Sightline Institute Research: Recent Episodes
Sightline Institute
Cascadia’s sustainability think tank brings you a feed of its latest research articles, in text-to-audio recordings. Learn how the region can advance abundant housing for vibrant communities; reform our democratic systems and elections to honor the public’s priorities, including its support for climate solutions; make a just transition away from fossil fuels and into a 21st-century energy economy; and model forestry and agricultural practices that rebuild our soils, ecosystems, and rural economies. View articles in full at sightline.org.
The multibillion-dollar question that Senator Maria Cantwell, Governor Jay Inslee, and other Northwest leaders can help answer. Editor's note: This is the second of three articles discussing the major challenges - planning, paying for it, and permitting - to building the transmission lines needed to transition to a cleaner energy future. Transmission lines cost a pretty penny. Take for example the only new regional transmission project that will break ground in the Northwest anytime soon. Idaho Power and PacifiCorp's 290-mile Boardman to Hemingway line will cost more than $4 million per mile, for a total of $1.2 billion. And that's hardly the steepest line in the works in the United States right now; developers anticipate footing multibillion-dollar bills for several large transmission projects outside Cascadia. Most incumbent transmission developers in the Northwest, namely the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) and investor-owned utilities (IOUs), balk at building projects sporting these price tags. BPA shies away from large investments that would require it to raise rates on its public power customers and assume additional federal debt. And most IOUs fear tying up billions of dollars for years or even decades only to risk state regulators ultimately not allowing them to recoup their investment. As a result, neither BPA nor IOUs are investing in the grid infrastructure Cascadia desperately needs to decarbonize. But if building transmission lines is expensive, not building them is exorbitant. Total decarbonization costs could rise by up to $13 billion if the Northwest does not expand transmission capacity. And unless Cascadia builds a grid that can support the end of climate-destroying fossil fuels, we will pay the highest price of all in the form of more devastating wildfires, oppressive heatwaves, and dangerous droughts. All Northwest leaders can help untangle the financial impediments to building new lines. Washington senator Maria Cantwell and the Northwest congressional delegation can pressure BPA to deploy more low-cost federal debt to the cause. The Oregon and Washington state legislatures can set up state entities to partner with private non-utility transmission developers. Oregon governor Tina Kotek and Washington governor Jay Inslee can initiate the development of a multistate cost allocation agreement to offer IOUs greater assurance that they will earn back their transmission investments. The best and least expensive options are those that leverage low-cost public financing so as to maintain to the extent possible the Northwest's relatively low electricity prices. Still, given the dire urgency of the climate crisis, all options are worth pursuing. Otherwise, Cascadians will be left holding the bag, coughing up for expensive and inefficient infrastructure projects while the planet burns. BPA'S PRIORITIES: LOW DEBT, LOW RATES, FEW BUILDS BPA is, as Sightline has written about extensively, the Northwest's transmission giant. And it looks flush with cash to pay for new wires: it has only tapped $5.7 billion of the $17.7 billion Congress authorizes it to borrow from the US Department of the Treasury. But BPA doesn't see it that way. Understanding why requires looking back at the agency's foundational statutes, which direct it to sell power from US government dams on the Columbia River to "public bodies and cooperatives" at "the lowest possible rates." These "preference customers," as they are known, include municipal utilities like Seattle City Light, public utility districts (PUDs) like Snohomish County PUD, consumer-owned cooperatives like Umatilla Electric Cooperative, and tribal utilities like Yakama Power. Just as these preference customers depend on BPA for power and transmission service, so too does BPA depend on them. US federal statute requires BPA to recover its costs, including debt repayment and interest, by selling power and transmission service; BPA does not receive annual Congressional appropriation...
Small changes could fully fund the program and produce many more affordable homes in desirable areas. In 2016, when Portland's city council voted to start requiring a share of homes in new buildings to be made affordable to lower-income Portlanders, some predicted disaster. "Could well make the city's housing affordability problems demonstrably worse," urban economist Joe Cortright warned. Others rejoiced. "Would harvest the windfall profits that our wildly inflated housing prices are creating," John Mulvey, a housing advocate with the East Portland Action Plan, predicted. Others said that it might need to be adjusted in the future. "At the earliest possible stage, if there is a need for us to reconvene and rethink any part of it. I want to make sure that that's baked into our policy," City Commissioner Nick Fish said. Well, it took six years for the city to get around to it, but that self-assessment is finally underway - and it points the way to a handful of relatively modest changes that could mend (and not end) a program that looks like a pretty good deal for both tenants and taxpayers. Since last fall, I've been honored to serve among 10 fellow Portlanders on the city's volunteer "inclusionary housing calibration work group" that has teamed with the city's staff and consultants to dig into the program's numbers, goals, outcomes, and future. Though there have been a few moments of healthy tension, the process left me impressed by the city staff's interest in getting the details of this policy right. In that time, I've also learned just how unusual Portland's program is among similar "inclusionary zoning" programs. The key difference: unlike almost all similar programs in the United States but like more productive flavors of inclusionary zoning such as this one in France, Portland's program is at least partially funded. In Portland, the public pays for the program in the gentlest of ways: by waiving some taxes and fees on buildings that comply with it. And as the city's contractor found, that waiver can potentially be enough to make the program work. The catch: if the program will both maximize the number of below-market homes and avoid driving up market prices, it needs full funding. With just a few tweaks, criticism of Portland's program would likely recede. In fact, it can become a model for other North American cities that want to mandate mixed-income homes in new buildings. Here's what that would take. 1. DEFINE SUCCESS Portland's program has an essentially qualitative purpose statement: the program should "increase" the number of less expensive homes available in areas with "superior access to quality schools, services, amenities and transportation," especially affordable to households making less than 60 percent of the city's median income. (For a one-person household, that's $47,400; for a three-person household, it's $60,960. At those incomes, federally defined "affordable" rents, including utilities, are capped at $1,185 for a studio, $1,524 for a two-bedroom, and so on.) Having a purpose is good. But Portland hasn't actually set any quantitative criteria for the city to judge this program's success or failure. This is bad. Here's one simple figure that could be used to evaluate the success of the program: not just to "increase" but to maximize, given available public resources, the number of new homes in desirable areas that are affordable to Portlanders making 60 percent of the median income. This is a crucial difference. Any construction at all under a mandatory inclusionary housing program will "increase" the number of below-market homes built, compared to a city with no such program. Someday, Portland might mandate that 40 percent of homes in new buildings have regulated affordability, with no public funding to offset those costs. If that set of rules resulted in a single 100-unit building each year, the current program language would count those 40 homes as a sign of success. But in a city of 600,000, just...
Bend residents have shown us how. William Kuhn, who lost his Bend, Oregon, home in the Awbrey Hall Fire, has a warning: "Anyone who decides to live on the edge of the forest risks losing their homes. We know that." Once considered rare, the "fire weather" that fueled the 1990 Awbrey Hall Fire is now a fixture of Cascadia's climate. "It's not a question of if, but when fires come through," said Boone Zimmerlee, Deschutes County's fire-adapted communities coordinator. Building wildfire-resilient communities is key for climate adaptation. As I recently documented, the best tool for the job is guiding growth away from areas of fire hazard, which I call fireplains. Building new homes within existing urban areas, or "infill," is the safest solution, followed by compact development contiguous with existing city limits. This is exactly what the residents of Bend, Oregon, did circa 2009, when they invoked the state's landmark 1973 land use law and prevented houses from being built in a fireplain by instead directing growth inside city limits. Across the state, Oregon's land use law has been silently protecting life and property from wildfire. As Rory Isbell of Central Oregon LandWatch noted, "If you think of where the Labor Day fires burned a few years ago, up and down the Santiam, the McKenzie, and the Clackamas, if they'd had big, sprawling residential suburbs, the fires would have been a heck of a lot worse." Bend's case shows how growth management policies can empower Cascadians to build wildfire-resilient communities. It also offers correctives to upgrade Oregon's land use law, or at least to improve how it is used. GROWTH IS COMING Along with the rest of the West, Cascadia's population is growing. To keep up with the influx, by 2040, Idaho needs to build about 660,000 new dwellings, and Washington will need an additional three million. Population is growing fastest in areas abutting or intermixing with wildlands, called the wildland-urban interface (WUI). Specifically, people are flocking to fireplains, where wildfires naturally return every few decades. Cascadians face a choice: continue to grow fastest in places that inherently require millions of dollars of firefighting every year, or direct growth into compact communities. As a "nature lover's dream," the city of Bend, Oregon, is among the fastest growing cities in the United States. Over the next 50 years, the city will likely more than double its population, welcoming 120,000 new residents. The big question: where will they live? PUSHING MORE HOUSES INTO A FIREPLAIN: AN ILL-ADVISED SOLUTION Bend sits directly east of the seasonally dry Deschutes National Forest, putting it at the edge of a "frequent fire" zone, where wildfires naturally return every 35 years or earlier. In 2009 the city of Bend and Deschutes County announced plans to expand Bend's urban growth boundary and add as many as 5,000 new dwellings in this fireplain. To the west of Bend, this proposed expansion overlapped with the footprint of the Awbrey Hall Fire that had burned homes and forced the evacuation of hundreds of people less than 20 years prior. The wind-whipped fire rebuffed the attack of fire crews fighting the main blaze's 150-foot flames and the exponentially expanding spot fires ignited by flying embers. Within ten hours, the fire spread six miles, jumping over three major roadways and the Deschutes River. The Awbrey Hall Fire would have been catastrophic had the wind shifted slightly and blown the wildfire head-on into downtown Bend, which could have caused a domino effect of house-to-house ignitions. But to the relief of residents and drivers idling in the backup of fleeing vehicles, a quirk in the weather saved the city. In the end, only 22 homes were destroyed, no lives were lost, and all fire crews came out safely. RESIDENTS REDIRECT NEW CONSTRUCTION TO SAFETY When Bend and Deschutes County proposed expanding the city's urban growth boundary into this fireplain, residents objected. Not onl...
Proposals to reduce overbuilt parking lots are popping up across the United States. In the 2023 legislative session, more than a dozen US states have proposed legislation to reduce or eliminate parking minimums. "It's exciting," said Tony Jordan, founder of the national Parking Reform Network, which connects advocates and policymakers with resources. To Jordan, the number of state bills introduced signal a quietly growing number of people working on the issue. "It's becoming very popular." For decades, nearly every town across North America has required all new homes and businesses to have a pre-determined number of parking spaces. But as widespread housing shortages and empty office buildings multiply, states are increasingly taking up the effort to roll back parking mandates instead of waiting for cities to adopt new codes one by one. Last year, Oregon and California both adopted policies that struck down parking mandates at the state level. Widespread parking reform proposals have yet to be as successful in other states, but the number of bills popping up in states across the political spectrum illustrates the movement's growing influence. Reducing parking minimums is most commonly found as one part of a larger reform package to increase housing supply, like in Colorado's comprehensive More Housing Now bill. Legislators from multiple states, though, have begun to address parking minimums directly with simple bills only a few pages long. In Oklahoma, a bill was introduced that would have ended parking minimums outright. Washington attempted to eliminate mandatory parking near frequent transit stations. Another transit-oriented measure in New Jersey would cut parking minimums near transit in half; that bill is still alive, having passed the state senate in May. Parking reformers' biggest 2023 wins so far have come in Vermont and Montana. Despite very different political majorities, both states legalized more housing while capping local parking mandates at one parking space per home through much of the state. Other successful housing supply bills, like ones that legalized accessory dwelling units, included pre-emptions of parking requirements. These efforts were buoyed by 2022 breakthroughs in state-level parking reform. Both Oregon and California adopted policies to make parking fully optional for properties near transit service, and for certain uses in Oregon. The new policies went into effect in both states on January 1, 2023. Oregon's parking reform survived the legislative session intact. The sole public hearing on a bill that would have nullified the state's new land use and transportation rules was canceled after more than 140 Oregon residents and organizations submitted testimony to oppose it. It was never rescheduled. In May, California Representative Robert Garcia broke another barrier, elevating the issue to the federal level by introducing the People Over Parking Act in Congress. Modeled after California's state law, the bill would eliminate parking requirements within a half-mile of transit service. He was joined by Representatives Earl Blumenauer (OR), Greg Casar (TX), and Seth Moulton (MA). The shifting Overton window is a welcome development to advocates like Jordan, who first got involved with parking reform a decade ago. He described the phases of policy change like steps on a ladder. "First, they cap what you can do. Then you legalize certain kinds of housing without it. And then maybe you go for the transit stations," he said. "Eventually someone's going to do the whole thing." The day when parking minimums are wholly relegated to the past might be a ways off yet, but it's clear that interest in removing them isn't going away anytime soon. Did we miss one? Let us know about your statewide parking reform at editor@sightline.org For the full state-by-state breakdown, please visit/
For starters, Cascadia has no plan. Editor's note: This is the first of three articles discussing the major challenges - planning, permitting, and paying for it - to building out the transmission lines needed to transition to a cleaner energy future. Electric transmission lines - those giant high-voltage wires that zap electricity across long distances - recently graduated from a fringe topic to a core challenge in the quest to decarbonize Cascadia. More leaders and climate hawks now recognize the centrality of transmission capacity to meeting climate goals, but that recognition has yet to yield action. The Northwest grid is jammed, and hundreds of wind and solar projects are languishing as a result. Neither the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) nor Northwest utilities - nor anyone else, for that matter - is building the new transmission lines necessary to power millions of households and businesses in Cascadia with clean electricity. Why? Much of the national conversation diagnosing impediments to new wires in the United States focuses on complex and lengthy permitting processes and their adjacent challenge: local communities' opposition to new energy projects in their backyards. But a smooth permitting process is only one leg of the three-legged stool that successful transmission projects rest on. The other two are adequate planning and the right incentives for paying for the expensive lines. Sightline looked into each of these three barriers in the unique context of Cascadia. This article, part of a series investigating the challenges of building transmission lines, focuses on planning. If transmission lines aren't planned, they aren't built. And if transmission lines aren't built, neither are new wind turbines or solar farms, prolonging our dependence on planet-destroying, war-fueling oil, coal, and gas. But the organizations that plan Cascadia's future wires (largely, BPA and utilities) are plodding along the same way they have for years, ticking boxes and averting their gaze from the impending new demands on the grid. Meanwhile, Cascadia is on fire, and heatwaves are shattering temperature records around the world. A different way forward is both imperative and entirely possible. Instead of betting our future on outdated, fractured, and myopic planning processes, Northwest leaders could establish a new regional transmission planning entity with the authority and resources to shepherd the region's grid into the twenty-first century. Until they do, Cascadia's climate ambitions grow more precarious by the year. CASCADIA'S TRANSMISSION PLANNING PROCESS: FRACTURED, SHORTSIGHTED, AND PERPETUALLY BEHIND THE TIMES "A goal without a plan is just a wish," author and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is said to have written. If you ask anyone at BPA or a Northwest utility whether they are planning the grid for the future, they will assure you that they are. But plunge into the murky depths of transmission planning processes yourself and you will quickly become alarmed that Cascadia's audacious climate goals may turn out to be mere wishes unless we chart a different course. Since 2011 the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has required all utilities that own transmission wires to participate in regional planning processes. In the Northwest, NorthernGrid leads that process. The group counts 16 members, including BPA, the region's investor-owned utilities (e.g., Portland General Electric [PGE], Puget Sound Energy [PSE]), and some municipal utilities (e.g., Seattle City Light). But NorthernGrid is ill prepared for the task at hand: ushering the Northwest's grid into an entirely new era dominated by climate change. The association has no full-time staff, no independent leadership, and is not accountable to state regulators or policymakers. It is essentially a small club of BPA and the biggest power utilities in the region that meets the letter, but not the spirit, of FERC's planning requirements. For evidence of these def...
Several examples exist, and Cascadian policymakers can encourage shifts while setting guardrails to protect customers. Between 2003 and 2018, about 55 percent of adults in the United States abandoned their landline telephones in favor of wireless ones. Phone companies that rode the wave of innovation and diversification reaped financial rewards, while those that stuck with the outmoded landline strategy faced demise. Like landline telephones, Cascadia's gas utilities' main business is quickly becoming obsolete. Gas companies are reckoning with disruption from all angles: consumers are buying electric heat pumps instead of gas furnaces, federal laws are boosting electric appliances, and new regulation is constraining gas customer growth. To survive, gas utilities will need to transform into enterprises that advance, rather than obstruct, the clean energy transition. The decarbonization solutions of hydrogen and renewable natural gas (RNG) that most gas utilities favor are unrealistic, dangerous, and expensive, and only in a few cases can they compete economically with electrification. But a few gas companies are experimenting with novel, climate-friendly ventures, including clean heat and electrification products and services. Some of these ideas, namely infrastructure-intensive heating investments like GeoNetworks and district energy, meet the traditional criteria for regulated utility businesses and merit active support from lawmakers and regulators. Indeed, leaders might do well to even require that utilities pilot them. Many other ideas do not meet these criteria, but they are still worth exploring for their potential to speed climate progress and to interrupt utilities' continuing climate obstructionism. Policymakers considering the gas industry's nontraditional reinvention proposals will need to take care to protect ratepayers, which will include extracting concessions from gas companies to shrink the gas system, and to shield smaller market competitors from economic injury. Why keep gas companies in business? For climate hawks, putting gas utilities out of business might seem like a top priority. However, it may be worthwhile to keep the industry solvent---in a reimagined, climate-friendly form---not only both during the decarbonization transition and well into the future. Here are four reasons gas business diversification is even worth considering: Preventing climate obstructionism. With dimming prospects, gas utilities have been using their clout in policy and regulatory forums to mislead the public and forecast doomsday scenarios about a world without gas. For example, NW Natural, Oregon's largest gas utility, has been bankrolling a referendum campaign to reverse Eugene's gas ban in new homes and has pumped more than $1 million into a front group fighting the city's policy. If gas utilities could reinvent themselves as decarbonization enterprises that earn lucrative returns, not only might they stop fighting against climate action but they might also begin fighting for it. Leveraging scale. Decarbonization solutions will have a tough time scaling up fast enough without some coordinated roll-out across blocks, neighborhoods, and cities. Gas utilities might be up to the task. They already operate across large territories, with thousands of miles of pipes snaking under Cascadia's cities and towns. Today these utilities count more than 4 million gas customers in the region. Leveraging gas utilities' broad reach and expertise in the energy sector to advance building electrification could speed climate action. Protecting retirees' savings. Utilities provide a steady income for millions of investors, most of whom are institutional investors focused in part on dependable returns for retirees. For example, investors in Puget Sound Energy, Washington's largest utility, include four large Canadian pension holding companies charged with managing the pensions for public sector employees in Canada, and institutional investors ho...
A preliminary estimate of potential cost savings from municipal election consolidation. In 2019 Wayne Thorley, then Nevada’s Deputy Secretary of State for Elections, promised a state legislative committee that Nevada taxpayers could “save a lot of money.” The trick, Thorley said, was to pass a low-profile bill to reschedule local elections so that they would be on the same ballots as federal ones. Millions of dollars of savings, he claimed, were there for the taking through election consolidation. Thorley’s argument was not unusual. Cost savings are a routine refrain in legislative discussions of consolidation. I have heard them invoked repeatedly, like a mantra, in election rescheduling hearings in Arizona, California, Montana, Nevada, and Washington. Over and over, from the left and the right, proponents point out that synchronizing elections not only commands overwhelming popular support, boosts turnout, improves government accountability, and brings out a more representative electorate but also saves money. How much money, though? Thorley didn’t say, and few others have offered estimates. The potential economies are large, no doubt. The cost of running local elections at off-cycle times (that is, at times other than Election Day in November of even-numbered years) runs to tens of millions of dollars a year in Cascadia. In the United States, it amounts to perhaps $2--$5 billion per year nationwide. An elections-cost calculation usable for any city or state As far as I can tell, though, no one has ever conducted a meticulous, CPA-proof before-and-after study on how much money election consolidation would save. And no one has documented the change in spending in cities that have moved their local elections to align with federal ones. That is surprising, given the near-violent controversy over the fairness and security of voting systems in the United States. You might assume that every aspect of the country’s elections would have been audited in excruciating detail. Instead, the question of voting schedules is a weird, neglected backwater of election debate and its costs little attended. Election budgets are buried in larger budgets for county clerks or auditors and for various city or state bureaus, and they are rarely analyzed separately. These budgets are also dwarfed by other spending categories and therefore draw little scrutiny. Charles Steward III, a political scientist at MIT, wrote, “The estimated cost of conducting elections on an annual basis is roughly what local governments spend managing public parking facilities.” In other words, it’s crumbs. In this article, I offer a back-of-the-digital-envelope estimate for three Cascadian states that hold off-cycle elections and their main cities. The analysis method I use is admittedly crude; I based it on all the data points I could assemble, though I could not find many data points. However, the method allows anyone anywhere to estimate potential savings for their own off-cycle city or state elections, and it’s simple and transparent enough to allow for quick upgrades as data improve. Examples of elections-cost savings from Idaho, Montana, and Washington Sightline estimates potential savings in Idaho, Montana, and Washington, the three Cascadian states that could easily move their municipal elections to Election Day, to be more than $30 million per two-year election cycle. The method used to determine these savings, detailed in the appendix, is simple and built from real-world examples. First, I estimated the range of total Cascadian spending for off-cycle elections based on expenditure data from two local examples: King County, Washington, and Anchorage, Alaska. Second, I estimated potential savings from two other local examples: a set of on-cycle and off-cycle elections in Nevada cities and a before-and-after estimate from the city of Concord, California. And third, I reality- checked each of these examples against other data points I could find. From these examples,...
Six months into the pioneering state policy, regulatory costs are falling and projects are springing to life. In cities across Oregon, parking mandates are going out not with a bang, but a whimper. “It’s sort of been a sleeper issue here”, said Anne Catlin, the comprehensive planning manager for Albany, Oregon. When Albany repealed minimum parking requirements citywide earlier this June, not a single person from the public testified. Catlin didn’t recall the topic even making the newspaper. Normally parking is one of the most contentious issues for local governments, making any relaxation of parking mandates – rules that prescribe a minimum number of parking spaces needed for any new home or business – a political hot potato. But new state parking rules have taken the status quo off the table, and turned what could be a big debate into a boring compliance exercise. “There really isn't much to provide input on, we're just going to comply with the rules,” said Sandy Belson from the city of Springfield. By June 30th, affected jurisdictions could choose to either eliminate all parking mandates, or enact a host of more complicated regulations if they wish to retain minimums in some instances. The two other compliance paths include regulations ranging from pricing one in ten on-street parking spaces, to separating the cost of parking from rent to creating parking benefits districts. All of which would take additional staff time and oversight. At least seven cities have voted to go the simpler route: Portland, Salem, Corvallis, Tigard, Bend, Albany, and Central Point. Now over a million people live in communities where parking is fully voluntary. More cities are poised to join them the next year, after using a deadline extension granted by the state. Transit proximity already removed parking mandates from majority of lots Removing all parking minimums wasn’t the dramatic leap it would have been a year ago. Last January, state rules lifted parking mandates for all properties within a half mile of frequent transit corridors, and within three-quarters mile of rail stations. City generated maps have revealed that those areas constitute the majority of lots in many cities. In Corvallis, those transit adjacent areas covered 65 percent of the city. For Gresham, 53 percent. In Tigard, 62 percent. The slivers of city not included were likely to be low-density residential neighborhoods, industrial land, or open space. “Most of our city falls within a half mile of our transportation corridor,” Catlin said. “It was an easy decision.” In Corvallis, city planners recommended removing all minimums because bus service can change over time. If transit service were downgraded, building owners might suddenly find themselves needing to add more parking to stay legal. Service-dependent rules could also give residents who like parking mandates a reason to oppose transit upgrades, thereby deepening transportation inequities. Transit service changes are already putting zoning maps in flux. A planned improvement to bus line 71 in Milwaukie this upcoming September would have increased the fraction of the city without minimum parking requirements from 78 percent to 95 percent. They plan to fully eliminate parking mandates later this year. In addition to areas near transit, the state has also done away with parking mandates for long list of uses for equity reasons, including for affordable housing, small residences, and childcare facilities and more. Those rules will give more flexibility to housing projects like a senior care facility that had their expansion plans scuttled over two parking spaces last year. State rules reduce barriers to new businesses Local governments are often well aware of the specific sites, like oddly shaped lots or old buildings, where parking minimums pose barriers to redevelopment. But before Oregon’s state rules, they didn’t have a lot of options for reforming those counterproductive codes without an arduous political process. On...
City Councilor Burhan Azeem shares his experiences from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Thanks to the charter change ballot measure voters approved in November 2022, Portlanders will see a few changes to the city’s election method and governance in the coming years. One of the first will be the November 2024 election, when voters will choose 12 councilors in 4 districts using proportional ranked choice voting. Under the new system, Portlanders will be able to rank multiple candidates on their ballot, bubbling in their first choice, second choice, and so on. Instead of a single candidate winning one seat with more than 50 percent of the vote, 3 candidates in each district will win seats with more than 25 percent of the vote each. Ballots are counted in rounds until these 3 candidates come out on top. Losing candidates in each round are eliminated, and their votes are transferred to the voters’ next-choice candidates. Candidates who pass that 25 percent threshold during counting will win a seat, and any votes above that threshold will be transferred to the voters’ next-choice candidates. To get some ideas about what voters can expect from the new system, I talked to Cambridge, Massachusetts, City Councilor Burhan Azeem. Azeem is serving his first term on the council and is the youngest councilor in the history of Cambridge, home to the United States’ longest-running proportional election system. Since 1941, Cambridge voters have selected nine citywide councilors using proportional ranked choice voting. While Portland’s experience won’t look exactly the same as Cambridge’s, Rose City residents can learn a lot from the practices and results they’ve had over the last 80 years. Here are excerpts, edited for brevity and clarity, from my conversation with Councilor Azeem. Why did you run for office? There’s all sorts of political causes and stuff I really care a lot about: housing and transportation policy, as well as other things. But my first real call was showing up to City Hall and thinking, “This is not the city I see right outside the doors.” Cambridge is a very young city, even without counting kids. And especially when I first got involved in politics, everyone was fairly old. Besides our mayor, all my other colleagues currently on the city council are between 50 and 80. They’re all great people, but it was just very different than the city that was represented. Some of my main issues as a candidate were topics related to the universities we have in town, and I ended up getting lots of votes in areas where lots of students live. So I think the message you generate resonates with people. How do Cambridge voters understand the proportional ranked choice system? Do you find yourself doing lots of voter education? As a baseline, we have a good political culture, there’s really good explainers and other materials, Cambridge residents are extremely well educated, and enough people get it to explain it to other people who don’t. The government and council actually do a lot of voter education on top of that, because the median length of residency of a voter in Cambridge is so low that for a lot of people it’s their first time doing ranked choice voting. One trade-off of our system of doing everything at-large is that we have almost 20 candidates run, and getting voters to understand the comprehensive differences between 20 candidates is really, really difficult. Cambridge voters tend to have a good understanding of who’s likely to win a seat and who the marginal candidates are that don’t really have a shot, but even the short list can still be a lot of candidates to sort through. So what the benefit might be of Portland having smaller districts is that you might have more like six candidates running. Six is a much more understandable number for most people; they’ll be able to get a sense of what’s going on in each district. How do voters decide between all those candidates? In Cambridge we tend to see slates, groups of candidates you’re ...
The new zoning code legalizes more types of housing but creates new barriers to abundance. The rising tide of pro-housing policy in the Pacific Northwest is about to reach up to the popular mountain town of Boise, Idaho. The city’s new zoning code, scheduled for a final vote by the city council this month, will legalize more types of housing in residential neighborhoods creating more affordable choices for the area’s growing population. While removing key barriers to increasing the supply of housing, the code also introduces some new ones. A full-strength embrace of abundant housing may require another round of reform. Boise’s existing zoning code dates to the 1960s, when the city abandoned the flexible rules of the early 20th century in favor of exclusionary codes that limited residential neighborhoods to single-family detached homes on their own lot. The new code’s improvements to what’s allowed in residential zones include: Decreasing the minimum lot size from 5,000 square feet to 3,500 square feet; Simplifying the permitting process to lower the risk and costs for developers to gain approval from the city to build more housing; Increasing the maximum size of backyard cottages and basement apartments from 700 to 900 square feet and ending city discrimination against renters in the primary house; Allowing triplexes and fourplexes that were previously banned; and Reducing off-street parking requirements for multiplexes by 50 percent. Unfortunately, the last three points come with new conditions: many of the newly allowed housing units will be subject to rent control through deed restrictions and incur higher costs due to requirements to meet sustainability goals. An earlier version of the zoning rewrite, released in 2022, would have allowed construction of fourplexes by right in all residential zones. City planning officials later backed away from that idea and added new requirements that fourplexes must exceed the building code on energy efficiency and water use and must limit rents on some units with deed restrictions. These new requirements along with limits on the demolition of existing buildings included in the new code will ultimately constrain the production of this infill-friendly housing. These late-arriving provisions of the new zoning code have a plausible logic: the city grants permission for more units per residential lot but in return developers must make the units sustainable and affordable through rent control. The problem is that these requirements don’t apply to single-family homes, so given the choice of redeveloping a lot with a large single-family home or, say, a fourplex, these added costs and conditions will push developers toward building familiar single-family homes. Boise’s proposed zoning code embodies a skepticism that relaxing the existing barriers to building more units per lot will actually promote enough new supply to hold down prices. This distrust that the laws of supply and demand actually apply to housing resulted in the imposition of rent control on many of the smaller new units in residential zones. The experience of other cities shows that if the problem is high rental prices due to inadequate housing supply, then rent control makes it worse and more new construction makes it better. It’s difficult to know exactly how infill developers will respond to Boise’s new code. Meaningful improvements in allowing smaller lots and more forms of housing could unleash a wave of new construction given the strong market for rental housing in Boise. But it is more likely given the new rules in the code that not much will change in the residential zones. Boise’s new zoning code is 611 pages long; no one knows exactly how it will work in practice. Should the city council pass it into law this month, staff plan to work with the new code for one year to better understand its strengths and weaknesses. They will have an opportunity to revisit what’s successful and what’s not in the second half of 2024. IF...
How a flexible “plex” design could add lower-cost homes, green space, and walkable, vibrant neighborhoods—fast—across housing-strapped cities. As people across Cascadia buckle under soaring home prices and rents, leaders are scrambling to legalize, or try to legalize, more “middle housing” options amid their single-detached-dominated stock. While options like laneway homes and backyard cottages, duplexes and triplexes, may get the job done in some locales, bigger cities will need bigger solutions—and fast. Vancouver, British Columbia, has perhaps an over-lauded reputation for transit-oriented development, given its mere handful of tall neighborhoods. The city was early to legalize laneway homes in 2009, seen then as an incremental way to add more compact, environmentally friendly housing “without incurring the wrath of. wealthy homeowner groups,” some of whom expressed shock that a person might be able to look from a modest laneway home balcony into the primary home’s garden. About 4,500 laneway homes have been built there since, with another 4,000 planned by 2028. They’re popular, and as of 2018, fully 45 percent of newly constructed houses included a laneway home, and many of them also incorporated attached mother-in-law suites. Fourteen years later, Vancouver planning staff have now proposed legalizing four and sixplexes across the city, including in areas currently restricted to single-detached houses. The new proposal would allow a modest 16 percent increase in building size across the city’s low-density zones. It would also permit more units: four or six homes would be allowed, depending on the lot size. Right now, only three units are allowed in most detached house areas (the main house, plus an attached in-law suite and a laneway house). The proposed 16 percent increase in housing density is not enough to make up for decades of inaction. Detached home prices in the once-affordable East Vancouver have increased 100 percent in just the past ten years. Yet nothing but these homes is permitted on 81 percent of Vancouver’s residential land, effectively excluding anyone who can’t afford the high price of a stand-alone house and freezing even a relatively dense city like Vancouver in a predominantly suburban state. The results aren’t surprising: Vancouver’s population has grown more slowly than that of its surrounding suburbs, with detached home prices ballooning to $3.3 million on the city’s west side, well out of reach for most families. If we faced a less daunting housing challenge, then this 16 percent increase in allowable density might make sense. But our problems are bigger than that, and our solutions are going to have to be, too. It’s time to end detached-house zoning—and give Vancouverites more ways to call the city home. INTRODUCING “THE PLEX” Fourteen years after laneway homes were legalized, the results are in, and prices are way, way up. Whatever we do next, let’s not make the same mistake of doing too little, too late. In the spirit of doing enough, and fast enough, we set out the following goals, looking to bridge the gap between the city’s towers and its single-detached-dominated neighborhoods: Make it dense—and build up, not out. Make it affordable. Make it fast. Do it everywhere. Make it accessible. What would a new housing form that does all of these things look like? We propose: “the Plex,” a modular, repeatable apartment building of six, eight, or ten homes. The Plex is a place for people to raise families, meet friends, and live their lives on quiet streets in the neighborhoods they love. They combine the large units and yard space that people associate with detached homes, with the walkability and affordability of apartments. Include a shared rooftop patio and solar panels, plus front and rear balconies to liven the streetscape and allow neighbors to mingle. Ensure full accessibility for residents of all abilities, design to energy-efficient passive house standards, and preserve or even add tree can...
Early efforts in California, Colorado, and New York offer lessons to get started. Cascadians are swapping gas furnaces for heat pumps, gas stoves for induction cooktops, and gas dryers for electric ones. The “electrify everything” movement is accelerating, spurred by new federal, state, and local incentives. But when and how are we going to start pruning the gas system accordingly? Without shutting down gas infrastructure in tandem with electrification, an ever-shrinking number of gas customers will face ever-ratcheting costs to maintain a bloated gas system. Renters and low-income people who face the greatest hurdles to electrify are at the most risk of this so-called “death spiral.” Thankfully, there is a better way: strategic gas decommissioning paired with neighborhood electrification. In this world, all the buildings in a neighborhood or area electrify, as opposed to today’s scattershot approach. Then, the gas utility shuts off that part of the system, rightsizing its infrastructure to fit the new, smaller number of gas customers. Cascadia has yet to start decommissioning gas infrastructure or electrifying whole neighborhoods, but early work underway in California, Colorado, and New York offer some insights to get going. At a minimum, leaders in Cascadia who are committed to clean, healthy buildings and an equitable transition off of gas would be smart to: Clarify or eliminate gas utilities’ “obligation to serve,” Require gas utilities to propose areas ripe for decommissioning and neighborhood electrification instead of replacing gas pipes, Incentivize decommissioning and neighborhood electrification while protecting ratepayers, and Shield gas customers from future stranded gas assets. Let’s take these steps in turn. 1. CLARIFY OR ELIMINATE GAS UTILITIES’ “OBLIGATION TO SERVE” All states and provinces of Cascadia (and all 50 US states) require gas utilities to provide service to any customer in their territory who wants it. These “obligation to serve” laws used to make sense. They prevented monopoly utilities from discriminating against customers who were not profitable to serve, like people in low-density areas or those who use only small amounts of gas. And they helped lower gas customers’ bills by spreading fixed infrastructure costs over more households over decades, a model possible for a gas system that exists in perpetuity. But we no longer live in a world where the gas system can last forever. And electric alternatives abound for every residential need currently met by gas. The obligation to serve—or, at least, regulators’ interpretation of it—is getting in the way of strategic gas decommissioning. “A single customer can tank a project,” explained David Sawaya, Senior Manager of Decarbonization Strategies at Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), California’s largest utility, at a 2021 webinar organized by the California Energy Commission (CEC). CEC is funding a roughly $2 million, two-year body of research to identify potential pilot sites in northern and southern California for strategic gas decommissioning and neighborhood electrification. Given the obligation to serve, “every single customer has to agree to electrify” for decommissioning at the neighborhood scale to be possible, Sawaya continued. With recent uproar over an imaginary US ban on gas stoves, it’s not hard to conceive of a single gas system hold-out. Obligation-to-serve laws are nebulous enough that the issue could be resolved through regulation alone, Professor Heather Payne, an expert on regulatory policy at Seton Hall University School of Law, told Sightline. Payne argues that a state’s Public Utility Commission (PUC) could do away with the obligation to serve simply by shrinking gas utilities’ service territory once the PUC identifies an area ripe for strategic decommissioning and neighborhood electrification. “Regulators gave service territories and they can take them away,” she emphasized. But legal challenges from utilities or consumers could fol...
Measuring the employment and tax losses to communities and how oil companies are avoiding or delaying cleaning up their long-polluted sites. Plus, looking ahead for Washington state planning.Recent US oil refinery closures illustrate what Washington state, home to five oil refineries, would be smart to avoid: unplanned, unexpected, and sudden shutdowns. Since 2019 seven refineries in the United States alone have shuttered, most abruptly, taking with them more than 3,400 high-paying jobs and $21 million annually in taxes from local governments’ coffers—funds that had supported key services like schools and hospitals. At the same time, most of the oil companies that own the refineries have managed to forestall cleanup of their heavily polluted sites.This new report details each closure’s story and the impacts on local communities. Without exception, the oil refineries’ corporate owners decided the sites’ future without community input.Washington state has five aging oil refineries of its own, including ones owned by Marathon Petroleum, HF Sinclair, and Phillips 66, the same owners of several recently closed refineries. They support more than 2,000 jobs and over $24 million in local property taxes. Leaders and communities in Washington have a chance to learn from recent closures and do things differently: not to save a dying, polluting industry but to create a smoother path for the workers and communities by planning ahead now. Otherwise, the refinery owners and the whims of the volatile oil market may chart the state’s future for it.
In the state’s first full ranked choice election, the same pool of voters elected candidates from across the political spectrum. Alaska’s midterm elections were a win for moderate politics. A moderate Republican regained her US Senate seat. A moderate Democrat will continue to serve as Alaska’s lone Congressperson in the US House. A conservative Republican returned to the governor’s mansion, while the state legislature appears poised to form a bipartisan majority in the Senate, with a much smaller chance the House does the same. In the state’s first regular ranked choice general election, the politically mixed results reflected the independent streak of Alaska voters. The pairing of the open primary with ranked choice voting yielded a group of winning candidates that, collectively, is moderate and independent, just like Alaska’s electorate. The system also helped to check extremist candidates; was easy for voters to understand; reduced the power of political parties and hyperpartisan primary voters; and ensured no candidate won without a majority in the final round. Alaska Division of Elections director Gail Fenumiai presented the results live on KTOO 360TV and KTOO-FM. Voters approved Alaska’s election reforms in 2020, meaning Fenumiai and her agency have spent the last two years setting up the election system. Fenumiai choked up while thanking election workers before painstakingly walking viewers through the tabulations. MURKOWSKI KEEPS US SENATE SEAT Moderate Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski was reelected to the US Senate for the fourth time, beating out challengers Kelly Tshibaka, a Trump-backed Republican, and Pat Chesbro, a Democrat. Murkowski barely led Tshibaka in first round results, 43.37 percent to 42.6 percent, then pulled ahead for the win in Round 3, after votes for Republican Buzz Kelley, who dropped out but was still on the ballot, and then Chesbro, were redistributed. Murkowski captured 54 percent of final round votes. It’s the first time Murkowski has crested the 50 percent mark in a race. The US Senate race was always between Murkowski and Tshibaka, the latest iteration of a struggle between the moderate and extreme strains of Republican politics in Alaska. Murkowski’s insistence on holding the middle-ish ground even as her party shifted to the right has angered a large chunk of Alaska Republicans for at least a decade. In 2010, Joe Miller, a candidate from the Tea Party, the precursor to Trump-centric conservative politics, bested Murkowski in the Republican primary. Murkowski then ran and won a write-in campaign in the general election. She roundly defeated Miller in 2016. In 2022, Trump and Alaska’s Republican Party shunned Murkowski, but without a closed primary, the party couldn’t keep her out of the general election. Murkowski and Tshibaka easily secured spots on the November ranked choice ballot. Chesbro and Kelley rounded out the top four. Murkowski’s campaign went full-on bipartisan, a smart move given that she needed Democrats’ rankings, first or second, to win, and because, as she told the Anchorage Daily News, “that’s who I am.” She endorsed Peltola, spoke about her support of women’s right to choose, and touted the benefits to Alaska of the $1 trillion federal infrastructure bill, a key piece of President Joe Biden’s agenda that Murkowski helped hammer out with a bipartisan group of lawmakers. She also stuck to her commitment to develop Alaska’s oil and gas fields, including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And she voted against Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which directed $369 billion to clean energy, health care, and other climate investments. Tshibaka, a pro-Trump conservative, grew up in Alaska, but lived outside the state for most of her adult life. She spent much of her campaign reestablishing her Alaska cred. Murkowski had eaten muktuk? She was carrying some in her purse? Well, Tshibaka had made muktuk, according to a story in The New Yorker. (Muktuk is whale skin and blubber, ...
Progressives and conservatives find common ground on easing regulations on housing and business development. By a unanimous 12--0 vote, the Anchorage Assembly voted Tuesday to repeal parking mandates across Alaska’s most populous city. The common-sense zoning reform found sponsors across the political spectrum, championed by progressive Daniel Volland and co-sponsored by conservative real estate broker Kevin Cross and by Forrest Dunbar, who just won election to the Alaska State Senate as a Democrat. The two other members of the conservative voting bloc on the Assembly followed suit, voting “aye” alongside the liberal majority. (The Assembly is technically nonpartisan, but the political leanings of members are well known.) There was little debate that parking mandates, which prescribe a particular minimum number of parking spots for every new building in the city, were an unnecessary barrier to building more homes and businesses. Bill sponsors have argued that Anchorage has too much parking, and builders are already incentivized to have enough parking to meet market needs. Development in Anchorage is already notoriously difficult due to the short construction season and high costs for materials and labor, often making the cost of construction more expensive than the potential property value. “There is broad consensus that can be found around the issue of wanting to support housing in Anchorage to address the housing shortage,” Volland said in a work session leading up to the vote. “I think that we have an Assembly committed to doing that.” Land use codes for the municipality have a big impact regionally: with nearly 300,000 residents, the city is home to 40 percent of all Alaskans. Covering just over 1,700 square miles, it’s the fourth-largest city by land area in the United States and larger than the state of Rhode Island. Cross, who has extensive experience in real estate and served as Chair of the Anchorage Platting Board campaigned on simplifying permitting. He explained last week that no one was going to remove their parking overnight. "This is going to be a gradual process as people take advantage of it,” he said. The flexibility would enable more business opportunities within neighborhoods and revitalize older buildings on space-constrained lots for the select group of property owners who take advantage of it. “There’s great bipartisan support for these kind of reforms,” said Dunbar. “One of my main motivations for this---and for all of us---is we have an affordable housing in crisis in Anchorage right now. This is a modest but important step towards making both new construction, and crucially the repurposing of existing buildings, more affordable.” Even conservative Mayor Dave Bronson, who has been at odds with the Assembly on other issues, congratulated them on the ordinance. He wrote, “This change will make more housing projects economically viable,” he wrote Wednesday. “I have stated before, there’s no daylight between myself and the Assembly when it comes to the need for housing.” The planning department walked so the Assembly could run Anchorage’s parking reform process began with a proposed ordinance from its city planning department. The ordinance included modest reductions to parking requirements and was limited to certain parts of the city. But the election of newcomers Volland and Cross this last spring opened the door to a larger conversation about how the city could remove barriers to new development. Volland and his cosponsors approached the planning department with a new idea: get rid of parking mandates entirely. Over the last few months, a working group of transportation advocates, Assembly members, and staff from the development services and planning departments extensively reworked the reform. The Assembly adopted that substitute version of the initial ordinance which eliminated all parking minimums citywide. The ordinance also increased ratios for disability-accessible parking spaces and included m...
While the most pro-housing parties didn’t win big support from voters, they pulled the conversation toward a more housing-abundant policy future for the province. The recent elections in and around Vancouver, British Columbia, created a stir among pro-housing advocates. In one of North America’s most expensive cities to rent or buy a home, numerous parties campaigned on statements that even just a few years ago pundits would have considered a third rail. They promised to address the region’s housing shortage by ending the ban on apartments citywide—including the leafy single-detached-house neighborhoods long kept off-limits to additional housing. While ultimately these more stridently pro-housing parties didn’t win the majority of residents’ support, they did shift the regional conversation. Indeed, the party that won both a majority on city council and the mayor’s seat, the centre-right ABC Vancouver party, vowed to deliver on recently approved plans to build thousands more homes in selected parts of the city and to ease approval processes for new proposals. What’s more, a party that claimed there had been too much development in recent years failed to win much of Vancouverites’ support at all. TEAM’S TOUGH TIME The party TEAM for a Livable Vancouver was most vocal in its position that the city had gone too far in terms of welcoming new people and construction, its bounty of yard signs especially conspicuous in front of west-side single-detached homes. A TEAM win could have signaled broader resistance to the abundant housing agenda. But the TEAM vote never matched the TEAM publicity. Instead, its mayoral candidate, first-term councillor Colleen Hardwick, won only about 10 percent of the vote. The rest went to parties and candidates that espoused pro-housing platforms ranging from extremely strong to mildly strong on both the left and right. PRO-HOUSING PARTIES’ PROGRESS Left-leaning OneCity Vancouver promised to allow everything from duplexes to small apartment buildings everywhere throughout the 60 percent of the city that is now reserved for only the most expensive form of housing, single-detached houses. Highly centrist Progress Vancouver, said much the same, but added a new detail. It would push for denser housing around city schools that have been emptying out, and along transit lines. Former mayor Kennedy Stewart, seen by most as left-wing, and his Forward Together party promised to get city approvals for 220,000 new homes in the next decade. He also continued to pitch his idea of allowing up to six homes on any residential lot in Vancouver. The very right-wing Non-Partisan Association party, which might have chosen to appeal to the same disaffected single-detached home owners as TEAM, instead opted for a message that the city desperately needs more housing everywhere in the city. The party failed to win any seats. Overall, candidates from the more left and progressive parties—OneCity, Forward Together, and Vision Vancouver—did not win broad support from voters. But area leaders watching the election assert that the housing discourse shifted importantly this year. “The political consensus on housing policy in the election is that it generally was shifting to an aggressive build-out of new houses,” said Khelsilem, the current chair of the Squamish Nation council, one of three Indigenous groups in the region who have become major housing builders in Vancouver. “There were different scales and approaches, but they were different ways of achieving the same outcome.” He said the public seems to have agreed that demand-side policies—mechanisms aimed at speculators or investors, like speculation taxes and empty-homes taxes—are not succeeding in making housing more affordable in Vancouver or in Canada more generally. He added, “Governments that have tried to use just demand-side tools haven’t achieved anything.” That opinion was widely shared by market-rate and nonprofit housing developers alike, as well as housing researche...
Five policy shifts could help communities harden their homes against fire danger. My family lives in fire country in Idaho, Montana, and Washington. A new era of megafires that no amount of firefighting can control is forcing all of us across Cascadia to learn a new way to live with fire. Wildfires have become more frequent, larger in acreage, and more severe, and the risk they pose to those in their path is predicted to increase two- to sixfold in most areas of the West. More firefighting is not the answer. What my family has discovered, and what wildfire scientist Jack Cohen has been saying for years, is that we cannot avoid extreme wildfires, but we can avoid devastating damages. This fall, my mother, with guidance and financial assistance from the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation (MDNRC), is pruning or removing flammable trees and brush near her home and regularly watering the lawn. Taking these and other measures to keep flames away from homes, schools, and businesses is commonly called “creating defensible space.” She also plans to cover her vents with ⅟8-inch metal mesh screens and caulk any gaps where embers could enter the home and ignite it from the inside. Thankfully she already has a metal roof. Her actions toward making the structure itself fire-resistant are referred to as “home hardening.” In this and subsequent related articles, I will refer to home hardening and creating defensible space together as “fire hardening.” Short of living in a concrete bunker, we can’t guarantee that our homes will survive a wildfire, but fire hardening them dramatically improves the odds. Fire hardening homes and communities is a cornerstone of climate resilience and adaptation. The question is, how can we make it a new norm? The first step is redefining wildland-urban fire as a home ignition problem, not as a problem of controlling wildfires. Aside from changing how fire is portrayed in the media (ahem, journalists!), shifting funding from suppression to fire hardening would cue this shift in our collective understanding. These funds could pay fire hardening professionals to provide services such as reroofing, covering vents, tree removal, and yard maintenance to homeowners in fire country or reimburse these homeowners’ fire hardening expenses through grants and tax breaks. Another step is overcoming some serious market disincentives that prevent developers from building fire-resistant communities and that keep homeowners from fire hardening their existing homes. But adopting and enforcing mandatory wildfire building codes may be the most effective way to overcome market disincentives and to etch the home-hardening norm into our collective consciousness. This is the first article in a short series on adapting to our new wildfire normal. These articles will investigate two cornerstones of living with wildfires: creating fire-adapted communities and returning “good fire” to the land. Extreme wildfire conditions are here to stay Of all the forest fires that ignite in the United States, 97 percent are put out on initial attack. But the 3 percent of fires that escape often grow to more than 100,000 acres, qualifying as “megafires.” There will be more of these large fires that are impossible to stop until the rains come or the wind changes, no matter how many patches of forests managers attempt to thin, how many bulldozers push control lines, or how many airtankers dump thousands of gallons of water, each flight-hour costing tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, in their attempts to extinguish the blaze. Wildfire suppression expenditures in the United States have increased twentyfold over the past 35 years, hitting $4.5 billion in 2021. Yet community losses continue to rise. When health and productivity costs are included, California’s 2018 fire season cost the US economy some $149 billion. That’s 0.7 percent of US GDP. In the wildland-urban interface (WUI), which describes the transition zone between unpe...
A week after Election Day, we round up the region’s ballot measures and ranked choice contests. What a week! Tons of elections results have already come in, and a few more contests are yet to be decided. While every race on the ballot is important, let’s focus on how some of Cascadia’s democracy-related ballot measures and elected offices turned out in the midterm elections. No results are final until election officials certify the counts over the next month, but after a week of counting, preliminary results are pretty close to where they’ll end up. And in many cases, the margins of victory are large enough that observers such as the Associated Press and the Oregonian are confident in the winners despite some ballots left to count. EXTENSIVE CHANGE FOR PORTLAND’S GOVERNMENT After eight failed attempts in a century, voters approved a comprehensive change to Portland’s charter last week. At the time of writing, 58 percent of voters supported measure 26-228, the first change to the city’s government and elections systems since 1913. As part of this change, Portland will move away from its unusual commission form of government, create a larger city council with four districts each electing three members, and implement ranked choice voting for choosing city officials (including proportional ranked choice voting for each council district). For more details about the changes, check out our FAQ written before the election. The city has already hit the ground running on implementing these changes. In 2023, an appointed districting committee will conduct research and community outreach to draw the four council districts. Applications are open now for Portlanders interested in serving on the committee, and other opportunities for engagement will be available soon. A separate salary committee will be appointed to decide compensation for the new elected officials (removing that role from city council). Finally, a general transition advisory committee will oversee and guide the city’s work to enact this ballot measure over the coming years. The first election under the new system will occur in November 2024, when every elected position (the mayor, the auditor, and 12 councilmembers) will be contested. The new system of government goes into effect when these officials take office in January 2025, though some things will start changing in the next two years of transition. Mayor Ted Wheeler has already announced his intention to reorganize bureau assignments and get a jump-start on how departments might be run under the new city manager system. Sightline will continue to research and publish about implementation details during the transition period. RANKED CHOICE VOTING FOR SEATTLE PRIMARIES As more ballots are received and counted, it looks like ranked choice voting will be coming to Seattle as well. Just over 50 percent of voters wanted to see a change to the city’s primary elections, and fully three quarters of voters preferred that the change be ranked choice voting instead of approval voting. Seattleites will likely see ranking options on their primary ballots in August 2025, according to Sightline’s analysis. While the city isn’t allowed to get rid of its top-two primary due to statewide rules, this vote from Washington’s largest city could be the push the state legislature needs to pass a bill that would allow localities to implement ranked choice voting in its full form—that is, not just for primary elections as in Seattle but in general elections, too. CASCADIAN COUNTIES SPLIT ON RANKED CHOICE VOTING Multnomah County, Oregon’s largest and home to the city of Portland, supported changing to ranked choice voting by more than a two-to-one margin. This makes Multnomah the second county in Oregon to use the system, after Benton County adopted it in 2016. Farther north, however, two Washington counties voted against changing their elections to use to ranked choice voting. Right across the Columbia River from Portland and Multnomah County...
A larger, more diverse, and competitive candidate pool coincided with the introduction of open primaries and ranked choice voting. In Alaska, 2022 was the year of the Independent. Freed by the state’s return to open primaries, nearly half of Alaska candidates running for governor, lieutenant governor, US House, and US Senate chose not to identify with either major party. As a result, the pool of candidates in those statewide races actually came close to mirroring Alaska’s majority-Independent electorate. This and other changes may be the result of a decision by Alaska voters in 2020 to adopt a new election system pairing open primaries with ranked choice general elections. While many factors affect a candidate’s choice to run for office, we hypothesize the new system opened the door to candidates who wouldn’t have chosen to run otherwise, leading to a more diverse candidate cohort and more competitive races. Sightline analyzed seven primary election candidate pools from 2010 to 2022. The focus was on statewide candidates. (Our analysis of state legislative races is coming in a separate article.) We found the 2022 statewide candidate cohorts looked different from earlier cycles’ pools in the following ways: More candidates identified as Independent and third-party. More Alaskans ran for office overall. No statewide primaries involved just one candidate (so, more of these races were actually competitive). More women ran for office. CANDIDATES DRIFTED FROM THE MAJOR PARTIES In 2022, the primary candidate pool came closer than ever to reflecting the independence of Alaska voters. About 58 percent of Alaskans are registered Independents, not affiliated with any political party, and another 5 percent align with third parties or political groups. But historically, candidates in Alaska have had far less freedom than voters to define their political identities. In 2018, Jason Grenn, an Independent, was aiming for his second straight term in the state House. Grenn was one of just a few Independent candidates running, which was odd given that more than half of Alaska voters were Independents, too. The demand was there, but the supply was not. What could explain the disconnect? Getting through an election is difficult for any candidate, but Alaska statute at the time put up particularly high barriers for candidates who didn’t identify as Democrat or Republican. Getting on the primary ballot required candidates to, well, run in a primary. And there were just two choices: the Republican primary or the Democratic primary. But you couldn’t just hop into a primary and run as an Independent. State statute required all candidates to register as a voter with the political parties running the primary they wanted to enter. On the Republican side, only Republicans could run. The Democrats had a slightly bigger tent, sharing their primary with registered Libertarians and Alaskan Independence Party candidates. (Note: The Alaska Independence Party is different from the “Independents” described in this article. Its primary goal is to hold a statewide vote for secession.) Grenn had been a registered Republican, but as a fiscal conservative with progressive social views, running as an Independent felt more authentic. As a political hybrid, he had no natural home in the primaries. The only path was to get his name on the general election ballot through a petition process. And so, just as he had in 2016, he waited outside coffee shops and went door to door gathering enough signatures from registered voters in his district to get into the general. Grenn ultimately lost the three-way race, his old seat going to a Republican with less than half the vote. He now represents Alaskans for Better Elections, the nonpartisan group that led advocacy for Alaska’s new election system. “I could honestly say I had conservative street cred, but I wanted to be more honest about who I was as a candidate and where my values were,” Grenn said in an interview this month. “Th...
A wave of democracy-related measures are on the region’s ballots this November. Voters across Cascadia will have the chance to decide charter amendments, funding levies, candidate races, and other elections in the November midterms. Dozens of jurisdictions will decide questions about the structure of their government, funding for services, and, yes, medicinal use of psilocybin mushrooms. Here’s a few of the democracy-related questions that Sightline is watching closely, plus ranked choice voting races in Alaska and Oregon. BALLOT MEASURES—OUR OPPORTUNITY FOR DIRECT DEMOCRACY How we vote, what we vote for, and who gets to vote are all on the ballot in the midterms. Could this be a year that Cascadia blazes a path for fairer election methods? PORTLAND’S CHARTER CHANGE Voters in Portland, Oregon, will decide whether to change the city’s government and election systems. Ballot measure 26-228 would amend the city charter (Portland’s constitution) to elect city offices through ranked choice voting, expand City Council to 12 members elected from 4 geographic districts, and give councilors a more defined legislative role by shifting the management of city bureaus to an appointed city manager supervised by the mayor. You can learn more about this proposed change from our FAQ on the ballot measure, our other research into the effects of these reforms, and educational materials from the City of Portland. Based on our research, Sightline recommends a yes vote on measure 26-228. Voters in ten other Oregon cities will consider amendments to their charters, including complete rewrites in Coburg and Detroit. SEATTLE’S CHOICE ON ELECTION REFORM Voters in Seattle, Washington, will consider two questions: 1. Should the city sunset its pick-one ballot style for primary elections? 2. Should the potential replacement be approval voting (1A) or ranked choice voting (1B)? Every voter can weigh in on both questions. Even if you think there should be no change, you can select an option in the second question that would count if the first question passes. Sightline executive director Alan Durning wrote a series of articles on the potential shortcomings of approval voting for Seattle. Based on our research, Sightline recommends a yes vote on Seattle questions 1 and, for question 2, option 1B. RANKED CHOICE VOTING IN COUNTIES BIG AND SMALL Across the Northwest, voters in several counties will decide whether to implement ranked choice voting for county elected positions like commissioner, auditor, sheriff, and treasurer. Charter amendments to implement ranked choice voting are on the ballot in Clark County and San Juan County, Washington; and in Multnomah County, Oregon. In all three counties, the proposed amendment is one of several recommended by the county’s charter review commission. Sightline has researched the effects of ranked choice voting for several years. Based on our research, Sightline recommends a yes vote on Clark County Proposed Charter Amendment No. 10, San Juan County Charter Amendment Proposition No. 3, and Multnomah County Measure 26-232. BRINGING ELECTIONS TO MORE PEOPLE In Washington and Oregon’s biggest counties, voters will consider two different fixes that could increase the number of people weighing in on county elections. King County, Washington, voters could decide to move their county elections (for offices like county council and assessor) from odd-numbered years to even-numbered years, putting them at the same time as federal races. This minor-sounding change would have a huge impact on voter turnout, potentially doubling the number of voters who weigh in on these important races. Sightline’s Alan Durning wrote about how this change could bring a larger and more representative group of voters to King County’s elections—or rather, to bring the elections to that larger and more representative set of even-year voters. Based on our research, Sightline recommends a yes vote on King County Charter Amendment No. 1. Meanwhile, Mul...
Transportation commissioners come and go, but policies to free up curb space remain perpetually stuck at City Hall. It’s often said that local elections have the biggest impact on people’s daily lives. That’s why when people ask about how well Portland’s government is working, I just point them to the nearest parking meter. In 2018 Portland officially adopted a policy to adjust meter rates based on how difficult it is to find a parking spot. If the block is full, prices go up; if the block is empty, prices come down. After San Francisco started adjusting its parking meters this way, drivers saved an average of five minutes looking for parking while paying slightly less at the meter. But on any given afternoon today, unless you are headed to a stadium on game day, the hourly rate still hasn’t changed. The result has been that growing neighborhoods like Portland’s Northwest district have struggled to free up curb space—40 percent of its blocks are too full by city standards—even after years of improving its parking permit program. That is unlikely to change until meter rates can be more finely tuned. This is one small story about how Portland’s form of government has left the city with an administrative attention span too short to follow through on its own good ideas. GREAT POLICIES GET LOST IN PORTLAND’S CURRENT FORM OF GOVERNMENT Sightline has written for years about the smart parking policies that Portland’s city council has adopted that would make it easier for neighborhoods to create parking permit districts and set meter rates at the right price to ensure every block has a few empty spots. But these parking management tools, while among the best in the country, have been more likely to sit on a shelf than to open up actual parking spots at the curb. The small policy tweaks needed to put these tools into practice have remained unaddressed, high on no one’s list of priorities. One of the obstacles: Portland’s system of government itself. It’s just one example of how Portland’s government structure gets in the way of voters’ elected representatives and the policies they want to see. That could change with the proposed charter reform on the ballot this upcoming election, which would expand city council to 12 members and add a city manager to oversee operations. In most other cities, anyone elected to city council would be able to take an interest in resolving these issues, and a city administrator would be able to keep agencies on track in doing so. But currently in Portland, the mayor delegates oversight of city bureaus among themselves and just four elected commissioners. Even if Donald Shoup himself (an academic researcher who wrote the literal book on parking policy) were elected, there is only a one in five chance he would be assigned oversight of the transportation bureau. Former commissioner Steve Novick described the fundamental problem with the system in an 2017 op-ed for the Willamette Week. “As soon as you assign bureaus to a commissioner, two things happen: Those bureaus become incredibly important to that commissioner, and everything else the city does becomes relatively unimportant,” he said. “The existence of the commission system reduced the universe of potential transportation champions by 80 percent.” It’s not as if other commissioners don’t care about issues they don’t have direct oversight over; they simply don’t have the time. Even as Portland’s population has more than tripled over the past century, the number of commissioners has remained the same. Similarly sized cities of Denver and Boston split work among 13 council members compared to Portland’s 5. Internally referred to as “the commissioner test,” bureaus are highly dependent on their assigned commissioner to bring policy updates to city council. Bureaus can be reassigned at any time to anyone, regardless of if they have expertise or even an interest in the work that agency does. Multiple times in the past decade, Portland’s Bureau of Transportat...
Surprise! For millions, state laws hang community rules out to dry. As we and others have reported, hundreds of thousands of people across Cascadia—and tens of millions across the United States—live where homeowners associations (HOAs) or apartment or condo rules ban clotheslines. Clotheslines are a quintessentially sustainable tool that saves money, prolongs clothes’ lifespan, and reduces pollution. A “right-to-dry” movement has sprung up and won laws in six states (Florida, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, and Vermont) to render these bans void and unenforceable. In another 13 states, I have discovered to my surprise and delight that solar access laws already on the books appear to protect solar drying. Yet in 19 of these states, illegal bans persist in community rule books such as HOA Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions (CC&Rs) and a number that likely runs into the millions of residents do not know they have a right to dry. Solar access laws, many of them from the 1970s, and obscure amendments to state property law hardly fall in the category of common knowledge. When Sightline asked people to let us know about bans where they live, over a third of responses came from these 19 states. Consider one example: The Forest Heights neighborhood, Oregon’s largest-ever new-home community, is located in Portland’s posh West Hills. The community boasts more than 1,600 single-family homes and covers 600 acres. A pillar of the Forest Heights marketing campaign is environmental stewardship: The HOA website boasts that the community has set aside more than a third of its acreage as common green space, complete with seven walking trails and a private pond. The HOA offers residents a shuttle service. Yet in direct contradiction to the community’s green claims, the Forest Heights CC&Rs limit placement of clotheslines to “service yards” that are “completely screened so that the elements screened are not visible at any time from the street or any adjoining property.” This amounts to a de facto ban. The average lot is under a quarter-acre, and nearly all homes have two stories, so completely concealing a clothesline is virtually impossible. The ban is also illegal, rendered toothless by a 1979 Oregon Law that says any restrictions on “solar radiation as a source for heating, cooling or electrical energy” are “void and unenforceable.” Clotheslines appear to fit under the umbrella of states’ solar rights because systems for hang-drying rely on the sun’s radiation to evaporate water in wet laundry. Clotheslines rely on solar energy, so their use is protected where laws provide blanket allowances for use of solar. Clotheslines appear to fit under the umbrella of Oregon’s, and other states’, solar rights because systems for hang drying rely on the sun’s radiation to evaporate water in wet laundry. Clotheslines rely on solar energy, so their use is protected where laws provide blanket allowances for solar usage. In addition to Oregon, solar access laws in Arizona, California, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin all delineate a homeowner’s right to install a “solar energy system,” “solar energy device,” “solar collector,” “system for obtaining solar energy,” or “solar energy collection device.” The legal terminology varies, but the letter and spirit of these laws has one overarching message: homeowners may utilize the power of the sun. Across the United States, more than a quarter million HOAs govern upward of 60 million people. Alexander Lee, a champion of the right-to-dry movement, estimates that “more than half of them [HOAs] restrict or ban the clothesline.” If he is right, then tens of millions of Americans are subject to either full or partial clothesline bans. Some 19 states, including populous ones such as California, Florida, and Texas, have right-to-dry laws. These facts combined suggest that millions of Americans live under illegal clothesline bans.So spre...
Gas companies are making a risky bet. Cascadia’s gas utilities know their prospects are rapidly dimming. Decarbonization, now official state and provincial policy in much of the region, is an existential threat to businesses chartered by law to distribute carbon-based fuels. The companies are hoping hydrogen will save them, forestalling bankruptcy as the region leaves fossil fuels behind. NW Natural, Puget Sound Energy (PSE), Cascade Natural Gas, Avista, and FortisBC, the region’s biggest gas utilities, are all developing plans for pumping green hydrogen through their pipes. NW Natural plans to produce green hydrogen that it will blend with natural gas and deliver to around 2,400 customers in Eugene, Oregon. PSE has budgeted $6.3 million through 2026 for pipeline modernization for “alternative fuels,” including hydrogen. And FortisBC plans to invest nearly Can$5 million annually to pursue low-carbon fuels like hydrogen. Policymakers throughout Cascadia have, perhaps unwittingly, dangled the hydrogen lifeline in front of the gas industry, passing laws that allow utilities to recoup the costs of green hydrogen investments. Oregon and Washington passed policies in 2019 encouraging gas utilities to procure and invest in hydrogen on behalf of their customers. That same year, under British Columbia’s Clean Energy Act, BC regulators added hydrogen to a list of prescribed undertakings for gas utilities to lower greenhouse gas emissions. But hydrogen is unlikely to save gas utilities from their impending irrelevance. Future hydrogen customers are few and far between, and the competitive hydrogen market will leave currently regulated monopoly utilities in unfamiliar waters. In this context, green hydrogen looks more like a leaky raft than the sturdy rescue boat gas utilities make it out to be. TOMORROW’S FEW INDUSTRIAL HYDROGEN CUSTOMERS WON’T BE ENOUGH TO SUSTAIN GAS UTILITIES Green hydrogen’s best role in decarbonization is to clean up a handful of industrial sectors, like steelmaking, international shipping, and long-haul aviation, that do not have suitable alternatives. Hydrogen makes little sense for decarbonizing homes and businesses. Electrification is a much more efficient, cheaper, and safer option, and one that state, local, and federal policies increasingly incentivize. But if utilities focus just on selling hydrogen to industrial customers, their balance sheets will show a big hole. That’s because under the eccentricities of utility regulation, utilities profit by expanding their vast web of gas pipelines, not by the volume of gas they sell. Even if utilities can make up the lost volume of gas from residential and commercial customers with a few large industrial customers, they won’t be able to earn the same profit from the much smaller pipeline footprint these new customers will need. Today, NW Natural’s industrial gas consumers, for example, make up 41 percent of the company’s gas volume sold and just 7 percent of profits, while its residential customers make up 38 percent of gas volume sold and 65 percent of profits. Although Northwest utilities don’t all publish data on the profit breakdowns by customer segment, the chart below shows the next best thing: the customer breakdowns by revenue and volume of gas sold by utility. For all the companies, the volume of gas sold to industrial customers far exceeds the revenues earned from them. The opposite is true for residential and commercial customers: utilities earn more of their revenue from this group relative to the share of gas sold to them because of the investments in the vast web of pipelines required to serve millions of smaller customers. To be fair, gas utilities’ current customer list doesn’t include all potential future hydrogen customers. For example, industries that produce their own hydrogen from natural gas today, like fertilizer manufacturers, could start to source from gas utilities, as could long-haul transportation industries that need to transition off ...
They’re more familiar than you might think. Major changes may be coming to Portland City Hall soon, courtesy of the city-appointed volunteer Charter Commission and the will of Portlanders as expressed at the ballot box this fall. After two years of research and public input, Charter Commission members proposed ballot measure 26-228, an important change to Portland’s founding document that would improve the city’s form of government and elections. Among other changes (which you can read about in our FAQ or the City’s), ballot measure 26-228 would introduce multi-member districts. The city would be portioned into four equally populated geographic regions that each elect three city councilors. Here are ten things you should know about multi-member districts before you vote on the charter proposal. 1. YOU’RE ALREADY USING THEM You heard me right: every Portlander is already living in a multi-member district system. Portland’s four city commissioners are elected in a multi-member district that encompasses the whole city. In the US Senate, there are 50 districts (states), each represented by two senators. And until 1972, Oregon itself used multi-member districts to elect its state legislature. Less populous counties were combined until enough people were included to warrant a single House or Senate seat, and larger counties elected multiple legislators to represent the entire county. Multi-member districts are also used in Anchorage, Alaska; Spokane, Washington; the Washington state House of Representatives; and many other places around the world. 2. THERE ARE MANY DIFFERENT WAYS TO ELECT THE MEMBERS Election systems require a ton of decisions, and different places often make different combinations of those decisions. If voters approve measure 26-228, Portland’s four districts of three councilors each would use a multi-winner ranked choice voting system. Cambridge, Massachusetts, also uses multi-winner ranked choice voting to elect its citywide council. In Portland’s current city commissioner system, the US Senate, and the old Oregon legislative system, candidates run for numbered positions and voters choose a single representative for each seat (single-winner races). Next door in Lake Oswego, voters select three candidates from a single pool on their ballot, and the top three vote-getters are elected to the citywide council. Similar systems, called “bloc voting,“ are used in more than 100 other Oregon cities. 3. SOME WAYS HAVE BEEN USED TO EXCLUDE SMALLER VOTER BLOCS. The different methods of electing multiple representatives all have pros and cons. Single-winner races and bloc voting are both winner-take-all systems. Portland currently uses a citywide winner-take-all system, meaning that a group of voters that makes up 50 percent (plus one) of the vote can elect all four commissioners and the mayor. Winner-take-all systems like this can lock any smaller group of voters out of winning any representation, whether used in at-large, single-member district, or multi-member district systems. For example, before the Civil Rights Movement, some Southern states used winner-take-all multi-member districts to prevent Black voters from electing their preferred candidates to the US House of Representatives. In states that elected their House delegations as one big multi-member district, white majorities were able to win every single seat and leave Black voters without representation. In an attempt to remedy this, Congress banned all types of multi-member districts for the US House of Representatives in 1967. This successfully prevented states from using statewide winner-take-all systems to elect all of their representatives, but it also blocked states from using the much more democratic proportional system that Portland has the chance to implement this November. 4. .WHILE OTHERS ARE GLOBAL BEST PRACTICES IN DEMOCRACY Proportional representation systems stand in stark contrast to winner-take-all systems and are the most common type of electi...
Otherwise, Oregon and Washington will miss critical climate targets. The Northwest seems finally poised to reap the fruits of years of hard work on climate change. Renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuels, states and clean energy developers will soon enjoy a huge influx of federal climate dollars, and climate leaders sit at the helm of many state and local governments. But much like the proverbial kingdom that was lost for want of a nail, the Northwest states’ climate ambitions may suffer defeat over something utterly mundane: not enough high-voltage power lines. That’s right. We may fail the climate test because we’re missing some wires. A core strategy for decarbonizing the Northwest, as elsewhere, is to stop burning fossil fuels for electricity. Oregon and Washington both recently passed laws that require electric utilities to shift quickly away from coal and gas and toward solar and wind to generate power. Meeting these targets is a mammoth, and critical, undertaking. Today, the two biggest electric utilities in these states derive about half of their electricity from natural gas or coal and just ten percent from wind and solar. But a major problem looms. Cascadia, like the United States as a whole, suffers from a woefully underbuilt and aging electric grid. The grid is so inadequate that hundreds of proposed wind and solar projects are ending up at the back of waitlists where they may sit for years—waitlists to connect to transmission. New transmission lines (the high-voltage lines that often stretch over mountain ranges and along rivers on tall, scaffolded towers) take a decade or more to construct, giving the problem increasing urgency with each passing year. Unless Northwest policymakers develop a plan for building out the grid we need, and unless they start erecting it immediately—through the Bonneville Power Agency, state action, utility investment, or some combination of these means—the region’s ambitious decarbonization commitments will amount to so much hot air. EASTSIDE SOLAR AND WIND NEED TRANSMISSION TO REACH WESTSIDE HOMES AND BUSINESSES In Cascadia, the best sunlight and wind for making power are east of the Cascade mountains. Renewable projects in the region are exploding, with more than 100 wind and solar projects underway in Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington. Backers have proposed dozens more, including more than 40 solar farms in Washington alone, which today houses just two. Washington and Oregon, and the electric utilities within them, are counting on tapping this eastside wind and solar to power the homes and businesses on the westside that consume most of the states’ energy. Washington’s state energy strategy, in the scenario that costs the least and electrifies the most, relies on wind from Wyoming and Montana to provide 36 percent of Washington’s clean electricity by 2050. Today, Washington derives just over 5 percent of its total electricity generation from wind power from any state. Similarly, almost all of the utility-scale wind and solar resources that Puget Sound Energy (PSE), Washington’s largest electric utility, modeled in its official, required 2021 integrated resource plan (IRP), are east of the Cascades. But to access this high-quality wind and sun, westside utilities like PSE in Washington and Portland General Electric (PGE) in Oregon will need to reach far outside their service territories, something they don’t need to do today because their current generating facilities, which are mostly powered by natural gas or hydroelectricity, are nearby. The power lines that PSE and PGE own run from generating facilities, many of which utilities will need to retire if they are powered by fossil fuels, to the cities and towns they serve on the westside. The utilities’ transmission lines barely touch the inland Northwest, with its vast wind and solar offerings. THE NORTHWEST GRID IS ALREADY JAMMED To bring far-away wind and solar power to their customers, PSE, PGE, and other utilities d...
Questions about ballot measure 26-228? We’ve got answers. Portlanders will soon find ballots for the November general election in their mailboxes. One important question they’ll see is ballot measure 26-228, which if voters approve it, will furnish a major upgrade to Portland’s form of government and elections as defined in the city charter. This measure would do three main things if approved by voters: Allow voters to use ranked choice voting to select their candidates of choice; Expand the City Council from 5 to 12 members by creating four geographic districts with three representatives each; and Replace the commission form of government with a system where a city administrator runs city bureaus, allowing commissioners to focus on their legislative responsibilities. Sightline’s democracy team has been researching election systems for over a decade, and opportunities for Portland specifically for the last several years, including following the work of the Charter Commission. Below we answer the questions we’ve heard most frequently from voters and others following the issue. BASICS OF THE CITY CHARTER WHAT IS THE PORTLAND CITY CHARTER? The Portland City Charter is the city’s governing document, which defines the legal foundation of the city government. City charters are like local constitutions and can prescribe things like the powers and responsibilities of the government, the organization and election of city officials, rules for utilities and public contracts, and the process for revising the charter itself. Oregon is a home rule state, meaning its cities and counties have lots of room to govern themselves within the boundaries of state and federal law. HOW DO WE CHANGE THE CHARTER? Charter amendments can’t happen without the approval of Portland voters. Amendments can be initiated by the people through signature-gathering, recommended by City Council, or recommended by the Charter Commission. In November, voters will see this question on their ballot: “Should Administrator manage city government, 12-member Council (three from each district) make laws, voters elect officials using ranked choice process?” If enough voters say yes, these changes to Portland’s government structure and voting system will be codified in the Charter. WHAT IS THE CHARTER COMMISSION? The Charter Commission is a volunteer body of 20 Portlanders tasked with reviewing the City Charter and recommending changes. Since 2007, the Charter has required the City Council to appoint a Charter Commission at least every 10 years. The Charter Commission has included small business owners, union representatives, disability and racial justice advocates, nonprofit directors, legal experts, and others from across the city. WHAT CAN THE CHARTER COMMISSION DO? The Charter Commission can recommend amendments to the people, who must approve all changes to the Charter. If 15 or more of the 20 Commissioners support an amendment, it goes directly to the ballot for Portlanders to vote on, such as in the case of the provisions in ballot measure 26-228. If a majority of Commissioners (but fewer than 15) support an amendment, it goes to City Council as a recommendation. City Council can then place it on the ballot if they choose to do so. HOW CAN I GET INVOLVED WITH THE CHARTER COMMISSION? While the changes on the ballot this November are already set for voters, the Charter Commission is still working on additional amendments. Phase II of its work is focused on environmental justice, the expansion of voting rights, and proposals from city government departments. Public input for Phase II amendments is ongoing, with various opportunities for engagement. If more than 15 Commissioners support Phase II amendments, then Portlanders will be able to vote on these changes in the next primary or general election, which will occur in May or November of 2024. However, the amendments could also go to City Council, in which case the timeline is much less certain. WHY PROPOSE CHANGES TO ...
A Q&A with the planner behind the mid-sized NY city’s successes. As more cities and states lift costly parking mandates, what will happen next? Chris Hawley has seen the future. Hawley, first as an activist, then as a city planner in Buffalo, New York, worked to remove minimum parking requirements citywide in 2017 under the city’s new form-based “Green Code.” (“Form-based” focuses on building form, including its physical appearance and relation to the street, rather than regulating uses, like commercial or residential.) Now five years later, Buffalo’s population is growing for the first time since the 1920s, and new homes and businesses are popping up left and right. Hawley shares the story behind the numbers. CAN YOU START BY INTRODUCING YOURSELF? First, I was an activist advocating for a new zoning rewrite, along with friends of mine. We felt that the zoning code was the core problem behind a lot of our development controversies and was a stumbling block to get the walkable, mixed-use development that was consistent with our historic character. The 1953 zoning code—adopted the same year that Elvis Presley recorded his first song in Memphis—was ancient. It had been overlaid hundreds of times and grown to an unsustainable 1,804 pages of regulations. We were in a good position with our new mayor Bryan Brown to throw everything in the garbage and start from scratch. He remained committed through politically difficult conversations, which included 242 public meetings over a seven-year period. SOUNDS GRUELING AND EXPENSIVE Writing a zoning code doesn’t involve many ribbon cuttings. But I think that he understood that once the new zoning code is adopted, every ribbon cutting is a victory for the Green Code, which is what we ended up calling it. A lot of planners advocate for a much more incremental step-by-step approach to adopting form-based codes. That is expensive and doesn’t provide a lot of returns for a municipality, if you are applying it only in very small areas. There is an advantage to a complete rewrite of your land use and zoning regulations, which South Bend [Indiana] and Hartford [Connecticut] have also learned. When we tackle individual topics, particularly controversial ones, on a bite-sized basis it’s easy to get stuck politically—the common council spent eight months on a chicken coop ordinance. But when it’s one giant package, that can mute controversies about particular elements, whether it’s height or density or certainly whether to have minimum parking requirements. WHAT KINDS OF CHANGES HAVE YOU SEEN IN BUFFALO SINCE GETTING RID OF PARKING REQUIREMENTS? Daniel Hass, a professor at the University of Buffalo, looked at the first two years of development activity that went through major site review. He found that developments were providing less parking than was required under the old code. In particular, mixed-use projects often provided substantially less. We have a few cases of new construction where zero parking was provided. 15 Allen Street was our first zero-parking construction project. It was one block from a metro rail station and had 12 units of housing and two shopfronts. Another one was for 201 dwelling units downtown close to a public library and adjacent to a new grocery store. I really wish that study had looked at staff-level reviews for smaller-scale projects. I think if that had been undertaken, their findings would have been even more pleasantly surprising. Smaller projects in particular benefited the most from the elimination of minimum parking requirements. Big developers with big projects have a lot more capacity financially to provide parking if they want to. Under the old code they could always get variances: they have expensive attorneys and relationships in City Hall. Smaller-scale projects don’t have those kinds of resources, or they’re constrained by the size of the site. Mixed-use is a lot easier now. We relaxed density restrictions in residential zones and eliminated them entirel...
The county’s affordable housing provider proposes 94 homes near Troutdale’s downtown. The city is holding it to a rule that would cut that to 70 to make more room for parking. For years, the City of Troutdale, Oregon, has pushed other government agencies to force the people living in tents along nearby riverbanks to move somewhere else. Situated on the Columbia and Sandy rivers five miles east of Portland, the city of 16,400 that bills itself as the “gateway” to the spectacular Columbia Gorge has far more low-income residents than low-priced homes, according to a city-commissioned analysis. Zillow estimates that average monthly rents in Troutdale recently exceeded $2,000, a 29 percent jump in 18 months. Last year, a Troutdale city councilor personally led what the mayor of a neighboring city called a “group of vigilantes” to illegally tear up riverside campsites with “a Bobcat and other tools.” They had organized on Facebook and were under the impression that the sites were unoccupied at the time. The tensions haven’t stopped there. This fall, as other government agencies have worked to fund and design a local project with 94 homes at a range of below-market rents, Troutdale has been saying: no, no, no. Base monthly rents in the proposed cluster of three-story buildings would range from $559 for some studios to $1,438 for some two-bedrooms. They’d be two blocks from the city’s historic downtown core and two TriMet bus lines. The city’s complaint: city officials say that 130 parking spaces is too few for 94 apartments. Troutdale is insisting that the project instead eliminate one of its three buildings to make room for a bigger parking lot. The 94-home proposal from Home Forward, the county’s federally affiliated affordable housing provider, is exactly the sort of project Oregon’s state land use commission had in mind in July, when it unanimously voted to roll back parking mandates in most urban and suburban areas, especially for homes that meet affordability standards. If that rule takes effect on January 1, 2023, as scheduled, the Home Forward project would be able to move ahead with 130 spaces for 94 homes. But if the City of Troutdale has its way, the new “Climate-Friendly and Equitable Communities” rules won’t take effect on January 1. Troutdale is one of nine cities around the state that have agreed to sue to block them. SIMILAR PROJECTS NEARBY HAVE MUCH MORE PARKING THAN THEY NEED, DEVELOPER SAYS Troutdale officials say they’re bringing the lawsuit as a matter of principle, not because it would give them more leverage in this high-profile negotiation with what’s effectively a different branch of government. Home Forward, meanwhile, says it’s trying to keep a commitment to taxpayers. Sixty percent of metro-area voters agreed in 2018 to fund at least 111 new affordable homes in east Multnomah County alongside thousands of others around the region. Based on its review of the number of cars parked overnight at similar affordable housing projects in Troutdale and nearby Fairview, Home Forward estimates that the future residents of the 94-unit building it aims to construct would probably need space for about 103 cars. But Troutdale requires parking lots in new residential buildings to have no less than two parking spaces for every home, even a studio apartment. Over the summer, Home Forward approached the city with a proposal: it would eliminate one of the two garbage and recycling areas originally planned for the site. This would bring the parking count to 130, 27 more parking spaces than it estimates its future residents will use. But it wouldn’t require eliminating any homes. That was still 31 percent less parking than the city generally requires. On September 14, Troutdale’s planning commission rejected that compromise after hearing a series of local residents criticize the project. The concerns raised ranged from curbside parking shortages in front of nearby businesses to a worry that children living in the two-bedroom...
No longer a political third rail, parties are vying for votes with big promises to build abundant homes in one the world’s priciest cities. They could set a gold standard for North America. Which North American city will be the first to address its housing crisis with abundant apartments, city-wide? A growing handful of North American states and major cities have been scoring wins in the battle to undo the historic scourge of exclusionary zoning laws, notably Oregon, California, Massachusetts, Portland, Vancouver, BC, Minneapolis, and most recently, Charlotte. These are all relatively incremental changes, though. Laneway cottages here, and duplexes or quadplexes there. None permit even small apartment buildings city-wide. But in the lead-up to the Vancouver, BC, October 15, 2022, election, municipal parties are competing to outdo each other with proposals to legalize apartments. With an influx of bold housing plans in recent months, Vancouver could be the first North American city to really undo exclusionary zoning. It could achieve, across all of its 115 square kilometers, the holy grail: re-legalizing neighborhoods that mix residential and commercial in a vibrant combination. “Four floors and corner stores.” Or maybe even six. These are uncharted waters; no city has ever undone restrictive zoning on this scale. According to Jill Atkey, CEO of the BC Non-Profit Housing Association, It would signal to other cities struggling with the housing crisis in the way Vancouver is, that we have elected officials that are really, really serious about tackling the housing crisis. And then, over time, we could potentially---now, it’s always a struggle, because Vancouver is one municipality in a region of 21 municipalities---but in combination with what [the Provincial government] is proposing, you could demonstrate that more supply could have a positive impact on rents. It could be a game-changer in many ways. If Vancouver adopts one of these proposals, it could open the floodgates, creating a template for other cities to follow, from coast to coast. An “emerging consensus” on zoning reform In Vancouver, densifying detached-home neighborhoods has gone from a political third rail, only a few years ago, to a banner that multiple parties are competing to claim. Atkey, for her part, says: I honestly didn't think it would happen this election. Maybe perhaps the next one. Because in 2018 we had OneCity proposing ‘every neighborhood for everyone’ and various housing forms in all neighborhoods, but they were pretty much the standalone in 2018. Now we’ve got One City, Progress Vancouver, Vision---all talking about densifying single-family neighborhoods. So there does seem to be, almost, an emerging consensus. Perhaps it shouldn’t be so surprising, given that zoning reform is immensely popular with the public. A 2019 Research Co poll, for example, found that 71 percent of Vancouver residents would support 3–4-story apartments in neighborhoods that currently only permit detached houses. This shift in public and political opinion makes sense. Who can afford a detached home in Vancouver today? The price is $1.8 million on the city’s more affordable east side, and $3.4 million on the west. Following public sentiment, Vancouver’s politicians are suddenly thinking really big. OneCity OneCity wants to “end the apartment ban” and permit new rental buildings of up to six stories in what it terms “formerly exclusive areas of the city.” The party would also permit stacked condo buildings of up to four stories across the city. OneCity leaders criticize the past practice of confining rental buildings to busy streets and setting aside quiet streets for the wealthy. They would also delegate many housing development approvals to staff, acknowledging that holding a lengthy public hearing for every project is inefficient and costly. OneCity has one incumbent city councillor and seeks to elect four. Forward Together Vancouver’s incumbent mayor Kennedy Stewart and ...
A simple reason is: we don’t have enough places to live. How does a growing, prospering city stay affordable for all kinds of people? At the most basic level, when there aren’t enough homes, prices will keep rising. And when there are plenty of homes, it helps prices stay down. It’s like a huge game of musical chairs. If there aren’t enough chairs when the music stops, someone is left out. When there aren’t enough homes for people who live and work in a city, everybody has to compete for what’s available, and rents go up until people get priced out. In the housing market, instead of being fast, you just need to be rich to stay in the game. To fix it, we need more homes in all shapes and sizes. That means more cottages, apartments, duplexes, triplexes, condos, and mother-in-law units. More homes allows more people to stay and thrive in their communities. It means more people can afford to live near jobs, great schools, and transit. Encouraging a variety of homes that fit a variety of people’s needs isn’t the only solution to keep rent and home prices down, but it’s an essential foundation for affordability. It's the necessary building block on which all kinds of other community protections, anti-displacement measures, affordable housing investments, and neighborhood improvements are built. Our new explainer video gives a simple illustration to think about how building more homes helps keep prices down at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQGQU0T6NBc Enjoy! And please spread the word and share the video on Facebook and Twitter.
An FAQ for voters on ranked choice voting, registering to vote, candidates on the ballot, and more. Alaskans tried ranked choice voting for the first time in August, during the special election that sent Representative Mary Peltola to Congress. They’ll use it again during the November general election to choose their governor, Congressional members, and the state legislature. Most voting systems in the US limit voters to just one candidate per race. But ranked choice voting allows voters to rank the candidates from most to least favorite. Ranked choice lets voters more fully express their views at the ballot box, tends to reward candidates with the widest appeal, and helps moderate candidates’ positions. Alaska voters across the political spectrum adopted ranked choice voting and open primaries in 2020. Recent polling found that 85 percent of Alaskans who voted in the special election thought ranked choice voting was “simple.” With an even greater number of voters turning out for the November election, we want to make sure all voters feel confident filling out their ballots. Here are answers to the top questions we’ve been hearing about Alaska’s November 8, 2022, general election. GENERAL INFORMATION ON ALASKA’S AUGUST 2022 ELECTIONS WHAT IS ON THE BALLOT IN NOVEMBER? On November 8, Alaskans will vote in the general election. They’ll use ranked choice voting to decide who represents them in the US House and Senate, the governor’s and lieutenant governor’s offices, and in the state legislature. The pick-one primary, held in August, sent the top four candidates from each race to November’s general election. In primary races with four or fewer candidates, the whole field advanced to the November ballot. HOW WILL RANKED CHOICE VOTING WORK IN ALASKA’S GENERAL ELECTION? Voters will be able to rank the candidates in order of preference. Once the polls are closed, everyone’s first-choice vote is counted. If a candidate receives a majority (50 percent plus one) of first–choice votes, then they are the winner. If no candidate gets a majority of votes after the first round, the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated, and his or her supporters’ votes are reallocated to the voters’ second preference. This process continues until a candidate receives a majority of the vote. WHAT KEY ELECTION DATES SHOULD I CALENDAR? The key dates for the election are: Sunday, October 9: Voter registration deadline. Monday, October 24: Most early and in-person absentee voting locations open. Hours and days vary by location. Saturday, October 29: Applications for an absentee ballot delivered by mail must be received by the Division of Elections. Tuesday, November 8: Election Day! Polls are open from 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. We made a free timeline of Alaska’s key 2022 election dates. It’s printable and social media-shareable. You could use it in a PowerPoint, or turn it into a fridge magnet, flyer, or poster. HOW DO I REGISTER TO VOTE? If you are an eligible voter in Alaska and applied for a Permanent Fund Dividend in 2021, you were automatically registered to vote. To check your voter registration status, go to the state’s My Voter Information page. If you need to register or change your voter information, visit the state’s Online Voter Registration page. You must register to vote by October 9. HOW DO I CHECK MY VOTER REGISTRATION STATUS? You can check your voter registration status at/ WHEN WILL ELECTION RESULTS COME OUT? Alaska’s election results won’t come out right away because the absentee ballots arriving after Election Day need to be counted. These ballots come from Alaska voters outside the state, including from members of the military, snowbirds, and college students. Under Alaska law, there’s a 15-day window after Election Day for these absentee ballots to arrive. This longstanding practice helps ensure absentee voters aren’t disenfranchised by mail delays. Other batches of late-arriving ballots will come in from remote rural p...
The city shouldn’t require parking that never gets used. Anchorage needs parking. The city was built around cars and so almost everyone uses them, whether they want to or not. Naturally we need a place to put them. But who should have the power to decide how much parking Anchorage’s homes and businesses need? It’s a question that’s come up in cities and states across the US. City zoning codes tend to dictate how many parking spaces, say, a retailer or homebuilder needs to pave. The problem is that cities frequently overestimate how much parking a site actually needs. And so, city after city, and the entire state of California, have decided to return that power to the people on the ground who have a much clearer idea of parking needs for the properties they own, projects they’re developing, or businesses they run. Anchorage could do the same. Like other cities across America, Anchorage has erred on building more parking than necessary. In every neighborhood except downtown, Anchorage code has highly specific (but not scientific) rules dictating the minimum number of parking spots required for over 100 business and housing types, from dry cleaners to bingo parlors to triplexes. A study conducted by the city in the late 2000s found a chronic oversupply of parking on multifamily and commercial properties across Anchorage, with 1 in 4 city-mandated parking spaces sitting empty at peak periods. Of the 35 sites listed, 31 of them never used all the parking required under the land use code, commonly referred to as “Title 21.” “Well,” you might think, “that seems fine. Hunting for parking is painful. The more parking the better!” Sure, an undersupply of parking spaces isn’t fun when you’re circling a lot. But an oversupply has insidious and less obvious downsides. Forcing businesses to provide more parking than they need costs them (and, by extension, you) thousands of dollars per stall. That’s why even Walmart is asking cities for permission to build less parking as more of its sales go online. And requiring extra spots that rarely, if ever, get used makes new housing much harder to design, more expensive to build, and pricier to rent or own. In the worst cases, government mandates to build excess parking snuff out new growth completely. In Midtown, a local dentist finds parking rules bite Take the case of Anchorage dentist Guy Burk. In 2020, Burk received a letter from the city warning him he’d be fined $300 per day for lack of parking at his Midtown office. Burk was stunned. He has more than 50 parking spaces to accommodate the 20 or so employees and patients who are in his office at peak times. In fact, he has so much parking that he lets visitors to the neighboring strip mall use the extra spots. “Parking capacity is a problem that should be on the business owners to solve,” Burk said. “If there’s not enough parking, my patients will say, ‘There’s not enough, and I’m going to go to another dental office.’ Why is the city getting involved at all?” The city asked Burk to submit a parking agreement showing that Burk and the owners of the lot he leases would provide parking in perpetuity. “Nobody’s going to do that,” Burk said. “No one’s going to lock up their land like that.” To avoid the fine, Burk bought three vacant parcels another block away, in case the city made him build more parking. He estimates that paving the parcels would cost nearly $200,000. In the meantime, he’s been working with the city on a possible temporary shared parking agreement and a parking use study. Burk would prefer to put his money and time toward two businesses---a dental milling and printing center and an industrial ATV retailer---that he’s planning for the building next door. But there again he will need another shared parking agreement, since zoning code requires about five times the number of spots Burk calculates he’ll need. Because of the parking issue, he’s put the renovation on hold. In Burk’s view, minimum parking requirements are the biggest...
Where ballot measure 26-228's reforms stand, less than two months from Election Day. With six weeks until the November 8 Election Day, Portlanders are gearing up to vote on a ballot measure that would transform the city’s system of government and elections so that they better serve and represent the people of Portland. Since Sightline’s last update on the effort to change Portland’s city charter, campaigns have geared up both for and against the measure, and news has proliferated around lawsuits, alternative reform proposals, and opposition figures. Below we review what the measure contains and the last few months’ developments you may have missed as you were enjoying your summer. What would ballot measure 26-228 deliver? Portland voters will have to look well down their ballots this fall, past numerous other races for federal, state, and local offices to find any local ballot measures. But when they do, they’ll see this question: “Should Administrator manage city government, 12-member Council (three from each district) make laws, voters elect officials using ranked choice process?” This is measure 26-228, an opportunity to change the city’s charter in three key ways: 1. CITY DEPARTMENTS RUN BY A MAYOR-APPOINTED PROFESSIONAL ADMINISTRATOR, NOT CITY COUNCILORS City Council would become a true legislative body instead of mixing council work with the daily duties of running city departments. This would let councilors focus on making laws, connecting with residents, and addressing constituents’ concerns. Most importantly, councilors would no longer directly supervise individual government bureaus’ day-to-day operations. Portland’s current system is kind of like if your US Representative was also in charge of running the IRS every day, taking away time from their work passing bills and responding to people in their district. Portland is the only large American city that uses this style of government (called the “commission form”), and critics decry it for a lack of efficiency, accountability, transparency, and cooperation. In place of individual commissioners running different departments, the mayor would supervise a professional city administrator (confirmed by City Council) to run the bureaus. 2. A BIGGER COUNCIL TO SERVE THE GROWING PORTLAND POPULATION, IN 4 GEOGRAPHIC DISTRICTS Each councilor would represent one of four geographic districts, and each district would elect three councilors. This would create a 12-member City Council, a figure that expands the council to better match Portland’s current population and updates it from the mere five councilors (including the mayor) it has comprised since 1913. This means not only more points of access for Portlanders to voice their needs to the city, but also better representation for constituencies historically excluded from council: women, people of color, renters, young people, residents of East Portland, and working-class Portlanders. For instance, since 1995, three-quarters of councilors have been white men and less than four percent have been people of color, even while over a quarter of Portlanders in that period were people of color. Multi-member districts and a larger council overall, like those proposed in measure 26-228, will help these groups gain a greater voice on council. And councilors would maintain an office in their district, meaning that residents could go to any of their three councilors at a more local city office for certain business instead of having to travel downtown. 3. ELECTIONS THAT INCLUDE MORE VOTERS AND HONOR THEIR TRUE PREFERENCES Finally, all elected officials would be chosen using ranked choice voting. Voters would rank candidates in order of their preference, then votes would be counted in rounds, with last-place candidates eliminated until a winner receives more than 50 percent of the votes. After the first round of counting, voters’ later choices are counted if their top candidate is eliminated. The mayor and auditor would each be elected unde...
Housing growth drops 20 percent, on average, in cities making the sort of switch proposed by Portland’s Commissioner Mapps. A new 11th-hour idea for rewriting the rules of Portland’s city government has several possible flaws, but here’s one: statistically speaking, it’d be likely to worsen the city’s housing shortage. The proposal was publicly floated in a media interview three weeks ago by its loudest advocate, city Commissioner Mingus Mapps. Mapps’s idea, according to The Oregonian/OregonLive: to scrap the concept hammered out by a city-appointed citizen commission over the last year, a form of proportional representation, in favor of a winner-take-all system that would elect its entire council from smaller, one-winner districts. A referendum that would implement proportional representation and other changes is on the November ballot in Cascadia’s third-largest city as measure 26-228. Mapps’s concept has yet to be fully hammered out and might yet change. If Mapps’s proposal ends up as described by The Oregonian and wins support from other councilors and the public, Portland would be imitating a form of government that reduces housing growth in US cities by an average of 20 percent. “The number of units permitted falls sharply . . . immediately upon the reform’s approval,” wrote Evan Mast, the author of an academic paper on this subject circulated in 2020 and published in May, “Warding Off Development: Local Control, Housing Supply, and NIMBYs.” ONE PORTLAND CITY COUNCILOR SAYS HE WANTS A COUNCIL ELECTED FROM SINGLE-WINNER WARDS Here’s the current political situation in Portland: In late 2020, its city council named 20 people to research and propose changes to Portland’s charter—essentially its city constitution. This summer (2022), after much testimony and debate, those 20 people (the Charter Commission) proposed some changes to how the city’s government operates and how voters elect its officials. By a 17–3 vote, they sent this package directly to Portland voters’ November ballots, bypassing any edits from City Council. The new election system they proposed was modeled on a system that’s common around the world: proportional representation. It would divide the city into four relatively large districts, each of which would use multi-winner ranked choice voting to elect three commissioners in rough proportion to the various political opinions and interests that make up each district. If more than one-quarter of a district ranks a candidate highly, that candidate earns one of the three seats in that district. During an informational presentation from the Charter Commission, three city council members announced that though they liked the proposed changes to how the city is run, they had concerns about that sort of election system. Then, on Aug. 30, one of those council members, Mingus Mapps, announced that if November’s ballot measure fails, he expects to propose his own, different election system, one more familiar to many Americans: eight smaller districts that would each elect just one person. It’s that system—a council made up entirely of “winner-take-all” wards—that a growing body of research says tends to lead to fewer homes being built. ONE-WINNER WARD SYSTEMS SEEM TO CAUSE HOUSING SLOWDOWNS One recent academic paper with this finding is from Evan Mast, a housing economist at the University of Notre Dame. He looked at housing growth rates in 238 cities that recently made the sort of switch that Mapps is suddenly advocating for in Portland: from at-large to district elections. It turned out that these cities generally saw a sharp dip in new construction immediately after their change. Then, after about two years, they tended to rebound somewhat to a new, lower equilibrium of housing production. Cities that switched to single-winner districts settled at about 20 percent fewer new permitted units per resident than cities that continued using at-large elections. Another relevant paper is by two political scientists. Mich...
Public investment is the key to sustainable forestry. Where timber plantations were once logged intensively on short rotations, older and more complex forests now stand on the 9,400 acres owned by the van Eck Forest Foundation in Oregon and California. The new practices store more carbon and offer ideal stream conditions for salmon as well as habitat for marbled murrelets and northern spotted owls. Legal agreements called working forest conservation easements (WFCEs) protect these forests from conversion to agriculture or development, and the van Eck easements include prescriptions that also guarantee improved forest management, including growing older trees, into the future. In defiance of the false jobs-versus-environment dichotomy, these forests produce millions of board feet of timber each year, supporting loggers, truck drivers, mill workers, foresters, and biologists. Selling carbon credits from its California forests adds another income stream for the Van Eck Forest Foundation. The practice of “long rotations” means growing trees longer before logging them. It extends the length of a harvest cycle from a short “financial rotation age” that maximizes net present value to a longer “biological rotation age” that maximizes timber production as well as carbon storage, habitat, and water quality. Economists call the ecological harm of intensive short-rotation logging a market failure. That is, when the environmental benefits are accounted for, long rotations increase the wealth of society as a whole by more than enough to pay landowners to delay harvest. Of course, though, without countervailing action, such payment does not occur. Meanwhile, timber companies do not have to pay the environmental costs of short rotations. These are often unseen “environmental externalities.” And long rotations’ ecological benefits, because they are public goods that everyone can enjoy whether or not they cut a check to the landowners and investors, suffer from a lack of adequate voluntary funding: the free rider problem. This means that timberland owners, for whom delaying harvest comes at a steep cost, can’t get paid for their work of stewarding these trees through long rotations. It’s a cycle that cheats the foresters, society, and the environment. In ballpark figures, fixing the short-rotation market failure on the 8 million acres of private industrial forest in western Oregon and Washington would cost around $16 billion.1 That sounds steep, until one learns that it would generate around $40 billion in carbon storage benefits alone.2 That is over 100 percent return on investment. Is there a way to fix this market failure? Economists have traditionally recommended two kinds of solutions: regulate companies or privatize benefits. Starting with the second option, Sightline examined seven existing mechanisms that Cascadians could use to pay landowners what it costs them to grow older forests, incentivizing those landowners to do so while also supporting the ecological benefits regional residents and people around the globe so appreciate about their forestlands. While we did not perform a robust quantitative analysis that accounts for feedback and equilibrium effects, we did examine the current size and shape of these mechanisms and we compared them with both the carbon storage benefits of long rotations and their costs to landowners. Because forest health and carbon storage are public goods that are vulnerable to free-riding, voluntary mechanisms alone—carbon markets, sustainable sourcing, sustainability certifications, and impact investing—cannot meet the scale needed to fix the short-rotation market failure. (In other words, these voluntary markets also suffer from market failure.) But two existing and time-tested US federal programs could. The Forest Legacy Program (FLP) and the Healthy Forest Reserve Program (HFRP) could pay landowners for long rotations at the scale needed to fix the short rotation market failure. FLP appears to be more...
Either one would likely launch in August 2025. Proponents of approval voting claim it is much faster to implement than ranked choice voting. For example, Seattle Approves, which sponsored the approval voting (AV) measure on the November ballot in the city, writes: "In Seattle, Approval Voting could be adopted in November 2022 and potentially could be used in the 2023 primary election. RCV [ranked choice voting] would have a difficult and long road to adoption because it would require changes to the law and voting software.” Is this true? Not really. In Seattle, any new voting system adopted in November 2022, whether AV or RCV, will almost certainly not be ready for the city’s August 2023 primary election nine months later. The real question is whether it will be ready within two years and nine months, for the August 2025 primary election, or within four years and nine months, for the August 2027 primary. The balance of evidence suggests that either system would launch in August 2025. AV: Simpler but not faster AV proponents are not wrong: AV is simpler to administer than RCV, which should make it faster to launch. It requires smaller changes to ballots than RCV. Julie Wise, elections director for King County, which encompasses Seattle, told Sightline, “Approval voting would be pretty familiar to our voters---the instructions would change but the overall ballot wouldn’t need to change.” Likewise, AV would require much smaller changes to ballot counting software than RCV. But that simplicity would not advance the launch date to August 2023 from August 2025, which is the deadline written into the ballot measure for AV. It’d be faster, but not fast enough to matter. Under state and local law and policy, all new and upgraded voting systems (including ballot designs combined with vote-counting hardware and software) require 1) certification in one of a handful of federally accredited testing laboratories, 2) testing by the state, 3) authorization by the secretary of state in Olympia, and 4) a final set of tests and audits at the local level. Completing these steps in nine months would be next to impossible. King County uses ballot counting software from a company called Clear Ballot, and Clear Ballot does not have software systems ready and certified for RCV or AV. Seattle Approves leader Troy Davis told Sightline that King County is already authorized to use its existing Clear Ballot systems to tabulate approval votes, but Elections Director Wise disagrees. She says it’s unclear what certification and authorization AV would need. One key line of state law, for example, says that any change in any voting system that “extend(s) its function” requires reapproval by the secretary of state. A wholesale change to approval voting sure seems like it “extends the function” of Clear Ballot’s system. Clear Ballot would therefore probably need to run the full gauntlet of certification and authorization before tallying AV votes. That process alone might take a year, as noted below. The final word in how to interpret state law, of course, is neither Julie Wise’s, nor Troy Davis’s, nor mine. It would have to come from the secretary of state or the courts, but even getting an answer would take time, slowing implementation. King County is meticulous (and unhurried) in its election administration Even without a full certification gauntlet, though, AV is unlikely to be ready by August 2023. Julie Wise and the staff of King County Elections treat ballot design and voter education with admirable seriousness. Seattle has twice as many voters as St. Louis and six times as many as Fargo, other places that have implemented AV. King County Elections is a national leader in election administration, and it tests, tests, and tests again its innovations before launching them: user testing, focus groups, real-world simulations, and more. Asked when she thought she could launch AV or RCV, Julie Wise demurred, citing the many unknowns. Then she told Sightline: ...
Did the state's first ranked choice voting election deliver on its promises? Mary Peltola is going to the US House. The former state House member will become the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress after winning the state’s first ranked choice election on Wednesday. Peltola will serve out the remainder of the term of former Representative Don Young, who passed away in March. Peltola maintained her lead in Round 1 to beat out Republicans Sarah Palin and Nick Begich with a final total of 91,206 votes, or a little over 51 percent. After Begich was eliminated in the first round of ranked-choice tabulations, the second-place votes on his voters’ ballots were redistributed. But they weren’t enough to grant victory to Palin, a former Alaska governor, vice presidential nominee, and far-right political celebrity. She captured 49 percent of the final vote. Alaska Division of Elections director Gail Fenumiai announced the results on a Facebook livestream. Did Alaska’s new election system work as predicted? Before the election reforms passed in November 2020, I wrote, “No voting system is absolutely perfect, but . ranked choice voting is better than the more prevalent winner-takes-all system at strengthening democracy.” After they passed, I called it a “cure for US elections.” In ranked choice voting, voters rank candidates from most- to least-favorite. In Round 1, any candidate who wins a majority of first-place votes wins. If no one secures a majority, the last-place candidate leaves the race and a new round begins. In Round 2, the second-place votes from the ballots of the candidate defeated in Round 1 get redistributed among the remaining candidates. The process continues until a candidate secures a majority of the voted ballots. I wrote that Alaska’s new system would likely have the following benefits: making campaigns less polarized and, possibly, more civil than the status quo; being easy for voters to understand; checking the power of political parties and hyperpartisan primary voters; leveling the playing field for candidates from underrepresented groups; improving voter turnout; and ensuring no candidate can win without a majority in the final round. Alaskan voters adopted ranked choice general elections, along with open primary elections, in November 2020. Many supported the reforms based on these anticipated benefits. And while the US House special election only gives us a single Alaska data point when it comes to ranked choice voting, it’s worth examining whether the new system delivered. Campaigns may become more civil and less polarized The apocalyptic tropes of left vs. right that so often characterize US elections didn’t dominate this one. Peltola radiated warmth throughout the campaign. She snapped selfies with her Republican opponents, spoke of her support for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and shared laughs with Palin over their time as pregnant politico moms working in Juneau. (Peltola served in the state House while Palin was governor.) Palin even called her a “sweetheart.” But civility did not exactly rule the day. With only one Republican expected to survive Round 1, the two conservatives turned on each other. Begich ran ads calling out Palin for leaving the governorship before her term ended to chase fame and fortune outside Alaska. Palin questioned Begich’s credentials as an Alaskan, threw shade on his relative lack of political experience, and cast doubt on his fealty to the Republican cause. (Begich did say he’d rank Palin second, but the ads spoke for themselves.) It didn’t have to go that way. A different set of Republican candidates may well have worked together to drum up votes for each other. Peltola’s victory meant the least polarizing candidate actually won. Peltola is a moderate Democrat. Like Sen. Lisa Murkowski, she supports abortion rights and cares deeply about the welfare of indigenous people and the health of the salmon runs across the state. She will also defend the oil ...
A design competition identified the key barriers to expanding great multifamily options in Alaska’s largest city. There’s not much consumer choice in the Anchorage housing market. Single-detached homes, or “one-plexes,” are the norm, even though residents want more options to accommodate their different life stages and budgets. So, some of Alaska’s top architects and builders teamed up with Fairview residents in a neighborhood design contest to imagine a future inspired by historic housing norms, when cities allowed a wider array of homes in American neighborhoods. In the Fairview design contest, teams proposed plans for a hypothetical triplex on a real-life vacant lot. The entries included: a coworking residence for remote workers looking to split housing costs with roommates; a duplex-plus-backyard-cottage option perfect for multigenerational families; a modern triplex that could work for people who aren’t into paying for a suburban house (not to mention lawncare); and underground apartments that might attract avid gardeners and avant-garde urbanites. Unfortunately, Anchorage city code, as written, makes every one of these designs either impossible or much harder to build than a single-detached house. A thicket of zoning rules, including parking requirements, setbacks, and onerous site preparation for triplexes, ensures that inefficient land use will continue in Anchorage for the foreseeable future. But changes may come soon. The contest helped spur the city to reconsider some of the zoning regulations that impede triplex construction, skew the market, and squash innovation. A HOUSING REFRESH ON A FAIRVIEW LOT Cook Inlet Housing Authority (CIHA, pronounced “see-ha”) stands out among the many groups working to make Anchorage’s housing stock more appealing to a broader group of renters and homebuyers. In 2019 CIHA partnered with the Fairview Community Council to sponsor a triplex design contest—a contest that ended up highlighting the biggest regulatory obstacles to expanding home choices. Local planning officials have since used these insights to move toward modest reforms to parking rules and other parts of the Anchorage land use code. The contest, dubbed COMP/act, was a community endeavor. (The name is a play on “competition” and the need for “action” that will allow construction of more compact housing styles.) The Rasmuson Foundation provided a grant to run COMP/act and award cash prizes. The Anchorage Museum featured the contest at an event in its SEED Lab. And the Anchorage Economic Development Corporation’s Live.Work.Play. committee helped to promote the contest. Four teams made the finals. Each consisted of a designer, a builder, and a neighborhood resident, with a vacant property in Fairview serving as the blank slate for their designs. The rectangular, 7,000-square-foot lot at 820 Nelchina Street is covered in vegetation and sits between a blue ranch house and a fourplex. The property is remarkable not for what it is but for what it represents: a way to envision how Anchorage might modernize the city’s housing stock, meet consumer appetites for more price points and housing styles, and use land more efficiently while preserving the intimate scale of the neighborhood. Historically, Fairview was one of only a few Anchorage neighborhoods where Alaska Natives and Blacks could own land. White neighborhoods, including Turnagain and Rogers Park, put in place racial covenants barring the sale of homes to non-whites. Following the exclusionary tactics used by Berkeley, California, and countless other American cities throughout the twentieth century, Anchorage created socioeconomic walls around desirable neighborhoods through zoning laws that made building more than one unit per lot relatively difficult. Today, the covenants are illegal, but the zoning laws live on. Rules like lot size and square footage minimums have made the real estate market less affordable over time and helped create the housing shortage we see in Anc...
It’s a novice system when it comes to real-world elections, where ranked choice voting is a battle-tested pro. Seattle voters will decide in November whether to adopt approval voting, ranked choice voting, or no change to their primary election ballots. What do the research literature and practical experience say about these two alternatives to pick-one voting? They say a tremendous amount about ranked choice voting (RCV), and Sightline has summarized the lessons in tens of thousands of mostly encouraging words over years. But they say much less about approval voting (AV). This article summarizes what’s known. Approval voting has intriguing features. It is simple to implement and easy to tabulate. Its proponents plausibly claim worthy benefits, including more moderate victors and less negative campaigning. It is worth experimenting with and deserving of study. We stand to learn more over time because two communities have recently adopted it. They are, in effect, conducting the clinical trials for this new voting method. Both intuition and theory say AV will elect people who are, if not necessarily voters’ favorites, at least unobjectionable to most. They would be “consensus-style candidates,” say AV proponents. That tendency to dampen extremism and reward competent, cooperative governance, I surmise, is a major appeal of AV for its proponents and financiers, and it’s a goal Sightline shares. But adopting AV for primary elections for all city offices in Cascadia’s largest city would be risky. For all its appeal, AV is a novel, unproven, and legally untested system for elections, and it has weaknesses that should give us pause. The most salient fact about approval voting is that we do not actually know much about how it operates in the real world, not just in simulations or in academic papers or in the minds of schemers on Twitter or Reddit but in the pressure cooker of actual government elections, where campaigns rage, TV ads promise and malign, tempers flare, and hopes soar. This is where voters face the unavoidable dilemma into which AV forces them—that is, between helping their favorite and guarding against their least favorite. We do not know if AV will deliver what it promises (moderation and a dampening of extremes), but we have reasons for doubt. We do not know if AV will lead to fair representation or pass court muster, but we have cause for caution. For these reasons, adopting it in Seattle in November would be risky, especially when Seattle can adopt the well vetted and helpful alternative of ranked choice voting instead. Let’s take a closer look at why. 1. APPROVAL VOTING IS TOO BASIC TO REPRESENT A VOTER’S PREFERENCES Let’s start with the voter’s experience. For voters, approval voting, like ranked choice voting, is an alternative to old-fashioned, pick-one voting. In it, you can fill in the bubbles next to as many candidates as you like. Whichever candidate gets the most approval votes wins. It seems simple, and simplicity is appealing. AV is easy to understand and easy to tabulate. Unfortunately, its simplicity also holds weakness. Indeed, simplicity can make approval voting frustrating for voters. The defining feature of approval voting is that it’s binary: approve or not, bubble filled or blank, yes or no. You approve just your favorite. Or your favorite and your second favorite. Or your top three. Or any number you choose. It’s up to you. Simple. What you cannot do is convey any other preferences. No rankings. No ratings. No way to say that you love Nader but would settle for Gore, that you’d really like Perot but could live with Bush Sr., that you’d be elated with Biden, could get excited about Klobuchar, would be satisfied with Booker, and could tolerate Mayor Pete. If your preferences are black and white, with no shades of gray, AV may be for you. Otherwise, the more you think about it, the more confounding it becomes. If you actually care who you vote for, you have no good option. Approve Elizabeth Warre...
In a setback for county residents and democracy reforms sprouting up across Cascadia, Councilors claimed without explanation that the amendments did not comply with provisions of the Charter. Nine months ago, the 18 residents elected to San Juan County, Washington’s, Charter Review Commission proposed 4 amendments to the County Charter, including one to implement ranked choice voting. On Tuesday evening, just after the deadline to refer these amendments to the voters, the County Council voted 3–0 not to place the amendments on this November’s ballot for residents to vote on. After returning from a portion of their meeting that was not available to the public, San Juan County’s three Councilors said that the amendments “[do] not conform with the procedural requirements of the San Juan County Charter” but neglected to explain their decision any further. An initial reading of the San Juan County Charter seems to indicate that the Council’s actions themselves are in violation of the Charter, which requires that “the County Council shall submit the amendment[s] to the voters at the next November general election.” This was not simply an error of omission. Not only did the Councilors fail to forward the amendments to the ballot as required by the Charter, but they explicitly made a motion stating that they would not submit the amendments to the County Auditor, the elections official that would put these measures on the ballot. Both the timing and scant reasoning behind this choice do no favors for county residents (including Charter Review Commissioners) displeased with the decision. Since the Council waited until after the last minute to rebuff the charter amendments, some procedural paths to placing them before the voters in November are closed off. Even if the County Council later changed its decision or the courts ruled against it, there’s no guarantee that election administrators would receive the amendments in time to include them on the ballot. Councilors also omitted crucial details that could help residents understand their decision, like whether they found any specific amendments to be out of compliance, what part of the charter review process led to the alleged procedural problem, and which provisions of the charter they claimed were being violated. [Author added this paragraph 8/9/22] While the Council provided no public explanation of its decision, the Journal of the San Juan Islands reported that the Council’s grievance may have been that the Charter Review Commission referred these four measures after previously referring six other measures. The local paper noted that the county’s Prosecuting Attorney originally told the Commission it could refer two sets of amendments but later advised against that option. The relevant portion of the County Charter states that the Commission’s term of service ends after one year or “when final recommendations are submitted” for the ballot, whichever comes first. If this reasoning holds up, the question is whether the Commission’s first set of amendments counted as submitting “final recommendations.” Every decade, San Juan County voters elect 18 residents to a Charter Review Commission to review the County Charter and propose amendments. The Commissioners elected in 2020 proposed six amendments for the November 2021 election, plus the aforementioned four amendments for the November 2022 election. The 2022 proposed amendments would: Establish a new position of Public Advocate for the county; Clarify the funding, support, and authority of future Charter Review Commissions; Implement ranked choice voting for county elected positions; and Lower the required number of signatures for initiative and referendum petitions. Several other jurisdictions throughout Cascadia are set to vote on adopting ranked choice voting this November. Portland, Oregon; Multnomah County, Oregon; and Clark County, Washington, all proposed it through charter commissions, and the Seattle City Council placed it on...
Pandering to the center is actually a viable strategy in the race to serve out Rep. Don Young's term in the US House. For a country bogged down by political polarization, the run-up to Alaska’s first ranked choice election might seem refreshing: a Democrat talking openly about family ties to a Republican Congressman; a Republican giving shout-outs to union members; and voters with the power to rank candidates from the opposing party. In Alaska’s special election to serve out the term of late US House Representative Don Young, cross-party outreach has clear benefits for both voters and candidates. The upsides of weighing both sides may not exist in every ranked choice election, but they do in this one. The two Republicans and one Democrat in the race all have paths to victory made all the more viable by courting voters from both parties. And voters have the opportunity to rank all three candidates, meaning they shouldn’t immediately write off candidates from the opposing side. Candidate and voter behavior in Alaska so far bolsters the theory that ranked choice voting, at least in certain elections, can to some degree counter polarization. If applied more widely, could ranked choice voting be part of a cure for hyper partisanship? If so, more moderate cohorts of lawmakers might make more progress on issues voters care about, like reducing the high cost of health care and improving educational opportunities. This article looks at the following: Where is there room for bipartisan behavior in Alaska’s special general election for US House? Does it actually make sense for voters? How are Republicans Nick Begich and Sarah Palin, and Democrat Mary Peltola courting voters from the other side? And what could it all imply for American democracy? For Democratic voters, ranking a Republican second isn’t a terrible idea In ranked choice voting, voters rank candidates from most- to least-favorite. In Round 1, the candidate with the most first-place votes wins. If no one wins outright by securing a majority of first-place votes, the last-place candidate exits the race and a new round begins. In Round 2, the second-place votes from the ballots of the candidate defeated in Round 1 get redistributed among the remaining candidates. The process continues until a candidate secures a majority of the votes. A ranked ballot affords voters more power to influence the results than they would in the typical American election, where each voter chooses just one candidate and the candidate with the most votes wins. The option to rank expands voting power. Even if your favorite candidate loses, your next-favorite candidate can get your vote. And yet, some Alaska progressives are talking about voting for the lone Democrat only and not ranking either of the two Republicans. Viewed one way, that strategy makes sense, at least for the House special election. Here’s why: The Democrat, Peltola, likely will secure about 40 percent of first round votes, enough to send her to Round 2. The two Republican candidates, Begich and Palin, will split the remaining 60 percent. That means either Begich or Palin will leave the field in Round 1. The other will advance with Peltola to Round 2. Here’s where ranked choice voting kicks in. The voters who chose the Round 1 loser as their No. 1 and ranked another candidate second will remain in the game. In fact, their second-choice votes will decide the election. In this scenario, where Peltola advances to Round 2, her supporters’ second choices won’t matter. With three candidates in the race, the election will end in Round 2. But if Peltola somehow loses in the first round, those of her supporters who failed to rank a second candidate will have forfeited a plum chance to influence the election. Ranking Peltola first and a Republican second would NOT allow the Republican to beat Peltola as long as she’s still in the race. Again, Peltola supporters lose nothing by ranking a Republican second. But if she’s out in Round 1, they’ll h...
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...
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 ...
And it’s a threat to the province’s climate commitments. A chorus of North American fossil fuel boosters is once again pushing for more pipelines and liquified natural gas (LNG) plants, this time purportedly to help Europe quit the 40 percent of its gas it imports from Russia. For example, Deborah Yedlin, CEO of the Chamber of Commerce in Canada’s fossil-fuel capital Calgary, declared, “We must resurrect [LNG] projects—on the east and west coasts. It is a moral imperative.” But like previous arguments for completing the mostly languishing LNG proposals on Cascadia’s West Coast, in British Columbia, these new ones do not add up. BC LNG proposals are solutions in search of a problem. Their fuel cannot be ready soon enough to matter to Europe and cannot be extracted and burned without harming the climate. FIVE LNG PROPOSALS REMAIN IN BRITISH COLUMBIA, TWO THE PUBLIC CAN COMMENT ON NOW Canada is home to a total of zero LNG export facilities. Of dozens proposed over the years in British Columbia, all but five are now dead. Most succumbed to a combination of market forces and concerted public opposition to fracking gas in eastern British Columbia and shipping it in liquified form off the Pacific Coast. The harms of fracking include health impacts like low birth weights, contaminated drinking water, degraded Indigenous land pockmarked with thousands of gas wells, and accelerated climate impacts. Proponents of remaining BC LNG proposals promise to begin operations between 2025 and 2030, but if their past records of delay are any guide, these promises will prove to have been little more than wishful thinking. Indeed, just one of the projects has started construction at all and is only 50 percent complete. This project, the Can$40-billion LNG Canada, has already pushed back its opening date from 2023 to mid-2025, a forecast that’s likely to slip further. Plus, the new Coastal Gaslink pipeline that TC Energy is building to supply LNG Canada has suffered repeated delays and will distinguish itself as one of the most expensive gas pipelines in the world. TC Energy pegged the pipeline’s cost at Can$4.4 billion in 2012, boosted the estimate to Can$6.6 billion in 2020, and in February warned that costs had “increased significantly,” without saying how much. Controversy about the pipeline, which will carry fracked gas across the territory of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation, keeps mounting. Wet’suwet’en leaders recently called on the United Nations to investigate Coastal Gaslink for what they say is Canada’s violation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Two other projects, the Tilbury Phase 2 Expansion project and Cedar LNG, await environmental assessments. (Members of the public can comment on both until mid-April.) Woodfibre LNG in Howe Sound was issued its environmental approval in 2016 by then-Minister of the Environment and Climate Change Catherine Mckenna, but the project languishes behind obstacles and lacks some permits. The last live project, Ksi Lisims, is so new that its timeline is highly speculative; a consortium that includes fossil fuel interests and the Nisga’a First Nation, only announced it in July 2021. BY THE TIME BC’S LNG FACILITIES OPEN THEIR DOORS, EUROPE PLANS TO HAVE ELIMINATED ITS RELIANCE ON RUSSIAN GAS British Columbia’s LNG is purportedly destined for Asia, not Europe. But because the market for LNG is increasingly global, with nearly 40 percent of LNG now traded on the spot market or via short-term contracts, adding Canadian LNG to the global supply could help Europe overcome its supply shortage. But the EU will be sailing away from Russian gas just as BC’s LNG arrives to dock. Not quite two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, the European Commission outlined its new “REPowerEU” plan, which aims to reduce the EU’s reliance on Russian gas by nearly two-thirds before year’s end. About 60 percent of this reduction would come from securing alternate gas suppliers and the other 40 percent from lo...
The region counts 40 canceled oil, gas, and coal export projects since 2012. Since 2012 fossil fuel executives from dozens of companies, including Kinder Morgan, Pembina Pipeline Corporation, and Enbridge, have schemed more than 50 large projects to export coal, oil, gas, or their derivatives from Cascadia’s coast in British Columbia, Oregon, and Washington. But local communities, Tribes, environmentalists, and local governments rejected calls to turn Cascadia into a fossil fuel export terminal. Thanks to a combination of local opposition, see-sawing energy prices, and regulatory hurdles, project backers canceled 40 of those projects—a whopping 73 percent. Just 6 of all the proposed projects have been completed and are operational today. Had all the once-proposed 55 projects gone ahead, it would have spelled disaster for the climate. Extracting, transporting, and burning the fuel associated with all the Cascadian fossil fuel export proposals would have spewed the equivalent of 2,095 million metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere annually, roughly 30 percent of the entire annual greenhouse gas emissions of the United States and nearly three times the annual emissions of Canada. Instead, Cascadia averted 1,717 million metric tons of annual greenhouse gas emissions. Cascadia cannot claim victory just yet. Nine projects are not yet canceled, eight of which are in British Columbia, as shown by the map and graphic below and detailed in Sightline’s new report. Of the remaining projects, the decade-long multibillion-dollar boondoggle to expand the Trans Mountain oil pipeline would be the single largest greenhouse gas emitter. If a livable future is something leaders in Cascadia are serious about, they will also relegate these remaining projects to history’s trash can.
The discount rate, vanishing large-log mills, and fear of the spotted owl. Extending timber harvest rotations is on the table as a triple bottom line solution—actually a sextuple bottom line solution. But is it really a good idea, and is it even possible? If so, how do we do it? In my last article, I posed the question: do long rotations really boost carbon storage and produce more timber? The answer is a resounding “Yes.” This article investigates why today’s forest landowners log on short rotations and what stands in the way of extending rotations. In a future article, I will examine how, through careful planning and public investment, we can overcome these hurdles and transform Cascadia’s forest landscape to long rotations in a way that works for timber-dependent communities. BRIEF REVIEW: THE SIX BOTTOM-LINE BENEFITS OF HARVESTING TIMBER ON LONGER ROTATIONS A “forest rotation” is the number of years that a crop of trees is grown before the forest is logged and replanted. Long rotations mean growing trees longer before logging. In the past, timberland owners cut their trees at a “biological rotation age.” A biological rotation age maximizes the amount of timber that the land can sustainably produce per year over time. For instance, the biological rotation age for Douglas-fir west of the Cascades might be 80–100 years. Today, most timber companies log their forests at a much shorter “financial rotation age,” often less than half the biological rotation age. By doing so, they maximize short-term profits at the expense of long-term timber volume, forest health, and carbon sequestration. Why are long rotations a sextuple bottom line solution? First, they have garnered the most attention for being the best “natural carbon solution” for California, Oregon, and Washington (that’s solution #1 of 6). Modelers also show that long rotations produce more total timber as well as higher quality and more valuable lumber for building homes (that’s #2). And, at a time when Washington and Oregon are scrambling to plan for wildfires (and pay for them), it turns out that long rotations likely mitigate fire severity (#3). Long rotations also improve water quantity and quality and serve as habitat for rare wildlife (#4 and #5). Finally, if history is a guide, extending rotations could help return stability to timber markets and flourishing economies to rural timber communities, if we can get past a transitional supply dip (and that’s #6). IF LONG ROTATIONS ARE SO MUCH BETTER, WHY AREN’T THEY MORE COMMON?
1. The time value of money
As mills sold off timberlands starting in the 1980s, the new owners changed from long rotations that maximize a steady supply of timber for the mill to management that maximizes their return on timberland investments (ROI). This is especially true for investor-owned Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) and Timberland Investment Management Organizations (TIMOs), which currently own a majority of private US timberlands. Large, family-owned timber companies also need short-term profits, especially if they want to invest in complementary businesses or grow their landholdings. It’s more lucrative to log short rotations on more land than long rotations on less land. TIMOs and REITs have raked in windfall profits. From 1990 through 2007, TIMOs averaged a whopping 13 percent return on investment, exceeding the 11 percent averaged by the S&P 500 over the same period, with far less volatility (i.e., making them less risky). When forestland is held as a financial investment, it must appreciate as fast as Apple or Tesla stock, or other competing investments. Investors want compounding growth, which means that value increases exponentially over time. The opportunity cost of not cashing in the trees now and investing in lucrative land deals or Tesla stock means that income received in the future from long rotations is essentially worth less than the same income received today. This is why selling a smaller volume of timber toda...
The state land use board provisionally approved the rules but left room for tweaks by July. Oregon’s statewide land use board declared its support Thursday for rules that, among other things, reduce or remove parking mandates in 61 jurisdictions in the state’s eight largest metro areas. But the board stopped short of permanently approving the full package as written, instead voting unanimously to temporarily adopt the rules, a major update to state land use standards more than two years in the making. “I think we’re 98 percent there,” said Land Conservation and Development Commission Vice Chair Anyeley Hallova, who will move into the chair position of the governor-appointed board at its next meeting in July. Commissioner Nick Lelack, who proposed the two-month slowdown, expressed support for the package but wanted more time to hear specific concerns on particular issues. He said he was responding in part to a letter received the previous night in which 29 mayors from around the state had urged delay. “I want to be genuine in listening to people that we have just heard from for the first time,” “The process isn’t complete.” In order to have time to more fully address local jurisdictions’ concerns, the commission set a deadline of July 1 for future comments. ‘A CHANCE TO DO SO MUCH GOOD FOR FREE’ Lelack’s stated concern wasn’t with the parking components of the proposal, which he’d singled out for particular praise at the commission’s previous meeting. “It’s pro-housing, pro-equity, pro-efficient-land-use,” Lelack said. “It addresses all the key issues we needed to address.” Most of the oral testimony the board received in Thursday’s three-hour public hearing was similarly supportive: 32 testifiers generally in favor of the reform package and 19 opposed. As we wrote earlier this week, parking mandates aren’t the main reason we have parking lots. 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 gradually and 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. Transportation advocate and city planning consultant Cathy Tuttle was among those speaking Thursday in favor of removing parking mandates. “The beauty of these administrative changes to eliminate parking mandates is that they’re easy to implement, and have the potential to do good without costing the state or the cities much money,” Tuttle said. “Rarely do we get a chance to do so much good for free.” ‘IT GIVES ME A STRESS ATTACK’ Parking was also on the minds of various local officials who spoke in opposition. “Since I’ve been on council for 10 years now, I can sum up in three words some of the most important issues: parking, parking, parking,” Eugene City Councilor Claire Syrett told the commission. “It is a huge topic that you don’t expect when you join city council. . Frankly, as an elected official it gives me a stress attack to think about how we’re going to deal with this in terms of public engagement.” In a state with soaring rents and sale prices, a state-estimated shortage of 111,000 homes, and one of the highest rates of homelessness in the U.S., the rules would increase the number of new homes, shops and offices that can be built without mandates for a certain number...
A word of caution to Cascadian lawmakers and regulators. “We’re very bullish on renewable hydrogen,” hyped a representative from NW Natural, Oregon’s largest gas utility, when testifying in support of a 2021 hydrogen bill in Oregon. Hydrogen enthusiasm is at an all-time high, with the recent passage of multi-billion dollar subsidies by federal policy makers and major oil and gas corporations backing hydrogen projects, including Northwest utilities. Proponents of the fuel envision a future in which hydrogen—and specifically a strain of it being marketed as “renewable hydrogen”—heats homes and businesses, powers trains and cars, and balances the electric grid. Renewable hydrogen, also known as green hydrogen, does have its place in a climate-friendly future, namely in cleaning up hard-to-decarbonize sectors like steelmaking, long-haul shipping, and aviation, and in generating electricity during windless, cloudy periods. Plus, existing hydrogen consumers, like petrochemical refineries, metallurgical industries, and ammonia and fertilizer manufacturers, could reduce their emissions by switching from hydrogen produced by fossil fuels to hydrogen produced from renewable electricity (see our primer on the different types of hydrogen). But natural gas utilities, including those in Cascadia, have their eyes on a much bigger prize: pumping hydrogen through the natural gas pipeline system to heat buildings—and raking in the accompanying profits. Unfortunately, hydrogen is not the solution these fossil fuel corporations make it out to be, nor should it be their next cash cow. It merely slows progress on the much-needed shift to electrification, holding ratepayers subject to more expensive fossil fuel infrastructure and a more dangerous and less efficient fuel—all while slowing progress toward the region’s decarbonization goals. Lawmakers and regulators should beware the industry’s hype as they weigh hydrogen’s permitted uses. HYDROGEN FOR HOME HEATING SCORES LOW ON EFFICACY, COST, EFFICIENCY, AND SAFETY Despite being touted by natural gas utilities as the best path to clean home heating, hydrogen is much less effective at decarbonizing buildings than is electricity. Only small volumes of hydrogen, perhaps up to a ratio of 20 percent hydrogen to 80 percent natural gas, can safely be injected into existing gas pipelines. But a 20 percent blend of hydrogen only shaves off around 7 percent of the combustion emissions of a system running on 100 percent natural gas. Put in context, in Washington, for example, buildings’ emissions will need to decrease 96 percent by 2050 for the state to meet its legislated decarbonization commitments. What’s more, blending higher ratios of hydrogen into existing natural gas infrastructure to achieve greater emissions reductions could cost billions. Most gas distribution pipelines would need to be replaced or extensively retrofitted to safely accommodate the new fuel, since at higher volumes than 20 percent, hydrogen can degrade pipelines. Plus, higher ratios of hydrogen are incompatible with existing appliances like stoves and water heaters, meaning consumers would also need to buy new hydrogen-compatible appliances. These replacement requirements and associated costs are why major studies for the Northwest conclude that wide-spread electrification is the least expensive pathway to decarbonize building. Plus, hydrogen is less efficient than electricity at heating homes. A 2021 study found that heating a home with green hydrogen has an efficiency of around 46 percent.1 Heating a home with an electric air-source heat pump, on the other hand, has almost six times that efficiency, at around 270 percent. Yes, hydrogen could provide carbon-free heat in a home, but heating with hydrogen demands nearly six times as much renewable electricity as does an electric heat pump. Heating with hydrogen, in other words, is like drying your dishes with a blow torch. Lastly, hydrogen introduces serious safety concerns. Hydrogen...
And no, it’s not a solution to Europe’s dependency on Russian oil. On February 18, 2022, the Canadian government-owned Trans Mountain Corporation revealed that the controversial Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion (TMX) project is delayed yet again and will now cost Can$21.4 billion. This is a whopping four times the original Can$5.4 billion cost estimate offered by then-owner Kinder Morgan when it first proposed the project a decade ago. The project, which is about 50 percent complete, will “twin” the existing Trans Mountain pipeline, transporting some of the world’s dirtiest oil from the tar sands in Alberta across British Columbia to Burnaby, BC. From there, it will be loaded onto oil tankers and shipped for export through the Salish Sea along BC and Washington coastlines. If completed, the project will triple the capacity of the existing pipeline, reaching a total capacity of about 890,000 barrels per day, more than the recently cancelled Keystone XL pipeline would have carried. Since Kinder Morgan first proposed the project in 2012, it has faced multiple lawsuits and staunch opposition from dozens of First Nations and Indigenous groups, environmental organizations, and local governments in both Canada and the United States. As we make sense of this latest announcement, and as oil industry boosters are using the Russian invasion of Ukraine to promote building more Canadian oil pipelines, it’s worth revisiting why Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should cancel the project—indeed should have canceled it years ago. We count at least five big reasons: 1. CANADIANS STAND TO LOSE BILLIONS FROM THE PROJECT Although the business case for the pipeline has always been shaky, the latest cost increase confirms that the pipeline has turned into a giant money pit, putting the Canadian public’s dollars at risk. Trudeau’s government bought the existing pipeline and the expansion project as a buyer of last resort in 2018 for Can$4.5 billion from US-based pipeline giant Kinder Morgan after it walked away in the face of mounting delays, costs, and opposition. The prime minister promised that after construction was complete, his administration would sell the pipeline for a profit and use the proceeds to fund the country’s clean energy transition. Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland repeated this claim after the February 18th announcement. Some First Nations along the pipeline’s route have expressed interest in a full or partial ownership stake of the pipeline, while dozens of others, including the Squamish Nation and the Tsleil-Waututh Nation have steadfastly opposed the project and challenged it multiple times in court. As Geraldine Manson, Elder of the Snuneymuxw First Nation, who opposes the pipeline, told Sightline, “The government is not listening to First Nations. If they are going to a First Nation community and offering them dollars they need, of course they will take those.. We can’t judge the community for having no infrastructure and no dollars to survive for their future.” However, the new Can$21.4 billion cost estimate makes abundantly clear that if the Trudeau administration completes and sells the pipeline, it will be at a stupendous loss, not at a profit. As Omar Mawji, energy analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), told Sightline, “I don’t know who will purchase it unless it’s at a huge discount.” Indeed, Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux told Canada’s National Observer that he is “not hopeful that there will be any profits to be made from that pipeline, at least for the federal government.” Losses are inevitable because the tolls that oil producers, also known as shippers, will pay Trans Mountain to use the pipeline do not and cannot cover the full capital cost of the project. As data shows, since Kinder Morgan first proposed the expansion project, capital costs have increased from Can$5.4 billion to Can$7.4 billion to Can$12.6 billion, and as of the latest announcement, ...
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 editor@sightline.org. Happy listening!