Housing shortages don’t stay confined to city limits. Parking reform shouldn’t either.

It’s not every day that elected leaders ask for less authority. But at a California Assembly committee hearing in April, two out of every three representatives for local governments testified in support of a new bill that would limit their zoning authority.

AB 2097, introduced by Assemblymember Laura Friedman, would prohibit cities from mandating off-street parking near high-quality transit, in an effort to increase housing production across the state.

For decades, nearly every city in North America has required new buildings to have a specific number of parking spaces, regardless of whether they were downtown or surrounded by empty parking lots. These regulations were successful in building a lot of parking spaces, even as housing for Californians has grown harder to come by. In the highly sought-after Bay Area, there are twice as many parking spaces as people.

Some of the cities represented, like San Diego and Emeryville, have already done away with local rules requiring off-street parking. But elected officials from Gilroy to Culver City had not, and they were hoping the state would intervene in what is often a contentious land use fight.

The sentiment is not just a Californian one. On the other side of the border in Oregon, Talent city council president Eleanor Ponomareff told a state land use board the same thing earlier this year, in regards to a policy change that would significantly reduce parking requirements in Oregon’s metro areas.

“Implementation at the state level means fewer battles we, at the local level, have to fight,”

she said. Officials from Talent have their hands full already, as they recover from a 2020 wildfire that destroyed one- third of local homes, worsening a pre-existing shortage of affordable housing. As governments across Cascadia try to course-correct decades of underbuilding housing, its critical to acknowledge the limits of what local governments can achieve on their own.

Back in Sacramento, one of the local officials at April’s hearing was Colin Parent, who serves on the City Council of La Mesa, a small suburban community ten miles east of San Diego. Every home in La Mesa is required to have two off-street parking spots, whether or not residents need them. Even though Parent is in favor of eliminating parking requirements, his fellow councilors have little appetite for a politically difficult reform.

“That’s not an issue on the table,”

Parent said.

“I think that’s similar to most cities in California.”

Assembly member Friedman knows this all too well. She recalled a case from her time on the Glendale City Council when a family wanted to add a bathroom to their home, but to do so would have had to build a three-car garage to bring the home up to current codes. The family never ended up building their bathroom, and Friedman wasn’t successful in building more flexibility into the zoning code. She lost by one vote.

LOCAL PARKING REQUIREMENTS ADD UP TO A STATEWIDE HOUSING SHORTAGE

There’s reason to believe that most voters prioritize housing over parking. But most voters don’t show up to zoning hearings. Instead, local zoning meetings often go something like this: the more localized a land use change is, the more heavily the scales are tipped towards the status quo. Current residents can easily visualize the downsides of new development, like more traffic or a blocked view. But the future residents who will benefit from those new homes aren’t there to advocate for themselves in the same way.

This imbalance in political power makes zoning changes difficult, even in the most progressive cities. As a result, local leaders can be hesitant to stick their necks out and instead choose to focus on other issues. Michael Manville, an urban planning professor at UCLA, thinks state action is appropriate.

“Even though things are sort of trending in the right direction, the fact is that the vast majority of local governmen...

Voters could approve changes to the city’s elections and form of government this November.

Yesterday, Portland’s Charter Commission voted to advance some of its reform proposals to be drafted into potential ballot measures by the City Attorney. The proposals moving forward include changes to the city’s form of government and elections. They are based on research done by the Commission and input from thousands of Portlanders over the past year. After months of deliberation over the details and values represented in these proposals (and more discussion to come), all 20 Charter Commissioners voted to send these proposals to be drafted into ballot measures.

For over a year, the Charter Commission has been meeting to discuss potential reforms to the city’s form of government and elections and hear from Portlanders what they want out of their city government. Sightline has written about the Commission’s purpose, powers, timeline, and areas of focus, as well as the history of prior charter reform efforts. But even before the Commission was established for this decade’s Charter review, groups like the City Club of Portland and League of Women Voters of Portland were researching different issues relating to form of government and elections. And for over a century, Portlanders have been debating how well their form of government and elections are serving them.

So what’s actually happening now? Last night’s vote was a major step forward by the Commission, but nothing about city government is changing just yet. Voters will need to approve the proposals in November 2022 before they can be implemented. In the next few weeks, the City Attorney will draft ballot language, the Charter Commission will edit and refine details, and the public will continue to weigh in. In June, the Commission will take its final vote on these reforms to place them on the ballot for Portlanders to vote on. If 15 out of 20 Charter Commissioners vote in favor of sending Charter reforms to the ballot, those referenda will bypass Portland’s City Council and head straight to voters.

THE CHARTER COMMISSION’S PROPOSALS

Over the coming weeks, the City Attorney will start drafting the following proposals for the Charter Commission to continue editing and then vote on. For more details about the Commission’s process and reasoning, see the progress report it released last week.

ELECT A LARGER CITY COUNCIL BY MULTI-MEMBER GEOGRAPHIC DISTRICTS

The Charter Commission’s proposal would split the city’s voters into four districts that each elect three city councilors. This proposal would increase the size of the City Council to 12 members from its current five, which could increase the number of viewpoints represented in council discussions. The Commission notes that single-member districts would prevent people of color from being able to elect a candidate of their choice in Portland, because they are not sufficiently concentrated in any area of the city to make up a majority of any district. Electing multiple members in each district allows representation for groups that are not geographically concentrated, like renters or people of color.

Multi-member districts, elected proportionally (see below), make it possible for multiple groups to be represented in a single district. In contrast, a single councilor can never represent the full diverse spectrum of political views present among their constituents. The Charter Commission won’t draw the districts themselves, but it will include some guidelines and a process for a different body (like a citizen committee) to draw the districts moving forward.

LET PORTLANDERS RANK THEIR CHOICES FOR ELECTED OFFICE

The Charter Commission’s proposals would also shift Portland away from its current pick-one method of electing candidates to a ranked choice voting system. Ranked choice voting is a system where voters get to rank multiple candidates in order of their preference. During ballot counting, voters’ later choices are counted if their earl...

Santa Claus is on the ballot, but that’s only one of the reasons.

Closed primary elections are not ideal for American democracy. In most states, the Democratic and Republican parties act as gatekeepers. They regularly bar independent voters from taking part, giving small percentages of older, wealthier hyperpartisans the power to select the general election menu for all levels of government. Appeasing this subset of voters requires politicians to both run and govern closer to the extremes, leaving the somewhat more moderate independent voters that make up 40 percent of the American electorate with scant representation.1 Mix in misinformation and carefully cultivated culture wars and voila! America is far more divided than it should be.

Open primaries, so called because they’re open to all candidates and all voters, are one antidote to fevered partisanship. In an open primary, the major parties can’t dictate which voters take part. And with all voters in play, candidates have less incentive to ally themselves with those on the fringes.

But not all open primaries are the same. “Top-four” or “top-five” races send the four or five top candidates on to the general election. Others, called “top-two” races, send just two. The number of candidates that advances matters hugely to an open primary’s success in overcoming the more destructive forms of partisanship and building a well-rounded slate of candidates. Alaska’s top-four primary system has important advantages over those in states such as Washington and California, where only two candidates make it to the general election:

Minimizing the chances that one party will monopolize the general election ballot;

Leaving more room for third-party and independent candidates to compete;

Opening the way to ranked choice voting; and

Reducing the need for strategic voting, where voters support a candidate who’s not their favorite but can likely beat the one they just can’t stand and/or has the best chance at success.

Here’s more on why advancing four (or five) candidates from an open primary is better than just two.

IN A TOP-FOUR OPEN PRIMARY, PARTIES HAVE A HARDER TIME MONOPOLIZING THE GENERAL ELECTION

In 2016, two Democrats won the top-two open primary for one of California’s Senate seats. Kamala Harris, now Vice President, won 40 percent of the open primary vote. Second-place candidate Loretta Sanchez won 19 percent. It was the first time since California introduced direct elections in 1914 that no Republican had ended up on the ballot. True, the state has shifted leftward, and a Republican win would have been a stretch. But if the primary had yielded more winners, Republican voters at least could have had representation on the ballot and a voice in the general election contest through the third- and fourth-place primary finishers, Duf Sundheim and Phil Wyman.

A similar situation unfolded in Washington State in 2020, where the top-two open primary for lieutenant governor sent two Democrats to the general election. About 7 percent of the nearly 1,000 top-two primaries run in Washington State since 2008 have seen candidates from the same party advance to the general. In 37 general elections, Democrats have been the only party on the ballot. Same goes for Republicans in 32 elections.

Top-two proponents argue that same-party elections simply reflect the preferences of a particular political jurisdiction. If a district is overwhelmingly Democratic, what’s the problem with having two Democrats running? they would say. Well, if more bipartisanship and less polarization is the goal, America’s political systems should be structured accordingly. Running two candidates of the same political party in a general election, to the exclusion of all other candidates, eliminates a high-profile public forum for debating political philosophies. And when people do not see their values represented in a race and/or don’t like the candidates, they become alienated from the democratic process.

Duopoly is a proble...

The reform proposal, authorized by the state’s anti-sprawl laws, is up for a vote this week.

About 100 years ago, governments started redesigning cities around cars. On Thursday, Oregon could approve a major step to prioritize space for people and businesses again, and reduce pollution in the process.

At the heart of its effort: sharply reducing urban and suburban parking mandates.

These little-known laws that make parking lots mandatory spread quickly and quietly across the rich world, including Cascadia and nearly all of North America, in the mid-twentieth century. They banned projects that included less than a certain, often arbitrary number of parking spaces. This in turn made it illegal or prohibitively expensive to create homes, shops, or offices in many places where driving is less necessary.

In effect, parking mandates declare a parking space to be more important than a home or a job.

Oregon’s proposed reform would begin to reverse that. Over the next three years, it would give the 61 jurisdictions in the state’s eight largest metro areas—the urbanized areas in and around Albany, Bend, Corvallis, Eugene, Grants Pass, Medford, Portland, and Salem, home to about two-thirds of the state’s population—various options for rolling back or eliminating their decades-old parking mandates, especially in designated “climate-friendly areas” (CFAs). The CFAs, whose borders would be drawn by most of the jurisdictions over the next few years, would also allow mixed-use buildings of up to four stories and see higher standards for walking, biking, and transit investments.

MANDATORY PARKING: ‘A SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY’

Parking mandates aren’t the main reason we have parking lots, of course. We have parking lots because cars are useful and, in many cases, necessary. And Oregon isn’t considering a ban on parking lots, new or old.

But the effect of mandatory parking lots is to keep cars necessary. By forcing buildings apart and driving up the cost of adding homes, shops, and offices to walkable areas, parking mandates make it illegal for cities to ever voluntarily evolve away from auto dependence.

Parking mandates ban new Main Streets by requiring each new 2,000-square-foot cafe to be surrounded by 5,000 square feet of parking lot. They keep buildings vacant. They drive up the rent in new apartments by hundreds of dollars a month and kill the incentive of landlords and employers to save everyone money by coordinating shared cars or discounted transit passes. They induce deadly heat islands and, by forcing new buildings to be spread out, literally cast modern auto dependence into stone.

“There’s always this assumption that everyone wants to have a car, but it’s, like, a self-fulfilling prophecy,”

said Sergio Cano, 40, a middle-school social studies teacher in Albany, Oregon, in an interview last week.

“We need to stop that cycle at some point.”

‘FEWER PEOPLE AND DESTINATIONS ARE WALKING DISTANCE’

Cano, who said his own family owns cars and expects to always need to, nevertheless submitted testimony supporting the parking reforms last fall. It was part of the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development’s two-year process to update statewide transportation and land use rules. Oregon calls the project “Climate-Friendly and Equitable Communities.”

The project comes out of Oregon’s 50-year tradition of state-led land use planning. It’d be the state’s latest effort to enforce its law requiring jurisdictions within metro areas to “encourage the availability of adequate numbers of needed housing units at price ranges and rent levels which are commensurate with the financial capabilities of Oregon households.” Among other things, the state also requires its metro areas’ transportation systems to “minimize adverse social, economic, and environmental impacts and costs,” “conserve energy,” and “meet the needs of the transportation-disadvantaged.”

Cano’s was one of hundreds of comments on the proposal received by the commission, its member...

FAQs on the extra-special special election.

Author’s note: I’ll be updating this article regularly with new information and additional questions we hear from readers. Sightline Institute is also producing and sharing free voter education resources for Alaska at sightline.org/AlaskaVote, including graphics detailing key election dates, sample ballots, and a map of regional election offices. I invite questions in the comments section, by email, and on Twitter.

Alaska’s special election is special indeed: The winner will temporarily fill the US House seat of the late Representative Don Young. A new voting system of open primaries and ranked choice general elections will make its debut. And in the special primary, Alaska will hold its first statewide mail-in election.

The special election gives Alaska voters a chance to test-drive their new approach to picking political leaders. In the primary election, all candidates will appear on a single ballot. The top four voter-getters will then advance to the general election ballot, where voters can rank them from most- to least-favorite. The same system will apply to the regular election later this year, when Alaskans will decide races for legislature, governor, US Senate, and the full two-year term for the House seat.

The combination of open primary and ranked choice general elections promises to help tamp down extreme partisanship, encourage cooperation between candidates, and let voters choose their true favorites rather than candidates they merely tolerate.

Below we answer the top questions we’ve been hearing about Alaska’s special election:

WHAT IS THE SPECIAL ELECTION AND WHY IS IT HAPPENING?

In March 2022, huge news swept the state: Alaska’s only member of the US House of Representatives, the pugnacious 88-year-old Congressman Don Young, had passed away. The US Constitution requires an election to fill a vacant US House seat.

Until Alaskans select a replacement for Young, they will have no voting member in the House. The office is still open and Alaskans can still get in touch, but without a representative in the seat, the Anchorage Daily News explains, “the office cannot introduce or cosponsor bills, nor can it advocate for bills that Young introduced or cosponsored before his death, though those bills can still be considered by the House.” The winner of the special election will serve in Congress from September through the end of Young’s term in January 2023. After that, the winner of the state’s regular election will assume the seat.

WHO ARE THE CANDIDATES RUNNING IN THE SPECIAL ELECTION?

An eclectic slate of 48 candidates is running in the special primary election. You can find their names on a sample ballot from the Alaska Division of Elections. Only 4 will advance from the special primary to the special general election.

HOW DO I LEARN MORE ABOUT THE CANDIDATES?

The Division of Elections has compiled a full list of candidates, along with their contact information and campaign websites.

WHAT ARE THE KEY DATES FOR THE SPECIAL ELECTION?

The special election will take place in two parts.

First, there will be a special primary election to narrow the field to four candidates. Voters must mail in their special primary election ballots with a postmark date on or before Saturday, June 11. (Limited options for early and absentee-in-person voting open on Friday, May 27.)

The special general election takes place on Tuesday, August 16. Important: This will happen on the same day as the regular primary election.

The key dates for the special election are:

Wednesday, April 27: Special election ballots are mailed to voters

Thursday, May 12: Special election deadline to register to vote or update your voter registration address

Friday, May 27: Special election early and absentee in-person voting begins

Saturday, June 11: Special primary election day! This is the last day to postmark a vote by mail ballot or cast a ballot at a Division of Elections Regional Office (see map below or downloa...

Political lessons from ten nations about building affordable, low-carbon neighborhoods.

“If you can’t solve a problem, enlarge it.”

This oft-repeated maxim was probably not expressed by Dwight D. Eisenhower, despite Internet claims to the contrary. (Experts at the Eisenhower Presidential Library have never found evidence he said it.)

Still, it’s wise counsel: expanding the scope of a problem can make new solutions possible. Confronting French beaches so fortified with German armaments that they seemed impregnable, Supreme Allied Commander Eisenhower launched a D-Day invasion that attacked five beaches at once—an operation the scale of which dwarfed all previous military landings. Attacking one beach was too hard, but when the problem was redefined as landing simultaneously on five, military planners began imagining the scale of engineering and force concentrations that would be needed.

Later, as president, confronted with a balkanized and piecemeal US highway system and a reluctant Congress, Eisenhower didn’t whittle down his proposal: he enlarged it. He proposed an interstate highway system so vast that it would not only speed travel but serve national defense needs, including evacuating cities in an age of nuclear weapons. If the problem was just transportation, it was politically unsolvable. If it was both transportation and military preparedness, the stakes were high enough to mobilize a commensurate response.

Just so, enlarging the problem of residential lockdown from a local housing issue to a state or national issue—elevating it to higher levels of government—is the cutting edge of pro-housing political strategy in recent years in North America. It’s an Eisenhower-like strategy. Starting in California and then in Oregon and a string of other states, advocates of abundant housing have elevated their case for upzoning and other pro-housing reforms from city halls to state capitols. Sightline has been prominent among them. Some advocates, including Sightline again, have escalated further, to the national level.

The political theory behind this strategy is that by taking the campaign to a larger arena, advocates can draw in a vast and rarely assembled coalition: displaced and would-be urban residents, affordable housing providers, major employers and unions, chambers of commerce and economic development agencies, and advocates for everything from racial and social justice to economic opportunity to climate sense to private property rights to transit improvement to children’s health to homelessness services.

These interests have a lot to gain from abundant housing, but they lack enough incentive to expend political effort in thousands of jurisdictions in countless local land-use planning processes. Only the obstructionists are widely distributed enough to engage in that conventional process. By enlarging the fight, pro-housing forces can dilute the excess influence that these housing-shortage deniers and home-building obstructionists hold in city politics.

TWO LESSONS

This political theory is, in fact, one of the central tenets of American political scholarship from the Eisenhower era: that solutions to hard political problems—solutions that advance the broad public interest—are more likely to emerge from larger arenas, from higher levels of government, where the power of narrow, private interests is watered down by the profusion of other such interests. Cascadian political scientist Grant McConnell wrote perhaps the classic articulation of this mid-twentieth century view that national government is more likely to solve hard problems well than are state or local governments. Small might be beautiful, went the reasoning, but it could also be parochial, backwards, and oligarchic.

This logic fits the problem of housing well: putting much more at stake, all at once, in one giant fight, rather than piece by piece in hundreds of separate local ones, might interrupt the trench warfare that has made abundant housing an unattainab...

Why do some US cities struggle more with homelessness? A new book explores a key component of the issue: housing supply.

The problem of homelessness has steadily worsened across the United States in recent decades, but some cities and metro regions have fared far worse than others.

A new book by University of Washington professor Gregg Colburn and Seattle-based data scientist and policy analyst Clayton Page Aldern examines these places’ disparate trends and the many causes that have been ascribed to homelessness. One by one, and with compelling data, Colburn and Aldern dismantle the common storylines that have blamed homelessness on individuals or cities’ social policies. Their research finds that the cause actually lies in these places’ very different housing markets.

Sightline interviewed the authors about their findings. Their book, Homelessness Is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns, is available from University of California Press.

HOW DID THIS RESEARCH START FOR YOU?

It began with the observation that much of the conversation around homelessness in our region, and across the country, lacks focus. Various explanations—individual, structural, and political—have dominated this conversation. There’s a perception that homelessness is a product of certain types of people who tend to gravitate toward certain types of cities. If you live on the West Coast, for example, you know the cities we’re talking about. Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles: all these cities have high per capita rates of homelessness.

But there’s actually significant variation in rates of homelessness around the country. Data shows that according to the 2019 point-in-time (PIT) count (the annual census of homelessness around the country), in King County, about 5 in every 1,000 people experience homelessness on a given night. In sunny Miami-Dade County in Florida, that number is closer to 1 per 1,000. What accounts for the difference? Specifically, what explains the variation in homelessness rates around the country? Our research seeks to answer those questions by zooming the lens out from the individual experiencing homelessness to the city in which they live.

WHAT FACTORS DO PEOPLE TYPICALLY THINK DRIVE HOMELESSNESS? AND WHAT DID YOU LEARN ABOUT THESE FACTORS?

If you watch the local news or spend time on Nextdoor, you have a sense of what these factors are. For many observers, homelessness is a function of mental illness, drug use, and overly generous social policies. These explanations are often supported by anecdotes, and certainly academic research confirms that a range of individual vulnerabilities, including poverty, substance abuse, and mental illness, increase one’s risk of homelessness. We both live in the Puget Sound region, and we know what it’s like to walk around downtown Seattle, where you encounter a lot of people who are probably sleeping outside and who might also be living with a serious mental illness or a substance use disorder. It’s not a huge analytical leap for people with housing to connect these individual conditions to Seattle’s homelessness problem.

But there are a couple of issues with this conclusion. First, the people sleeping on the street only represent a subset of the total population of people experiencing homelessness. In the 2020 count, chronic homelessness (what policy makers call being homeless for at least a year and living with some kind of physical or mental disability, including mental illness, a chronic health condition, and substance use disorder) accounted for less than 30 percent of the homeless cases in King County, while the chronic unsheltered population made up less than 17 percent of total cases. Second, we know that mental health and drug use can be both a cause of homelessness and a consequence. The trauma associated with homelessness is significant; that drug use and mental illness might result from this experience is not surprising. Research confirms this relation...

We’re introducing audio options on our latest research.

For a while now, readers have asked when Sightline Institute would start a podcast. And while we don’t quite have the bandwidth for that just now, we at least want to offer a new way to access our articles: in audio format.

Over the next few months, we’ll be rolling out an audio option for some of our more recent articles using text-to-speech technology. This allows you to listen to our articles (and at whatever speed you like) while you bike, hike, knit, engage in civic actions to make Cascadia a model of global sustainability, or whatever other activities make us Cascadians happy.

Plus, you’ll be able to find these recordings wherever you listen to podcasts, too. Whenever we publish an article containing an audio option, we’ll also post it to a basic podcast feed. To be clear, it won’t be a full-on podcast, just a simple feed of these text-to-speech recordings of our latest research, so you can scoop those facts conveniently alongside your other frequent listens.

Why audio? Accessibility! For as long as Sightline has been cranking out the wonky research, we’ve also worked to ensure that it’s comprehensible, convenient, and compelling for the many people who access it. Providing an audio option (at long last!) is one more way we’re doing that.

Finally, as we roll out this new function, do let us know of any problems you encounter with it. Drop a note in the comments section below, or contact us at [email protected]. Happy listening!