Tens of thousands of homes are now more buildable, including several projects now resurrected that local parking mandates had previously killed.

Oregon’s new governor just put her state on a mission to accelerate homebuilding by 80 percent. But her influence on housing growth began before she took office.

Starting on January 3, more than a week before Governor Tina Kotek’s inauguration, housing projects around Oregon started springing to life. Thirteen homes on an oddly shaped scrap of land near a Beaverton rail stop. Eighty-four new affordable apartments just outside Troutdale’s walkable downtown. A 12-room residential care home that’d help relieve the state’s painful hospital-bed shortage.

Was Kotek personally breaking ground on projects during her campaign stops? No. Rather, unlike both her major opponents, Kotek had pledged to uphold a policy passed by her predecessor Kate Brown: a package of climate-focused rules that reduced the number of car parking spaces new projects are legally required to build.

So when the first business day of 2023 rolled around, homes freed from that red tape were already lining up to start construction.

A new analysis for Sightline estimates that in the Portland suburbs alone, the rules stand to make about 37,000 potential new homes less expensive to develop---and therefore more likely to start construction without further increases in rents and sale prices. That alone is 20 percent of Kotek's new homebuilding target for the Portland metro area, and 10 percent of her target for the entire state.

Meanwhile, though, a group of six state lawmakers, five of them from Kotek’s own Democratic Party, has introduced bills that would repeal the new rules, which also include many other provisions aimed at reducing climate-warming emissions and improving social equity. The group’s bills would also give a minority of affected jurisdictions veto power over future state rules to advance climate and equity goals. A group of 14 local jurisdictions is also pursuing a legal challenge in the courts, arguing that Oregon had no right to make the rules in the first place.

If these reforms were rolled back, it’d kill thousands of potential homes that would address the state’s worsening housing shortage.

These are the stories of a few of those homes.

A downtown apartment project, about to be scrapped, returns with 40 percent more homes

“We have to break down the barriers that are keeping housing from being built, or taking too much time,”

Kotek told reporters on her first day in office, after signing an executive order intended to accelerate homebuilding, especially of less expensive homes.

That’s exactly what happened to Gene Templeton’s project, Pacific Avenue Apartments, in the inner-ring Portland suburb of Beaverton.

Last summer, Templeton realized he had a big problem with the small apartment building he was planning to build on the edge of downtown Beaverton, whose walkability the city itself boasts.

“It was not penciling out at all,”

he said, because of the structural gymnastics required to accommodate the required on-site parking.

The nine-unit building was approved with seven parking spaces in the back, as mandated by Beaverton’s parking minimum. To build those seven spaces, Templeton would have to pave half of the property, creating a large hole in the building where the ground floor should be.

“We would have had to put in massive concrete columns and an incredibly expensive steel package to just get the building to stand up,”

said Templeton.

“It did not make any sense because it was so expensive to build.”

Then Templeton got news that Oregon had adopted a new set of rules that would eliminate parking mandates starting in 2023 for properties like his, nearby a frequent bus line and a MAX light rail station.

“It was actually remarkable timing.”

An architect by trade, he went to work redesigning the building.

No longer constrained by mandatory parking, Templeton added four more homes to the project and divers...