From more historic building renovations to smarter curbside parking management, two-thirds of Oregonians are about to experience the benefits of making more asphalt optional.

On Thursday, Oregon approved the largest rollback to parking mandates in modern US history.

The unanimous vote by the state’s land use commission came through an unusual channel: an administrative action, ordered by the governor, that breathed new ambition into the broadly written land use laws that have gradually shaped Oregon for 50 years.

The law in question gives the state board the power to set land use rules that, among other things, “minimize adverse social, economic, and environmental impacts and costs.”

As Sightline has been arguing for decades, including in a new series over the last year, parking mandates create those costs. Lots of them.

Beginning January 1, 2023, Oregon is scheduled to do more to cut those costs than any other US state or Canadian province. In some situations—within a half-mile of relatively frequent transit, for homes of 750 square feet or less, and for homes meeting affordability targets—minimum parking mandates will no longer apply for jurisdictions within Oregon’s eight largest metro areas. This doesn’t prevent parking lots from being built, but it does remove the current prevailing requirements to construct a specific number of stalls: one stall per bedroom, for example, or three per 1,000 square feet of retail space.

Farther from transit, jurisdictions in the state’s eight largest metro areas will have more flexibility in how to gradually make driving less necessary. In all, 48 cities and 5 counties representing about two-thirds of the state’s population are subject to the reforms. By the end of June 2023, the affected cities and urbanized unincorporated areas will need to choose from a branching menu of options on how to manage parking. In every case, jurisdictions will be able to comply simply by making off-street parking fully optional.

The commission did decide to give the Portland metro area a bit of additional flexibility. Its regional government is allowed to come up with its own parking rules, but the state commission must sign off that they are at worst equivalent to the statewide rules.

After several rounds of delays to the reform timeline, the Land Conservation and Development Commission (LCDC) unanimously voted Thursday for the sooner of two deadlines for putting the new rules in place.

“Science is dictating that we should be acting now,”

said Barbara Boyer, an LCDC member and family farmer outside McMinnville, Oregon.

The proposal had drawn support from a coalition of 41 organizations that advocate for affordable housing, the environment, local businesses, and better transportation.

The new parking rules are part of a larger package called “Climate-Friendly and Equitable Communities” that industry groups, including the Oregon Home Builders Association and Oregon Association of Realtors, oppose. Though those groups hadn’t singled out the parking reforms for much criticism, they objected to other parts of the package. Meanwhile, various cities have also objected, arguing that the new rules are too prescriptive and would take considerable resources to implement.

But assuming these new rules survive legal challenge, people looking to build new homes and businesses, or dreaming of renovating an older building, can look forward to deciding for themselves how much parking their property needs. In many cases, it will be the first time since the 1950s that property owners are able to do so.

What will this mean for other Oregonians? Probably not much, for a while. But as the years go by, here are five things they might start to notice.

1. Vacant buildings will come back into use

One of the most visible ways a passerby might notice the elimination of parking mandates is that formerly vacant buildings might quickly get a makeover. Even in small cities like Fayetteville, Arkansas, city leaders are keeping their local...

One ballot, two elections: The pick-one midterm primaries and the ranked choice special election for US House are on the same ballot.

August is a big month for Alaska voters, with a regular midterm primary election and special general election happening on the same day. The races will appear on the same ballot.

Our best advice? Don’t forget to flip it over and complete both sides! The front of the ballot features pick-one primaries for governor and other statewide races. Flip it over to vote in Alaska’s first ever ranked choice election. The winner of the ranked choice election will temporarily fill the US House seat held most recently by the late Representative Don Young.

2022 marks the first year Alaska voters will use a combination of pick-one open primaries and ranked choice general elections to choose their lawmakers. When combined, the two voting reforms promise to help tamp down extreme partisanship, encourage cooperation between candidates, and let voters opt for their true favorites rather than candidates they merely tolerate.

Below we answer the top questions we’ve been hearing about Alaska’s August 16, 2022, primary and special general elections.

GENERAL INFORMATION ON ALASKA’S AUGUST 2022 ELECTIONS

The regular midterm pick-one primary and the special ranked choice general election are both on the ballot due August 16.

Voters in the primary will pick one candidate per race. The top four vote-getters in each race will move on to the general election. The primaries will include races for governor, US Senate, US House, and both houses of the Alaska state legislature.

The special general election will fill the seat of Representative Don Young, but just for a short time. The longtime Congressman died in March at the age of 88. Voters need to choose a new representative to serve out the last several months of his term in the US House.

Including both elections on a single ballot allows the Alaska Division of Elections to be more efficient in a year with an unexpected special election.

WHAT’S A PICK-ONE PRIMARY?

In a pick-one open primary, all candidates appear in a single race, regardless of party affiliation. Voters pick their one favorite. The top four vote-getters in Alaska’s primary advance to the ranked choice general election in November. Voters will use the pick-one primary in August in races for legislature, governor, US Senate, and the full two-year term for US House.

Alaskans already voted in a pick-one primary earlier this year. The special primary election for the late Don Young’s US House seat, held in June, sent four candidates to the special general election: Sarah Palin, Nick Begich, Al Gross, and Mary Peltola. (Gross later dropped out, leaving only three candidates in the running.) The special general election featuring Peltola, Begich, and Palin will appear on the back side of the August ballot, where voters will use ranked choice voting to indicate their preferences among the three.

HOW WILL RANKED CHOICE VOTING WORK IN THE SPECIAL GENERAL ELECTION?

The ranked choice election for Congressman Young’s seat appears on the back of the August ballot. Voters will rank those candidates in their order of preference. (This quick video shows how election officials count ranked choice ballots and determine a winner.)

Once the polls are closed, everybody’s first-choice vote is counted. If a candidate receives a majority of the first-choice votes (50 percent plus 1), that candidate is the winner. If no candidate achieves a majority with first-choice votes alone, then the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated. The voters who preferred that candidate will then have their vote count for their next preference on their ballot. The elimination of candidates and redistribution of votes continues until a candidate receives a majority of the vote.

HOW DO I KEEP TRACK OF KEY ELECTION DATES?

The special general election and the regular primary election both take place on Tuesday, August 16. This is the l...

That would take a New Zealand-style, all-forests cap-and-trade system

Nestled in the southwest corner of Washington, home to coho salmon and the occasional spotted owl, the Winston Creek carbon project is extending rotations on 10,000 acres of forest. By delaying harvest from 40 years to 60 years and letting these trees continue to grow during their carbon sequestration prime, Port Blakely, the forest owner, hopes to double the biomass of its forest.

According to American Carbon Registry (ACR) documents, this extension will sequester about 850,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) above and beyond what a 40-year rotation would sequester. One ton of CO2 is about what a gas-powered car emits on a trip from Klamath Falls, Oregon, to Anchorage, Alaska (about 2,500 miles); therefore, this forest carbon project offsets the emissions from about 850,000 road trips to see moose and hear glaciers crack and rumble.

As part of its Carbon Balance program, Puget Sound Energy (PSE) purchased many of these credits on the “voluntary” carbon market. REI, Avocado Mattress, Boeing, Direct Wines, and the City of Eugene are only a few of the other groups to have bought Winston Creek carbon offset credits. The voluntary market includes all transactions outside of the dozen or so global “compliance” markets that result from mandatory government regulations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, such as California’s cap-and-trade program.

Globally, the entire voluntary carbon market is projected to grow from about $320 million in 2019 to between $5 billion and $30 billion by 2030. Even though only a tiny fraction of carbon market dollars will go to forest projects in the Pacific Northwest, excitement is brewing among conservationists and savvy wood products companies alike.

Tom Tuchmann, who’s worked in forest conservation for 30 years and is now president of US Forest Capital, is excited about carbon market growth.

“It’s the first time that a true market price has been created to incentivize private landowners to invest in conservation at scale,”

he said.

“Hundreds of millions of dollars are being raised and spent on carbon credit.”

On the ground in Oregon and Washington, carbon offsets have financed innovative forest conservation that protects clean drinking water and salmon habitat as well as jobs for loggers, mills, and mountain bike guides. Native American tribes that have logged less aggressively have sold offset credits from their carbon-rich forests and used the income to reacquire ancestral territory. But how much of forests’ “natural climate solution” potential can the carbon market actually fund?

This article explores how to overcome these hurdles, starting with market mechanisms to compensate landowners. The goal is a landscape-level shift to long rotations on private timberlands.

By themselves, carbon markets cannot solve our climate problem, and they pose some environmental justice dilemmas. Even New Zealand’s full-enrollment Emissions Trading Scheme has shown little progress in decarbonizing that country’s economy. But it has been effective at reforestation, extending rotations, and preventing deforestation (if not without some hiccups that I will discuss below).

Could carbon markets help incentivize long-rotation forestry in western Oregon and Washington?

Forest carbon markets show promise. But they have severe limits: insufficient market demand and price, impermanence, and ghost credits (offset credits for carbon that would have been stored in forests even without any carbon market payment). To confront these limits, forest carbon markets need more rigorous standards and oversight. But the best solution to remove these limits may be to include all forests in a mandatory nationwide cap-and-trade program.

THE CLIMATE POTENTIAL OF FORESTS

To keep warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius, we need net-zero global emissions by 2050. For Oregon and Washington together, net-zero emissions means a reduction of 170 million metric tons of...

Finally, homes for people will no longer be conditional on car parking.

Avelina Cabantan, 84, has never had a driver’s license. Her husband always drove. But after he passed away in 2003, what she really needed was a home she could afford on her own.

Cabantan has seen her share of hard times. She grew up poor in the Philippines, at one point pawning her mother’s ring to afford a $10 document fee that would give her children a future in the United States. In Oregon, she found work at Tektronix and Nike. But after her husband passed and she retired, Cabantan couldn’t keep up with the $1,600 rent on their longtime apartment. For the next twelve years, she moved frequently, staying with friends and family and craving another stable home.

An early riser, each morning she walked over to see the construction of a new affordable housing development steps away from the Orenco light rail station in Hillsboro, Oregon, chatting with the carpenters. By then, Cabantan had applied for two other low-income housing projects but was told the waitlist was years long. Then, leaving church one day, she got the news that her application at Orchards at Orenco had been accepted. She wept with relief. The rent was only $603 per month.

Cabantan is one of the lucky ones, the one in four households that qualify for federal housing assistance that actually receive it.

“I love living here,”

she repeated frequently during our conversation. She plans to stay for the rest of her life.

Stories like Cabantan’s make affordable housing popular across Cascadia amid the region’s housing crisis. In poll after poll, year after year, Northwest voters call homelessness a top issue and say the region needs more affordable homes. Which only makes it stranger that, even as Cabantan was moving into her forever home, her own local government was working to block more low-priced homes like hers from existing.

Why? The planning commission was insisting that something else needed to be built on the land instead of homes.

More parking spaces.

EXCESS PARKING SPACES COME AT A COST: HOUSING FOR PEOPLE

When Cabantan’s home was built, Hillsboro’s zoning code required every new home to provide 1.5 parking spaces. But data presented by REACH showed that even during the busiest times, similar affordable housing complexes averaged closer to 0.6 parked cars per household. REACH didn’t want to kill dozens of affordable homes in favor of dozens of parking spaces that would probably sit empty.

REACH requested to build 0.8 parking spaces per household, but an initially receptive planning commission turned skeptical over the course of approving three separate buildings.

“We had to fight tooth and nail every step of the way to just get some reduction,”

recounted Dan Valliere, Executive Director of REACH Community Development. At one point, even the Metro Council President and former Hillsboro mayor, Tom Hughes, weighed in, giving his full support to the parking reduction.

In the end, the housing complex was required to have 1.1 parking spaces per household. It knocked up to 30 homes off the project, recalled a city staffer.

Minimum parking requirements—ratios of how many parking spaces each building needs to have—were widely adopted in North America in the mid-twentieth century. Intended to provide a home for every car, these regulations frequently overestimate how much parking will actually get used. That creates a new host of problems.

Parking eats away at the buildable area of a site. It means fewer homes and less space for amenities like Cabantan’s garden bed, playgrounds, or walking paths. Bigger impervious surfaces also drive up the cost of managing stormwater and amplify temperatures during heatwaves. Each needless parking space hits a project twice: once in its direct construction costs, and then perpetually through the lost revenue of homes that weren’t built, increasing the public subsidy needed to maintain the building over time.

Households with the lowest incomes are also the le...

So let’s give clear, meaningful transportation subsidies instead.

A recent surge in gas prices has prompted state and federal legislators in the United States to propose suspending the gas tax. But if consumers didn’t hear about it on the news, would they even notice?

Governments collect gas taxes from a small number of fuel distributors, not directly from drivers. That means consumers often have no idea how much they’re paying back into the transportation system when they fuel up. In that void of information, imagination abounds, as illustrated by a 2019 survey of participants in a Washington State pilot project for a gas tax alternative. When asked to estimate their annual state gas tax expenditure, only one in five participants came within 10 percent of the calculated cost. 55 percent of respondents underestimated their gas taxes by more than 10 percent. The other 24 percent overestimated, sometimes by huge margins.

Another 2017 survey asking Washington’s registered voters about transportation funding found similar results. People often couldn’t guess how much they paid in state gas taxes, but 52 percent of respondents still thought it was too high. DHM Research, which conducted the survey, wrote, “Awareness that there is a gas tax and a tendency to default to the idea that it is too much (whatever it is) may reflect media attention on this issue following implementation of gas tax increases over the past two years.”

When record gas prices make headlines in a competitive election year, it can lead politicians to further subsidize driving. For example, the Move Ahead Washington transportation package paid for highway expansions without an increase to the state gas tax (which is unprecedented in its own right). Instead, legislators filled the gap with billions from the state’s General Fund and Public Works Trust Fund. In other words, the state burdened everyone, whether they drive or not, with the cost.

Proponents of suspending the gas tax make quick calculations about how much a family might save. Washington Senator Sefzik, who proposed suspending the state gas tax, claimed it would give an estimated $1 billion of financial relief to families. But as any economist can tell you, the effect of taxes on prices isn’t that simple. And there is scant evidence that all those savings for oil companies would transfer directly to consumers. For instance, according to AAA, on Wednesday March 16th the average cost of gasoline was just a penny cheaper in Oregon than Washington, despite state gas taxes being 11 cents lower in Oregon.

THERE ARE MORE DIRECT WAYS TO LOWER TRANSPORTATION COSTS

The long-term solution to shield the transportation system from global spikes in fuel prices is, of course, to reduce demand for fossil fuels. And in fact, that is already happening. slowly. Average fuel efficiency of new vehicles is up 20 percent since the last time gas prices spiked in 2008.

In the short term, there are many ways governments could help people drive less and save them money at the same time. At $4 per gallon, which has already arrived in Cascadia, 59 percent of Americans would make changes to their driving habits or lifestyle to offset the costs, according to a recent survey by AAA.

One proposal from the Climate and Community Project was a Clean Mobility for Clunkers program, which would let people trade in gas-powered vehicles to get electric cars, e-bikes, mobility passes for shared bike or scooter systems, or transit passes. BikePortland.org advocated for making bikeshare temporarily free, similar to promotions in the past that boosted ridership.

Cutting public transit fares is also a popular idea. New Zealand just reduced fares by half for a three-month trial period. Boston declared three bus lines completely free for two years beginning this month. The program, which started with bus routes whose ridership primarily comprises low-income people of color, is expected to make the buses more reliable. One bus line has already repor...

And how taxing land value can cool speculation and unlock affordability.

British Columbia is a far wealthier place than it was a decade ago. It has also become a prohibitively expensive place to live for more and more working families, young people, and renters of all ages, thanks to ballooning housing prices. And those high prices are inflated by a tax system that encourages speculative investment in residential property with three key policies: low property taxes, the principal residence capital gains tax exemption, and the provincial homeowner grant.

Who has profited from these speculation-friendly tax policies? The people who own most of the land in Vancouver: our neighbors and friends. It may also be significant that most of our elected leaders own property: 93 percent of the members of British Columbia’s legislative assembly are homeowners, with half of those owning more than one property. In the rush to tax the bogeymen of foreigners and owners of vacant condos, a basic fact has been largely overlooked: the speculation is coming from inside the house, as homeowners who were fortunate enough to buy at the right time have quietly benefited handsomely from an unjust tax system.

These three policies enrich homeowners while driving up housing costs for everyone else. They allow private landowners to capture increased property value created by the community as a whole through its labor, public services, and contributions to the city. And while these policies have not received nearly as much media or government attention as taxes on vacant homes or foreign buyers, they are a greater contributor to Vancouver’s spiraling housing costs.

Threatening the value of what is most residents’ biggest personal investment is a political challenge, to say the least. As British Columbia Premier John Horgan acknowledged, “people have equity in their homes, we need to be mindful of that.” At the same time, elected leaders in charge during a drastic loss of affordability will face political challenges from those left behind. But there’s no wiggling out of the reality that housing cannot be both affordable and a lucrative investment; prices cannot go up and down at the same time.

Policymakers hoping to fix British Columbia’s affordability crisis can no longer ignore the need to raise property taxes, limit the capital gains tax exemption, and end the homeowner grant.

A TRILLION DOLLARS IN NEW PROPERTY WEALTH

The paradox of Vancouver’s housing crisis is immense gains in land wealth accompanied by poverty and desperation caused by rents and home prices surging out of control. Property values in British Columbia have almost doubled in the past decade (even when adjusted for inflation), increasing from $1.3 trillion to $2.4 trillion. Some of this increase is from new construction, but about two-thirds of it is property owners getting richer in their sleep.

The new wealth works out to $220,000 for each of BC’s 5 million residents, or $22,000 per person per year. But not every British Columbian got $220,000 richer. Many owners of detached homes in Vancouver’s central neighborhoods made millions while most renters got nothing besides steep rent increases.

VANCOUVER’S EXCEPTIONALLY LOW PROPERTY TAX RATE

The property tax rate in British Columbia’s largest city, Vancouver, has declined by more than 50 percent since 2000 and is now among the lowest in North America. It’s only because property values have risen so much over the past two decades that the city has been able to maintain sufficient property tax revenue at ever lower tax rates.

Property taxes in other BC cities are also low. For example, although British Columbia’s capital, Victoria, has property taxes that rank relatively high among BC municipalities, it still has the second lowest rates on the chart above, which includes cities across North America.

LOW PROPERTY TAXES BOOST PRICES AND SPECULATION

All else equal, when property taxes go down, home prices go up. In Portland, Oregon, for example...

The heat dome bolstered the case for cleaner home cooling and heating technology and for decarbonizing the region’s economy.

In June 2021, Cascadia weathered a scorching string of hundred-plus-degree days. Nearly 800 people died heat-related deaths across British Columbia, Oregon, and Washington combined. The town of Lytton, BC, burned to the ground after the temperature climbed to a record-shattering 121 degrees; streetcar cables in Portland melted; and roads in Washington cracked under the intense heat. Climate scientists found that a heat wave of such intensity would have been “virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.”

While extreme heat events like 2021’s “heat dome” are unlikely to occur annually, Cascadia’s mild climate is rapidly becoming a relic. Researchers estimate the Pacific Northwest will experience a 2021-level heat wave every five to ten years at two degrees Celsius warming, which could come as early as the 2040s, posing health and safety hazards to residents in a region with below-average levels of air conditioning. In the immediate term, making public cooling centers widely available is one way to mitigate, though not eliminate, the human cost of the next heat wave. But as more residents seek out in-home cooling solutions, electric heat pumps offer an effective solution with an added benefit: helping accelerate the region’s transition away from fossil fuels by replacing gas furnaces.

CLIMATE CHANGE MEANS CASCADIANS NEED COOLING

Because of Cascadia’s historically mild climate, the region claims some of the lowest levels of air conditioning in North America. Among the 15 largest metro areas in the United States, Seattle ranks last in percentage of households with air conditioning; just under half of households have AC. In the Portland metro area, which has historically hotter summers than Seattle, about three-quarters of households have it. And in British Columbia, about 40 percent of households do. These rates are all lower than national averages: 91 percent of households across the United States and 61 percent of households in Canada are equipped with cooling.

Access to cooling is unequally distributed, too, with low-income households the least likely to have it. In Seattle, the highest-income households are 17 percentage points more likely to have AC than the lowest-income households, as shown by the graph at left. The difference is 22 percentage points in the Portland metro area, as shown by the graph at right. These disparities played out across Cascadia in the 2021 heat dome, including in Multnomah County, Oregon (home to the city of Portland), where 61 percent of confirmed deaths occurred in zip codes with above-average poverty rates. In response, the Portland Housing Bureau is now requiring air conditioning in future affordable housing developments.

HEAT PUMPS BOTH HEAT AND COOL, WHILE SPEEDING DECARBONIZATION

Heat pumps warm buildings by transferring outdoor air to indoor spaces via liquid refrigerant; they cool buildings by reversing the flow of the refrigerant. When used for cooling, heat pumps are just as effective as other air conditioning units with similar efficiency ratings. Heat pumps are also twice as efficient as electric resistance heaters. Because they can both heat and cool buildings, they can replace gas-powered furnaces. They therefore offer decarbonization benefits that other air conditioning solutions do not.

In 2019, some 38 percent of homes in the Seattle metro area used gas for heating, as did 46 percent of homes in the Portland metro area. Half of homes in British Columbia are heated with natural gas. If all gas-heated homes in Cascadia that do not currently have air conditioning could replace their furnaces with heat pumps, rather than simply installing AC units and keeping their heating source as-is, the region could avert more than 5 million metric tons of CO2 emissions annually. This is nearly as much as the combined annual emissions of Washington’s five oil ...

Oregon and Washington can support women who come here needing abortions and can lead the way on state-of-the-art reproductive healthcare and contraceptive options that have had abortion on the decline for decades anyway.

US federal protection of a woman’s right to abortion will effectively end in 2022. Even if the Supreme Court shocks close observers and does not kill Roe outright, it will surely remove the precedent’s teeth. What does this watershed change mean for Cascadians?

First off, it is a backward step that will cause real harms throughout the region, and disproportionately so for people of color and low-income people. Planned Parenthood clinics serving Spokane, Pullman, and rural Oregon are scrambling to build capacity and find funding for a flood of uninsured women traveling from Idaho, Montana, and even Texas for abortion care. Without additional funding, says Karl Eastlund, CEO of the eastern Washington and North Idaho affiliate, they may be forced to reduce preventive care, primary care, and mental health services in order to meet the urgent need for abortion. Staff also are bracing for an influx of roving, re-emboldened protesters who, as clinics in red states close, can now redouble their focus on those that remain.

Given these developments, Cascadia’s standing as a pro-choice stronghold is more important than ever for people wishing to choose whether, when, and how they have children. It is some comfort, then, that even as the area must gird itself to serve more patients, six key facts and trends will reduce the impact of the US Supreme Court’s whims with regard to Roe.

1. ABORTION RIGHTS AND COVERAGE WILL REMAIN INTACT FOR OR AND WA CASCADIANS

Much of Cascadia has robust legal protection for abortion as well as strong systems of care. In Cascadia’s most populous parts, essentially nothing will change legally post-Roe:

Washington’s longstanding and broad protections for abortion rights began entering state law even before Roe v. Wade. The state also now covers abortion services under the state’s Apple Care healthcare plans.

Oregon encoded Roe v. Wade into state law in 2017 and mandated insurance coverage.

Even red-state Alaska has a constitution that specifically spells out a right to privacy, and restricting abortion access would likely require a constitutional amendment. British Columbia is, of course, immune to SCOTUS action, but for the record: It places no gestational restrictions on abortion, and a 1995 law creates protected no-protest zones around clinics.

Further progress is afoot with regard to abortion medication that patients take in the comfort and convenience of their own homes. In 2017, Canada nationally removed restrictions on the abortion medication Mifepristone. Research at the University of British Columbia confirmed that the medication can be prescribed by any doctor or nurse practitioner and taken at home with no decrease in safety. On December 16, the US Food and Drug Administration, citing similar research, made permanent a set of rules that allow medication abortion to be dispensed via telemedicine, improving access for women in rural areas and “healthcare deserts”—critical for many across Cascadia.

2. ROE’S PROTECTIONS ARE ALREADY WEAK AT BEST FOR MANY WOMEN, INCLUDING IN ID AND MT

Legal rights are meaningless unless people have the means to act on them, and federal abortion rights have failed to create a uniform landscape of access. Idaho has abortion providers in only 3 out of 44 counties. This figure is about to get worse: the fall of Roe will trigger an Idaho law that bans all abortions save for rape and incest.

But even today, mandatory waiting periods, bogus “safety” regulations, and consent laws have driven up costs and created insurmountable barriers for some women while forcing others to seek care across state lines, if they can afford to do so. In Montana, abortion is already severely restricted, with parental notification requirements for teens and felony charges for some l...

Parking lots amplify high temperatures. Why are we still requiring them to be larger than they need to be?

Urban heat islands got national attention this past summer after a record heat wave in the Pacific Northwest killed hundreds. In Portland, where the heat disparities between neighborhoods are among the worst in the country, one thing jumps out when you look at maps of these places: huge parking lots.

When agencies publish guidance for how to break up heat islands, they usually suggest shady trees and lighter-colored roads. But one assumption goes relatively unquestioned: why do we have these huge parking lots in the first place?

“People don’t want to go there because they’re afraid of the blowback or something,”

said Ted Labbe, a Portland-based habitat advocate who helped found the group Depave. In his experience, public officials will often talk about adding trees and rain gardens, but they never start by asking how much parking is really needed.

“Pavement removal is the simplest, lowest-cost, lowest-maintenance intervention you can do,”

said Labbe, but

“surprisingly, pavement removal is not considered a best practice.”

HOW ONE ZONING DECISION TRANSFORMED A NEIGHBORHOOD

Large parking lots are not natural or inevitable. They do not spontaneously appear, like dandelions on the edges of roads. They are the outcome of a series of choices by property owners and the governments that regulate these owners. And those choices have consequences.

Sightline took a deep dive into one of the hottest areas of Portland: Southeast 82nd Avenue and Foster Road, the western anchor of the Lents neighborhood, marked off by the black rectangle in the map below. This area was largely redeveloped after Portland added its first parking requirements in its 1959 zoning code. The new code defined minimum off-street parking ratios for more than 50 types of businesses, from bowling alleys (two parking spaces per lane) to wedding chapels (one parking space per 56 square feet of public floor area).

Parking requirements are based on little or no data. Yet Portland joined in the mid-twentieth century car-centric planning craze that was sweeping the nation. According to urban planning scholar Donald Shoup in The High Cost of Free Parking, a survey of 76 cities in 1946 found that only 17 percent of them had parking requirements in their zoning code. Five years later, 71 percent had adopted them or were in the process of doing so. “Other than zoning itself, few if any other planning practices have spread more rapidly,” wrote Shoup.

Off-street parking in Lents did exist before the minimum requirements went into effect, but the new rules cast those norms in stone. Once new buildings were required to supply enough on-site parking for anyone who showed up in a car, the price that car owners would ever be willing to pay for parking in the area fell to zero. It also became pointless for a new building even to share its parking lot with a neighbor; after all, it was already required to create its own dedicated lot.

Even then, big parking lots weren’t the only way to do business. Businesses on the triangular block between SE Foster and SE Harold still operate in buildings constructed between 1911 and 1950. Today, multiple businesses share the parking lot, which equates to 1 parking space per 1,000 square feet of building area.

But since 1959, parking mandates for new construction kicked off a cycle in which people expected more and more parking. The red-outlined area in the map below, which was redeveloped after parking minimums went into effect, has 3 parking spaces per 1,000 square feet. By 1970, new big box stores were providing 4–5 spaces per 1,000 square feet, above and beyond what was required.

Even way back in a 1954 Planning Advisory Service report on shopping center design, Architect G. Morton Wolfe wrote about the pressure to expand parking lots. “Many years ago it was considered good practice to provide as much parking area as the total area of the bui...

TC Energy is hoping no one will notice.

TC Energy, the Canadian fossil fuel giant behind the failed Keystone XL project and the controversial Coastal GasLink project in British Columbia, is quietly preparing to expand the capacity of a major fracked gas pipeline in Cascadia. Gas Transmission Northwest (GTN), one of two large gas transmission pipelines that run through Oregon and Washington, pushes fracked Canadian gas from Kingsgate, British Columbia, across northern Idaho, eastern Washington, and central Oregon to Malin, Oregon, where it connects to pipelines in California.

The expansion project, dubbed GTN Xpress, would grow GTN’s capacity by 250 million cubic feet per day (cf/d), which is equivalent to roughly a quarter of Washington State’s annual gas consumption. TC Energy justified its October 2021 request for federal approval of the project by claiming that it needs more pipeline capacity to “meet increased market demand [for gas].in the Pacific Northwest.” The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) will release a draft environmental impact statement on the project in June 2022.

But TC Energy is either not paying close attention to what’s happening in the Pacific Northwest or choosing to ignore it. Oregon and Washington are taking major steps to wean themselves off gas with some of the most ambitious policies in the United States. In that context, TC Energy’s stated rationale for hurtling more methane-spewing fracked gas across Cascadia hardly passes muster. Instead, GTN Xpress is the fossil fuel giant’s latest profit-making scheme—one it hopes no one will notice.

TC ENERGY IS PUSHING ITS PRODUCT ON THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST WHEN THE REGION IS LAYING OFF GAS

The future of gas in the Pacific Northwest is dimming rapidly. Washington and Oregon will require 100 percent renewable electricity generation by 2040 and 2045, respectively, meaning that gas will no longer be needed for power generation. Washington recently passed the nation’s first state-level de facto ban on gas in new commercial buildings, with the same policy in new residential buildings likely to follow later this year. And momentum is growing at the local level in cities like Eugene and Milwaukie, Oregon, and Bellingham, Washington, to require building electrification. Eliminating gas usage for electricity generation and residential buildings alone would eliminate about a third of Washington and Oregon’s current gas demand.

In other words, Cascadia is not crying out for more gas.

In fact, the capacity of the existing GTN pipeline already exceeds the annual gas consumption in Oregon and Washington by almost a factor of two. GTN pumps about 1,000 billion cubic feet per year (bcf/y) across the region. Washington consumes 378 bcf/y and Oregon consumes 302 bcf/y.

To be fair, it makes sense that GTN’s capacity exceeds Oregon and Washington’s current gas consumption, since some portion of the gas in GTN flows south to markets in California. But the fact that GTN has more than enough capacity today to meet Oregon and Washington’s gas consumption calls into question TC Energy’s claim that it needs to expand GTN to meet demand in the Pacific Northwest.

Plus, while gas consumption has increased slightly in Washington and Oregon over the past five years, before the states’ ambitious climate policies have taken effect, the same cannot be said for California, where gas demand has declined. Looking at all three states together, the net change in gas consumption from 2015 to 2019 actually declined by 61.52 billion cubic feet per year (bcf/y). In that regional context, expanding GTN by 91 bcf/y should raise eyebrows.

Is TC Energy ignoring the writing on the wall? Not necessarily. According to industry source Natural Gas Intelligence, the pipeline company does not actually think that Northwest gas demand will rise, despite what it told FERC. Instead, TC Energy is seeking to grab market share by pushing more Canadian gas onto the Pacific Northwest, displacing other gas sour...