Over the next year, advocates for housing, food, mobility, health, and child care can unite around a common interest.

Like a tree twisted by a shadow above it, everything about anti-poverty policy in the United States has been shaped by one unusual decision: not to give poor people cash.

Want housing, but can’t afford it? Join a voucher waitlist. (Oh, and also sign up separately to 17 other waitlists for particular buildings or organizations.) Launched a small business and need to eat while it grows? Sorry, your state might require you to spend down your savings and sell your car before you can get food stamps. Need child care so you can get a job? Well, we subsidize that through a federal tax deduction, but only if you decide not to claim a different federal tax deduction. (Tough luck if, like the families of more than half of US kids in deep poverty, you don’t file taxes. You really should find more time in your schedule for paperwork, so you can give the government information it already has. It builds character.)

The impulse to micromanage the household budgets of the poor gradually created a vast array of valuable but convoluted social programs, separately applied for and maintained at incalculable burden to their recipients.

The American Rescue Plan opened the door to an alternative approach to future expansions of the US social safety net: giving people money and letting them decide how to use it.

Among many other things, the economic stimulus bill overhauled the existing Child Tax Credit, an annual payment that previously maxed out at $2,000 per child per year for middle-income parents and gave the poorest families nothing.

Instead, the Rescue Plan created a cash payment of $3,000 per child aged six to 17 and $3,600 per child under five years old. In many cases, this credit would be distributed as a monthly check.

And, crucially, the full sum would go even to kids in the poorest families. (That is, as long as their families have Social Security numbers and file taxes—more on that in a moment.) This means that, unlike the old Child Tax Credit, it’s a powerful antipoverty measure. Families that most need to prioritize housing in the right location could spend it on housing. Those that most need a bus pass, child care, or medicine could spend it on that.

Compared to other rich countries, this would bring US children to the middle of the pack in cash benefits—a smaller universal child benefit than in Canada or Germany, a larger one than in Norway or the Netherlands.

As I argued last month, a federal child payment is like a universal housing voucher for kids. Except it’s even better, because it’s cash.

CONGRESS COULD MAKE THIS PROGRAM PERMANENT, AND BETTER

There are several catches.

The biggest is that the plan lasted for just one year. To make something like it permanent, Congress would need to find an ongoing funding plan.

Fortunately, Congress has many options to fund the child credit permanently. Retiring the previous, regressive version of the Child Tax Credit would be a big start. The State and Local Tax deduction and Mortgage Interest Deduction are even more regressive, and now claimed by relatively few taxpayers. We could end them. There are also good, old-fashioned progressive income taxes. Or you could even pay for this with—are we supposed to whisper this these days?—a tax on carbon pollution.

Another catch: the Child Tax Credit doesn’t go to children without documented Social Security numbers, including immigrants, recent adoptees, and others. That’s despite empirical evidence that cash payments to children in poverty pay for themselves in economic benefits over a child’s life. Racial and xenophobic prejudices conceal the fact that humanity is a universal condition; universal programs reveal the things we share, including caring for children.

And here’s one more catch: you can’t get the Child Tax Credit if you don’t file annual tax forms, and many of the children who most need help live in families that didn’...

Senators representing only a fifth of voters become gatekeepers on what laws we can pass.

Since it represents states, not people, the Senate is undemocratic enough as is. As it is wielded today, the filibuster makes it even worse, further exaggerating the outsized power of a few senators who represent only a slim slice of the American electorate.

THE SENATE EXERTS NEAR-TOTAL CONTROL OVER AMERICAN LAWMAKING

US senators make or break progress for proposed legislation. Lots of bills pass the House only to die in the Senate. In fact, Senate legislation overrides House-passed legislation totally or partially 82 percent of the time. The Senate has the final say on treaties and federal court nominations too, including the Supreme Court.

US SENATORS FROM SMALLER, WHITER STATES HOLD EXCESSIVE POWER

One might think that such a powerful body would be democratic, that its power would flow from the people. Not so. By design, the Senate represents states, not people, with the result that it grants people in small states more power than their counterparts in big states. In fact, since every state gets two senators no matter how many people live there, it works out that half of the US population has only 18 senators representing them, while 52 senators from the 26 smaller states stand for just 18 percent of Americans.

And, since the populations of smaller states tend to be overwhelmingly white (compared to larger, growing states where the electorate is more likely to be racially and ethnically diverse), white Americans have, on average, nearly twice as much representation in the Senate as Black and Hispanic Americans. Of the ten smallest states, seven are also in the top ten whitest.

THE FILIBUSTER ALLOWS THE MINORITY TO ROUTINELY OBSTRUCT THE WILL OF THE MAJORITY, DERAILING EVEN THE MOST POPULAR BILLS

The Senate’s design already gives outsize voice to a tiny minority of Americans. The filibuster makes it even worse. By effectively requiring a supermajority—or at least 60 votes—instead of just 51, this procedural relic has become a kill switch for even the most popular legislation, further narrowing who gets to decide what the country can or can’t do. What a majority—or even a supermajority—of voters want no longer matters; the filibuster allows a minority of senators representing only one in five US voters to call the shots for everyone else. That’s right, senators for 20 percent of the population can control what is possible for all of us.

Apologists plead that the filibuster promotes bipartisanship. If only that were true. In contrast, it incentivizes the minority party to obstruct. When the majority party has a credible threat of passing something, it is in the minority’s interest to come to the table and help shape the thing before it becomes law. But nothing has a credible threat of winning a supermajority in the Senate, so the minority is better off creating gridlock than participating in a win for the majority. The filibuster gives the minority the power—and political incentive—to kill even proposals with broad support across party lines, and bills that passed with bi-partisan support in the House.

Over and over again, 41 senators representing only 21 percent of Americans can deploy the filibuster to block progress, and even prevent a vote. Take these policy proposals that don’t stand a chance against the threat of a filibuster despite strong popular support:

Half of the US population has only 18 senators representing them, but 52 senators from the 26 smaller states stand for just 18 percent of American

65 percent of US voters say gun laws should be stricter.

61 percent of US voters say the Senate should pass the increased background check bills already passed by the House, including 55 percent of gun owners.

74 percent of all voters support the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, including 88 percent of Democrats, 78 percent of Independents, and 55 percent of Republicans.

Over half of US voters support cancelling student loan de...

Six years into their deregulation experiment, a growing city thrives without parking mandates.

In 2015, the city council of Fayetteville, Arkansas, adopted a radical but simple idea: do away with minimum parking mandates and let businesses decide for themselves how much parking they need.

The average person walking down the main drag of Dickson Street might be surprised to learn that this growing city of 94,000 was perhaps the first city in the nation to eliminate commercial parking minimums citywide. Striking the section of zoning code that detailed how many parking spots each business was required to provide created new opportunities for local entrepreneurs. The ordinance, which left maximum parking ratios in place, did not spur a frenzy of redevelopment, nor did it bring a malady of parking complaints and plummeting home values, as the city attorney had warned.

“Our experiences have been somewhat anti-climactic,”

city planner Quin Thompson said.

PARKING REQUIREMENTS DISCOURAGED NEW POSSIBILITIES

Thompson built the case to remove parking minimums after several years on the job.

“As a city planner, you receive phone calls [from Realtors and potential investors] about what’s possible with this property or this potential piece of property,”

he said.

He began to see a pattern in the same properties over and over again. Something in the city rules seemed to be keeping those buildings empty—and preventing anyone’s new ideas from taking root.

These commercial buildings that sat vacant for years had a similar profile: older buildings on smaller lots, often near downtown. In one case after another, it turned out that the key issue was parking—specifically the minimum number of parking spots required. It was possible for a property owner to get planning permission to reduce the amount of parking required, but people seldom tried.

CODE CHANGE SPURS GROWTH

Now, six years after the mandates were lifted, those addresses have rejoined Fayetteville’s thriving economy.

“The buildings I had identified as being perpetually and perhaps permanently unusable were very quickly purchased, redeveloped, and are in use right now,”

Thompson said.

One of those places is 110 South College Avenue. Fayetteville resident Lewis Chase convinced his childhood friends, chefs and brothers Michael and Matthew Sutton, to come back home to start their own restaurant. After two potential properties fell through, the trio came across a vacant building downtown. It was in bad shape, having been unoccupied for nearly 40 years, but then they climbed onto the roof and saw the view. There were only five parking spots on site, 30 short of what the previous parking code would have required.

Disaster? Nope. Despite losing two nearby parking lots that customers could use since they signed the lease, customers keep showing up.

“It hasn’t killed our business, that’s for sure,”

Chase said. Now the partners are planning to open a second restaurant on the north side of town.

ENDING PARKING REQUIREMENTS CITYWIDE

It’s common for towns to exempt historic downtown areas from parking requirements in order to preserve the aesthetics and walkability of cherished main streets that were built before parking mandates. But when Thompson sat down with Fayetteville’s planning director to establish a boundary, they struggled to define an edge that seemed fair.

“Some of these properties were downtown, but a lot weren’t,”

Thompson said. Eventually they gave up on drawing lines, agreeing that everyone deserved the same opportunity. Brandon Rostek, one of the owners of two-year-old Atlas the Restaurant, is a fan.

“It’s nice to have more space for more local businesses to open up,”

Rostek said.

“The more businesses that are centrally located and closer together, the better it is for everyone when you have more foot traffic.”

Atlas the Restaurant is the first venture in the newly renovated Ellis Building, which dates to 1923 and is on the National Register of Historic Places. The restaurant’s off-...

Most German localities welcome new homes; their budgets depend on it.

If Cascadia has a European cousin, it’s Germany. Cascadia and Germany both tend to the serious and practical, not the flashy or fashionable. Both are more nature-loving than God-fearing. Both display a marked fondness for beer and mountains. And both are powerhouses of engineering, making products that dominate markets worldwide.

Yet for all the harmonies between these far-off cousins, one difference jangles like a broken guitar string. Germany has a housing economy that provides an abundance of affordable dwellings for its people in compact, low-carbon neighborhoods. Cascadia, for its part, suffers an enduring housing shortage and resulting high prices; its homebuilders are walled out of most neighborhoods, unable to construct enough apartments, rowhouses, and other dwellings for its fast-growing population. Cascadia’s dearth of housing entrains a litany of woes, from worsened traffic to displaced minorities, from forgone prosperity to climate pollution.

How does Germany do it? Not the way Japan does. Japan’s lesson, as I previously wrote, is that pushing power to higher levels of government is a tonic for housing. It counteracts NIMBY obstructionism. Germany’s lesson is that decentralized control can be fine, as long as local authorities have strong incentives to welcome homebuilding. Already, Sightline and others are trying to put this lesson into practice in Cascadian capitols—but I am getting ahead of myself.

Germany’s success is doubly important because Germany is a better analog for Cascadia than Japan. Japan has one of the most centralized governments in the industrial world, while Germany governs itself more as Cascadia does, through a decentralized system that corresponds to the states, provinces, counties, regional districts, and cities of Cascadia in the United States and Canada. Germany is not as decentralized as North America overall, but it’s similar to Cascadia’s most populous jurisdictions of British Columbia, Oregon, and Washington. All have land-use planning systems, for example, where localities are expected to harmonize their plans with those of higher levels of government through processes of review and consultation.

Modest prices, extreme stability

“The German system [of housing] is the best in Europe,”

says Paul Cheshire, emeritus professor at the London School of Economics and a leading housing scholar. Housing is dramatically more affordable in Germany than in hot housing markets elsewhere in Europe or North America. It’s more like Houston than Cascadia’s high-priced cities. Beyond its modest price and rent levels, Germany also stands out for the stability of its housing costs: they’re uncannily, freakishly stable.

Residential prices in Germany have changed little in the last 45 years, never varying by more than 21 percent from their 1995 level. Straight through German reunification, European Union expansion, and the 2008 global financial crisis, German home prices stayed the same. Germany’s housing economy is the most stable around, rivaled only by Japan. Germany’s housing prices are more stable than any other country in the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank’s dataset (from which the figure is drawn), or the Economist’s larger dataset, or the International Monetary Fund’s even larger one.

German housing isn’t perfect, of course. Prices have edged upward in recent years. The country has suffered a shortage of construction labor since the housing crash of the late aughts, while its urban population has grown quickly, as young Germans, immigrants from elsewhere in the Eurozone, and refugees from abroad have flocked to cities. Germany has fallen behind its own homebuilding goals. Like home prices, rents in new buildings have climbed more in the past decade than in previous ones, although rents in existing buildings have not.

Carolin Schmidt, a scholar of German housing at Cambridge University, finds plenty to criticize about German housin...

Are utility business models aligned with our decarbonization goals?

To achieve our climate goals in the Northwest (or any other region in North America), we’ll need to clean up the power grid while also shifting whole sectors of the economy from dirty fuels to electricity. That two-pronged approach is central to every serious study of decarbonization, even in places like Cascadia where we already boast relatively low-carbon power systems. A starting place is utilities. To decarbonize, policymakers will need to fundamentally change how utilities make money. Today, utilities are primarily incentivized to build new infrastructure—more pipes and wires—rather than boost efficiency, make repairs, or invest in operations. And, utilities may see third-party-owned climate-friendly energy systems like solar panels and batteries as a threat to their business model. Understanding how we can realign utility profit incentives is key to decarbonizing the Northwest.

The utility business is not like most other businesses. Utilities inhabit a world of special accounting rules and pre-established investment returns, where ordinary business incentives often do not matter, and where changing course is exceedingly hard.

Utilities’ profit doesn’t come from the natural gas or water or electricity they provide to customers. That’s right, utilities do not earn profits on the products they sell—gas, water, and power are provided “at cost” to consumers—but rather from the investment in the assets (the pipes, substations, transmission lines, etc.) that are used to provide the service. In short, the more infrastructure that a utility builds, the higher the profits it can generate.

Utilities do not operate in a normal free market system where prices and profits are determined by the willingness of consumers to pay. Instead, they are “regulated monopolies” in which public officials guarantee the companies a monetary return on their investments while also fixing prices for consumers. In practice, that means before a utility can earn money, it needs to convince regulators how much it should make. In public proceedings called “rate cases,” utilities appear before a dedicated state agency known as a utility commission (it’s the Utilities and Transportation Commission in Washington and the Public Utility Commission in Oregon) and lay out their argument for how much money they need to bring in to run their business and make a reasonable profit, namely the “revenue requirement.”

This is the basic formula that governs how a utility makes money:

REVENUE REQUIREMENT = (RATE OF RETURN ON EQUITY)(VALUE OF ASSETS AFTER DEPRECIATION) + EXPENSES

Let’s take a closer look at the parts of this formula.

Revenue requirement—a disincentive to innovate

The revenue requirement is the key outcome of a rate case. It determines how much utility customers will have to pay and how much profit the utility will make, but it is designed in a way that discourages innovation.

What’s a rate case? That’s when utility officials present the state utility commission with reams of documents that spell out its need to earn a specific amount of money to pay for salaries, equipment, and the like and on top of that, to earn a 9.5 percent profit. The commission is supposed to thoroughly examine the request and weigh the prudence of each part, rejecting costs that are not necessary or not allowed. Ultimately, in negotiation with the utility, the commission will decide on the amount of money that the utility can collect, known as the revenue requirement. Once determined, the revenue requirement is then divided up—by the number of customers and the amount of commodity they are expected to use—to determine the rates that customers pay.

It’s easier for utilities to play it safe, plodding ahead with business as usual that can reliably turn a profit rather than try to innovate or design new systems for a changing energy environment.

Rate of return on equity—a disincentive to reduce waste and boost perform...

It gives outsized power to big, battleground states. Safe states, big and small, are just spectators.

The Electoral College gives a numerical advantage to small states. Because each state gets two Electoral Votes for its two senators, no matter how many people live in the state, smaller states have more Electoral College representation per voter. For example, a voter in Wyoming has four times as much say in the Electoral College as does a voter in Texas. But despite getting a bump in Electoral Votes relative to their populations, small states that vote consistently red or blue are still just spectator states in the current state-winner-take-all system. In practice, a voter in Wyoming counts for just as much as a voter in California. Nothing.

In other words, small states’ numerical advantage doesn’t translate into political advantage. If all the small states leaned the same way, the Electoral College would put a heavy thumb on the scale in favor of that small-state-favored political party. But small states don’t all lean one way.

The ten smallest states are evenly split, five red and five blue

Of the ten smallest states, five are safe blue states (Maine, Vermont, DC, Rhode Island, Delaware) and five are safe red (Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota). In other words, they don’t have a shared “small state” political agenda for the Electoral College to protect. The fact that the smallest states all lean heavily toward one party or the other might not be entirely accidental. Small states tend to have more homogenous populations, making it more likely that they will lean toward one party.

In the map found on www.sightline.org, each square represents one Electoral College vote, and the ten smallest states are blue or pink according to which party has consistently won in that state in recent decades.

Even though they have more Electoral Votes than they would based on population, these 10 states still only boast 32 Electoral Votes between them, which is only three more than the state of Florida. Faced with seeking support from 10 states with widely varying values, or trying to win over a single state for nearly the same political advantage, political parties pay more attention to big Florida than to the 10 small states.

The ten battleground states are big

The presidential race is fought and won, not across the country as a whole, and not in small states, but in battleground states. These are the handful of states where the margin between the two major parties is thin, and so all their Electoral College votes are up for grabs under the state-winner-take-all system. This is where candidates campaign, campaigns spend money, and presidents spend more federal funds once in office to boost their chances of reelection. Battleground states are the ones that matter. And they are big states.

Of the ten main battleground states in 2020, six of them are in the top ten biggest states. And nine of them are in the top twenty largest states. The only one that’s not is Nevada.

Again, that’s not coincidental. Bigger states have more diverse populations, making it more likely that voters might be closely divided, creating stiff competition between the two parties. The state-winner-take-all model makes closely divided states more important, and bigger states may be more likely to be closely divided (see big, diverse Texas trending toward battleground status).

Plus, bigger states offer more bang for their buck, more Electoral College votes per victory. Together, these ten battleground states hold 151 electoral votes, nearly five times as many as the ten smallest states. Campaigning in and winning Florida gives 29 Electoral votes for one state victory, compared to just three for a victory in Wyoming.

Spectator states don’t matter

All the gray states in the map found on www.sightline.org are “safe” for one party, which makes them mere spectators to the presidential race that plays out in battleground states. Because all of their Electoral...

Gas utilities are telling tall tales about RNG

Avoiding the worst impacts from climate change will require throttling back on fossil fuels. While many electric utilities in the Northwest are beginning to understand that clean, renewable power is their only possible future, the gas utility sector is taking a different tack with a new pipe dream: renewable natural gas (RNG). These utilities aim to position RNG as the answer to decarbonization. It’s an answer that would allow them to continue to grow their customer base, lock in profits from new infrastructure investment, and green up their image. Unfortunately, their RNG strategy rests on faulty assumptions and fuzzy math, plus a bit of deception. In the next article in this series, we’ll explore some of the deceptive tactics that utilities are deploying. But first we’ll dive into the fundamentals of RNG.

What is RNG, and where does it come from?

RNG is methane gas, chemically identical to fossil natural gas but sourced from decaying feedstocks. Nearly all available RNG is siphoned off landfills, sewage treatment plants, or livestock manure ponds on large industrial farms. These places are rich sources of RNG because when animal waste and trash decay, the microbes that break down the waste produce gases that contain methane, which can, in turn, be captured, cleaned up, and pumped into a pipeline. Today, many waste facilities already capture their methane gas and use it on-site to generate heat or electricity. Farms also sometimes capture the gas for on-site heat and power, though it is more common for them to release the gas from manure ponds into the air, where it becomes a greenhouse gas in the earth’s atmosphere.

Another flavor of RNG is synthetically manufactured, either from inciting chemical reactions between molecules of water and carbon dioxide or from thermal gasification of biomass like crop residues or debris from logging operations. Synthetically produced RNG is still in the early stages of commercialization, as developers have completed only a handful of demonstration projects, with a few larger-scale plants in the European Union online or in construction.

RNG’s Four Fatal Flaws

On the surface, RNG seems like a promising solution, one with enviable branding: it’s both renewable and natural! But a closer look reveals that RNG is hardly a panacea.

Although it may play a niche role for a few select purposes, even large-scale RNG deployment would not allow us to keep up business as usual while decarbonizing. RNG has four fatal flaws: availability, cost, carbon intensity, and industry obfuscation.

Fatal Flaw 1: Availability.

There simply isn’t enough RNG to replace our current consumption of natural gas—not even close. In 2019, gas usage in the Northwest states of Idaho, Oregon, and Washington totaled 710 million BTUs of gas of the 27 billion BTUs of gas consumed throughout the United States. These quantities far outstrip even the rosiest projections for RNG development. Industry-influenced studies by ICF estimate that RNG could fill in as much as 16 percent of current gas usage nationwide, if all sources were developed. Unfortunately, that’s only about half of what’s currently used by the hard-to-decarbonize industrial sector, which accounts for 30 percent of the nation’s gas consumption. (In Cascadia, industry uses a somewhat smaller proportion of the total amount of gas used: 32 percent in Idaho, 24 percent in Washington, and 20 percent in Oregon.)

To the extent that any RNG is commercially available, it should probably be reserved for industries that cannot easily replace gas with electricity and have no other cost-effective alternatives for decarbonizing. In fact, studies by Energy Transitions Commission and Rocky Mountain Institute suggest that using RNG for residential or commercial purposes would be misallocating a “precious” resource because these sectors can be transitioned to all-electric clean power relatively easily.

Fatal Flaw 2: Cost.

RNG is very expens...

County-based red and blue breakdowns show numbers of acres, not voters. But in a democracy, it’s the people that should count.

Someone recently, earnestly, told me that Oregon and Washington legislative lines must be gerrymandered “because Democrats win more elections, but both states are actually red.” When I asked what they meant by that, they said, “Just look at the maps!”

Loren Culp, who ran for governor against incumbent Jay Inslee in Washington in 2020, used the same logic when he showed maps of counties in Washington as proof that the election results were wrong.

Maps can be powerful and important visuals for helping people quickly understand complex geography-based information—hence their prevalence in election-night newscasts. But they can also distort viewers’ understanding of election outcomes, because first and foremost, they show acres, not the number of people living on those acres. And in an election? It’s the people that should matter.

The numbers are clear: in 2020, 57.97 percent of Washington voters chose Joe Biden, and only 38.77 percent chose Donald Trump. Similarly, one state south, 56.45 percent of Oregon voters chose Joe Biden in 2020 compared to just 40.37 percent for Donald Trump.

But maps that color entire counties red or blue can dupe viewers: they make both states look majority red. And they make counties look like monoliths in a way that is unhelpful to Americans interested in bridging current political divides. If you didn’t understand how voting works, you would think the maps above show that Trump won handily in the Pacific Northwest. You might also think there are no conservatives in urban areas and almost no progressives in the rural region east of the Cascades.

It seems that the state winner-take-all electoral college process for choosing the US president has infected the way we think about voters within a state, too. When electing the president, we do this weird thing where we don’t count up all the people’s votes; we count each state’s electoral votes. The visuals we then see out of this count are maps where each state is solidly blue or solidly red, painting over the reality that there are plenty of voters of both and other persuasions throughout all states. Such maps also distort the reality that some states have a lot of people, while other states have a lot of land. The maps show the land, not the people, thus tricking our minds into thinking that acres vote. (Thankfully, some outlets are starting to use more accurate maps.)

In every other US election—state governors, city mayors, Congressional and state legislature representatives—we do the sensible thing and count up all the people’s votes to determine those races’ winners. Yet some have taken the distorted visuals from the electoral college and applied them at the county level, where it makes no sense at all because counties have no role in determining presidential or state-level elections.

Oregon has one very concentrated metropolitan area and large swaths of less populated land. Displaying county lands, rather than Oregon voters, creates a disingenuous visual. In the maps above, counties are colored red or blue based on which presidential candidate won more votes there in 2020. But this view fails to represent how many voters are in each county, which is what really matters in a democracy.

This is a problem when nearly half of Oregon voters live in just three counties on a sliver of the state’s total land. Nine counties in the eastern and southern part of the state make up about half the land but are home to less than one-tenth of the people. A similar pattern holds in Washington. Just three of the Evergreen State’s thirty-nine counties are home to more than half the people.

Maps showing election results by colored county suggest to the viewer that voters are equal to acreage. But, especially in the West, that is a dangerously false thing to suggest. Acres are acres. Voters vote.

Our maps don’t have to keep lying to us. Here are...

An explanation, via hamburgers.

Sometimes it’s hard for me to remember how normal Cascadians think about housing. After all, I’ve spent the last 10 years in an ever-spiraling obsession with housing policy. (Wait. Maybe that’s exactly what makes me a normal Cascadian. Anyway.)

This is how I suspect most normal people think about housing:

Prices are ridiculously high. New apartment buildings near me are annoying. But I can deal, because more apartments are supposed to be the answer to the price thing. But how can that possibly be the answer when the prices of the new apartments are so high? Developers must be building too fancy. They should build less fancy.

Guess what? Normal people are correct. I’ve spent the last 10 years in housing policy learning that all of the above is basically true. The main factor driving the cost of all housing is the cost of building new housing.

If we want our cities’ older homes to cost less, either to buy or rent, we need it to be less expensive to create a new home. Why? Here’s one way I like to think about it.

HOME PRICES ARE LIKE HAMBURGER PRICES

A Big Mac sells for $4.89 right now for two reasons. First, because it costs less than $4.89 to give someone a Big Mac. Second, because a Whopper, which tastes better, sells for $7.29.

McDonald’s would love to raise the price of a Big Mac to $6 or $8, but it can’t. It’s competing with Burger King on both price and quality. If it jacks the price too high, I’m buying a Whopper instead.

The seller (or landlord) of an existing home is McDonald’s. There’s a puddle in the cellar and the kitchen window is jammed shut, but that’s not going to stop the seller from raising the sale price (or rent) anyway. right up until the point where the landlord is afraid the unit will sit empty for a precious month or three. And what might make the unit sit empty? If I can find a nicer place—like, say, a newly built one—for not much more money.

The developer of a new home is Burger King. (With me so far?)

Next question: Why isn’t Burger King, or Burgerville, or some other voracious capitalist, putting greedy McDonald’s out of business by selling the Whopper for $5?

Because it costs somebody more than $5 to hand you a Whopper. If you’re losing money on every Whopper, selling more Whoppers won’t help.

There are a lot of other complications to housing, of course. (To food, too.) But in the end, pricing mostly comes down to cost. The price of existing homes is held down (or driven up), more than anything else, by the cost factors of creating new housing.

BUSTING HOUSING MYTHS

Once I grokked this two-step between costs and prices, a lot of things started to make sense.

Here’s one: Why isn’t the answer to homelessness “just let the market build”? Because even cheap old homes cost money to keep habitable: upkeep, utilities, property taxes. Wherever you live, that stuff comes to a few hundred bucks a month. Many people simply don’t have that much money in a month, let alone enough for other necessities. One way or another, ending homelessness requires those people having more money, or else an equivalent home subsidy. (Sightline’s general take: give poor people money.)

Here’s another: Why not cap rent hikes in older buildings at the inflation rate? Because upkeep, utilities, and property taxes regularly rise faster than inflation. If the cost of a hamburger were capped at $1, hamburgers wouldn’t start selling for $1. What would happen is you wouldn’t be able to buy a hamburger anymore, except maybe on the black market where they’d go for $30 each.

If all of us deserve a home, and I happen to agree with the 1948 United Nations General Assembly that we all do, there’s no alternative to taxing and spending. And if we also want to avoid housing shortages like today’s, there’s also no alternative to making homes cost less to build.

HOW TO CUT THE COST FACTORS OF HOUSING

This brings me back to where we started. Prices are ridiculously high. Developers must be building too fancy. They s...

You can build it, but they won’t park there.

Over the decade since I moved to Portland, I have lived in seven different places. Three of those homes had off-street garages, but I always parked my car on the curb.

Why? One house used the garage as an extra living room. Another driveway had a sharp turn into the garage, making it a hassle to back out of. The last garage had a steep incline to get to it, so bikes and other bulky items were stored in it instead.

This isn’t uncommon. A survey of detached homeowners in Sacramento, California, published in February, showed that when there isn’t space enough for both storing a car and household items, the cars are the items that end up moving elsewhere. The survey found that 37 percent of homeowners didn’t store a single car in their garage.

And why would they? The government constructs, maintains and distributes free car storage space along the curb in front of almost every house.

Yet our governments continue to mandate off-street parking with every new home, thinking that somehow the presence of a garage is enough to make someone park in it.

The Sacramento finding adds to a growing body of work documenting how infrequently people use garages for cars:

Field observations of 97 garages in the Mission District of San Fransisco, California, found that 49 percent of them were not used for car parking.

A New York Metropolitain Transportation Council survey found only 13 percent of households with a garage parked there.

A survey of homeowners with a one-car garage in a suburb near Redding, England, found 38 percent of garages were not used for vehicles.

In Melbourne, Australia, a survey found that 18 percent of residents in single-family detached homes used garages for non-car purposes.

One of the most thorough studies was performed by a team of researchers from UCLA’s Center on Everyday Lives of Families, who photographed the homes of three dozen families over nine years. They found that 3 of 4 households had too much stuff in their garage to park a car.

It’s not surprising that when push comes to shove, cars are the items that end up outside. Unlike an old sofa, cars are weatherproof. Curbside spots are also legal to store automobiles, while putting an extra fridge or storage shed in the same spot can get you fined. There is also likely an ample number of spaces available. Surveys of on-street parking spaces in the residential neighborhoods of Davis, California; Eugene, Oregon; and Bellevue, Washington, found that even at peak hours the curb spaces were mostly vacant, with 71 to 89 percent of parking spaces going unused.

Almost everywhere in the Pacific Northwest, as in the rest of the United States and Canada, it’s illegal to build a home without also building one or more parking spaces to go with it. A common defense of these costly parking mandates is that if there is an off-street space to tuck in every car for the night, curbside parking will never get too full. But this idealized image ignores reality. When storing a car on the curb is free, a garage isn’t necessarily a garage: it’s a great big walk-in closet.

TO CLEAR UP A CROWDED CURB, YOU HAVE TO PRICE IT

Even when curbside parking is a hassle, it can still be difficult to coax a car owner into a garage, no matter how mandatory the garage is. Perhaps no example illustrates this better than the West End neighborhood of Vancouver, British Columbia.

A study in 2017 found that 15 out of 16 car owners who live in the West End have access to an off-street parking space. But even at the busiest times of day, those garages and driveways were half empty, just 47 percent utilized. Meanwhile, 88 percent of on-street spots were full.

Why wouldn’t residents want to use their private garages instead of circling for five minutes for a street spot? Because parking garages that needed to recoup their construction cost were being undercut by the city. At the time, residential parking permits from the city were $6 a month, while most buildings ...