.

A pillar of the Forest Heights marketing campaign is environmental stewardship: The HOA website boasts that the community has set aside more than a third of its acreage as common green space, complete with seven walking trails and a private pond. The HOA offers residents a shuttle service.

Yet in direct contradiction to the community’s green claims, the Forest Heights CC&Rs limit placement of clotheslines to “service yards” that are “completely screened so that the elements screened are not visible at any time from the street or any adjoining property.” This amounts to a de facto ban. The average lot is under a quarter-acre, and nearly all homes have two stories, so completely concealing a clothesline is virtually impossible. The ban is also illegal, rendered toothless by a 1979 Oregon Law that says any restrictions on “solar radiation as a source for heating, cooling or electrical energy” are “void and unenforceable.”

Clotheslines appear to fit under the umbrella of states’ solar rights because systems for hang-drying rely on the sun’s radiation to evaporate water in wet laundry. Clotheslines rely on solar energy, so their use is protected where laws provide blanket allowances for use of solar.

Clotheslines appear to fit under the umbrella of Oregon’s, and other states’, solar rights because systems for hang drying rely on the sun’s radiation to evaporate water in wet laundry. Clotheslines rely on solar energy, so their use is protected where laws provide blanket allowances for solar usage.

In addition to Oregon, solar access laws in Arizona, California, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin all delineate a homeowner’s right to install a “solar energy system,” “solar energy device,” “solar collector,” “system for obtaining solar energy,” or “solar energy collection device.” The legal terminology varies, but the letter and spirit of these laws has one overarching message: homeowners may utilize the power of the sun.

Across the United States, more than a quarter million HOAs govern upward of 60 million people. Alexander Lee, a champion of the right-to-dry movement, estimates that “more than half of them [HOAs] restrict or ban the clothesline.” If he is right, then tens of millions of Americans are subject to either full or partial clothesline bans. Some 19 states, including populous ones such as California, Florida, and Texas, have right-to-dry laws. These facts combined suggest that millions of Americans live under illegal clothesline bans.So spre...

Gas companies are making a risky bet.

Cascadia’s gas utilities know their prospects are rapidly dimming. Decarbonization, now official state and provincial policy in much of the region, is an existential threat to businesses chartered by law to distribute carbon-based fuels. The companies are hoping hydrogen will save them, forestalling bankruptcy as the region leaves fossil fuels behind. NW Natural, Puget Sound Energy (PSE), Cascade Natural Gas, Avista, and FortisBC, the region’s biggest gas utilities, are all developing plans for pumping green hydrogen through their pipes. NW Natural plans to produce green hydrogen that it will blend with natural gas and deliver to around 2,400 customers in Eugene, Oregon. PSE has budgeted $6.3 million through 2026 for pipeline modernization for “alternative fuels,” including hydrogen. And FortisBC plans to invest nearly Can$5 million annually to pursue low-carbon fuels like hydrogen.

Policymakers throughout Cascadia have, perhaps unwittingly, dangled the hydrogen lifeline in front of the gas industry, passing laws that allow utilities to recoup the costs of green hydrogen investments. Oregon and Washington passed policies in 2019 encouraging gas utilities to procure and invest in hydrogen on behalf of their customers. That same year, under British Columbia’s Clean Energy Act, BC regulators added hydrogen to a list of prescribed undertakings for gas utilities to lower greenhouse gas emissions.

But hydrogen is unlikely to save gas utilities from their impending irrelevance. Future hydrogen customers are few and far between, and the competitive hydrogen market will leave currently regulated monopoly utilities in unfamiliar waters. In this context, green hydrogen looks more like a leaky raft than the sturdy rescue boat gas utilities make it out to be.

TOMORROW’S FEW INDUSTRIAL HYDROGEN CUSTOMERS WON’T BE ENOUGH TO SUSTAIN GAS UTILITIES

Green hydrogen’s best role in decarbonization is to clean up a handful of industrial sectors, like steelmaking, international shipping, and long-haul aviation, that do not have suitable alternatives. Hydrogen makes little sense for decarbonizing homes and businesses. Electrification is a much more efficient, cheaper, and safer option, and one that state, local, and federal policies increasingly incentivize.

But if utilities focus just on selling hydrogen to industrial customers, their balance sheets will show a big hole. That’s because under the eccentricities of utility regulation, utilities profit by expanding their vast web of gas pipelines, not by the volume of gas they sell. Even if utilities can make up the lost volume of gas from residential and commercial customers with a few large industrial customers, they won’t be able to earn the same profit from the much smaller pipeline footprint these new customers will need. Today, NW Natural’s industrial gas consumers, for example, make up 41 percent of the company’s gas volume sold and just 7 percent of profits, while its residential customers make up 38 percent of gas volume sold and 65 percent of profits.

Although Northwest utilities don’t all publish data on the profit breakdowns by customer segment, the chart below shows the next best thing: the customer breakdowns by revenue and volume of gas sold by utility. For all the companies, the volume of gas sold to industrial customers far exceeds the revenues earned from them. The opposite is true for residential and commercial customers: utilities earn more of their revenue from this group relative to the share of gas sold to them because of the investments in the vast web of pipelines required to serve millions of smaller customers.

To be fair, gas utilities’ current customer list doesn’t include all potential future hydrogen customers. For example, industries that produce their own hydrogen from natural gas today, like fertilizer manufacturers, could start to source from gas utilities, as could long-haul transportation industries that need to transition off ...

They’re more familiar than you might think.

Major changes may be coming to Portland City Hall soon, courtesy of the city-appointed volunteer Charter Commission and the will of Portlanders as expressed at the ballot box this fall. After two years of research and public input, Charter Commission members proposed ballot measure 26-228, an important change to Portland’s founding document that would improve the city’s form of government and elections.

Among other changes (which you can read about in our FAQ or the City’s), ballot measure 26-228 would introduce multi-member districts. The city would be portioned into four equally populated geographic regions that each elect three city councilors. Here are ten things you should know about multi-member districts before you vote on the charter proposal.

1. YOU’RE ALREADY USING THEM

You heard me right: every Portlander is already living in a multi-member district system. Portland’s four city commissioners are elected in a multi-member district that encompasses the whole city. In the US Senate, there are 50 districts (states), each represented by two senators. And until 1972, Oregon itself used multi-member districts to elect its state legislature. Less populous counties were combined until enough people were included to warrant a single House or Senate seat, and larger counties elected multiple legislators to represent the entire county. Multi-member districts are also used in Anchorage, Alaska; Spokane, Washington; the Washington state House of Representatives; and many other places around the world.

2. THERE ARE MANY DIFFERENT WAYS TO ELECT THE MEMBERS

Election systems require a ton of decisions, and different places often make different combinations of those decisions. If voters approve measure 26-228, Portland’s four districts of three councilors each would use a multi-winner ranked choice voting system. Cambridge, Massachusetts, also uses multi-winner ranked choice voting to elect its citywide council. In Portland’s current city commissioner system, the US Senate, and the old Oregon legislative system, candidates run for numbered positions and voters choose a single representative for each seat (single-winner races). Next door in Lake Oswego, voters select three candidates from a single pool on their ballot, and the top three vote-getters are elected to the citywide council. Similar systems, called “bloc voting,“ are used in more than 100 other Oregon cities.

3. SOME WAYS HAVE BEEN USED TO EXCLUDE SMALLER VOTER BLOCS.

The different methods of electing multiple representatives all have pros and cons. Single-winner races and bloc voting are both winner-take-all systems. Portland currently uses a citywide winner-take-all system, meaning that a group of voters that makes up 50 percent (plus one) of the vote can elect all four commissioners and the mayor. Winner-take-all systems like this can lock any smaller group of voters out of winning any representation, whether used in at-large, single-member district, or multi-member district systems.

For example, before the Civil Rights Movement, some Southern states used winner-take-all multi-member districts to prevent Black voters from electing their preferred candidates to the US House of Representatives. In states that elected their House delegations as one big multi-member district, white majorities were able to win every single seat and leave Black voters without representation. In an attempt to remedy this, Congress banned all types of multi-member districts for the US House of Representatives in 1967. This successfully prevented states from using statewide winner-take-all systems to elect all of their representatives, but it also blocked states from using the much more democratic proportional system that Portland has the chance to implement this November.

4. .WHILE OTHERS ARE GLOBAL BEST PRACTICES IN DEMOCRACY

Proportional representation systems stand in stark contrast to winner-take-all systems and are the most common type of electi...

Otherwise, Oregon and Washington will miss critical climate targets.

The Northwest seems finally poised to reap the fruits of years of hard work on climate change. Renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuels, states and clean energy developers will soon enjoy a huge influx of federal climate dollars, and climate leaders sit at the helm of many state and local governments. But much like the proverbial kingdom that was lost for want of a nail, the Northwest states’ climate ambitions may suffer defeat over something utterly mundane: not enough high-voltage power lines.

That’s right. We may fail the climate test because we’re missing some wires.

A core strategy for decarbonizing the Northwest, as elsewhere, is to stop burning fossil fuels for electricity. Oregon and Washington both recently passed laws that require electric utilities to shift quickly away from coal and gas and toward solar and wind to generate power. Meeting these targets is a mammoth, and critical, undertaking. Today, the two biggest electric utilities in these states derive about half of their electricity from natural gas or coal and just ten percent from wind and solar.

But a major problem looms. Cascadia, like the United States as a whole, suffers from a woefully underbuilt and aging electric grid. The grid is so inadequate that hundreds of proposed wind and solar projects are ending up at the back of waitlists where they may sit for years—waitlists to connect to transmission. New transmission lines (the high-voltage lines that often stretch over mountain ranges and along rivers on tall, scaffolded towers) take a decade or more to construct, giving the problem increasing urgency with each passing year.

Unless Northwest policymakers develop a plan for building out the grid we need, and unless they start erecting it immediately—through the Bonneville Power Agency, state action, utility investment, or some combination of these means—the region’s ambitious decarbonization commitments will amount to so much hot air.

EASTSIDE SOLAR AND WIND NEED TRANSMISSION TO REACH WESTSIDE HOMES AND BUSINESSES

In Cascadia, the best sunlight and wind for making power are east of the Cascade mountains. Renewable projects in the region are exploding, with more than 100 wind and solar projects underway in Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington. Backers have proposed dozens more, including more than 40 solar farms in Washington alone, which today houses just two.

Washington and Oregon, and the electric utilities within them, are counting on tapping this eastside wind and solar to power the homes and businesses on the westside that consume most of the states’ energy. Washington’s state energy strategy, in the scenario that costs the least and electrifies the most, relies on wind from Wyoming and Montana to provide 36 percent of Washington’s clean electricity by 2050. Today, Washington derives just over 5 percent of its total electricity generation from wind power from any state. Similarly, almost all of the utility-scale wind and solar resources that Puget Sound Energy (PSE), Washington’s largest electric utility, modeled in its official, required 2021 integrated resource plan (IRP), are east of the Cascades.

But to access this high-quality wind and sun, westside utilities like PSE in Washington and Portland General Electric (PGE) in Oregon will need to reach far outside their service territories, something they don’t need to do today because their current generating facilities, which are mostly powered by natural gas or hydroelectricity, are nearby. The power lines that PSE and PGE own run from generating facilities, many of which utilities will need to retire if they are powered by fossil fuels, to the cities and towns they serve on the westside. The utilities’ transmission lines barely touch the inland Northwest, with its vast wind and solar offerings.

THE NORTHWEST GRID IS ALREADY JAMMED

To bring far-away wind and solar power to their customers, PSE, PGE, and other utilities d...

Questions about ballot measure 26-228? We’ve got answers.

Portlanders will soon find ballots for the November general election in their mailboxes. One important question they’ll see is ballot measure 26-228, which if voters approve it, will furnish a major upgrade to Portland’s form of government and elections as defined in the city charter. This measure would do three main things if approved by voters:

Allow voters to use ranked choice voting to select their candidates of choice;

Expand the City Council from 5 to 12 members by creating four geographic districts with three representatives each; and

Replace the commission form of government with a system where a city administrator runs city bureaus, allowing commissioners to focus on their legislative responsibilities.

Sightline’s democracy team has been researching election systems for over a decade, and opportunities for Portland specifically for the last several years, including following the work of the Charter Commission. Below we answer the questions we’ve heard most frequently from voters and others following the issue.

BASICS OF THE CITY CHARTER

WHAT IS THE PORTLAND CITY CHARTER?

The Portland City Charter is the city’s governing document, which defines the legal foundation of the city government. City charters are like local constitutions and can prescribe things like the powers and responsibilities of the government, the organization and election of city officials, rules for utilities and public contracts, and the process for revising the charter itself. Oregon is a home rule state, meaning its cities and counties have lots of room to govern themselves within the boundaries of state and federal law.

HOW DO WE CHANGE THE CHARTER?

Charter amendments can’t happen without the approval of Portland voters. Amendments can be initiated by the people through signature-gathering, recommended by City Council, or recommended by the Charter Commission.

In November, voters will see this question on their ballot: “Should Administrator manage city government, 12-member Council (three from each district) make laws, voters elect officials using ranked choice process?” If enough voters say yes, these changes to Portland’s government structure and voting system will be codified in the Charter.

WHAT IS THE CHARTER COMMISSION?

The Charter Commission is a volunteer body of 20 Portlanders tasked with reviewing the City Charter and recommending changes. Since 2007, the Charter has required the City Council to appoint a Charter Commission at least every 10 years. The Charter Commission has included small business owners, union representatives, disability and racial justice advocates, nonprofit directors, legal experts, and others from across the city.

WHAT CAN THE CHARTER COMMISSION DO?

The Charter Commission can recommend amendments to the people, who must approve all changes to the Charter. If 15 or more of the 20 Commissioners support an amendment, it goes directly to the ballot for Portlanders to vote on, such as in the case of the provisions in ballot measure 26-228. If a majority of Commissioners (but fewer than 15) support an amendment, it goes to City Council as a recommendation. City Council can then place it on the ballot if they choose to do so.

HOW CAN I GET INVOLVED WITH THE CHARTER COMMISSION?

While the changes on the ballot this November are already set for voters, the Charter Commission is still working on additional amendments. Phase II of its work is focused on environmental justice, the expansion of voting rights, and proposals from city government departments. Public input for Phase II amendments is ongoing, with various opportunities for engagement.

If more than 15 Commissioners support Phase II amendments, then Portlanders will be able to vote on these changes in the next primary or general election, which will occur in May or November of 2024. However, the amendments could also go to City Council, in which case the timeline is much less certain.

WHY PROPOSE CHANGES TO ...

A Q&A with the planner behind the mid-sized NY city’s successes.

As more cities and states lift costly parking mandates, what will happen next? Chris Hawley has seen the future.

Hawley, first as an activist, then as a city planner in Buffalo, New York, worked to remove minimum parking requirements citywide in 2017 under the city’s new form-based “Green Code.” (“Form-based” focuses on building form, including its physical appearance and relation to the street, rather than regulating uses, like commercial or residential.) Now five years later, Buffalo’s population is growing for the first time since the 1920s, and new homes and businesses are popping up left and right. Hawley shares the story behind the numbers.

CAN YOU START BY INTRODUCING YOURSELF?

First, I was an activist advocating for a new zoning rewrite, along with friends of mine. We felt that the zoning code was the core problem behind a lot of our development controversies and was a stumbling block to get the walkable, mixed-use development that was consistent with our historic character. The 1953 zoning code—adopted the same year that Elvis Presley recorded his first song in Memphis—was ancient. It had been overlaid hundreds of times and grown to an unsustainable 1,804 pages of regulations.

We were in a good position with our new mayor Bryan Brown to throw everything in the garbage and start from scratch. He remained committed through politically difficult conversations, which included 242 public meetings over a seven-year period.

SOUNDS GRUELING AND EXPENSIVE

Writing a zoning code doesn’t involve many ribbon cuttings. But I think that he understood that once the new zoning code is adopted, every ribbon cutting is a victory for the Green Code, which is what we ended up calling it.

A lot of planners advocate for a much more incremental step-by-step approach to adopting form-based codes. That is expensive and doesn’t provide a lot of returns for a municipality, if you are applying it only in very small areas.

There is an advantage to a complete rewrite of your land use and zoning regulations, which South Bend [Indiana] and Hartford [Connecticut] have also learned. When we tackle individual topics, particularly controversial ones, on a bite-sized basis it’s easy to get stuck politically—the common council spent eight months on a chicken coop ordinance. But when it’s one giant package, that can mute controversies about particular elements, whether it’s height or density or certainly whether to have minimum parking requirements.

WHAT KINDS OF CHANGES HAVE YOU SEEN IN BUFFALO SINCE GETTING RID OF PARKING REQUIREMENTS?

Daniel Hass, a professor at the University of Buffalo, looked at the first two years of development activity that went through major site review. He found that developments were providing less parking than was required under the old code. In particular, mixed-use projects often provided substantially less.

We have a few cases of new construction where zero parking was provided. 15 Allen Street was our first zero-parking construction project. It was one block from a metro rail station and had 12 units of housing and two shopfronts. Another one was for 201 dwelling units downtown close to a public library and adjacent to a new grocery store.

I really wish that study had looked at staff-level reviews for smaller-scale projects. I think if that had been undertaken, their findings would have been even more pleasantly surprising. Smaller projects in particular benefited the most from the elimination of minimum parking requirements. Big developers with big projects have a lot more capacity financially to provide parking if they want to. Under the old code they could always get variances: they have expensive attorneys and relationships in City Hall. Smaller-scale projects don’t have those kinds of resources, or they’re constrained by the size of the site.

Mixed-use is a lot easier now. We relaxed density restrictions in residential zones and eliminated them entirel...

The county’s affordable housing provider proposes 94 homes near Troutdale’s downtown. The city is holding it to a rule that would cut that to 70 to make more room for parking.

For years, the City of Troutdale, Oregon, has pushed other government agencies to force the people living in tents along nearby riverbanks to move somewhere else.

Situated on the Columbia and Sandy rivers five miles east of Portland, the city of 16,400 that bills itself as the “gateway” to the spectacular Columbia Gorge has far more low-income residents than low-priced homes, according to a city-commissioned analysis. Zillow estimates that average monthly rents in Troutdale recently exceeded $2,000, a 29 percent jump in 18 months.

Last year, a Troutdale city councilor personally led what the mayor of a neighboring city called a “group of vigilantes” to illegally tear up riverside campsites with “a Bobcat and other tools.” They had organized on Facebook and were under the impression that the sites were unoccupied at the time.

The tensions haven’t stopped there.

This fall, as other government agencies have worked to fund and design a local project with 94 homes at a range of below-market rents, Troutdale has been saying: no, no, no.

Base monthly rents in the proposed cluster of three-story buildings would range from $559 for some studios to $1,438 for some two-bedrooms. They’d be two blocks from the city’s historic downtown core and two TriMet bus lines.

The city’s complaint: city officials say that 130 parking spaces is too few for 94 apartments. Troutdale is insisting that the project instead eliminate one of its three buildings to make room for a bigger parking lot.

The 94-home proposal from Home Forward, the county’s federally affiliated affordable housing provider, is exactly the sort of project Oregon’s state land use commission had in mind in July, when it unanimously voted to roll back parking mandates in most urban and suburban areas, especially for homes that meet affordability standards. If that rule takes effect on January 1, 2023, as scheduled, the Home Forward project would be able to move ahead with 130 spaces for 94 homes.

But if the City of Troutdale has its way, the new “Climate-Friendly and Equitable Communities” rules won’t take effect on January 1. Troutdale is one of nine cities around the state that have agreed to sue to block them.

SIMILAR PROJECTS NEARBY HAVE MUCH MORE PARKING THAN THEY NEED, DEVELOPER SAYS

Troutdale officials say they’re bringing the lawsuit as a matter of principle, not because it would give them more leverage in this high-profile negotiation with what’s effectively a different branch of government.

Home Forward, meanwhile, says it’s trying to keep a commitment to taxpayers. Sixty percent of metro-area voters agreed in 2018 to fund at least 111 new affordable homes in east Multnomah County alongside thousands of others around the region.

Based on its review of the number of cars parked overnight at similar affordable housing projects in Troutdale and nearby Fairview, Home Forward estimates that the future residents of the 94-unit building it aims to construct would probably need space for about 103 cars.

But Troutdale requires parking lots in new residential buildings to have no less than two parking spaces for every home, even a studio apartment. Over the summer, Home Forward approached the city with a proposal: it would eliminate one of the two garbage and recycling areas originally planned for the site. This would bring the parking count to 130, 27 more parking spaces than it estimates its future residents will use. But it wouldn’t require eliminating any homes.

That was still 31 percent less parking than the city generally requires. On September 14, Troutdale’s planning commission rejected that compromise after hearing a series of local residents criticize the project. The concerns raised ranged from curbside parking shortages in front of nearby businesses to a worry that children living in the two-bedroom...

No longer a political third rail, parties are vying for votes with big promises to build abundant homes in one the world’s priciest cities. They could set a gold standard for North America.

Which North American city will be the first to address its housing crisis with abundant apartments, city-wide?

A growing handful of North American states and major cities have been scoring wins in the battle to undo the historic scourge of exclusionary zoning laws, notably Oregon, California, Massachusetts, Portland, Vancouver, BC, Minneapolis, and most recently, Charlotte. These are all relatively incremental changes, though. Laneway cottages here, and duplexes or quadplexes there. None permit even small apartment buildings city-wide.

But in the lead-up to the Vancouver, BC, October 15, 2022, election, municipal parties are competing to outdo each other with proposals to legalize apartments. With an influx of bold housing plans in recent months, Vancouver could be the first North American city to really undo exclusionary zoning. It could achieve, across all of its 115 square kilometers, the holy grail: re-legalizing neighborhoods that mix residential and commercial in a vibrant combination. “Four floors and corner stores.” Or maybe even six.

These are uncharted waters; no city has ever undone restrictive zoning on this scale. According to Jill Atkey, CEO of the BC Non-Profit Housing Association,

It would signal to other cities struggling with the housing crisis in the way Vancouver is, that we have elected officials that are really, really serious about tackling the housing crisis. And then, over time, we could potentially---now, it’s always a struggle, because Vancouver is one municipality in a region of 21 municipalities---but in combination with what [the Provincial government] is proposing, you could demonstrate that more supply could have a positive impact on rents. It could be a game-changer in many ways.

If Vancouver adopts one of these proposals, it could open the floodgates, creating a template for other cities to follow, from coast to coast.

An “emerging consensus” on zoning reform

In Vancouver, densifying detached-home neighborhoods has gone from a political third rail, only a few years ago, to a banner that multiple parties are competing to claim. Atkey, for her part, says:

I honestly didn't think it would happen this election. Maybe perhaps the next one. Because in 2018 we had OneCity proposing ‘every neighborhood for everyone’ and various housing forms in all neighborhoods, but they were pretty much the standalone in 2018. Now we’ve got One City, Progress Vancouver, Vision---all talking about densifying single-family neighborhoods. So there does seem to be, almost, an emerging consensus.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be so surprising, given that zoning reform is immensely popular with the public. A 2019 Research Co poll, for example, found that 71 percent of Vancouver residents would support 3–4-story apartments in neighborhoods that currently only permit detached houses.

This shift in public and political opinion makes sense. Who can afford a detached home in Vancouver today? The price is $1.8 million on the city’s more affordable east side, and $3.4 million on the west. Following public sentiment, Vancouver’s politicians are suddenly thinking really big.

OneCity

OneCity wants to “end the apartment ban” and permit new rental buildings of up to six stories in what it terms “formerly exclusive areas of the city.” The party would also permit stacked condo buildings of up to four stories across the city. OneCity leaders criticize the past practice of confining rental buildings to busy streets and setting aside quiet streets for the wealthy. They would also delegate many housing development approvals to staff, acknowledging that holding a lengthy public hearing for every project is inefficient and costly.

OneCity has one incumbent city councillor and seeks to elect four.

Forward Together

Vancouver’s incumbent mayor Kennedy Stewart and ...

A simple reason is: we don’t have enough places to live.

How does a growing, prospering city stay affordable for all kinds of people? At the most basic level, when there aren’t enough homes, prices will keep rising. And when there are plenty of homes, it helps prices stay down.

It’s like a huge game of musical chairs. If there aren’t enough chairs when the music stops, someone is left out. When there aren’t enough homes for people who live and work in a city, everybody has to compete for what’s available, and rents go up until people get priced out. In the housing market, instead of being fast, you just need to be rich to stay in the game.

To fix it, we need more homes in all shapes and sizes. That means more cottages, apartments, duplexes, triplexes, condos, and mother-in-law units. More homes allows more people to stay and thrive in their communities. It means more people can afford to live near jobs, great schools, and transit.

Encouraging a variety of homes that fit a variety of people’s needs isn’t the only solution to keep rent and home prices down, but it’s an essential foundation for affordability. It's the necessary building block on which all kinds of other community protections, anti-displacement measures, affordable housing investments, and neighborhood improvements are built.

Our new explainer video gives a simple illustration to think about how building more homes helps keep prices down at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQGQU0T6NBc

Enjoy! And please spread the word and share the video on Facebook and Twitter.

An FAQ for voters on ranked choice voting, registering to vote, candidates on the ballot, and more.

Alaskans tried ranked choice voting for the first time in August, during the special election that sent Representative Mary Peltola to Congress. They’ll use it again during the November general election to choose their governor, Congressional members, and the state legislature.

Most voting systems in the US limit voters to just one candidate per race. But ranked choice voting allows voters to rank the candidates from most to least favorite. Ranked choice lets voters more fully express their views at the ballot box, tends to reward candidates with the widest appeal, and helps moderate candidates’ positions. Alaska voters across the political spectrum adopted ranked choice voting and open primaries in 2020.

Recent polling found that 85 percent of Alaskans who voted in the special election thought ranked choice voting was “simple.” With an even greater number of voters turning out for the November election, we want to make sure all voters feel confident filling out their ballots.

Here are answers to the top questions we’ve been hearing about Alaska’s November 8, 2022, general election.

GENERAL INFORMATION ON ALASKA’S AUGUST 2022 ELECTIONS

WHAT IS ON THE BALLOT IN NOVEMBER?

On November 8, Alaskans will vote in the general election. They’ll use ranked choice voting to decide who represents them in the US House and Senate, the governor’s and lieutenant governor’s offices, and in the state legislature.

The pick-one primary, held in August, sent the top four candidates from each race to November’s general election. In primary races with four or fewer candidates, the whole field advanced to the November ballot.

HOW WILL RANKED CHOICE VOTING WORK IN ALASKA’S GENERAL ELECTION?

Voters will be able to rank the candidates in order of preference. Once the polls are closed, everyone’s first-choice vote is counted. If a candidate receives a majority (50 percent plus one) of first–choice votes, then they are the winner. If no candidate gets a majority of votes after the first round, the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated, and his or her supporters’ votes are reallocated to the voters’ second preference. This process continues until a candidate receives a majority of the vote.

WHAT KEY ELECTION DATES SHOULD I CALENDAR?

The key dates for the election are:

Sunday, October 9: Voter registration deadline.

Monday, October 24: Most early and in-person absentee voting locations open. Hours and days vary by location.

Saturday, October 29: Applications for an absentee ballot delivered by mail must be received by the Division of Elections.

Tuesday, November 8: Election Day! Polls are open from 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.

We made a free timeline of Alaska’s key 2022 election dates. It’s printable and social media-shareable. You could use it in a PowerPoint, or turn it into a fridge magnet, flyer, or poster.

HOW DO I REGISTER TO VOTE?

If you are an eligible voter in Alaska and applied for a Permanent Fund Dividend in 2021, you were automatically registered to vote. To check your voter registration status, go to the state’s My Voter Information page.

If you need to register or change your voter information, visit the state’s Online Voter Registration page. You must register to vote by October 9.

HOW DO I CHECK MY VOTER REGISTRATION STATUS?

You can check your voter registration status at/

WHEN WILL ELECTION RESULTS COME OUT?

Alaska’s election results won’t come out right away because the absentee ballots arriving after Election Day need to be counted. These ballots come from Alaska voters outside the state, including from members of the military, snowbirds, and college students.

Under Alaska law, there’s a 15-day window after Election Day for these absentee ballots to arrive. This longstanding practice helps ensure absentee voters aren’t disenfranchised by mail delays. Other batches of late-arriving ballots will come in from remote rural p...