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Washington Housing Bills to Watch in 2025 Feb 17, 2025

More than two dozen bills aim to unlock great neighborhoods, greater affordability, and less red tape for Washingtonians.
Washingtonians from Spokane to Sequim, Washougal to Wenatchee, are struggling to afford homes and rents in their communities due to a deep housing shortage. While recent years' laudable legislative actions have begun to relegalize more homes, in all shapes and sizes, it will take years of dedicated effort to make up for decades of stunted homebuilding in cities and towns. It will also take a series of smart policy upgrades to correct for all the restrictions that have outlawed anything but the most expensive kind of housing in the residential neighborhoods of Washington's cities: single-detached houses on their own exclusive lots.
Legislators are considering numerous bills in Olympia this year to do just that. Below Sightline catalogs the ones we're watching and, in many cases, weighing in on. The first several are our highest priorities for the 2025 legislative session.
Washington residents interested in supporting these bills can subscribe to the Homes4WA emails for action alerts and informational resources.
Sightline's priority bills
Free communities from costly parking mandates | SB 5184, HB 1299
Sponsors: Sen. Bateman, Rep. Peterson
Parking mandates are local governments' requirements that every new home or business come with an arbitrary, pre-determined number of parking spaces. From bowling alleys to churches, daycares to moth breeding facilities (yes, really), these excessive prescriptions drive up the cost of new homes, businesses, and community resources at a time when Washington urgently needs more of all of these things. It writes sprawl into law and makes it harder to build the great neighborhoods and Main Streets people love in their communities.
The Parking Reform and Modernization Act would cap residential and commercial mandates and provide full parking flexibility for projects like daycares, senior housing, affordable housing, and other building types that need it most. To be clear, the bill does not bar anyone from building as much parking as they like as part of their project. Rather, it returns these decisions to the people investing in their communities, whether a homeowner, homebuilder, or entrepreneur, who are best positioned to know how many parking spaces they need for their dream to succeed.
Incentivize transit-oriented development with smart funding tools | SB 5604
Sponsor: Sen. Liias
Transit-oriented development (TOD) is a strategy of building more homes near transit hubs so people can live closer to and more easily access the places where they work, learn, and recreate. Pursuing this strategy in Washington in particular would make the most of the state's large public transit investments in recent years.
With these benefits in mind, SB 5604 would establish several new ways for the state to incentivize TOD. But unlike typical TOD bills it does not address zoning at all. For new housing developments in transit station areas, it would create special property tax abatements, sales tax exemptions, lower excise tax rates, and reduced impact fees, along with associated affordability requirements. It's designed to complement TOD zoning, existing or future.
High interest rates and construction costs have made apartments difficult to finance, and future permitting has plummeted in cities throughout the state. That's why SB 5604 focuses on helping housing development pencil. It doesn't rezone because that's not the limiting factor at most major station areas in Washington metros.
Legalize abundant, affordable apartment homes near transit | HB 1491
Sponsor: Rep. Reed
Similar to Washington's 2024 TOD bill, HB 1491 would legalize larger apartment buildings near major transit stops, with stipulations that some of their units meet affordability mandates - known as inclusionary zoning (IZ). Setting statewide minimum standards for multifamily zoning near transit is a key piece of the TOD puzzl...

Ending Subsidies for New Gas Hook-Ups Can Save Cascadians Millions Feb 17, 2025

Line extension allowances are on their way out, and regulators can finish the job.
Line extension allowances - the term of art for the utility customer-funded subsidies for new gas pipes - are finally, slowly on their way out of Cascadia. This is thanks to regulators who recognize the contradiction of, on the one hand, utility customers subsidizing the proliferation of carbon-intensive gas infrastructure and use, and on the other, utilities' obligations to reduce their carbon emissions over time - to say nothing of the general need to protect customers from the high costs of future stranded assets and bloated energy bills.
On January 1, 2025, two Washington state utilities, Avista and Puget Sound Energy (PSE), fully eliminated costly line extension allowances - a first in Cascadia. And Oregon regulators have put Avista and NW Natural on a schedule to ratchet down their allowances annually and ultimately eliminate them in 2027. Similar phaseouts are in the works for Cascade Natural Gas's gas infrastructure subsidies in both Oregon and Washington.
Still, regulators have not yet done away with the line extension allowances offered by the 11 other gas utilities across Cascadia, including three in Oregon and Washington. And as more customers every year choose to reduce their gas use or go fully electric, for financial or health or climate reasons, they're leaving a shrinking number of customers on the hook for paying off those gas pipe extensions over time. Plus, new evidence suggests gas utilities that are getting rid of line extension allowances may have overcharged customers already, on the order of millions of dollars in excess of allowed amounts.
Regulators across the region can do away with these costly subsidies to obsolescing fossil fuel-based systems once and for all (something California regulators did in 2023). And they can do one better by investigating utilities' possible overcharges to customers to fund these subsidies.
The old logic: Endless gas expansion, funded by ratepayers
Line extension allowances, as Sightline wrote about in 2023, were once a good deal for both new and existing gas customers - that is, before the world learned of the incontrovertible evidence about the climate and health hazards of burning gas in homes. Without the subsidies, a developer or homeowner could expect to pay thousands of dollars to connect their building to a gas distribution pipeline. So, regulators allowed utilities to subsidize the cost of installing new gas service lines, a cost utilities then recouped by adding them to their "rate base."
Financing these subsidies though a rate base works like a home mortgage. Every month ratepayers pay back to the utility some of the original investment plus an interest charge (i.e., profit for the utility). Once the investment is fully paid off (say, in 50 or 60 years for a gas service line), the amount ratepayers have paid is many times the original subsidy amount. In Oregon and Washington, the total cost of line extension allowances over the depreciation life can be four to ten times the initial subsidy price.
In Oregon and Washington, utilities will roll into the rates they charge their customers roughly $91 million in costs for gas line extension allowance offered in 2022-23 alone. Sightline estimates that figure balloons to more than $570 million over the new pipelines' "book life" when accounting for utility profits, taxes, and operational and maintenance expenses. In British Columbia, FortisBC padded its rate base with an estimated C$139 million in line extension allowances in 2022-23, which will cost British Columbians more than C$1.5 billion over the 60-year book life of these assets.
Historically, existing customers of a utility benefited from this arrangement, even though they were footing the bill for the subsidy. That's because more total gas customers meant further spreading out the costs of maintaining expensive pipeline infrastructure, which lowered everyone's bills.
But as ...

Washington’s Bills to Safeguard and Upgrade Democracy in 2025 Feb 17, 2025

State leaders are considering measures to allow ranked choice voting and turnout-boosting even-year elections, protect voting rights, increase language resources for elections, and more.
Washington State leaders are pursuing democracy and elections upgrades that would improve representation across the broad array of Washington communities, boost voter turnout for races large and small, streamline administrative processes for running elections, and offer more diverse candidate choices to advance the priorities of everyday Washingtonians.
The legislature has considered many of these issues in previous years, including Sightline's priorities of ranked choice voting and moving to even-year elections. This year, they might finally become law.
Smoothing the path for local governments wanting to adopt ranked choice voting
Washington state law prevents local jurisdictions from changing their election code.1 This restriction means that they can't use methods like ranked choice voting, if they wish to do so, or that they're very constrained in its application.
Yet cities and other districts are pursuing ranked choice voting anyway. Seattle voters adopted it in 2022, for first use in the city's primary election in 2027 - a workaround of the state law that requires top-two general elections. Multiple districts (such as plaintiffs in Yakima County) have requested ranked choice voting as a remedy for voting rights violations under the Washington Voting Rights Act, which the Washington State Supreme Court affirmed as an option in the June 2023 decision Portugal v. Franklin County. Other places are looking to charter commissions or other pathways for adopting the voting method.
Ranked choice voting is coming to Washington regardless of additional legislation. Why? Because voters want it, along with the bevy of benefits they see it delivering elsewhere, including less negative campaigns, more focus on the issues, and the neutralization of the "spoiler effect."
The state legislature has an important opportunity to serve Washington voters by helping local jurisdictions wanting to make the ranked choice switch to do so smoothly. HB 1448, the Washington VOICES (Voting Options, Implementation, Compliance, Education, and Standards) Act, sponsored by Rep. Gregerson, would clarify state law to provide local governments a clear path to adopt ranked choice voting (again, only if they wish to do so; the bill does not require adoption anywhere) and set guidelines for implementing and educating voters about the reform. The legislation would improve efficiency and consistency for local election administrators while ensuring that voters can access this improved election method to make their voices heard.
Boosting voter turnout by allowing local elections in high-turnout years
State law in Washington currently requires cities and towns to hold their regularly scheduled elections for local offices, such as mayor and city council, in odd-numbered years, when voter turnout rarely rises above 40 percent. Turnout in even-numbered years, in contrast, is often double that of odd-numbered years, including for local races. What's more, national studies have shown that voters tend to be better represented by leaders elected in even years.
HB 1339, sponsored by Rep. Gregerson, would amend the state's election code to allow cities and towns to hold regular elections in even years if they choose, rather than just benefiting from high turnout in even-year special elections like Seattle's recent council race. This change creates the option for more local governments to follow the example of King County, whose voters approved a switch to even-year elections in November 2022. Voters in the state's largest county will soon enjoy fewer campaign cycles to track and leaders who have won support from more of their constituents.
This bill would go a long way toward ensuring that local electeds share residents' values and priorities when making decisions that impact everyday life...

The 4 Big Reasons Why States Should Ditch Parking Mandates Feb 17, 2025

Parking reform unlocks more homes and great neighborhoods, while cutting red tape and excess asphalt, sprawl, and pollution.
Cities, towns, and jurisdictions around the world are adopting a powerful reform that accelerates homebuilding, eliminates red tape for small businesses, reduces pollution and sprawl, revitalizes downtowns, and streamlines permitting - at zero cost to the taxpayer.
That reform? Eliminating parking mandates - local governments' arcane and unfounded requirements that every new home or business come with an arbitrary, pre-determined number of parking spaces. These requirements hamstring local builders and business owners, drive up rents and home costs, and write sprawl into law. It's time to return these decisions to the people investing in their communities, whether a homeowner, homebuilder, or entrepreneur, who are best positioned to know how many parking spaces they need for their dream to succeed.
In Washington state specifically, the legislature is considering a bill to do just that: the Parking Reform and Modernization, SB 5184 (companion bill HB 1299).
SB 5184 would cap excessive parking mandates both for residential and commercial construction, restoring people's ability to decide for themselves how many parking spots they need, instead of the ratios some city planner wrote down back in, say, 1963. It would also give full parking flexibility to project types that need it most, like repurposing existing buildings for cafes or apartments and building more middle housing and affordable housing, daycares, and more. (Read the full Sightline Institute explainer of the Parking Reform and Modernization Act here.)
Communities considering parking reform for themselves can look to the many other jurisdictions that have already enacted it for a view into what they can expect in a world with fewer parking mandates, including:
More homes, in all shapes and sizes, from backyard cottages and duplexes to apartment buildings and affordable housing
More great neighborhoods, with creative reuse and preservation of historic buildings, smart sharing agreements for existing parking, and even conversions of parking lots to new communities of homes and shops
Less unneeded asphalt and the pollution, deadly "heat islands," and long-lasting sprawl that come with it, paving over nearby farmland and open spaces
Less red tape and costly delays for builders and city staff alike
More nimble adaptation to modern parking-lite conveniences like online shopping, remote work options, and ride-hail apps
More money in local budgets for everything from firefighting to libraries, after-school programs to parks, and other community priorities
Sound too good to be true? Read on to learn more about the power of parking reform.
1. More homes of all shapes and sizes
More middle housing, like backyard cottages and fourplexes
Even one parking spot can render a backyard cottage impossible to build. A study out of Kent, Washington, for example, found that 85 percent of residential properties didn't have room to add an additional parking space that local rules mandated owners to have if they wanted to build a backyard cottage.
In 2023, Washington legalized accessory dwellings along with other middle housing options like fourplexes. But unless the property is near a major transit stop, homeowners still have to meet local parking mandates, whether or not they want or need the parking.
Since neighboring Oregon implemented its sweeping parking reforms in 2023, middle housing is sprouting up that would not have been possible under prior parking rules. One project, Grant Street Grow Homes, in Eugene, Oregon, was able to add four backyard homes without demolishing the existing primary house only because no off-street parking was required. The new homes are now selling for $96,000 each to qualified buyers.
The Grant Street Grow Homes are far from outliers in the Beaver State. In Portland, 79 percent of homes permitted since the 2021 middle housing reform ...

The Next Big Thing in Low-Cost Housing Feb 17, 2025

Meet MDUs, a low-cost, fast-build, flexible solution for more homes now.
Communities across Cascadia face a dire shortage of homes that is driving up prices and rents for everyone. From seniors wanting to downsize and age in place, to young people starting out and seeking apartments near their jobs, to families needing more space and nearby schools for their kids, people across the region need more homes, in all shapes and sizes, to suit their various stages of life, price points, and preferences.
Leaders in Washington state have listened to their constituents and answered by passing numerous bills to legalize or re-legalize more kinds of housing, earning 2023 the moniker "the year of housing" and 2024 "the year of housing 2.0." Among these measures was one to boost the construction of accessory dwelling units (ADUs) - also known as backyard cottages, in-law apartments, or bonus homes.
ADUs have been a key element of adding "gentle density" in neighborhoods across the state, but their costs can still prove prohibitive. Enter: MDUs, or "mobile dwelling units" - a much less expensive, more flexible, and faster-built option that could be another integral tool in the toolbox for bringing much-needed homes online fast for Washingtonians. (We're using the term "MDU" in this article to align with a legislative proposal concerning this housing type in Cascadia. Elsewhere, they're known by terms including "tiny homes on wheels," "movable tiny homes," and "vehicular residential facilities." Same general idea, though.)
And Washington wouldn't be blazing any trails if it legalized this housing form. Other jurisdictions, from Oakland, California, to Portland, Oregon, have done so in recent years and seen a modest but meaningful uptake in their construction.
Below, Portland-based Kol Peterson, an early proponent of MDUs, and Sightline Housing and Cities Senior Director Dan Bertolet answer common questions about them. Peterson's general contracting company, TinyHookups LLC, specializes in electrical and plumbing hookups installation for MDUs and has installed them for about 25 properties in the past few years, making these homes a reality for more of his neighbors.
What are MDUs?
A mobile dwelling unit, or MDU, is a movable home with utility connections located on a residential lot that also has a conventional home. An MDU could be a tiny house on wheels, a campervan conversion, a park model RV, or a standard RV. MDUs are a very inexpensive form of housing that can be rapidly deployed. MDUs address a gap in the low end of the cost spectrum that no other housing type can fill.
Why do we need state legislation for MDUs?
Most jurisdictions have tight restrictions or outright bans on the use of MDUs as legal residences. Washington state has a pressing need for more housing - especially homes that can be created quickly and that are affordable to lower-income residents without the need for public subsidy. Legislation is needed to set statewide standards that will enable homeowners to add MDUs to their properties predictably and safely.
What would Washington's proposed MDU bill do?
SB 5332 would legalize one MDU on any residential lot that already has a primary dwelling on it and is located within an urban growth area. Consistent with standard regulations in RV parks, it would require locally permitted connections to the MDU for water, sewer, and electricity but would not require any permitting or inspections of the MDU itself.
How affordable are MDUs?
MDUs with full bathrooms and kitchens sell for anywhere from $10,000-$200,000 and are commonly available new and used throughout the state. Connections for sewer, water, and electrical, plus site preparation, typically cost in the range of $15,000. For comparison, stand-alone accessory dwelling units (ADU) typically cost $250,000 to $500,000.
How quickly can MDUs be deployed?
Once the infrastructure has been installed, an MDU can be set up in as little as a day or two. Getting the utility connect...

Washington Bill Would Cap Excessive Parking Mandates Around the State Feb 17, 2025

More trees, senior living, daycares, and lower-cost housing for Washington cities and towns - and less pavement.
In 2023 Washington state adopted a raft of bills unlocking more home choices, at more affordable prices, in cities and towns across the state. It was hailed as the year of housing.
The 2025 legislative session could be the year of parking reform, with the promise of taming rents and housing costs, curbing sprawling development, and prioritizing things communities want, like trees, affordable housing, senior living facilities, and daycares, rather than unneeded pavement.
Last week, Washington state housing affordability champion Senator Jessica Bateman introduced the Parking Reform and Modernization Act, SB 5184. The bill would cap how many parking spots local governments can require for new homes and commercial buildings, and give full parking flexibility to a set of building types that need it the most. The bill also has a companion in the House of Representatives: HB 1299, sponsored by Representative Strom Peterson.
Commonly adopted in the 1950s and '60s, parking mandates prescribe a pre-determined number of parking spaces for every new building, assigning unique quotas for hundreds of different uses, from churches to bowling alleys, butterfly breeding facilities to daycares. These regulations increase construction costs, outlaw traditional main streets and historic neighborhoods, block building conversions from one use to another, and make entire properties impossible to build on simply because they lack space for a sprawling parking lot. What's worse: many of those mandatory parking spots end up sitting empty. Despite the ubiquity of highly specific parking mandates in local permitting, city officials rarely know where the numbers originated but must enforce them nonetheless.
This legislation would set a new course by creating consistent statewide standards to unlock more opportunities for homes and small businesses alike. And to be clear, it would not ban parking: builders would still be free to include as much parking as they decide they need.
The bill is scheduled for a hearing are the Senate Housing committee on Friday January 24th.
What the bill does
In short, SB 5184:
Caps residential mandates at 0.5-1 parking space per home
Caps commercial mandates at 1 parking space per 1,000 square feet
Provides full parking flexibility for building types that need it the most
Applies everywhere in Washington, towns large and small
Expands existing transit exemptions for housing
Does NOT place any restrictions on how much parking people can build if they deem it right for their project to succeed
Caps residential mandates at 0.5-1 parking space per home
In the past two years, the Washington state legislature has legalized granny flats, fourplexes, and co-living buildings statewide. But outside of a tiny portion of urban residential lots near frequent transit that those bills exempted, excessive parking mandates continue to undercut home building.
In Pasco, for example, the rules require two parking spots for every apartment. In Marysville, code mandates six parking spots for a duplex. Meanwhile, nearly sixty percent of Washington renter households only own one car or no car at all.
To keep unnecessary parking mandates from hindering much-needed new homes and affordability, SB 5184 would prevent towns and cities from requiring more than 1 parking space per home. Counties and non-code cities would allow even more flexibility, with caps set at 0.5 parking spaces per home. This latter ratio would apply to larger cities, including Aberdeen, Bellingham, Bremerton, Everett, Seattle, Richland, Tacoma, Vancouver, and Yakima.
Allowing builders to go below one parking spot per home enables natural "unbundling" in multifamily buildings. When there are fewer spaces than homes, owners have to charge for parking separately, and that lets tenants who don't want a parking space save money on total rent. Single-detached houses in thos...

Worried about Infrastructure Costs? Then End the Apartment Ban Feb 17, 2025

Allowing more homes, in all shapes and sizes, makes it easier and cheaper for communities to tackle infrastructure challenges.
Editor's note: Sightline Institute is co-publishing this article with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. View its version here.
The costs of public infrastructure are becoming the go-to excuse for restrictive zoning policies in British Columbia. These policies effectively ban apartments on most residential land and reserve it exclusively for low-density housing like detached houses.
As one newspaper headline put it, "Density is coming to BC municipalities. Leaders don't know how they'll pay for it." On its surface, the objection to density on infrastructure grounds may sound reasonable, but it gets things backwards.
As researchers and good planners have long understood, it's far cheaper to build and maintain public infrastructure to service denser forms of housing than it is to service low-density sprawl. It's one of those intuitive truths that is also borne out by decades of research.
Imagine the infrastructure needed to service 100 homes in an apartment building compared to 100 houses in a low-density suburban development. When homes are farther apart, they require longer pipes, wires, and roads to connect them, raising costs. And spreading out homes farther from important services and amenities increases the demand on transit and roads.
British Columbia undoubtedly needs to invest more in public infrastructure both to replace aging assets and to support new construction that alleviates existing housing shortages. This includes investments in new and upgraded sewers, water pipes, power lines, rapid transit, roads, libraries, schools, and hospitals, which both cities and senior governments must contribute to funding.
But housing density is not the problem. Indeed, by imposing low-density zoning, cities have been making the challenge of paying for infrastructure harder, not easier.
Infrastructure concerns: The new exclusionary zoning?
The well-known infrastructure cost savings of density still aren't reflected in the land use planning policies enforced by cities in Metro Vancouver. In fact, since the provincial government enacted legislation prodding municipalities to reform zoning and allow more housing, some municipalities and housing opponents have claimed that more density would add to their infrastructure woes.
In the lead-up to the October provincial election, the Union of BC Municipalities (UBCM) warned that, in light of provincial housing legislation, "costly upgrades to water, sewer, and roads are required to expand capacity and enable the creation of new high-density housing."
What new housing opponents don't say is that when cities use restrictive zoning to block apartments on most of their land, they steer new housing disproportionately into low-density suburban development - with higher infrastructure costs.
Others have warned against new housing on the premise that we have a shortage of schools and teachers for the next generation. This could be an excellent argument to hire more teachers or to build more schools, but it is a dubious argument against much-needed housing. Some may simply be disguising an argument against population growth as an argument against density.
The infrastructure gap is real, but apartment bans make it worse
Cities are flagging a real issue when they raise infrastructure concerns. Canada has a widely recognized infrastructure deficit owing to decades of underinvestment. At the low end, it's estimated that Canada has an accumulated infrastructure gap of $150 billion; at the higher end, up to $1 trillion. In British Columbia, UBCM estimates that "over $24 billion in core infrastructure alone needs to be replaced within the next ten years."
But to tackle that infrastructure deficit and address the housing shortage, ending apartment bans and allowing denser housing is a critical part of the solution, including cost-effectively building out the necessary s...

Can You Guess the AI-Generated Parking Mandate? Feb 07, 2025

AI doesn't know how many parking spaces a coffee shop in Tumwater will need in 2040. Nobody else does, either.
Artificial intelligence is coming to write your city's zoning codes.
Or is it? Most people assume their town's zoning rules are carefully tailored by educated planners to meet today's best practices while also ensuring future buildings integrate well with the existing community. Unfortunately, that's not really how it works in practice. The fact is that inside government offices around Cascadia, city staff are stuck enforcing rules they inherited from decades past, often having lost any explanation for the original requirements, though they continue to dictate how land can be used.
Among the worst of these regulations are parking mandates - a predetermined number of parking spaces required for every new home, business, or public building. These numbers were frequently copy-pasted from one city to the next or adopted from the average of a small number of parking studies. In Sightline's research on parking mandates across Washington state, we found that one town could require up to nine or twelve times the number of parking spaces for the same type of building as in another.
At some point we wondered if anyone would notice a difference between parking mandates that were generated by a computer rather than by a team of degreed city planners and administrators, plus zoning boards and city councils. So we enlisted Chat GPT, one of the most popular artificial intelligence (AI) tools, to produce parking mandates for several building uses. We gave the system zero inputs, keeping all of our research separate from the inquiry.
Now we challenge Sightline readers to see if they can spot the AI-generated parking mandates from the real ones. A note that we edited real and AI-generated mandates for uniformity, clarity, and grammar, according to our editing standards - and to ensure you can't spot the difference based solely on writing style.
Play the game at www.sightline.org

Parking Reform Alone Can Boost Homebuilding by 40 to 70 Percent Feb 07, 2025

More evidence that parking flexibility is key to housing abundance.
Making parking fully flexible could unlock more new homes than other land use reforms combined, according to new research out of Colorado that modeled how multiple policies would impact economic feasibility for new housing projects.
The findings add to a growing body of evidence that making off-street parking optional is a small policy change that can lead to an abundance of new homes. Even though all the buildings modeled in the analysis voluntarily included parking, allowing homebuilders to create less parking made the biggest difference. In fact, building at lower home-to-parking-space ratios than what Colorado cities currently require could result in 40 to 70 percent more homes than are feasible to build today, the study found.
"Requiring more parking than the market demands leads to inefficient outcomes,"
researcher Ian Carlton explained.
"Excess parking takes up space in buildings that could otherwise be housing, adds costs that are seldom offset by revenues, and can determine whether certain types of housing projects fit on sites of various sizes. [Real estate modeling group] MapCraft's pro forma evaluations capture all three of these factors."
Compared to other zoning reforms such as legalizing ADUs or increasing building heights near transit, parking reform proved to be two to three times more effective at boosting housing supply.
Lower parking ratios increase homebuilding more than legalizing both granny flats and apartments near transit
The analysis, done by ECOnorthwest and MapCraft, looked at 19 counties across Colorado, representing about 90 percent of the state population and where nearly all future population growth is projected to occur. To estimate outcomes under different policy options, MapCraft generated potential development opportunities on eligible parcels and then found what would be competitive under current market conditions.
The 86-page report takes a deep dive into the outcomes of different combinations of housing policies. (Spoiler: more reforms = more housing.) But what caught our eye was one finding that compared eliminating parking mandates by itself against two other pro-housing reforms.
Accessory dwelling units (ADUs) allowed one backyard cottage per property without additional utility fees or owner occupancy requirements. The analysis assumed one parking space per ADU, unless local governments required more.
Transit-oriented development (TOD) would allow multifamily housing within a half-mile of rail and bus rapid transit stations and within a quarter-mile of bus routes with 15-minute service or better. Both existing and planned transit were taken into account, and local parking minimums were not adjusted for this scenario.
Parking, under the fully flexible parking policy, was still incorporated into new buildings at a rate of one parking space for every two homes in transit-oriented areas and one parking space per home in all other areas. Those ratios were based on real-world findings from Seattle after the city relaxed parking mandates in 2012. These results were compared to current local parking minimums in the baseline model.
If state legislators had to pick just one of these to throw their weight behind, the winner was clear: Fully flexible parking would result in more new homes than legalizing granny flats and larger multifamily buildings near transit combined, even if every new building still included some amount of parking.
When considering the policy influence along transit routes, increasing the allowed building size would be only a fraction as effective as allowing flexible parking quantities for what's already legal under zoning today.
Over a wider geography, parking reform still came out as the most effective policy for homebuilding. And that's when every new apartment outside the transit zones still built one parking space for every home.
The increase in potential homes was primarily driven by already-feasib...

The History of Washington's Wandering Election Day Feb 07, 2025

Despite intending to choose a voting day that's best for voters, timing could still be easier - and legislators can fix that.
For the past 50 years, Washington has held municipal elections in November of odd-numbered years, separate from other federal, state, and county elections. Most voters are too young to remember when the state's municipal elections happened on different dates, but the timing of elections has never been set in stone. Now, given the changes to voting that the state has enacted since the last date change - namely, mail-in voting - it may be time for another update to when Washington holds Election Day. Legislators could follow through on the goals of their predecessors, to say nothing of the overwhelming preference of voters, and continue to make voting easier by moving municipal elections to even-numbered years.
Early date changes consolidated most elections
Washington has never held national and municipal elections on the same day. When the state was founded in 1889, municipal elections were held annually on the first Tuesday in December. Then, the state legislature changed the timing of elections five times in the first half of the 20th century:
1907: Elections moved to the first Tuesday in April.
1921: The date moved to the first Tuesday in May. The wording of the law specified that elections were held "in the year in which they may be called." This phrasing suggests that elections could be held in either odd- or even-numbered years, based on the politicians' terms of office.
1923: The state moved elections to the second Tuesday in March.
1955: Elections were set for March of even-numbered years so that they happened in the same year as federal, state, and county elections, but in a different month.
1963: The election date for the largest cities changed to the first Tuesday in November of odd-numbered years. The law did not take effect until 1967. After an Executive Session in 1975-76, this change applied to all cities and towns in the state.
Five date changes in less than 100 years is a lot; state lawmakers certainly have not always aligned on the best time to hold elections. And many of the updates have complicated caveats - some of these date changes only affected the larger "Class A" and "Class AA" counties, for example. The change in 1955 did not apply if it conflicted with a city's charter. So, large cities with a charter provision that required elections in an odd-numbered year on a date other than the first Tuesday in November were allowed to keep that date; other large cities moved their elections to the first Tuesday in November of odd numbered years; and smaller cities still held their elections in March of either even- or odd-numbered years.
In those early years, lawmakers seem to have been trying to figure out the best timing for local elections. What were they aiming for?
The reasoning behind the change in 1963
Alas, historical records don't include the reasoning behind most of the earlier changes. But the Office of the Secretary of State wrote an Explanatory Comment for the 1963 change, which suggests that the Secretary is focused on making voting easier for voters.
The first reason the office offered for moving elections to November of odd-numbered years was to "re-unite the holding of city elections with school districts elections." In addition, the explanatory comment said the change "would establish September and November of each year as a consistent time for holding of elections. It would make sense to the voters, and the cities, towns, and districts concerned would be able to share the costs of elections." The Secretary likely noticed that the convoluted timing across different cities was not easy for voters or election administrators.
The 1963 bill also moved port elections in King and Pierce counties from November of even-numbered years to odd-numbered years. The Explanatory Comment says that the goal of that shift was to reduce the "overcrowding of state election ballots."
To ...

A Magic Boost for Low-Turnout City Elections Feb 07, 2025

Seattle's 2024 special city council election showed just how easily local voter participation could skyrocket.
First-time candidate for Seattle City Council Alexis Mercedes Rinck just got more votes in her 2024 race than the city's mayor, Bruce Harrell, when he won in 2021. In fact, she got more votes than any elected official in all elections that Seattle city government has ever recorded.
But it's not because she's particularly popular. (Plenty of other candidates have achieved a similar margin of victory.) It's just that she ran for office in an even-numbered year. Even the candidate Rinck defeated, Tanya Woo, got more votes than almost all other city leaders when they won their respective elections.
Rinck and Woo had the good fortune to run for office in a rare special election, which happened to appear on the same ballot as the major league offices of US president and Washington governor. Other city politicians in Seattle, as across Washington, normally run in odd-numbered years, when a fraction of as many voters bother to show up.
The result: King County voter turnout in the 2024 November election is on track to more than double the turnout in the 2023 November election (79.9 percent to 37.3 percent). And that's how Rinck can claim support from many more voters than anyone else in city hall.
Rinck earned around one-and-a-half times more votes than other recent at-large city candidates. She received 65,000 more votes than Teresa Mosqueda, who won the same at-large Position 8 seat in 2021.
Mayoral elections typically net the highest voter participation of any city election. But over 100,000 more people voted in Rinck's election than in the previous odd-numbered-year mayoral race. Far more voters voted in the 2024 city council race than in any recent previous city office election, as depicted in the chart below.
Rinck handily beat her opponent, Tanya Woo (58 percent to 41 percent), but even the defeated Woo received more votes than the winning at-large council candidates did in 2021. In fact, though Woo lost in 2024, she earned more votes than any winning city officeholder in recent elections, except current mayor Bruce Harrell.
Was this election, then, asphyxiated by the toxic presidential race that sucked up an outsized share of media attention? No. Were the ballots too long for voters to understand, as the Seattle Times suggested, forcing people to drop their pens and stop voting? Certainly not.
Instead, the takeaway from this special election is that more voters participate when voting is easy: when they're doing it anyway. It's much easier to look up one more position and fill in one more bubble when you're already completing a ballot than it is to open, research, and fill out an entirely new one at another time. And that lessened effort shows in this year's participation numbers.
State legislators could allow localities to more consistently take advantage of this simple participation boost by allowing them to move their elections to even-numbered years. Then cities could be freed to access a more engaged electorate during every election, rather than just a one-off special circumstance.

Reintroducing: Your Local Library, a Critical Tool for Democracy Feb 06, 2025

A Q&A with author and advocate Shamichael Hallman on how public libraries can help us rebuild civic trust and connection - if we redefine our relationship with them.
"A community is not a machine. It is not a cogs-and-gears device or an elegant algorithm designed by an engineer to maximize efficiency. A community is a garden: a complex adaptive ecosystem in which all kinds of life is striving to thrive, a riot of diversity with the potential for both beautiful bounty and terrible chaos. Left to itself, a garden will eventually be overrun by weeds. Gardens require gardeners. There are no better gardeners of our democracy than public librarians."
Eric Liu, CEO and cofounder of Citizen University, in the foreword to Meet Me at the Library
As Cascadians from Oregon to Alaska, British Columbia to the Rockies, process their respective election results and reflect further on the health of the democratic institutions that support their communities, they might take heart from the lessons of a new book exploring the public library as a space of critical civic engagement. Author Shamichael Hallman, Director of Civic Health and Economic Opportunity with Urban Libraries Council, writes of a space that joins people together from all walks of life and offers resources to learn, connect, and realize their shared priorities.
Below Hallman shares ideas from his long and varied experience working with public libraries, including his own path to library advocacy, stories from Pacific Northwest libraries, and ways to learn more and get involved. Read more by purchasing - or checking out from your library! - his book, Meet Me At the Library: A Place to Foster Social Connection and Promote Democracy.
How did you first connect with the world of public libraries?
I share this story often because it holds a special place in my heart. Some of my fondest childhood memories revolve around public libraries. As an introverted, highly sensitive kid, libraries were one of the few places where I felt truly safe. The librarians were always kind, I could always discover new comic books, and they had the best encyclopedias. One of my favorite reads was Encyclopedia Brown, a series of children's novels from the 1960s about boy detective Leroy Brown. I'd sit in the library for hours, reading those stories and then trying to write my own versions. Some days, I'd just people-watch. Occasionally, there were fun programs where I could meet others. The library became my home away from home.
My professional journey into the world of libraries began in 2016. That year, I had a conversation with the Memphis Public Library system about a potential opportunity to develop and coordinate library services for teens. The role was exciting - it involved working alongside librarians and teen specialists throughout the system to create engaging, customer-centered activities and programs. It also included responsibilities like enhancing teen-focused digital services, designing metrics to evaluate program effectiveness, recruiting and retaining participants, and aligning everything with the library's strategic plan.
At the time, I was working for an incredible megachurch in Memphis, where I held various leadership roles that allowed me to explore and refine innovative approaches to community building and technology. In addition, I had spent the previous three years co-organizing a global faith-based hackathon series, which kept me deeply connected to emerging technologies. While the library role initially aligned with many of my interests and skills, the timing simply wasn't right. However, less than a year later, the library approached me with a new opportunity: helping to oversee the renovation of a historic branch in downtown Memphis, the Cossitt Library. This time, the timing was perfect. The role allowed me to fully integrate my expertise in technology, community engagement, strategic planning, and public speaking. It became a defining moment in my life and career, marking a ...

Election Reform Measures Lost; Election Reform Didn’t Feb 06, 2025

What to learn - and what to leave behind - from the 2024 ballot measure losses in Cascadia.
Sooner or later, bad things happen to everyone. That's inevitable. The problem is that people often learn the wrong lessons from their misfortunes.
Across Cascadia and beyond, proponents of unified primaries and ranked choice voting just had bad things happen to them. They lost four out of five statewide ballot measures in Cascadia and matched that record elsewhere. What's important now is to avoid learning the wrong lesson.
The wrong lesson would be that winning a better democracy is hopeless - an impossible get.
It is not. It's just hard. You lose more often than you win. You have to keep trying, even when the odds are against you. In fact, you have to study your losses assiduously and learn from them: they reveal the obstacles between you and victory. As Thomas Edison said about the trial and error required to invent the light bulb, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that don't work."
You have to persevere because success, when it comes, brings immense payoffs. Open primaries and ranked choice voting are steps toward a public sector that can better do its jobs, from educating children to maintaining roads, from safeguarding borders to defending rights, from policing crime to cleaning the air. Specifically, unified primaries and ranked choice voting upgrade representation, dampen extremism and polarization, and favor leaders intent on governing, rather than grandstanding. They yield a public sector that is better able to solve problems.
Losing and winning
Proponents of reform swelled with optimism in 2024 as one after another state put change on its ballot: in Idaho, Montana, and Oregon within Cascadia, and in five states outside Cascadia. Conversely, they grew concerned about an attempt to repeal open primaries and ranked choice voting in Alaska.
The win/loss record left many of them disheartened (see table). Alaska was the only state where pro-reform votes topped 50 percent. Voters there rejected an attempt to repeal its model election system, but the final ballot gap was only 0.2 percentage points, barely a win.
The measure next closest to winning on the list of Cascadian questions was Montana's Constitutional Initiative 126, which captured almost 49 percent of votes. It would have enacted unified, all-candidate, top-four primaries for most federal and state elections.
Trailing behind with 42 percent support was Oregon's Measure 117, which would have used ranked choice voting in both party primaries and general elections for federal and statewide executive offices.
Then came another Montana Constitutional Initiative, number 127, which required majority winners in Montana elections, but left the state legislature to decide how to achieve that goal. The logical options would have been instant runoffs with ranked choice voting or delayed conventional runoffs. The measure gained support of less than 40 percent.
Finally, Idaho Proposition 1, which would have replicated Alaska's system of open, top-four primaries and ranked choice general elections in the Gem State, lagged the field. A little more than 30 percent of voters cast their ballots in its favor.
In sum, therefore, November 5 brought one win (by a hair), one near miss, and three lopsided losses for election reform in Cascadia. Meanwhile, elsewhere, Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada rejected reform with support in the mid-forties, and South Dakota did so in the low forties. Among the ten ballot measures in populous jurisdictions for electoral reforms involving open primaries or ranked choice voting (five within and five without Cascadia), only in Washington, DC, did voters newly embrace reform. They did so with enthusiasm, approving ranked choice voting by 73 percent.
Losing expensively
One source of encouragement in this gloomy picture is that Cascadian places familiar with ranked choice voting, including Benton County, Oregon, and the state of Alaska (which already ...

Lessons for Washington State Leaders as Another US Oil Refinery Closes Feb 06, 2025

In a state home to five oil refineries, a forthcoming, taxpayer-funded study can answer some central questions.
Yet another US oil refinery will soon shut its doors. Phillips 66 announced in October 2024 that it will close its Los Angeles refinery by the end of 2025, due to factors that include declining oil demand and slim refining margins. An estimated 900 people are likely to lose their jobs when the refinery shutters.
Phillips 66's decision to close its Los Angeles refinery comes after reports earlier this year that the corporation planned to divest from $3 billion of its assets. And the news continues the ongoing trend of refinery closures across the United States. Seven US refineries closed between 2019 and 2022, according to Sightline's research. At least one other, in Houston, Texas, will shutter in 2025. More refineries will undoubtedly close as oil demand slows and then peaks, an event likely to occur before 2030.
Phillips 66 also owns a refinery in Ferndale, one of five in Washington state. News of the Los Angeles closure re-ups the urgency for Washington leaders to start a transition plan now for the future of the state's refining communities.
Lawmakers have an opportunity with a forthcoming refinery study from the state Department of Commerce. Legislators who requested the study - and invested $250,000 of public funds in it - can make sure the final product hews to its original intent and helps set Washington up for a better, more resilient future: one with clean air and water for nearby residents and Tribes, support for refinery workers, economic stability and tax and employment diversification for towns and counties that host the state's refineries, and a pathway to meeting Washington's climate goals.
The Phillips 66 oil refinery has polluted Los Angeles's Wilmington neighborhood for decades
Residents of Wilmington, the neighborhood in South Los Angeles where the soon-to-be-closed Phillips 66 refinery and several others are based, have breathed in the refinery's toxic pollution for decades - and suffered the health consequences that come with that. Just one example: one in three Wilmington households includes a member with cancer, compared to the US average of one in ten.
The Phillips 66 refinery has spewed on average more than 1,000 pounds of chemicals every day into Wilmington's air since 2000, including hydrogen cyanide, ammonia, and hydrogen sulfide, according to analysis by the environmental news outlet Grist. Unsurprisingly, then, many local environmental and community activists welcomed the news of the refinery's closure, while expressing concern for the laid-off workers.
Locals worry site will follow other shuttered refineries' fates
Still, Phillips 66 has not yet announced what will come next for the site, leaving some residents concerned that pollution could continue.
"I hope that Phillips 66 doesn't plan another polluting operation…continuing the trend of fossil fuels that are fueling the catastrophe of illnesses in the neighborhood and in the climate,"
Alicia Rivera, an organizer with the California environmental justice group, Communities for a Better Environment, told LAist.
Sightline's 2022 report on recent US refinery closures shows Rivera is right to be worried about what will come next. Four of the seven US refineries that closed between 2019 and 2022 converted to processing biofuels, in most cases with a sliver of their former workforce, no environmental remediation of the sites, and continued local pollution. Two refineries are keeping skeletal operations open to store oil or "idle" indefinitely, laying off almost all of their workers and shirking responsibility for environmental cleanup.
Only one of the seven, in Philadelphia, is being redeveloped entirely into a complex of e-commerce warehouses and life sciences buildings, which developers have branded the "Bellwether District." Even so, some local residents, who, like those in Wilmington, have suffered from decades of toxic pollution, a...

Three Ways Anchorage Leaders Could Unlock More Homes Feb 06, 2025

The ordinances under consideration offer commonsense solutions to address the city's longstanding housing shortage.
$524,000. That's the average price of a home built for one family in Anchorage today. The average cost of new single-detached house is even steeper: $683,000. These prices, astronomical for Anchorage, have risen by 23 percent since 2020.
In that same period, the city took steps to make its zoning code, Title 21, more conducive to building homes. In 2022, Anchorage abolished parking mandates, giving homebuilders more flexibility to decide how much square footage to give over to cars versus the interiors of homes and businesses. In 2023, the city made it easier to build accessory dwelling units - a.k.a. "bonus homes" or "backyard cottages" - and opened up downtown to more businesses that support locals. In 2024, Anchorage removed some regulatory barriers to building triplexes and fourplexes and allowed duplexes on all lots in the Anchorage Bowl, where most of the city's residents live.
While Anchorage can't completely control the housing market, the city continues to make changes where it can. Title 21, which determines how Anchorage uses its land, still contains countless impediments to building the homes that people in Alaska's largest city badly need.
New ordinances coming up in the Anchorage Assembly could help alleviate the shortage by lifting arcane rules that in effect bar developers from building more homes, in all shapes and sizes - not just your basic nuclear family model. More apartments for singles and downsizing seniors. More modest-sized homes for young or divorced families. More accessory dwelling units for aging relatives. More multigenerational homes for grandparents, grown kids, and extended family. In short, more options for the wide range of people who call Anchorage home.
More flexibility for homes and businesses to mix in urban zones
Anchorage assigns different rules to different parcels of land. Each set of rules defines what's known as a zone. There are 15 zones across the city, all with rules restricting what kinds of buildings can go on a particular property, such as homes, schools, shops, and restaurants. Zoning rules also set out the maximum heights of buildings, the minimum sizes of lots, the width of the margin between buildings and streets, and how many homes developers can build on each lot. Some zones only allow commercial development. Others allow only residential or only industrial.
One zone, called "B-3," is more flexible than most. B-3 is a mixed-use zone, meaning its rules allow housing and businesses to coexist on a lot. Think an ice cream shop, bookstore, and dental practice on the first floor, with housing above. This flexibility makes it popular with developers of multifamily homes, primarily Cook Inlet Housing Authority. The parcels tend to be located in more urbanized parts of Anchorage, giving residents relatively convenient access to schools, workplaces, parks, and amenities.
The Anchorage Assembly is considering an ordinance, AO 2024-102, aimed at lowering the cost of homebuilding in B-3. Currently, residential developments face more stringent limitations in the B-3 zone than businesses. For example, building garden apartments would face more code barriers, like lower height limits and mandatory architectural elements, than a motel with the exact same dimensions and number of units. The ordinance essentially would put residential developments in B-3 on the same regulatory footing as commercial ones.
The ordinance would also do away with mandated private open space, like dedicated yards or balconies for each apartment. While private open space sounds like a great idea on paper, making such space mandatory can limit the number of possible units and the viability of projects, while not necessarily improving the quality of the development. Dropping the private open space requirement is similar to the city's decision to get rid of parking mandates. As for parking, so too...

Alaskans Keep Their Model Election System Feb 06, 2025

The open primaries and ranked choice voting that have delivered more representation for independents and moderate Republicans survived a repeal effort.
Alaska voters narrowly decided to retain their groundbreaking election system. By a margin of just 664 votes, a ballot initiative to roll back open, top-four primaries and ranked choice general elections failed. The Alaska Division of Elections announced the unofficial results on Wednesday.
A recount is likely because the margin was just 0.2 percent. Support for "yes, repeal the system" stood at 49.9 percent. On the other side, 50.1 percent of voters opted for "no, let's not repeal the system." In just the few years it's been in effect, it has delivered more inclusive and less partisan primary elections, more room for lawmakers to govern in less polarized ways, the elimination of the "spoiler candidate" role, and a far reduced chance that candidates win elections without majority support.
Alaska's system has two key components. In the open primary, voters choose one favorite from a list of all the candidates, regardless of voters' or candidates' party affiliation - or nonaffiliation, as is the case for a large portion of Alaska voters. The top four candidates in each race advance to the ranked choice general election. In general election races with three or more candidates, voters rank the contenders from most to least favorite.
The system has allowed a small but significant number of more moderate candidates to run and win in Alaska. It has also given the state's large share of independent voters more say in who gets elected and allowed all voters the option to vote for candidates from different parties in both the primary and general elections. It's part of the reason Alaska's legislature will likely form a bipartisan majority in the state Senate and, most likely, the state House.
The system does not inherently favor one party over the other, but the victory in 2022 of US Rep. Mary Peltola, the first Democrat to represent Alaska in the US House in decades, prompted some Republicans to mistakenly believe that it had. Peltola's win in 2022 against Republicans Sarah Palin and Nick Begich came about because of poor strategy choices by Republican party leaders, not because of the election system. (Instead of sniping at each other, Begich and Palin should have teamed up.)
Other Republicans, however, including US Senator Lisa Murkowski, state Senator Cathy Giessel, and former state Representative Jesse Sumner, all benefited from the system because it enabled them to draw support from voters with an array of political preferences. They spoke out publicly in support and brought some Republicans into the fold, despite pushback from the Alaska Republican Party.
Support from these prominent Republicans ensured the system had enough cross-partisan appeal for Alaskans across the political spectrum to retain it. Looking at the presidential results, about 55 percent of Alaskans voted for former President Donald Trump. A small but critical segment of those voters also opted to keep the open primaries and ranked choice voting election system.
The repeal effort started taking shape in 2023 with a signature-gathering campaign spearheaded by Philip Izon and failed US Senate candidate Kelly Tshibaka. The effort eventually drew the attention of the Alaska Public Offices Commission (APOC) for multiple campaign violations, including money laundering through a bogus church in Washington state. For instance, APOC officials in January recommended the group be fined $95,000 for violating state campaign laws. The repeal effort never succeeded in attracting the monetary support that's crucial to winning campaigns. As of October, it reported raising about $127,000.
The initiative's opposition campaign drew enormous sums of money from funders based outside Alaska who believe open primaries and ranked choice voting are critical to tempering political polarization. Key funders included Unite America and Art...

Portland Election Delivers City's Most Representative Council Ever Feb 06, 2025

Proportional ranked choice voting lived up to the promises of the voter-approved charter reform.
Well, it's working!
Portlanders just used proportional ranked choice voting to elect their most representative city government in more than a century. Voters chose leaders who form a portrait of the city in miniature. The dozen councilors include three renters, five people of color, six women, eight millennials (one only 28 years old), and residents of twelve different neighborhoods. Most importantly, proportional representation paved the way for a council that reflects Portlanders' varied political beliefs, full of advocates for different viewpoints from business to labor, from moderates to progressives, and even from animal rights to transportation safety.
After years of thoughtful proposals, discussions, committees, and implementation, Portland got its first real-world look at a system that will hopefully serve the city well for generations. The upgraded council will govern alongside a new mayor who promised to be laser-focused on ending unsheltered homelessness, aided by a streamlined set of departments working in tandem under a professional city administrator. The next step? Getting to work on the city's most pressing problems.
A remarkably smooth and transparent election
Critics feared that ranked choice voting would be too complicated and onerous for administrators to manage. They projected chaos and raised alarms about undecipherable algorithms.
Nope.
The officials at Multnomah County Elections pulled off the implementation without a hitch, after only two years to prepare. Commentators from Multnomah County itself to the Oregonian called the election remarkably smooth and transparent. The elections office released preliminary results every few days during the ballot counting process as planned. Media outlets were able to call some winners based on large vote shares on election night, then confirm other seats within a few days. The closest races still depend on the last sets of ballots to arrive, just like under the old election system. And election officials are on track to finalize results before the legal certification deadline.
The biggest surprise from the tabulation was not its controversy but its consistency. Mayor-elect Keith Wilson started ahead in the first round of counting, with 34 percent of first-choice votes. No other candidate had more than 23 percent. Wilson stayed ahead until he gained a majority in the 19th round of counting.
Similarly, the top three candidates in the first round won council seats in all but one district. In the remaining District 4, which includes every voter west of the Willamette River and some Southeast neighborhoods, Eric Zimmerman started in fourth place, 112 votes behind initial third-place candidate Eli Arnold. But Zimmerman overtook Arnold in later rounds. In all the races, results remained mostly unchanged all week, as election workers counted additional ballots.
Multiple rounds of tabulation didn't substantially change the orderings of candidates, but ranked choice voting still had major impacts on this election. Vote transfers confirmed that a majority of voters supported Keith Wilson for mayor in the final round, a significant increase from the first round when he only received one-third of first-choice votes. In council races, candidates who passed the 25 percent threshold in later rounds started with as low as 10 percent of first-choice votes in a crowded field. Moreover, since ranked choice voting is better at avoiding spoilers in multi-candidate fields than the old pick-one method, Portland was able to eliminate the primary election, and voter turnout nearly doubled compared with the low-turnout primary elections that used to elect most city commissioners.
Mayor-elect Wilson might not have survived the prior system: the outsider eco-trucking CEO likely would have been eliminated in the former May primary in favor of two sitting commissioners, who were more familiar (and...

Parking Mandates Are Keeping Kids Out of Daycare Dec 11, 2024

But cities can ditch these arbitrary rules and help families out of the daycare desert.
Children can't drive cars. Yet across Cascadia, onerous rules defining how much parking new daycares must provide on-site are blocking those wee non-drivers - and their families - from the care they need. Even as the majority of families live in childcare deserts, jurisdictions that enforce mandatory parking minimums make it difficult or impossible to permit new daycares if the sites are unable to meet that arbitrary asphalt standard, worsening the shortage.
Dana Christiansen has experienced this conflict firsthand. In 2023, she hoped to open a new daycare center for 100 children at a site she found in Clark County, Washington, near Ridgefield. After her offer for the property was accepted, she started working with an architect.
"We were having a hard time getting the building situated with the amount of playground that we require,"
Christiansen said.
"But parking is what killed it."
Christiansen is not a novice to the industry: she serves on the board of the Washington Childcare Center Association and has been a daycare owner for 24 years. But her expertise counted for nothing against the Clark County legal mandate of 2 parking spaces for every employee on the largest shift. For the 16 employees she estimated would be there at any given time, 32 parking spaces were required.
"Why do we need that many parking spaces?"
she lamented. Her center down the road in Vancouver runs fine with 8, she said.
But the law was the law, so Christiansen and her architect struggled to fit all the spaces in. They had found room for 29 spaces when the city reminded them of landscape islands, a design feature required for large parking lots to lessen their environmental impact. The additional space for those islands was the last straw that broke the project camel's back. Christiansen had to abandon her plans, and local families lost needed childcare as a result.
Death by a thousand regulations
This area of Clark County is considered a childcare desert, where there are at least three children under the age of five for each licensed childcare slot. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the shortage has deepened. At the end of 2023, the county still had 700 fewer daycare spots than were available in 2019.
Childcare scarcity is a common experience for parents in the Evergreen State. Sixty-three percent of Washington families live in a childcare desert, the sixth worst in the United States. The lack of access was estimated to cost $6.9 billion to Washington's economy in 2023.
There is no single explanation for how childcare got into such a crisis, and no single solution to fix it. Childcare is a notoriously tough business to balance economically, resulting in high costs for families and low wages for workers. State interventions to increase access to daycares typically involve subsidies, both to childcare centers and to families.
Additional funding isn't a cure-all, though.
"Our issues are a mile long,"
explained Christiansen. Back in the '90s, she recalled, the licensing requirements for childcare centers were 45 pages long. Now, it's 450 pages.
"The rules just keep coming,"
she said.
"We are one hundred precent over-regulated."
At the top of her list are new educational requirements for childcare providers. Even people currently operating and childcare programs must obtain new certifications by 2026 to retain their positions.
"We're not against higher education, but there's no vehicle to pay our teachers higher wages."
said Christiansen.
"It's a real crisis we have on our hands."
Trying to find an adequate site for a childcare facility is a whole other can of worms. Many cities restrict commercial daycares to small areas of town or force operators to obtain a conditional use permit - a time-consuming process ending in a committee vote. When Lakewood, Washington, updated its zoning code in 2023, daycare centers went from being allowed by right on just 4 percent of city l...

In Race after Race, People Keep Electing Pro-Housing Politicians Nov 27, 2024

Contrary to some misconceptions, most voters seem to understand that housing is good.
The claim comes again and again like clockwork: That allowing homes to exist can be hazardous to a politician's career.
Even at the annual picnic of her own neighborhood association, surrounded by pasta salad and barbeque, Jessica Bateman couldn't escape the threat.
It was summer 2019. In her first term as a city councilor in Olympia, Washington, Bateman had led a charge to legalize duplexes, fourplexes, and other small apartment buildings in much more of the city. A man who lived down the street from her confronted her about it at the picnic.
"I said, 'I think people are gonna like it,'"
Bateman recalled.
"And he said, 'Or we're just gonna vote you out of office!'"
Bateman did indeed draw a challenger for her council seat, who made the seemingly controversial new zoning code her central issue. But then Bateman defeated her by 33 points, carrying every precinct in the city.
It'd be hard to call Bateman's election victory a fluke - or Bateman's subsequent election to the state House of Representatives and then the state Senate, where she was immediately selected to chair the housing committee. Last week's results offer the latest evidence that in election after election politicians who support housing options like duplexes, townhomes, and apartments overwhelmingly tend to win their races.
In Washington, universal re-election for pro-housing legislators
Let's start with Washington, where Bateman quickly established herself as one of the state's leading housing advocates after her constituents sent her to the state Capitol. In 2023, she carried a law through the legislature that re-legalized so-called "missing middle" housing, like triplexes and townhomes, in cities across the state.
In a 2022 news report, the state's largest public radio station had called an earlier version of the concept "potentially career-ending." Now, 19 months after the contested but successful legislative votes over Bateman's House Bill 1110, we can test that notion:
Every single Washington legislator of either party who voted for Bateman's zoning bill and ran for re-election in 2024 ended up winning both their August primary and November general elections. Six other legislators, including Bateman, ran for new offices and won.
Meanwhile, only three legislators who had supported House Bill 1110 lost, all three after deciding to enter already-crowded races for higher office: Republican Jacquelin Maycumber, who ran for Congress and lost to Spokane County Treasurer Michael Baumgartner; Democrat Kevin Van De Wege, who ran for public lands commissioner and lost to King County Council member Dave Upthegrove; and Democrat Mark Mullet, who ran for governor and lost to Attorney General Bob Ferguson.
In Oregon, zoning reformers in both parties have been defeated only by other zoning reformers
Because Washington's bill was only passed last year, 18 of its supporters in the state senate haven't come up for reelection yet. So for a look at the longer-term political implications of a housing bill, let's check in on Oregon's very similar fourplex legalization from 2019. Every legislator who voted for that bill, House Bill 2001, has now been up for re-election at least once; House members have been up twice.
Five years later, fourplex supporters in Oregon continue to have a flawless electoral performance:
Out of 48 Oregon legislators who supported HB 2001 and subsequently ran again, only three have lost:
Republican Sen. Denyc Boles, who'd been appointed to fill a Democratic-leaning seat in Salem and lost to Congregational minister Deb Patterson, a Democrat who went on to co-sponsor a follow-up to the fourplex bill.
Republican Rep. Cheri Helt, who had won a Democratic-leaning seat in Bend after her opponent faced a sexual abuse scandal. Helt was then ousted after one term in favor of Jason Kropf, a Democrat who also went on to co-sponsor the follow-up fourplex bill.
Democratic Sen. Bet...

One of Washington’s Anti-Climate Initiatives, 2066, Eked Out a Victory. Why? Nov 26, 2024

And how leaders can still help families and businesses electrify for safer, cleaner buildings in line with the state's climate values.
Washingtonians narrowly approved Initiative 2066, the ballot measure that will hinder the state's efforts to reduce climate pollution from buildings. It is the only one of the four state ballot measures backed by conservative group Let's Go Washington that voters passed. I-2066 squeaked by with a 3-point margin, according to the latest vote tally, with 90 percent of ballots counted. That's compared to the whopping 24-point margin by which voters rejected I-2117, which would have repealed the state's cap-and-invest law, the Climate Commitment Act. (Environmental groups are promising legal challenges to the constitutionality of I-2066.)
The choice to pass I-2066 but reject I-2117 is contradictory, as I wrote before the election. In essence, it was a vote to maintain a cap on emissions, while rejecting tools that could actually reduce emissions.
What explains this inconsistency? And where does the effort to stop burning gas in Washington's buildings go from here?
One lesson may be that future gas transition policies need to clearly paint a picture of what people gain by going all-electric - cleaner air, more comfortable homes, thicker wallets - not just what they'd be missing - in this case, the indoor air pollution that comes from gas-powered appliances and the greenhouse gas emissions that come from fracking for gas in the first place, among other drawbacks.
Moving forward, legislators and Governor-elect Bob Ferguson would be wise not to interpret I-2066's narrow passage as a signal from voters to slow climate progress. Instead, they can take inspiration from Washingtonians' overwhelming rejection of I-2117 and hold gas utilities accountable to fulfilling the intent of the immensely popular Climate Commitment Act.
Money, messaging, and movement backing: Why voters rejected one anti-climate initiative and passed the other
Of the four Let's Go Washington measures on Washingtonians' ballots, Initiative 2066 was the most likely to pass, according to pre-election polling. Initiative 2066's confusing language certainly played a part. Five percent of voters left the question about I-2066 blank, the most of any of the four initiatives, according to the No on 2066 campaign.
But the effort to oppose I-2066 faced several other headwinds, which could help explain why voters approved the measure even though they signaled strong support for state climate solutions by resoundingly rejecting I-2117.
Scant funding and a misinformed Seattle Times endorsement made for an uphill battle against I-2066
The campaign against I-2066 ran on a shoestring budget, compared to the campaign against I-2117 to protect Washington's Climate Commitment Act. No on 2066 raised less than 2 percent of the money that No on 2117 pulled in: $301,645 compared to more than $16 million. (Let's Go Washington had more than $9 million at its disposal to support all four of its ballot measures.) The top two contributors to No on 2117 - protecting the well-known Climate Commitment Act - included high-profile billionaires Steve and Connie Ballmer and Bill Gates, whereas the top two contributors to No on 2066 were local nonprofit environmental organizations Washington Conservation Action and Climate Solutions.
A misleading, error-ridden "yes" endorsement from the Seattle Times no doubt also helped I-2066 eke out a win. The two measures that the Seattle Times recommended voters reject, I-2117 and I-2109, both failed by more than 20-point margins. By contrast, the other initiative (besides I-2066) that the Times recommended a "yes" vote for, I-2124, failed by a narrower 10-point margin.
Voters could already see tangible wins from the Climate Commitment Act, helping the opposition to I-2117
One advantage that the No on 2117 campaign had over the No on 2066 campaign was the vested interest the Climate Commitment Act has already created across the s...

Four Ways Gov.-elect Ferguson and Washington Lawmakers Can Build on the State’s Big Climate Win Nov 26, 2024

After Washingtonians overwhelmingly voted to keep the Climate Commitment Act, their leaders have powerful opportunities ahead.
Voters in Washington state delivered a resounding endorsement of climate action on Tuesday. They overwhelmingly rejected Initiative 2117, which would have repealed the state's cap-and-invest law, the Climate Commitment Act. In fact, as of the latest ballot count, with 80 percent of votes counted, Washingtonians opted to keep the Climate Commitment Act by a bigger margin than the one by which the dependably blue state voted for Vice President Kamala Harris. A signal of widespread support to prioritize climate action - and not go backward - even sounded from places in Washington that Donald Trump won handily, like Spokane County.
As of this writing, the other anti-climate ballot initiative, Initiative 2066, which would roll back the state's efforts to power buildings with clean electricity instead of burning gas, is still too close to call. Confusion over the double negative language of that ballot measure, deceptive booster messaging about what it would do, a less well-funded "no" campaign than the one focused on defeating I-2117, and a (misleading, error-ridden) "yes" endorsement from the Seattle Times likely all contributed to I-2066 being a far closer race than that for I-2117. Still, that votes on I-2066 are so close - 51 percent in favor and 49 percent against - is indicative of support for climate action among a broad swath of Washingtonians. (If I-2066 passes, it is also likely to face legal challenges in the coming months.)
Now that the election is over, what's next for climate policy in the Evergreen state? In short, it's time to get back to work, passing more policies that will put Washington state on track to meet its legally required greenhouse gas emissions reductions.
And to be clear, when we're talking about emissions and climate policy, we're talking about things most people want in their everyday lives: clean air to breathe and water to drink; safe and toxics-free homes, schools, and businesses; vibrant, connective neighborhoods free from highway noise and pollution; and a shared path of accountability and commitment to a more stable climate future.
With federal climate action likely at a standstill (at best) over the next four years, Washington can keep moving forward. Below, Sightline outlines four ways that Governor-elect Bob Ferguson and Washington lawmakers can model climate action for the rest of the United States, including:
Round out the Climate Commitment Act to fulfill what the legislature and voters intend for it to do: cut pollution, including from gas utilities and big polluting facilities, and uphold its environmental justice commitments.
Advance climate action at the Utilities and Transportation Commission, which regulates investor-owned gas utilities, including by appointing a climate champion as commissioner.
Build the grid Washington needs to support its clean energy future.
Double down on neighborhood-scale thermal energy networks, the highly efficient carbon-free networks of water pipes and ground-source heat pumps that are popular with environmental, labor, and consumer advocates.
After all, Tuesday's results show that climate is a winning issue in Washington.
1. Round out the Climate Commitment Act to hold polluters accountable and advance environmental justice
The Climate Commitment Act is one of Washington's most powerful climate policies. Washingtonians voted to uphold that law by a nearly 24-point margin, as of the latest ballot count. Still, the Climate Commitment Act as written does not guarantee that Washington meets its climate or environmental goals. Now that voters have unequivocally made clear that they want to retain the state's cap-and-invest program, lawmakers can get to work filling in its gaps. They can do that in at least three ways:
A. Hold gas utilities accountable to reducing emissions, rather allowing them to simply pay to keep polluting
Big...

Montana: So Close to Better Elections Nov 26, 2024

Primaries featuring more choice for voters and candidates almost became the law in Big Sky Country.
Nearly half of Montana voters elected to open Montana's primary elections to all candidates and all voters. They almost made Montana the second state, after Alaska, to adopt this reform that gives voters more freedom to choose. Surprisingly, many of the same voters split their ballots on a companion election reform proposals for majority winners. Thus, Montanans pushed one proposal tantalizingly close to victory while rejecting the other by a wide margin.
The first proposal, Constitutional Initiative 126, would have implemented unified primary elections - that is, open to all voters and candidates, regardless of party - with the top four vote-getters advancing to the general election. Almost 49 percent of Montanans voted in favor of this primary system, a dramatically larger share than in neighboring Idaho and more than in Colorado or Nevada, other states that considered proposals for unified primaries.
The second, Constitutional Initiative 127, would have required Montana elections to honor a core tenet of democracy - the principle of majority rule: winners of state general elections would have to secure the support of a majority of voters for statewide and congressional offices. The legislature would determine the method of securing a majority vote. Some 40 percent of voters supported the majority-winner measure.
Open primaries and majority-winner elections deliver a bevy of benefits
The initiatives' election methods together, proposed and supported by a single campaign, probably would have led to a system akin to Alaska's, with open, all-candidate and -voter primaries and instant runoff elections. Alaska's system has effected the following changes:
Political parties used to make the rules for primary elections. Now, laws approved by voters govern the primaries.
Candidates popular with general election voters no longer face the prospect of "getting primaried" - that is, losing in the primary to candidates who appeal to the smaller, often less representative pool of primary voters.
Lawmakers have more freedom to work with colleagues of different political backgrounds on practical policy solutions without fear of electoral backlash.
Independent candidates can now run for office under the same rules as candidates who belong to a political party rather than having to fulfill extra requirements to get on the ballot.
Voters in the general election no longer must worry about "wasting" their vote on a "spoiler candidate." That is, they don't have to vote for a candidate they're not excited about just to keep their least-favorite candidate from winning.
Ranked choice general elections ensure winners have the support of a majority of voters, not just more voters than any other candidate.
In Montana, proponents hoped the measures would rise or fall together, but 9 percent of ballots (almost 54,000 voters) supported open primaries while opposing the majority-winner rule.
Status quo system limits voter choice and sometimes delivers winners without majority support
Under the status quo, Montanans must pick one party's primary ballot and advance one candidate for each race, a system that narrows general election voters' choices and doesn't allow for cross-partisan voting. And in general elections, candidates can win with a plurality, rather than a majority, of voter support. (A plurality means more than other candidates, but less than 50 percent of the vote.)
How has this problem played out in Montana? From 2012 to 2022, in one gubernatorial election, one US Senate election, and two elections for US House, a majority of Montanans voted for losing candidates, meaning someone in each instance won election to a powerful office with less than majority support. Despite these recent high-profile plurality-winner elections, voters rejected CI-127, meaning that future elections are still at risk of unrepresentative results.
Had Montana adopted op...

Almost One in Three Idahoans Wanted Open Primaries and Instant Runoff Elections Nov 26, 2024

In the reddest patch of Cascadia, a sizable minority of voters wished for a system to thwart spoilers, promote cooperation, and allow participation beyond partisan labels.
In Idaho, about 30 percent of voters saw room for improvement in the state's pick-one, closed primary voting system. But a majority chose to stick with the status quo, rejecting Proposition 1, the open-primary, instant-runoff measure on the November ballot. The proposed statute had an uphill climb despite support from many prominent Republicans; others, including Speaker of the House Mike Moyle and Idaho Republican Party Chair Dorothy Moon, came out against the measure.
The opposition campaign's provocative messaging, including claims that Proposition 1 was a scheme to "californicate" Idaho's elections, likely also contributed to the measure's loss. Though pro-reformers outraised Proposition 1's detractors by over 8:1 according to the last round of reporting, it seems that the "Yes" campaign did not convince voters that a change was necessary.
The fundamental dynamic in all electoral reform ballot measure campaigns is that citizens, even if they dislike the hyperpartisan status quo, are deeply suspicious about proposals to change the way they vote or the way their votes are counted. The YES campaign has to vault over a high bar. In a supermajority Republican state like Idaho, division among Republican leaders may have been enough to doom the measure, just as in the supermajority Democratic state of Oregon, the doubts generated by division may have tanked that state's reform.
And while Alaska uses a similar system, the open, all-candidate primary and instant runoff model remained an utter novelty to almost all Idaho voters. Perhaps in a state that consistently and reliably elects Republicans, Idahoans did not feel pain points in the current system: the shoe wasn't pinching, so they didn't want to change it. Some commentators speculated this was the case when deep-blue Massachusetts rejected a ranked choice voting amendment in 2020.
Still, 30 percent of Idahoans recognized and voted to address problems below the surface of Idaho's electoral system. That's not a bad place to start. Under the status quo, primaries exclude tax-paying citizens, candidates have incentives to campaign on personal attacks and culture war issues rather than policy, and the state is tiptoeing around a plurality winner pitfall that could elect a governor or senator with as little as 34 percent of the vote. Independent voters, despite making up a quarter of the registered population, will still largely be politically homeless.
Other models might appeal to voters whose appetite for reform is more incremental. California and Washington State have a "top-two" unified primary system that has been shown to turn down the political temperature and increase turnout. Even simply opening Idaho's primaries to all voters and parties could boost participation and representation in the Gem State. Reformers will have to regroup and assess whether any of the 70 percent of voters who turned down Proposition 1 might be interested in alternative ways to upgrade Idaho's elections.

Oregon Elections Will Continue to Suffer Spoiler Candidates Nov 26, 2024

The state's voters rejected Measure 117 to implement ranked choice voting in the state, though notably not in places where voters use ranked choice voting locally.
Current vote totals show that a large majority of Oregon voters chose not to approve Measure 117, which would have established ranked choice voting for statewide and federal offices (similar to the model currently in place in Maine). The result means that future Oregon elections will continue to suffer from spoiler candidates and the potential for wasted votes. While administrators have not yet counted all votes, early results show a decisive margin of defeat: 60 percent of ballots counted opposed the measure, and remaining ballots are unlikely to change the outcome.
Portland voters, meanwhile, used ranked choice voting for the first time, and preliminary results from the state's largest city indicate that Multnomah County Elections implemented it without any major hitches, following similar smooth implementation in 2020 in Benton County. Notably, too, results so far show that both Multnomah and Benton counties voted in favor of Measure 117, suggesting that the reform becomes more appealing with use. As more voters gain familiarity with ranked ballots in Oregon and elsewhere, support for a similar change in the future may grow.
Among a dozen election-reform ballot measures in the United States this month, Oregon's Measure 117 was unique in being on the ballot thanks to the legislature rather than a citizens' petition drive. Majority Democrats in Salem referred the question to voters, partly motivated by the desire to prevent recurrences of their party's near-loss of the 2022 governor's race because of an independent spoiler candidate. The partisan back-story of Measure 117 may be one reason for its demise: Democratic-leaning areas supported it, but more conservative counties (and commentators) opposed it.
Although the coalition in favor of the measure attracted broad support from a variety of organizations, county clerks (who administer elections in Oregon) expressed concern over the costs of the implementation. In addition, some voters may have been swayed by a "no" endorsement from one of the state's leading news outlets, the Oregonian. Interestingly, one of the arguments megaphoned by the paper was that the measure did not go far enough, because it did not change the structure of the primary, unlike Alaska's model.1 While in other states, mostly with more conservative electorates, majorities of voters are on track to reject measures with open, all-party primaries, future democracy reformers in Oregon may still look to make that bigger upgrade.

Portland Voters Are Shifting into a Higher Gear Nov 26, 2024

More choices mean more legwork but should lead to a more effective and representative government.
By now, many Portlanders have received and opened their ballots to vote in this November's election. For the first time, they see a grid ballot where they can choose up to six candidates in order, for both mayor and their city council district.
Many Portlanders are still learning how this new voting method works. The first time voting this way will take some adjustment, and residents might feel like they're participating in a grand experiment. Maybe some Portlanders are overwhelmed by the abundance of choices (although one might add that it's a bounty of highly qualified choices and that US democracy has been an experiment from the get-go). At the same time, voters might feel glad to know that they'll have a backup choice if their first-choice candidate can't win - particularly in the mayoral race, which has more than two top contenders who might have split votes under the former, non-ranked method.
Amid the sometimes frustrating nuts and bolts of learning a new ballot and strategizing about candidate rankings, it's worth remembering: there's a reason for all of this. Portland is switching into a higher gear, and just like on a bicycle, it takes some effort to make the shift.
Former troubles
Portland's outgoing form of government was not working. From trash to parking to trees, good ideas got mired in bureau transitions, turf wars, and other baggage of the city's outdated commission form of government. City services that residents prioritize are not the ones they rate as having the best quality. Most Portlanders - 58 percent - do not think that Portland has an effective government, according to a 2024 survey.
In addition, the city's elected officials have not reflected its population for the preponderance of the city's history. Women and people of color are severely underrepresented historically. Most (80 percent) of Portland's commissioners have lived in inner northeast Portland and west of the Willamette (in what are now Districts 2 and 4), neighborhoods that are whiter and wealthier, and that have more homeowners than the rest of the city. Just 23 percent of people polled in 2024 said there was someone on Portland City Council who represents them or their interests.
Process matters in determining these outcomes: more than two-thirds of commissioner races, for example, were won with votes from less than 35 percent of registered voters, many times because the candidates prevailed in a low-turnout primary election.
All that history is part of why this election is such an important step in changing gears to move toward a solution - or multiple solutions - to remedy Portland's ailments.
Future hope
The unfamiliar ballots that Portlanders are currently encountering are a major component of the changes voters adopted (by a large margin) in 2022, and they will define both the legislative and executive branches of the new model of government.
The Charter Commission that proposed the changes carefully chose this method of running elections - multi-member districts with proportional ranked choice voting - after exploring a variety of other electoral options. Single-member districts wouldn't guarantee any type of representation beyond geography, which doesn't necessarily align with every issue important to city residents. And few other electoral methods can offer proportional representation for nonpartisan races (without giving a role to political parties). Plus, other US cities, not to mention other national governments, have tried out multi-winner ranked choice voting and achieved legislative bodies that better reflect their populations.
The longer ballots, though, do give voters more to parse. Portland is likely now experiencing the least satisfying phase of its transition, like the whirring and clicking that comes with shifting a bicycle into a higher gear before it settles into place. With the multitude of candidates running for al...

Idaho Has a Spoiler Problem Nov 05, 2024

Closed primaries exclude voters, encourage divisive behavior, and can subvert the will of Idahoans.
Janice McGeachin's four years as Idaho's lieutenant governor were fraught with controversy. In what Governor Brad Little called an "abuse of power," McGeachin on two occasions issued wide-ranging executive orders while the governor was temporarily out of state. She also spoke at a conference hosted by a white nationalist who called for "total Aryan victory." And when McGeachin violated the Idaho Public Records Act, a judge quipped that she "would stop at nothing, no matter how misguided, to shield public records from the public."
But though Republican McGeachin won the office in 2018 in a state that had not elected a Democrat to statewide office in 16 years, she was not even the first choice of most Republican voters. Of about 177,000 votes cast in the May 2018 Republican primary, just 51,000 voters - less than a third - picked McGeachin. Four other candidates split the remainder, putting McGeachin on top with only a plurality (more votes than anyone else but less than 50 percent). In other words, a majority of primary voters chose someone other than Janice McGeachin.
The very possibility of plurality winner elections conflicts with the concept of majority rule, a core tenet of democracy. Winners lacking majority support (like McGeachin) are not the norm in Idaho but they are not uncommon. A Sightline study of Idaho elections from 2012 to 2022 found that 11 percent of Republican primaries for statewide executive offices such as governor and attorney general produced a primary winner who earned only a plurality of votes, not a majority.
Idaho's primaries amplify the risk of a plurality winner in a race with three or more candidates. Closed partisan primaries attract low turnout, skewing toward the preferences of party diehards. Candidates can campaign on inflammatory ideas or personal attacks to stand out in a crowded field, emphasizing intraparty divisions and splitting the electorate. And even though independent and minority party voters pay for primary elections with their taxes, they are excluded from the process.
A recent gubernatorial race highlights the potential for the plurality winner problem to spill over into general election contests even in deep red Idaho. In 2022 independent candidate Ammon Bundy received the highest vote share of any candidate outside the two major parties in nearly a century. Under the current pick-one voting system, a strong independent candidate like Bundy could split the statewide vote, and someone who fails to represent most voters' values could be elected into office.
Other states, including Alaska, Georgia, Maine, and Mississippi, have implemented systems that guarantee majority-winner elections. A measure on November's ballot would do the same in Idaho.
Plurality winners by the numbers
A new Sightline study examined more than 1,700 Idaho primary and general elections from 2012 to 2022. The data included results for governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state, state controller, state treasurer, and superintendent of public instruction, along with senators and representatives at the state and federal levels. Altogether, the inquiry covered 1,748 races (667 general elections and 1,081 partisan primaries) over the decade. It revealed that:
In 91 percent of races, only one or two candidates ran for election, guaranteeing a majority winner.
Congressional and statewide executive elections were more likely than elections for legislative offices to attract a field of three or more candidates.
Overall, 11 percent of statewide executive races and 3 percent of state legislative races produced a plurality winner.
At the statewide and congressional levels, every instance of a plurality winner occurred in the Republican primaries.
Because the Republican Party dominates most general elections in Idaho, competitive elections play out mainly within Republican primaries. Plurality ...

To Fix Inclusionary Zoning, Fund It Nov 05, 2024

Lessons from places that are solving the biggest problem in abundant housing politics and policy.
On Labor Day weekend, Sound Transit opened four more stops of its light rail line north of Seattle. But when I took my inaugural ride, I had my eye on something equally important as the shiny new transit line to the future of the region's cities: new apartment buildings sprouting up near the stations.
And not just any apartment buildings, but four of them built through a rare new policy that may be a key to digging out of the statewide housing shortage: funded inclusionary zoning.
Public investments in rail and bus transit create immense opportunities for healthy, low-carbon, economically diverse communities clustered around jobs, services, and transportation choices. But only if those communities also allow ample mixed-income housing to grow up alongside those hubs.
One way some North American cities have tried to meet that challenge is by requiring private developers to offer a set percentage of their new apartments at reduced rents, known as inclusionary zoning (IZ). But there's a big problem with that. If the IZ mandate is unfunded, it actually backfires: the rent revenue lost on the required affordable apartments can make it a money-losing proposition to construct the building in the first place, and homebuilders walk away from projects altogether. This conventional model of IZ - unfunded inclusionary zoning - impedes construction of much-needed affordable and market-rate homes, and squanders the new transit-unlocked opportunities.
The good news is there's a way to avoid the unfunded-IZ backfire: use public dollars to cover the cost of the affordability mandate. That is, funded inclusionary zoning.
When IZ is funded in this way it doesn't harm the financial feasibility of homebuilding, and so it avoids the unintended consequences of unfunded IZ that worsen the housing shortage and make rents higher for everyone. And funded IZ still ensures that all new apartment buildings include affordable homes and create mixed-income communities.
In the following I:
discuss why funded inclusionary zoning is both good politics and good policy, and that it matters how you fund it
share examples of places doing it already (Portland, Baltimore, Chicago, Shoreline, and Washington state's optional version), and
specify how Washington legislators could enable this powerful tool to help more residents find the homes they need and want, all across the Evergreen State.
Legalizing larger apartment buildings near jobs and transit is a critical piece of unfinished business for cities throughout North America to meet the long backlog of homes residents need - from young people starting out to retirees downsizing their digs, growing families to growing workforces. Unlike unfunded inclusionary zoning that can backfire and thwart that goal, funded IZ can unlock an abundance of homes - including income-restricted homes - in urban centers with both employment opportunities and robust transit connectivity. For Washington state in particular, funded IZ offers a solution for equitably leveraging the state's transit investments and creating communities where all neighbors are welcome.
What's different about funded inclusionary zoning
Funded IZ is good politics
Funded IZ is not just a smart policy solution. It's also a promising political solution.
Proposals to allow large apartment buildings tend to intensify disagreement over affordability requirements, which can fracture the broad coalition needed to pass zoning legislation. Case in point: Washington state's transit-oriented development (TOD) bill to legalize apartments near transit that died two years in a row.
State legislatures across North America are also susceptible to the impasse that played out in Washington: most left-leaning Democratic legislators won't vote for a TOD bill without IZ, while many centrist Democrats and all Republicans won't vote for a bill with IZ. Even when policymakers are commit...

What’s Different in Alaska Since Election Laws Changed Nov 05, 2024

How Alaskans have responded to nonpartisan open primaries and ranked choice voting.
In 2020 Alaska led the country on election reform by adopting a combination of nonpartisan open primaries and ranked choice general elections, jettisoning its previous system of semi-closed primaries and plurality general elections.
Four years later, Alaska has more company.
Voters in multiple states, both red and blue, will decide in November whether to emulate Alaska's system (or adopt variations) for their own elections. Montana voters are considering open primaries and mandating majority-winner elections. South Dakota voters will decide whether to open their primaries. Oregon voters will choose whether to adopt ranked choice voting for party-run primaries and general elections. Voters in Idaho and Nevada are considering an Alaska-style system of nonpartisan open primaries and allowing voters to rank candidates in general elections. And Washington, DC, is looking at allowing independents into party-controlled primaries and using ranked choice voting in general elections.
Alaska can show other states and our nation's capital what to expect with these election reforms. Nonpartisan open primaries and ranked choice voting took effect in the state in 2022 and brought about the following changes:
Political parties used to make the rules for primary elections. Now, laws approved by voters govern the primaries.
Candidates popular with general election voters no longer face the prospect of "getting primaried" - i.e., losing in the primary to candidates who appeal to the smaller, often less representative pool of primary voters.
Lawmakers have more freedom to work with colleagues of different political backgrounds on practical policy solutions without fear of electoral backlash.
Independent candidates can now run for office under the same rules as candidates who belong to a political party rather than having to fulfill extra requirements to get on the ballot.
Voters in the general election no longer have to worry about "wasting" their vote on a "spoiler candidate." That is, they don't have to vote for a candidate they're not excited about just to keep their least-favorite candidate from winning.
Ranked choice general elections ensure winners have the support of a majority of voters, not just more voters than any other candidate.
How Alaska's system works: Nonpartisan open primaries and ranked choice general elections
Alaskans choose their lawmakers using a combination of nonpartisan open primaries and ranked choice general elections.
In the primary election, voters choose one favorite from a list of all the candidates. The top four candidates in each race, regardless of party affiliation, advance to the ranked choice general election.
In general election races with three or more candidates, voters rank the contenders from most to least favorite. Once the polls close, election officials count everyone's first-choice vote. Candidates who receive a majority of the first-choice votes (more than 50 percent) win in the first round. 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 prefer the eliminated candidate have their vote for their next preference on their ballot counted. This process continues until a candidate receives majority support.
Alaska's current system applies to the races for US House, US Senate, governor, and state legislature. The presidential election is a little different. Alaska's Republican and Democratic parties still control the presidential primaries, but Alaska uses ranked choice voting in the general election to determine which candidate receives the state's three electoral votes.
A then vs. now comparison: Alaska elections and politics
Then: The state paid for primary elections, but political parties made the rules.
Now: The state pays for primaries and runs them according to voter-approved laws.
Before Alaska switched to nonp...

The Contradiction of a Split Vote on Washington’s Anti-Climate Ballot Initiatives Nov 05, 2024

Initiatives 2066 and 2117 are closely linked, but polls and endorsements diverge.
Two of the four measures on Washington state's ballots this fall, Initiatives 2066 and 2117, take aim at the state's climate policies. I-2117, the better known of the two, would repeal the state's cap-and-invest law, the Climate Commitment Act. I-2066 would restrict Washington's ability to decarbonize buildings, the state's second highest emitting sector.
Yet support for the two initiatives diverges. Roughly 44 percent of respondents indicated they would approve I-2066 compared to just 30 percent who said they would approve I-2117, according to an October Seattle Times poll. Roughly a quarter of respondents were undecided on each measure. And some media outlets, such as the Seattle Times, recommend Washingtonians split their votes: approving I-2066, while rejecting I-2117. (In case you missed it, I fact-checked the Seattle Times editorial board's misleading and mistake-laden "yes" endorsement of I-2066).
Contrary to what the divergent polling and endorsements suggest, I-2066 and I-2117 are closely interconnected. So, too, are the underlying climate policies they would roll back.
Sightline does not support or oppose any 2024 ballot initiatives. But we do endorse clear thinking and consistent reasoning. And in this case, a split vote is inconsistent. Here's why:
Recap: What are I-2117 and I-2066?
I-2117 would repeal the Climate Commitment Act, Washington's landmark cap-and-invest law, and prohibit the state from enacting another similar policy in its stead. The Climate Commitment Act, which Washington elected officials passed in 2021, sets a declining limit on carbon pollution for the state's biggest emitters. The law has so far raised more than $2 billion for climate- and community-friendly projects in Washington since it went into effect in January 2023. Here's my detailed explainer of the Climate Commitment Act.
I-2066 takes aim at Washington's efforts to decarbonize buildings, the state's second highest emitting sector. It does this in two big ways. First, I-2066 would repeal numerous sections of a 2024 state law (HB 1589) that requires Washington's biggest utility, Puget Sound Energy (PSE), to develop a plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. I-2066 specifically would get rid of a requirement that PSE create a plan for cost-effective electrification (e.g., swapping out gas-fired furnaces for high-efficiency electric heat pumps). Second, I-2066 would add preemptive restrictions on Washington cities, towns, and state agencies, making it harder to incentivize buildings in the state to transition away from burning gas and toward using clean electricity and to move toward all-electric new construction. Here's my detailed explainer of I-2066.
The contradiction: Maintaining Washington's emissions cap, while repealing a policy that aims to curb emissions
PSE proposed relying heavily on buying additional allowances - and passing those costs on to customers - to comply with the Climate Commitment Act, rather than reducing its emissions by helping its customers transition from gas to electricity.
If the latest polling is indicative, voters could reject I-2117, thus keeping the Climate Commitment Act as state law. At the same time, voters could approve I-2066, which would make it harder for Washington's biggest utility to achieve the goals of the Climate Commitment Act. Let me explain why.
The Climate Commitment Act incentivizes all big polluters in Washington, including utilities like PSE, to reduce their carbon pollution to levels consistent with the state's greenhouse gas emissions reduction requirements. Gas utilities receive a set number of emissions allowances every year, each worth one metric ton of carbon pollution. Utilities receive fewer allowances each year proportional to the statewide emissions cap set by the Climate Commitment Act. (Washington provides utilities with free allowances to mitigate the cost of compliance with the Climate ...

Montana’s Plurality Problem Nov 05, 2024

Political gamesmanship and the spoiler effect prevent majority winners in some of the Treasure State's most impactful elections.
As in most elections, Montanans have a lot of important priorities to consider this November. One contest in particular, though, is receiving outsized attention: control of the US Senate may hinge on the outcome of the race between incumbent Democrat Jon Tester and Republican Tim Sheehy. In this race, two other candidates are drawing the attention (and ire) of the major parties. Earlier in 2024, the Montana Democratic Party lost a lawsuit to remove Green Party candidate Robert Barb from the US Senate ballot. And former president Donald Trump personally put pressure on Libertarian nominee Sid Daoud to drop out of the race and endorse Sheehy.
Partisan jockeying over candidates with virtually no chance of winning is not uncommon in the United States and should be familiar to longtime observers of Montana politics. The more competitive a race, the more third-party candidates matter. Partisan primaries present a similar problem: crowded fields of candidates can split the vote, sending a nominee with minority support from their own party to the general election.
In 46 primary and general election contests from 2012 to 2022, state and federal officeholders in Montana won only plurality support (more votes than any other candidate but less than 50 percent of the vote). In other words, a majority of voters preferred other candidates to the actual winner.
The plurality winner problem conflicts with the principle of majority rule, a core tenet of democracy. It also encourages the major parties to amplify divisions among voters and spend valuable resources propping up or undermining minor-party candidates to spoil an election for their competitors.
Other states, including Alaska, Georgia, Maine, and Mississippi, have implemented systems that guarantee majority-winner elections. Two measures on November's ballot would do the same in Montana.
Montana plurality winners by the numbers
Sightline examined more than 2,000 Montana elections between 2012 and 2022, including all statewide races for governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state, state auditor, and superintendent of public instruction, along with senators and representatives at the state and federal levels.1 Altogether, the inquiry covered 2,163 races (780 general elections and 1,383 partisan primaries) over the decade. It revealed that:
In 94 percent of races, only one or two candidates were on the ballot, guaranteeing a majority winner.
Multicandidate races are most common at the congressional and statewide levels, as more than half of Montana's congressional races from 2012 to 2022 had three or more candidates.
Few state legislative contests attract more than two candidates, as plurality winners prevailed in only 2 percent of the 2,077 elections for state house and state senate.
However, some of the most consequential state and federal general election contests produced plurality winners, with winning candidates receiving less than 50 percent of the vote in elections for US Senate (2012), Montana governor and lieutenant governor (2012), and US House (2017 and 2022).
In ten partisan primaries for statewide or congressional offices, nominees who did not have majority support from their own party moved on to the general election.
All told, a majority of voters cast their ballots for someone other than the winning candidate in 26 percent of congressional races and 9 percent of statewide races.
The majority of Montana elections produce majority winners. But plurality winners are most common in high-profile, high-impact statewide and congressional contests.
Notable among the plurality-winner contests were Democratic US Senator Jon Tester's general election in 2012 and Republican US Representative Ryan Zinke's bid for Montana's First Congressional District in 2022. In both instances, a majority of voters split their vote between the nom...

Despite Candidate Dropouts, Alaska Elections Are Becoming More Competitive Nov 05, 2024

A dozen candidates removed themselves from 2024's general election, but voters still have plenty to choose from.
A spate of candidates in Alaska made headlines for dropping out of November's general election. This, after running successfully in the state's nonpartisan open primaries to qualify for the general election ballot. For instance, in August Lieutenant Governor Nancy Dahlstrom quit the US House race, and State Representative Jesse Sumner left his race for reelection in House District 28. In all, 12 candidates decided not to run in the general election despite advancing from the primary.
In Alaska's system, dropping out of a race is a personal choice made by candidates based on a multitude of factors. The greatest potential effect on voters is to make elections less competitive by shrinking their options on the ballot.
And so, our research for this article focused on whether candidate attrition made Alaska's 2024 general election less competitive than the state's previous general elections. The short answer: No, it did not.
The analysis considered the following metrics from the years 2012-2024:
Average number of candidates in state senate races
Average number of candidates in state house races
Incidence of one-candidate races in the legislature
Number of candidates in the US House race
Sightline found Alaska's 2024 election races to be either just as or more competitive than they had been in previous election years.
Alaska legislature
State senate competition peaked in 2022 and fell just slightly in 2024
In the state senate races, the average number of candidates running in the general election peaked in 2022, the debut year of Alaska's nonpartisan open primaries and ranked choice general elections. Two years later, the 2024 general election marked the second-highest candidate participation rate in the state senate races since 2012. An average of 2.3 candidates are on the ballot in Alaska's 10 state senate races, despite 5 candidates (4 Republicans and 1 affiliated with the Alaskan Independence Party3) dropping out after the primary.
State house competition also peaked in 2022, remained healthy in 2024
Like the state senate, competitiveness in Alaska's 2024 house races remains on the higher end of the historic norm. In 2024, an average of two candidates are on the ballot in the state house races. That's down from 2.3 in 2022 and about on par with the 2018 election, when 2.1 candidates on average ran for state house seats. Five candidates (4 Republicans and 1 nonpartisan candidate) dropped out of state house races in 2024.4
2024 has third-lowest number of uncontested legislative races
None of the candidate withdrawals in 2024 resulted in a race switching from contested (meaning two or more candidates participating) to uncontested (meaning just a single candidate on the ballot).5 In terms of uncontested races, 2024 ranked as the third-most competitive election year, as 2022 and 2018 both had fewer one-candidate races.
Typically, there are 50 legislative races in each election, with all 40 state house seats and half of the 20 state senate seats up for reelection every two years. However, there have been exceptions. In 2012 and 2022, mandatory redistricting resulted in 59 legislative seats on the ballot. In 2014, complications related to redistricting put 14 senate districts on the ballot. And in 2020, there was a special election for Senate District M following the death of Senator Chris Birch.
Congress: US House Race Could Have Been More Competitive
In the US House race, the number of candidates remained unchanged at four following Lieutenant Governor Nancy Dahlstrom's decision to pull out of the contest, along with another Republican, Matthew Salisbury. The candidates who finished fifth and sixth in the primary, John Wayne Howe and Eric Hafner, simply took their places. Four is the maximum number of candidates who have participated in a US House general election since 2012, so by the numbers, 2024 is a competitive rac...

Ranked Choice Voting Already Passed Its First Test in Oregon Nov 05, 2024

Benton County and Corvallis transitioned smoothly to the revised method.
This November, Oregon voters will decide whether to adopt ranked choice voting for statewide and federal races. But many voters in the state have already chosen the voting method, and some Oregonians have even used it.
Portlanders voted for ranked choice voting in November 2022 and will rank candidates for the first time this November. Two other Oregon locations, though, already have hands-on experience with ranked choice voting: Benton County and the city of Corvallis.
As Sightline covered in 2020, Benton County blazed the trail for the voting method in Oregon. Voters in the county adopted ranked choice voting in 2016 and first used it in 2020. Corvallis City Council then passed an ordinance in favor of the reform in 2022 and voters ranked candidates later that year.
In both jurisdictions, voters have filled out ranked ballots in only a few contests, since most races still have just one or two candidates. The voting method did play a major role in determining the outcome of a couple of tight races, though. And even when tabulating ranked votes meant that residents had to wait for results, voters in Benton County and Corvallis reported that they were happy with the change.
Plus, implementation went off without a hitch, offering a promising example for successful statewide rollout if the Oregon ballot measure passes this fall.
Stepwise implementation goes smoothly
Benton County clerk James Morales took on implementing the shift to ranked choice voting for both Benton County and Corvallis, although Corvallis was a simple addition after the county had established its procedures. Implementation meant upgrading the voting systems software, getting the tabulation system certified, rolling out voter education, and planning for results release. The county received state funding and was able to work through the administrative hurdles in two years without any major hitches.
Benton County had been behind on updating its voting system hardware, and the switch to ranked choice voting gave the clerk a nudge to modernize the county's equipment. (Most up-to-date voting system machines can tabulate ranked choice voting with a straightforward software add-on.) Morales also initiated a few extra checks to make sure ballots were counted as planned, such as running votes through another system, the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center's universal tabulator, which was unnecessary for their election compliance but helpful for confirming results.
In an interview with Sightline, Morales mentioned that Benton County voters had adopted a basic version of ranked choice voting, which made it simple to implement and easy for the voters to understand. Only a few candidates typically run for the positions that are eligible for ranked choice voting, so the ranking section of the ballot didn't take up a huge amount of additional space, although the layout was a bit more complicated than previous ballots and took time to design and test. The county's dedication to voter education certainly helped voters understand the new ballots. Like contests in other places that have ranked choice voting, some races continued to use the old plurality voting method, and Benton County voters had no problem adapting to having both voting methods on the same ballot.
In addition to a different-looking ballot, voters adjusted to a new results release schedule. Benton County Elections decided to release first-choice votes right away on Election Day, but determined that it would wait to show the detailed vote transfers until all ballots (including any resolved ballot challenges) had come in. This process was intended to avoid reporting in-process information about candidates who had been eliminated in preliminary results but not in final results. Elections are never certified right away, but results do sometimes take longer to become clear under ranked choice voting since every ballot counts. Plus, Oregon's ...

Correcting the Record on Initiative 2066 Nov 05, 2024

What the Seattle Times editorial board got wrong about the Washington ballot measure.
On October 4, 2024, the Seattle Times editorial board encouraged its readers to vote yes on Washington Ballot Initiative 2066. That endorsement is riddled with misleading statements and omits critical facts about the issues at hand.
The endorsement focuses almost exclusively on critiquing House Bill 1589, a law passed by the state legislature in 2024. In doing so, the editorial board implies (incorrectly) that Initiative 2066 would repeal HB 1589 in its entirety. In fact, Initiative 2066 selectively takes aim at some of the most climate-friendly provisions of HB 1589, leaving much of the law intact.
More important, the editorial board glosses over other potentially further-reaching consequences of Initiative 2066, such as those on the state energy code. The editorial board also misleads readers on the facts of the energy transition. (For instance, it erroneously implies that converting gas pipes to pump green hydrogen into homes is a worthy and viable climate solution.)
Sightline is not endorsing or opposing any ballot initiatives in 2024. But as an independent nonpartisan research organization, we have extensively studied the policies that Initiative 2066 would repeal and others it could affect. The Seattle Times editorial board is entitled to an opinion, but for the paper of record in Washington state to take a stand, the opinion should be based on fact, not fiction. Below we correct the errors and fill in the gaps in the Seattle Times' endorsement of Initiative 2066.
The Seattle Times editorial board glosses over how Initiative 2066 could affect the Washington energy code.
"Tacked on was a concurrent repeal of new state building codes that make installation of gas furnaces nearly impossible." - Seattle Times editorial board
FACT: Initiative 2066 could prevent Washington from encouraging the most energy-efficient heating and cooling systems in new buildings.
The editorial board devotes just a single sentence to one of the biggest potential effects of Initiative 2066: a new restriction on the state energy code.
The energy code sets the standards for all new construction of buildings in Washington. Since 2009, Washington state law has required that the energy code be designed to construct "increasingly energy efficient homes and buildings" and help achieve a statewide goal of emissions-free new construction by 2031.
Initiative 2066 would add new language to state statute that prevents the state energy code from "prohibiting, penalizing, or discouraging" the use of gas in any building. The initiative would also eliminate Washington's longstanding requirement that the energy code help achieve emissions-free new construction. In practice, this new restriction could be used to challenge Washington's 2021 state energy code.
To be clear, the 2021 energy code (which is currently in effect) does not prevent gas in new construction. But because the energy code must be designed to construct "increasingly energy efficient homes," it does incentivize the most efficient heating system on the market: electric heat pumps. Air-source heat pumps can earn an efficiency rating of 300 to 400 percent compared to the highest-efficiency gas furnace, which tops out at 95 percent efficiency.
If a builder wants to construct a new dwelling with a gas furnace, they can. But to meet Washington's overall efficiency standards, they'll need to devote resources to other (likely more expensive) efficiency measures, such as reducing air leakage.
Plus, the editorial board fails to remind readers that not constructing new homes that burn fossil fuels is one of the easiest, cheapest climate actions Washington can take. The state will add nearly one million new residential units between 2024 and 2050, according to forecast data from the Northwest Power and Conservation Council. (Never mind that building new all-electric homes is cheaper than building new homes with gas hookups ...

Ranked Choice Voting Already Passed Its First Test in Oregon Oct 15, 2024

Vancouver Shows Just How Much It Costs to Ban Apartments Oct 09, 2024

Driving problems from inequality to sprawl to pollution, restrictions against anything but single-detached houses have to go.
Vancouver is the epicenter of British Columbia's housing crisis and shortage. So why does the city still ban new apartment buildings on most of its residential land, reserving it exclusively for low-density housing? While there have been small steps towards reforming single-detached zoning in Vancouver in recent years, apartments are still not allowed on more than three-quarters of the city's residential land.
Much the same is true in other big, expensive cities in BC and across North America. Under this decades-old zoning regime, sometimes referred to as the "grand bargain," apartments are permitted only in relatively narrow segments of a city. Apartment construction is largely confined to busy roads and areas with older apartments where working-class and poorer folks live, while the wealthiest single-detached housing areas are left largely untouched to avoid provoking NIMBY backlash. The results of this "grand bargain" are perhaps easiest to see from above, as in the image below from the housing advocacy group, Vancouver Area Neighbours Association.
While Vancouver may conjure images of glassy downtown skyscrapers, the reality is that most of the city's land area is taken up by single-detached houses, the most expensive and land-intensive form of housing.
The BC government has recently shown a willingness to incrementally push back on cities applying exclusionary zoning (more on this below), but as yet, it hasn't been prepared to overturn widespread apartment bans. Persistent exclusionary zoning in cities like Vancouver is deepening the housing shortage and inflicting damage on Vancouverites and British Columbians - especially renters - in several ways.
Seven ways the apartment ban hurts renters and perpetuates the housing shortage
1. It blocks new homes on most of cities' land
First, the apartment ban is suppressing the creation of badly needed new housing in huge parts of our cities. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation estimates that British Columbia needs to build 610,000 more homes by 2030 above current trends, consistent with findings of independent analysts. Housing shortages hurt the most vulnerable, while adding new housing helps reduce upward pressure on rents. We can't address those shortages while blocking apartment creation on the vast majority of cities' residential land.
2. It drives renter displacement and the loss of older, more affordable apartments
Second, the apartment ban in single-detached areas is driving displacement of tenants in existing apartment areas. Under the status quo, with apartments blocked in the vast detached-housing zones of our cities, development is steered instead towards places where apartment buildings are already located, leading to the demolition of older, lower-cost apartments. Burnaby notoriously saw widespread displacement of renters in this manner near Metrotown, and other cities have seen similar patterns of development. It doesn't have to be this way: new apartments could be built instead in nearby single-detached areas if cities would allow it.
3. It balloons the costs and risks of building new homes, including for affordable housing developers
Third, exclusionary zoning increases both the costs of new housing and the risk that uncertainty and delay prevent construction altogether. In limited areas where apartment housing is allowed (through an unpredictable discretionary rezoning process), developers of new housing - non-market1 and market alike - have to compete for scarce parcels, driving up land purchase prices. As a result, even well before a rezoning process, exclusionary zoning artificially increases land prices for the sites where apartments are allowed by keeping them scarce. For nonprofits trying to build affordable housing, the cost and risk of the rezoning process itself can jeopardize project viability. Higher costs for non-mar...

(Re)explaining Washington’s Climate Commitment Act Oct 08, 2024

Understanding the cap-and-invest law that Washington Initiative 2117 would repeal.
In 2021 Washington enacted the Climate Commitment Act, becoming only the second US state (after California) with an economy-wide cap-and-invest program. With the passage of the Climate Commitment Act, Washington also put in place its primary enforcement mechanism for achieving the state's greenhouse gas reduction goals. The law went into effect in January 2023.
In November 2024, Initiative 2117 on Washington's ballot puts to voters the option to keep the program or repeal it. (The initiative also prohibits Washington from enacting a new carbon tax or cap-and-invest program). By way of education about the policy, Sightline answers frequently asked questions about the Climate Commitment Act's cap-and-invest program and how it has worked to date.
How does the Climate Commitment Act cap greenhouse gas emissions?
Washington law, originally enacted in 2008 and updated in 2020, mandates that the state cut its greenhouse gas emissions roughly in half by 2030 and by 95 percent by 2050. Put another way, the state emitted more than 100 million metric tons of greenhouse gas pollution in 2019 (the most recent year data is available); by 2030, Washington must shrink that figure to 50 million metric tons and to 5 million metric tons by 2050.
The Climate Commitment Act is the primary policy Washington has to attain these statewide emissions targets. The 2021 law directed the Washington State Department of Ecology to set a declining cap on pollution for companies that emit more than 25,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases annually. This cap set by the Climate Commitment Act covers roughly 75 percent of the state's total greenhouse gas emissions.
Washington counts about 160 facilities that emit more 25,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases annually, including the state's five oil refineries, several utilities, and manufacturing companies, such as steel and cement factories.
To enforce the emissions cap, the Climate Commitment Act requires the state's top polluters, known in the law as "covered entities," to acquire one allowance for each metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) they release into the atmosphere. (The Climate Commitment Act exempts pollution from combusting certain fuel types, such as jet fuel and biofuels, from emissions calculations.) Each year, the Department of Ecology gradually ratchets down the number of allowances available, according to a declining allowance budget (shown below) that tracks Washington's overall greenhouse gas emissions targets. As allowances become scarcer over time, they rise in price, incentivizing polluters to reduce their emissions rather than buy allowances.
It's still too early to know whether Washington's Climate Commitment Act cap has lessened the state's climate pollution. For one, Washington has not released data on the state's greenhouse gas emissions since the Climate Commitment Act went into effect.
In addition, the law's first compliance deadline has not yet occurred. On November 1, 2024, covered entities will have to submit their first set of compliance instruments (i.e., allowances or offsets - more on offsets below) equal to 30 percent of their prior year's emissions. (Emissions are counted in aggregate per four-year compliance period. There are seven compliance periods between 2023 and 2050.) By the end of each compliance period, covered entities must have submitted compliance instruments for all their emissions over the prior four years. That means the emissions impact of the Climate Commitment Act will not become clear until at least 2026.
How do polluters get allowances?
All polluters covered under the Climate Commitment Act (those emitting more than 25,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases annually) must obtain allowances equal to their emissions, whether by buying them in an auction or receiving them for free from the state. Washington provides free allowances to three types of businesses:
Electri...

A Guide to Alaska’s November 2024 Election Oct 01, 2024

Ranked choice voting for president and other offices, plus deciding on whether to keep open primaries and ranked choice voting.
On November 5, 2024, Alaskans will use ranked choice voting in their general election. On the ballot: US president, one US House seat, most of the state legislature, two ballot measures, and judges for retention.
We've put together answers to the top questions we've been hearing about Alaska's ranked choice election:
Sightline Institute is also producing and sharing free voter education resources for Alaska at sightline.org/alaska-elections, including graphics detailing key election dates, sample ballots, and a map of regional election offices. If you still have questions after reviewing the ones below, please don't hesitate to email authors Jeannette Lee or Jay Lee (no relation). We'll update this article with additional answers to reader questions.
General information on Alaska's November 2024 elections
What is on the ballot in November?
On November 5, 2024, Alaskans will vote in the general election. They'll use ranked choice voting to decide who represents them for president, US House, all members of the state House, and half the state Senate.1 Voters will also decide on two ballot measures and whether to retain various state and district judges.
Neither of Alaska's US Senate seats is up for election this year, nor are the governor and lieutenant governor positions.
How does ranked choice voting work in Alaska's general election?
Voters have the option 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 their supporters' votes are reallocated to the voters' second preference. This process continues until a candidate receives a majority of the vote.
Alaska voters used ranked choice voting for the first time in 2022, electing members of Congress, the governor and lieutenant governor, and state legislators. Alaska isn't alone. Maine also uses ranked choice voting, as do several cities and political parties. As of February 2024, voters in 60 jurisdictions across 24 states were using ranked choice voting in an array of elections, according to the election advocacy organization FairVote.
What key election dates should I know?
The key dates for the election are:
Sunday, October 6: Deadline to register to vote. If you received a Permanent Fund Dividend last year, then the state has already registered you automatically.
Monday, October 21: Most early and in-person absentee voting locations open. Hours and days vary by location.
Saturday, October 26: Applications for an absentee ballot delivered by mail must be received by the Division of Elections.
Tuesday, November 5: Election Day! Polls are open from 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.
How do I register to vote?
If you are an eligible voter in Alaska and applied for a Permanent Fund Dividend in 2023, 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. Remember to register to vote by October 5.
How do I check my voter registration status?
You can check your voter registration status here.
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 10-day window after Election Day for these absentee ballots to arrive (15 days for overseas ballots). This longstanding practice helps ensure absentee voters aren't disenfranchised by m...

Washington's Most Parking-Burdened Towns and Cities Oct 01, 2024

A new Sightline report details the arcane, arbitrary, and pernicious rules blocking homes and businesses across the state.
Middle school teacher Marijean Rak moved to Mount Vernon, Washington, in 2022 to care for her 86-year-old mother. She hoped to build a modest, 1,000-square-foot, single-story home on a vacant lot she owned to securely and economically age in place in her newly adopted town. But Mount Vernon parking mandates, which require a two-car garage plus two additional off-street parking spaces, made it impossible to do so.
"This requirement is cost-prohibitive and doesn't align with the character of the neighborhood,"
she told her city council members earlier this year, pointing out that most of the existing homes in the blocks surrounding her lot have a one-car garage or no off-street parking at all.
Rak's story is one of thousands across Washington of a dream unrealized, whether it's a home in a neighborhood they like, the conversion of a vacant storefront to a new café, or the opening of a much-needed daycare facility. Parking mandates - rules establishing a predetermined number of parking spaces for all new buildings - have proven a sneaky but consequential factor in driving up the costs of homebuilding and developing businesses; sometimes, they've prevented them from existing altogether.
And these parking rules are as arbitrary as they are arcane, slapping one-size-fits-all minimums with no scientific basis across a range of establishments. From restaurants to retail stores, homes to houses of worship, libraries to "butterfly or moth breeding facilities" (yes, really), cities and towns have mandated an excess of parking, locking communities into patterns of sprawling development that makes traveling without a car impossible and promotes unsightly seas of asphalt. In short, parking mandates have silently shaped how we live and how we get around.
City planners know that parking minimums are too high. That's why they have layered on exceptions over the years whether for downtown zones or historic buildings. In addition to those exceptions and overlays making zoning more complicated for small businesses or homeowners to navigate, cities are still blindly copying each other's base codes and killing new homes in the process. Therefore, all our rankings use the standard parking mandates that apply city- or county-wide. These are the numbers that property owners and planning staff are both stuck trying to navigate around.
Below we call out some of the most onerous parking requirements for a variety of building types and community members: for entrepreneurs, restaurants, renters, daycares, and families seeking apartments. Don't see your town? Find complete listings of all jurisdictions in the full report.
Worst parking mandates for entrepreneurs
No one cares more about the success of a small business than the people pouring their life savings into it. Yet local governments think they know best when it comes to how many parking spaces a new store, law office, or coffeeshop might need.
High mandates rule out plenty of otherwise suitable properties in favor of lots large enough to accommodate the mandatory parking. As a rule of thumb, a mandate of 3 parking spaces per 1,000 square feet forces property owners to dedicate as much space to parking as the building itself. You can see how this land-hungry requirement drives new businesses to the edge of town or prevents them from opening altogether.
We added together the base requirements for 1,000 square feet of each of these common uses (office, retail, and restaurants) to see which jurisdictions create the highest barriers to opening a business. Here are the top ten by Parking spaces mandated for 3,000 sq feet of combined office, retail and restaurant space:
1. Bellevue 20.7
2. Yakima (tie) 20.3
Yakima County (tie) 20.3
3. Kent (tie) 19
Kennewick (tie) 19
Whatcom County (tie) 19
Longview (tie) 19
4. Lynnwood 18.8
5. Issaquah (tie) 18.3
Walla Walla (tie) 18.3
Worst parking...

Open Primaries and Ranked Choice Voting Strengthened Moderate Republicans in Alaska’s Legislature Sep 24, 2024

Fewer hardliners won office, leading to an overwhelmingly bipartisan Senate majority, a hard-fought win on education funding, and the ability to neutralize culture warriors.
The debut in Alaska of nonpartisan open primaries and ranked choice general elections in 2022 promised to reduce polarization in government by rewarding lawmakers who prioritize solving problems over partisan gamesmanship. The system likely did not change the outcome in a majority of races, but did appear to make a difference in a few.
A handful of moderate Republican state legislators who most likely would have lost in the previous semi-closed primary system defeated more conservative candidates. The moderates appealed to a broader base of voters in their districts while the conservatives targeted a more partisan subset. In 2022, 59 of 60 legislators won in the system of open primaries and ranked choice general elections.
Two legislative sessions have passed since then. Has Juneau shown any signs of increased pragmatism? Are legislators more disposed to govern in ways that accurately reflect the views of Alaska's moderate Republican electorate? These questions are timely given that several states, including Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington, DC, are considering similar changes to their voting systems.
Interviews with more than a dozen state legislators, political reporters, and longtime political watchers yielded little agreement on how exactly the election system affected lawmaking in Juneau. There was consensus, however, on the following:
The bipartisan majority in the Senate was larger than it otherwise would have been.
A larger number of Republican lawmakers were willing to override the conservative governor's widely unpopular veto of education funding in March.
Polarizing politicians on the right still won in the handful of districts where voters support them but were unable to effectively open the gates to a full-blown culture war.
Now for the caveats:
We don't have much data to go on. Alaska has had only one election using open primaries and ranked choice general elections.
Lawmakers respond to a world of stakeholders, fiscal realities, events, and other factors unrelated to whatever election system is in play.
The counterfactual (how legislators would have behaved had they been elected under Alaska's previous election system) is also unknowable.
The new election system wasn't the only big change in 2022. The decennial redrawing of Alaska's legislative districts changed the voter constituencies of sitting legislators and brought a large class of freshman lawmakers to the state capitol. These less-experienced lawmakers may not have legislated according to the bipartisan incentives introduced by the election system.
A quick explainer of Alaska's election system
In the 2022 midterms, Alaskans chose their lawmakers using a combination of open primaries and ranked choice general elections. Two years prior, Alaska voters had jettisoned the previous system of semi-closed primaries and plurality general elections, which allow candidates to win with less than a majority of votes. Alaska's current open primaries and ranked choice general elections system applies to the races for US House, US Senate, governor, and state legislature. Alaska's Republican and Democratic parties still control the presidential primaries, but Alaska uses ranked choice voting in the general election to determine which candidate receives the state's three electoral votes.
In the primaries, voters choose one favorite from a list of all the candidates. The top four candidates in each race, regardless of party affiliation, advance to the ranked choice general election. Party registration information for each candidate appears on both the primary and general election ballots. And the new system does not prevent parties or other groups from endorsing candidates.
In general election races with three or more candidates, voters rank the contenders from most to least favorit...

Explaining Washington’s Ballot Initiative 2066 Sep 24, 2024

Four ways the initiative could affect Washington.
Burning gas to heat homes, generate electricity, and power industry bears responsibility for about a quarter of Washington's climate pollution. Washington State - and its cities-have enacted a suite of laws to help homes and businesses make the transition from gas to all-electric appliances such as heat pumps. Initiative Measure No. 2066 on Washington's November 2024 ballot would directly repeal some of the state's gas transition policies and could impact others.
Below we explain four policies and regulations in Washington that the initiative could impact.
1. Washington's 2021 Energy Code
Initiative 2066 reverses a requirement that Washington's energy code work toward emissions-free new construction by 2031 and prohibits the energy code from limiting gas in buildings. This change could affect Washington's latest energy code, which incentivizes electric heat pumps over gas appliances in new buildings.
Buildings make up a quarter of Washington's carbon emissions, polluting more than any other sector except transportation. Almost half of that pollution comes from burning fossil fuels, mostly gas, for space and water heating.
Fifteen years ago, Washington legislators recognized that constructing more and more buildings that burn fossil fuels would catapult the state's carbon pollution problem from bad to worse. In 2009 policymakers passed Senate Bill 5854, establishing new requirements for the state's energy code, which regulates the design and construction of new buildings. The law mandated that the energy code help achieve a statewide goal of constructing emissions-free homes and buildings by 2031.
In 2024 Washington's State Building Code Council (SBCC) finalized the state's latest residential and commercial energy code. In its initial draft of the 2021 code, SBCC required electric heat pumps in all new commercial and residential buildings. However, after the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturned Berkeley, Califonia's prohibition on gas hookups in new buildings, SBCC voluntarily revised its draft code to bolster it against potential lawsuits from the gas industry.
Washington's final 2021 energy code does not require heat pumps or ban gas hookups, but it strongly incentivizes electric heat pumps. If builders choose to install a gas furnace or boiler, they will need to compensate with a slew of other (likely more expensive) efficiency measures. It's worth noting that building new all-electric homes is cheaper than building new homes that use both gas and electricity. Further, heat pumps can reduce people's energy bills and are a cooling solution as well as a heating one. Today nearly half of Washington homes lack air conditioning.
Initiative 2066 would repeal the state's longstanding requirement that the energy code work toward emissions-free new construction by 2031, and it would bar the code from "prohibiting, penalizing, or discouraging" gas appliances in buildings. This new prohibition might be used to challenge the 2021 energy code for incentivizing electric heat pumps over gas appliances.
Initiative 2066 strike-through: "The Washington state energy code shall be designed to: Construct increasingly energy efficient homes and buildings that help achieve the broader goal of building zero fossil-fuel greenhouse gas emission homes and buildings by the year 2031." Initiative 2066 addition: "The Washington state energy code may not in any way prohibit, penalize, or discourage the use of gas for any form of heating, or for uses related to any appliance or equipment, in any building."
2. Seattle's 2023 Building Emissions Performance Standard
Initiative 2066 prohibits cities and towns from actions that "prohibit, penalize, or discourage" the use of gas in buildings. This could affect Seattle's new Building Emissions Performance Standard, which requires large buildings to reach net zero emissions by 2050 - a goal that's difficult to achieve without transitio...

The Curious Case of Voters’ Pamphlets Sep 24, 2024

A secret, nonpartisan chance to better inform voters.
Consider the humble Voters' Guide: an official booklet that lets candidates and campaigns state their cases. Those of us who live in Voters' Guide states take them for granted, filling in our ballots with the pamphlet open beside us, indispensable companions. An easy way to upgrade democracy would be to replicate Voters' Guides across Cascadia and beyond. Such pamphlets are ubiquitous in coastal Cascadia (with one exception - more on that below) but rare inland.
We Cascadians in Oregon and Washington - we who have voted by mail for so long that going to a polling place is mostly just a story told by elders - take such guides for granted. They arrive from elections offices shortly before our ballots do, lining mailboxes with comforting newsprint pages filled with headshots, candidate pitches, and arguments for and against ballot measures. They also compile other useful information, such as deadlines, locations, schedules, and services for those with disabilities or language barriers. Many localities offer guides in languages other than English, and Washington's state nonpartisan TV station even produces a video version.
The same goes for Cascadians who live on the southern periphery of the region on California's redwood coast: voters' guides are a given. Just so, Cascadians in the region's northernmost reaches benefit from Alaska's Official Election Pamphlet, which describes ballot issues and provides candidate statements.
The singularity of this practice is easy to forget. On TikTok, one newcomer to Washington from Oklahoma expressed bewildered delight at the discovery, "They mail you a pamphlet . . . with everyone's stances on everything so you don't have to do research?!?! That's not true! That can't be true!" Oh yes, it is.
Away from the Pacific, and long before you get to Oklahoma, though, voters' guides thin out. Montana's Voter Information Pamphlet excludes candidate races entirely, though it does provide pro and con arguments for state ballot measures (an example). In Idaho and Wyoming, official voters' guides don't even do that. They exclude candidate statements and pro/con statements. In Wyoming, they don't even include the text of the measures.
What explains this pattern? Is it just a blue-red split, with coastal blues happier to pay to inform voters while Rocky Mountain reds save their money? Maybe, but red-state Alaska doesn't fit that pattern. It votes conservative but mails a comprehensive voters' guide to every home in the state, like its coastal cousins to the south. And brick-red Utah, cozied up beside Idaho and Wyoming, publishes a comprehensive voters' pamphlet, though it distributes it mostly online rather than through the mail.
The difference is likely just a fluke of history. That's why it's heartening that Idaho's conservative Secretary of State has repeatedly sponsored legislation for a comprehensive voters' guide in the Gem State. Let's hope the state legislature stops demurring and approves the plan.
P.S. The exception
Oh, then there's the big outlier, the coastal exception which I referred to above: the province of British Columbia. ElectionsBC publishes no voters' pamphlet at all. No candidate information. Nothing on ballot measures. Only generic information on the mechanics of voting.
Is British Columbia, famously the most liberal jurisdiction in Cascadia, a Wyoming-like conservative about paying to inform voters? Not really.
The province's entire election system is so completely different than that in the US parts of Cascadia that voters' pamphlets are less needed. In the province's high-stakes October 19 election, voters' ballots will offer only one single race: the choice of a local representative to the legislative assembly in Victoria. While US Cascadian voters fill in a dozen or more bubbles for different national, state, and local races, British Columbians will fill in just one. In practice, they'll vote for whichever party they want t...

Maine’s Lessons in Ranked Choice Voting Sep 24, 2024

The state's groundbreaking statewide use of ranked choice voting is a positive model.
Ranked choice voting will be on the ballot in Oregon this fall. And because the proposed measure won't alter Oregon's partisan primaries, it is not the same as Alaska's much-discussed electoral system, which combines ranked choice general elections with unified all-party, top-four primaries. It's also unlike proposals before voters this fall in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and Nevada, which emulate Alaska's system.
Instead, Maine, the first state to adopt ranked choice voting statewide, offers Oregonians the closest example of what the changes might look like in practice. Like Oregon, Maine has mostly closed partisan primaries and kept them after implementing ranked choice voting.
Cascadians, therefore, may want to know: How has ranked choice voting influenced elections in Maine?
In short, Maine's groundbreaking use of ranked choice voting showcases similar advantages to what we've seen elsewhere, before and since the Pine Tree State's journey with the voting method began. Ranked choice voting is popular and well-liked, especially after people use it. Candidates sometimes campaign together or reach out to each other's supporters. And because elected leaders must earn majority support, they have strong incentives to seek votes beyond their party base.
Mainers express enthusiasm for ranked choice voting across multiple elections
Mainers like ranked choice voting. They voted to affirm its use not once but twice, and polls confirm continued voter enthusiasm.
Maine has used ranked choice voting statewide since 2018, and its largest city, Portland, has used it since 2011. The election of Paul LePage, Maine's controversial former governor, was a major spur for reform. LePage served two terms but never won a majority of votes; in 2010, for example, he won with less than 38 percent of the vote.
After LePage, many Mainers wanted a system that would never again elect outlier officeholders supported only by pluralities of voters. Still, winning reform was not easy.
Voters in Maine adopted ranked choice voting in 2016 through a citizens' petition and ballot measure. Ranked choice voting was set to start in the 2018 elections; however, in 2017, following inquiries from the Maine Senate, the state supreme court advised that ranked choice voting was unconstitutional in some general elections because the Maine constitution stipulates that state offices be won with a plurality (whoever receives the most votes). In response, the state legislature passed a bill to delay implementation of all uses of ranked choice voting until the constitution could be changed - a move many saw as repealing ranked choice voting in opposition to the people's will.
Volunteers collected signatures for a "people's veto" of the legislature's delay. With the law on hold until the veto measure was voted on, the courts directed the secretary of state to move forward in implementing ranked choice voting in the June 2018 primaries. In the same June election where they used ranked choice voting for the first time, Maine voters again voiced their support at the ballot for the voting method, passing the veto measure.
Further controversy followed Maine's use of ranked choice voting in the 2018 general election (more on this below) and again when the Maine Republican Party sought to reduce the use of the voting method after the state legislature expanded it to apply to presidential contests. But ranked choice voting remains in action.
Because the constitutional quirk that requires plurality general election winners applies to state offices, Maine uses ranked choice voting in only the partisan primaries for governor, state senator, and state representative, and in both primaries and general elections for US senator, US representative, and now US president.
Ranked ballots offer small but mighty improvements for voters
Election reform has not dramatically shifted Maine's politics. Maine's election...

What Oregonians Need to Know About Ranked Choice Voting Sep 12, 2024

Mitigating spoiler candidates and other upsides for Beaver State elections.
Author's note:
In early 2023, I wrote about Oregon House Bill 2004, which let voters decide whether to adopt ranked choice voting in statewide elections, including those for president, US House and Senate, and governor. If adopted, it would also give cities, school districts, and other local entities in Oregon guidelines to adopt ranked choice voting in their elections. The legislature passed the bill in June 2023, putting it to voters to approve or reject this fall as Measure 117. Today, by way of offering an explainer on what a switch to ranked choice voting looks like for Oregon voters, I'm re-sharing my 2023 research on the substance of that bill, including four ways evidence shows ranked choice voting gives voters more voice and more choices in elections. I've made a few minor updates to reflect the measure on the ballot in Oregon this November.
How ranked choice voting works
Ranked choice voting would make some key changes to Oregon's current pick-one voting system, particularly in contests where voters have more than two candidates to choose from (as they do in almost every state election). Using ranked choice voting, Oregon voters would no longer be limited to selecting a single candidate (though they could choose just one if they wanted to). Instead, voters would be free to rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of first preferences, ballots go to further rounds of counting where last-place candidates are eliminated and their voters' later choices are considered, continuing until one candidate has over 50 percent of the vote among the remaining candidates. Here are four reasons voters tend to like the option to rank candidates on their ballots:
1. Winners earn stronger bases of support
Pick-one elections often work fine for elections with just two candidates in the running: voters select their favorite, and the person with more votes wins. But things get tricky when voters have three or more candidates to choose from. Maybe only 40 percent of voters cast their ballots for the winner, while two contending candidates each receive 30 percent - so the winner has less than majority support. Or maybe there are ten candidates, and the winner comes out with support from only 15 or 20 percent of voters - quite the minority! When the top candidate has a plurality (the most votes) but not a majority (more than half of the votes), more voters voted against the winner than for them.
This situation happens all the time in Oregon. Of the seven gubernatorial elections since 2000, four saw the winning candidate finish with less than 50 percent of the vote. In 2022, with high-profile nonpartisan candidate Betsy Johnson drawing nine percent of the vote, Tina Kotek won the race for Governor with only 47 percent of voters supporting her.
It's even worse in primary elections. Oregon's Republican primaries for governor since 2000 usually saw nine or ten candidates, and in only one of those races did a winner receive a majority of the vote. 2022 was a particularly extreme example of this, with 19 candidates running; Christine Drazan came out on top but garnered only 23 percent of the vote. But say those other 77 percent of voters really didn't like Drazan, and voters would have jointly preferred another candidate even if their first choice lost. Those 18 other candidates split the anti-Drazan vote, and the Drazan supporters, a small minority overall, got to pick their favorite, overriding the majority.
Ranked choice voting would help that majority coalesce around a single candidate, mitigating vote splitting among multiple similar options. Since Drazan wouldn't be immediately elected in the first round of counting, later rounds might show that a stronger candidate had the support of more voters. Or they could show that other voters did support Drazan, giving her a clearer base of support heading into the general elect...

Hydrogen Is Sneaking Its Way into Oregon Homes Sep 12, 2024

Oregon laws can catch up to protect customers.
Customers in southeast Portland recently found out that hydrogen may be sneaking its way into their homes. NW Natural, Oregon's largest gas utility, has started injecting hydrogen, blended with so-called "natural gas," into its distribution lines without informing customers or regulators.
Hydrogen is a bad bet for decarbonizing homes pretty much any way you look at it. It's far more expensive than electrification, can't achieve nearly the same climate impact, and can be dangerous, as Sightline has written about extensively. Plus, since carbon-free green hydrogen is in short supply and is electricity-intensive to produce, policymakers would be smart to save it for the hardest-to-decarbonize sectors, like heavy industry.
But gas utilities across Cascadia are pushing hydrogen for use in homes and businesses, and lawmakers and regulators have yet to catch up. Oregon, home to Cascadia's first hydrogen-blending pilot, has no laws to protect consumers and communities from ineffective, unsafe, and inefficient use of the fuel.
And Oregon is not alone in the region; Alaska, Idaho, and Montana all lack legal oversight of hydrogen blending, although no projects of this type are yet underway in these states. (British Columbia statute permits gas utilities to replace some of its natural gas with hydrogen, subject to price and quantity caps.) Washington State is the only jurisdiction in Cascadia with some safeguards for consumers, communities, and the electric grid around utilities' use of hydrogen. Policymakers in Oregon and Cascadia writ large can build from Washington's policy to protect customers and ensure that gas utilities aren't throwing good money after bad.
Cascadia's first hydrogen blending project is underway
All Cascadian gas utilities promote hydrogen as a pivotal part of their decarbonization plans. Hydrogen and biomethane feature prominently in NW Natural's 2022 integrated resource plan (IRP). Oregon regulators recently rejected this plan, partly because its long-range assumptions about hydrogen "skew optimistic" and do not present an "objective view of the significant risks and uncertainties" of the fuel. In fact, the Oregon Public Utilities Commission (PUC) rejected all three of the state's gas utilities' plans to decarbonize with hydrogen due in part to high cost and overly optimistic forecasts for growth of a hydrogen economy.
But this regulatory setback didn't stop NW Natural from moving ahead with the fuel. "Hydrogen is a key piece of our plan to reach our goal of delivering carbon neutral energy by 2050," NW Natural boasts on its website. In May 2024, the utility started delivering hydrogen to homes and businesses in the Portland area without formal notice to regulators or customers. The pilot is displacing just 0.2 percent of summer gas volumes and 0.003 percent of winter gas volumes.
Cascadia's gas utilities have promoted so-called green hydrogen, made from renewable electricity-powered electrolyzers that split water into hydrogen and oxygen. (See Sightline's primer on the different types of hydrogen.) But NW Natural isn't even piloting green hydrogen; it is blending turquoise hydrogen into its system, which it produces at its Central Portland facility. To create turquoise hydrogen, natural gas is heated to high temperatures and converted to hydrogen and solid carbon - a process known as pyrolysis. Climate-warming pollution is emitted throughout the process: methane leaks during fracking and delivery, and fossil fuels may be burned to generate heat for pyrolysis.
Even if NW Natural were using green hydrogen, its pilot would skim less than 0.07 percent of carbon emissions from NW Natural's gas system. And if NW Natural scales its hydrogen operations to displace 20 percent of its gas blend (a hundredfold increase from the pilot and the maximum possible blend amount in existing pipelines), it would still reduce its carbon emissions by at most 7 percent.
Oregon lawmakers ...

The Northwest’s Electric Grid Deserves an Upgrade Sep 11, 2024

Up to 40 percent of the region's grid could be suitable for reconductoring - for less than half the time and cost of building new transmission lines.
The lights could soon dim on the Northwest's climate goals unless the grid gets some serious TLC.
The region, like the United States as a whole, needs more electric transmission capacity to reach the best wind and solar resources and meet rising power demand without burning coal or gas. But building new transmission lines can take decades and cost billions. Luckily there are no-brainer ways to squeeze more juice out of the existing grid.
Among the options, reconductoring - swapping out the wires on transmission lines for higher capacity ones - holds particular promise for its relative speed to deployment, capacity potential, and cost. Reconductoring can more than double a line's capacity, costs less than half the price of building a brand-new line, and can take just 18 to 36 months to implement.
In the Northwest, up to 23,000 miles of transmission lines (about 40 percent of the region's grid) could be suitable for reconductoring. To get more wire upgrade projects off the ground, policymakers can improve utility planning processes, fast-track permitting, and introduce performance incentives. With most of the region's grid strung up with wires invented more than 100 years ago, a grid glow-up is long overdue.
Reconductoring can double transmission lines' capacity for less than half the cost of building new lines
Why should people who care about climate change pay attention to wires? Here's a quick primer: In sum, the type of wire - conductor - on a transmission line affects how much power it can carry, how much electricity it wastes, and how much it sags. (Sagging lines can spark wildfires.) Swapping out old wires with the latest and greatest technology is far cheaper, faster, and easier than building whole new transmission lines.
For more than 100 years, transmission owners have strung up the same type of wire. Aluminum conductor steel reinforced (ACSR), as it is known, remains the default conductor for most transmission projects in the United States.
In the Northwest, nearly all investor-owned utilities' transmission lines are outfitted with ACSR. (Bonneville Power Administration [BPA], which owns and operates most of the region's high-voltage transmission system, does not provide detailed data about conductor type. However, the vast majority of its lines use ACSR, according to a BPA representative.)
In the 1970s, the industry introduced a new type of conductor known as aluminum conductor steel supported (ACSS). ACSS conductors nearly double the capacity of their ACSR counterparts, but they come with a big downside: excessive sagging at high temperatures. Sag is a particular concern in wildfire-prone areas like the Northwest. Reconductoring with ACSS conductors can require raising structures or placing more towers closer together to meet minimum clearance standards, which increases project costs.
In the 2000s, newer, more advanced conductors entered the market, which traded out the traditional steel core for a smaller composite of glass, ceramic, or carbon fibers. This new lighter core allowed more aluminum (which conducts electricity) to fit on a wire of equal diameter, making it possible to operate the line at a higher temperature. Higher operating temperatures increase a line's thermal limit - one of three possible limits to transmission lines' capacity.
The most promising and widely deployed composite-core conductor is known as aluminum conductor composite core (ACCC). (ACSS trapezoidal wire [ACSS/TW], a more advanced ACSS model, was also introduced in the 2000s.)
Here's an analogy to explain this that will make sense to anyone born before the 2000s, at least: If ACSR conductors are dial-up internet, ACCC conductors are 5G. ACCC conductors double the capacity of ACSR models. They don't sag at high temperatures, and they're the most efficient conductors on the market, meanin...

Twice As Many Small Towns Have Eliminated Parking Mandates As Large Cities Sep 04, 2024

Three hometown stories show why parking reform is for everyone.
Earlier this spring, when Port Townsend, Washington, eliminated parking mandates - predetermined numbers of parking spaces required by law for new buildings - the news took the internet by surprise. Not many people expected the first Washington city to make off-street parking fully optional would be a small town of 10,000 residents.
"Seattle getting lapped by…Port Townsend," The Urbanist wrote. Another commenter wrote, "Port Townsend punches well above its weight in a few ways." Even my own colleague Dan remarked on the news, "The politics around abolishing parking mandates is bizarre."
But it's not surprising that towns of Port Townsend's size are leading the way. While large cities like San Jose, California, and Austin, Texas, garner national press coverage for eliminating parking mandates, this policy reform is most commonly enacted in towns with fewer than 25,000 residents.
According to the Parking Reform Network's mandates map, for every large American city (with a population of 250,000 or more) that has fully repealed parking mandates, there are two small towns (fewer than 25,000 people) that have done the same.
To be clear, there are far more tiny towns in the United States than big cities. But small jurisdictions are also likely underrepresented in the Parking Reform Network data. With little to no media coverage of zoning changes in places like Gilman, Wisconsin, or Canandaigua, New York, those parking reforms are less likely to make it onto the map in the first place. The database also fails to acknowledge the multitude of rural communities and small towns that never adopted parking mandates in the first place - or any zoning codes at all - and still manage to get along just fine. My hometown in northern Maine is one of them.
Overall, places with 25,000 or fewer residents make up 40 percent of known jurisdictions in the United States that have returned decisions about parking back to the people who live and work there. Below are just a handful of stories from these communities about why they removed parking minimums and what has happened since.
A town charts an economic revival
Ecorse, Michigan, was already scheduled to update its local zoning code in 2020, when United States Steel, the town's largest employer, announced it would be shutting down most of its operations. The news prompted the city to completely overhaul its zoning, including eliminating parking mandates.
"We didn't really get any pushback against the reduction of parking minimums,"
said planner Nani Wolf.
"We have way more parking than we need, and I think everybody was generally in recognition of that."
The main form of development in Ecorse is renovations of existing buildings. Unfortunately, there are a number of vacant properties. Since its peak in the 1970s, the town has lost almost half its population, now at 9,800 residents.
"Having those parking minimums removed has made it so much easier and quicker for people to reoccupy those buildings,"
said Wolf. She pointed to one example of a former ice cream shop that someone wanted to turn into a Puerto Rican restaurant. The owner's biggest concern was parking: there were only two spaces on the property. In past years, that would have posed a regulatory problem, but Wolf reassured the owner that he was good to go.
In other cases, the city introduced prospective entrepreneurs to nearby businesses that might be amenable to a parking lot sharing agreement.
"We really need to focus on redistributing what already exists, not requiring people to build more,"
said Wolf.
As Ecorse charts a new future, the reduced red tape has made it easier for people to invest in their community.
"Speed of development review is so much faster,"
said Wolf.
"That's true for developers and for city staff. Parking just takes so much time and energy from everybody involved."
Protecting rural land
The town of Chattahoochee Hills incorporated in 2007 with the aim of...

Mirroring the Nation, Voter Turnout Dropped in Alaska’s 2022 Election Sep 03, 2024

How a democracy data analyst assesses changes in voter turnout.
In November 2022, Alaska saw its lowest voter turnout in any general election since 1980. While it's tempting to try to blame a single flashy reason for that fact, there are many factors that can raise and lower overall voter turnout: voter interest, competitive high-profile contests, media coverage, ballot access, even the weather on Election Day. Another factor that can impact voter turnout: changes in election laws, such as Alaska's 2022 implementation of ranked choice voting (RCV).
Since higher voter turnout is a win for all of us, it's important to find out if ranked choice voting has any impact on voter turnout and how that impact stacks up against the system's other pros and cons. In this article, I'll walk through how I calculate voter turnout, how I explore a data set to investigate any changes in voter turnout, and what the November 2022 election can tell us about ranked choice voting's impact on turnout. (Spoiler: it can't tell us much.)
What's in a denominator?
To start, 267,047 Alaskans cast a ballot in November 2022. Simple! But not super useful without any context. Is that high? Is it low? How does it compare to other elections or other states?
In the 1958 election for Alaska statehood, only about 48,000 people cast a ballot. Down in Washington state, more than 3 million people voted in the 2022 general election. Comparing the raw number of voters in Alaska in 2022 to these two numbers doesn't say much about voting behavior. All it really shows is that way more people live in Alaska now than in 1958, and that way more people live in Washington now than in Alaska.
Since the raw numbers lump together differences in voting behavior with differences in population, I can isolate the impact of voting behavior by dividing the raw vote count by some measure of population. Choosing the right denominator is important for calculating voter turnout.
A few different measures of population are useful for understanding different aspects of voter turnout. Total residents is useful for assessing the impact of large-scale disenfranchisement, but the huge number of legally ineligible voters under 18 will drown out the smaller impacts that I'm concerned with here. Registered voters is good for administrative checks (because each voter is listed individually, unlike aggregate census data) or when assessing partisan turnout differences, but factors such as automatic voter registration can artificially decrease registered voter turnout by increasing the number of registered voters.
The sweet spot for the Alaska election turnout analysis is the voting-eligible population, a metric published by researchers at the University of Florida that counts the number of people who are legally eligible to vote in a given jurisdiction. Many election researchers prefer the voting-eligible population as a gold standard for calculating voter turnout in their analyses.
So! In Alaska's 2022 general election, 267,047 voters cast a ballot. That's 50.27 percent of the state's 531,272 eligible voters.
Next, to figure out if that number is meaningful or unusual, I'll compare it to the state's previous general elections.
Visualizing and contextualizing
Now that I know what data I'm working with, my next step in trying to find any stories that the data is telling is to visualize this data. Turning the data into a plot or graph often makes it easier to spot trends or details that wouldn't be clear from the numbers alone. I typically focus my attention on ranges (the spread of the values), patterns (any trends or repetitions), outliers (unusual points that break patterns), and subgroups and supergroups (comparisons between sections of the data or to other data sources).
Ranges
Looking at the range of the data is a useful start to finding any lessons or highlights from the information. We want to understand all the values our data could take and the values it takes in practice. I'll start with a l...

Four Ways Context Matters for Wildfire News Coverage Aug 21, 2024

Reporters can help people see the forest, even when the trees are on fire.
News is news. And fire is fire. But coverage of wildfires in 2024 is more than a matter of acres burned, percentage contained, drought and wind conditions, evacuation orders, and threats to lives and property. All that is important, but it's not the full story. Journalists play a vital role in interpreting the significance of wildfire events within a broader context. For example, over the past decade, following the available science, reporters have shifted from covering wildfires simply as natural disasters and zeroing in only on a singular "cause" or spark. They are more often clarifying how wildfires are climate-boosted natural disasters, with global warming as one major factor creating conditions for more severe fires that are more difficult to fight.
As science, conditions, and understanding evolves, it's time to go further. As megafires burn across the west and firefighters put their lives on the line over and over, the news media have an important role to play, highlighting other human-caused factors that exacerbate the wildfire crisis---namely policies that put people and property in harm's way by encouraging building houses in wildfire-prone areas, lack of information and mandates for fire hardening, and a default tendency to frame all wildfire as simply "bad," overlooking the use "beneficial" fire as an effective prevention measure.
Here are four ways that journalists can tell the full story of wildfires.
#1: Reframe wildfires as natural
Although wildfires can bring tragic destruction, at the same time, it's crucial to understand that wildfires and human-started fires have burned regularly throughout the West for thousands of years and that fire has benefits in ecosystem health and in preventing the largest and most severe fires. In places with high summer temperatures, low humidity, and little rain, the natural "fire return interval" can be just 10 to 15 years before another fire comes through, clearing out the debris that would otherwise accumulate into highly flammable kindling and reinvigorating "fire-adapted" ecosystems where fire is needed to activate seeds and clear openings where wildlife can then browse on young tree shoots and ground-level shrubs.
Indigenous people have relied on intentional burns to cultivate food, fiber, and forage and to mitigate big destructive fires. Settler-colonial history of putting out all fires has left a legacy of choked forests where wildlife suffers, and the accumulation of forest fuels turns what could be small fires into megafires.
Now the United States and Canada are transitioning away from full suppression and trying to return a more natural regime of beneficial fire. Their success depends in part on a cultural redefinition of wildfires as a natural occurrence.
Journalists play an important role in redefining wildfires. While wildfire coverage is often necessarily focused on people and property destruction, reporters can begin to recast fires as a natural part of western landscapes. For example, when covering a fire, journalists can:
Mention the area's natural fire return interval by referencing a map or noting the area's level of wildfire hazard. (This is also shown on maps.) Showcasing physical evidence, such as a photograph of fire scars on a cross-section of tree growth rings, is also effective. This sets the expectation of fire as a natural occurrence with an important role in preventing the accumulation of fuel.
Show that fire is baked into ecosystem life by referencing local species that are fire-dependent or fire-adapted. Journalists can identify such species with the help of the US Forest Service, US Bureau of Land Management, or state department of natural resources.
Describe wildfire in neutral terms instead of alarming and negative ones. For example, use "large and high-intensity wildfires" or just "wildfires" instead of "raging" or "devastating wildfires."
Measure damage in terms of co...

Five Reasons Four-Story Apartment Buildings Are Good Aug 20, 2024

Especially in Oregon and the rest of the Pacific Northwest.
They're naturally inexpensive. They're often islands of physical accessibility. They're supremely green without even trying - in part because they're an essential ingredient for a truly walkable neighborhood. A lot of them are even sorta cute.
They're four-story apartment buildings, and they may be the most underrated building block of a healthy city or town, especially in the Pacific Northwest.
Four-story apartment buildings hit a "sweet spot" of low costs and high benefits, according to Nathan Teske, executive director of Hillsboro-based affordable housing developer Bienestar.
In the transect of housing types, a spectrum that runs from farmhouses to skyscrapers, this keystone of the Cascadia region's potential future housing growth sits plop in the middle, nestled between the townhouse and the "5-over-1." Here in the Northwest, four-story apartment buildings are almost always made of wood; under US building codes, they're the tallest structures a team of workers can easily build without using more expensive, more complicated, and more energy-intensive concrete.
Add all this to the shortage of construction labor and to overlapping state and federal prevailing wage rules that kick in with the fifth story, and you've got a good case that four is an even more magical number in our corner of the continent than elsewhere.
"This is timber country, so folks [here] know how to build with it,"
said Meaghan Bullard, managing principal at Portland-based Jones Architecture, which has designed market-rate and below-market housing in Astoria, Pacific City, Portland, and Seattle.
As Oregon in particular looks for ways to accelerate housing production across the state without letting prices rise further, it may be coming to grips with the fact that removing the many regulatory barriers to new apartment buildings should be a bigger part of the solution than it has been so far. And if Oregon wants to start building more apartments, it should start thinking a lot about the number four.
In my next article, I'll explore how four-story apartment buildings have generally become illegal to build in Oregon, especially in the areas richest with jobs, infrastructure, and services where people actually want to live. For now, though, let's take a short walk through the reasons why we should care about these four-story structures: four-story apartments are affordable to live in, inexpensive to build, and physically accessible; plus, they save energy costs and fit anywhere.
1. Four-story buildings are inexpensive to live in
Unfortunately, the American Housing Survey doesn't offer recent price data for the state of Oregon. However, it did recently conduct a survey for the half of the state's population that falls within the Portland metro area, and here's what it found:
Some of the savings compared to a detached home simply reflect the fact that most apartments are smaller than most oneplexes. But the benefit of having homes of various sizes on the market should be obvious: it lets people choose to save money by living smaller if they want to or if that's what they can afford. Put another way: making apartments legal in more places lets people prioritize amenities or price, if that's what they want, rather than just size.
Then there's the smaller price difference between smaller buildings and bigger ones - look at the rightmost bar on that chart. One reason it's a little taller than the middle three is about location; the whole point of a high-rise is to fit many homes in a premium location. Some of it reflects a building's age; because modern zoning leaves a so-called "missing middle" between oneplexes and skyscrapers, small apartment buildings tend to be older. But again, the chart above shows why midsize apartment buildings should be allowed to exist. If they aren't, people get stuck with the more expensive extremes.
But why four stories, not just three? In Oregon, four-story buildings are a ...

Five Ways Ranked Choice Voting Could Help Climate Action Aug 19, 2024

A functioning democracy is essential to tackling any large-scale issue.
A supermajority of Americans wants more climate action. And yes, there's been progress, especially here in Cascadia. Yet laws in the United States are still not aligned with public sentiment on climate and many other issues.
That's because our democracy isn't functioning as it should.
One could blame individual elected leaders for their foibles. But perceiving everyone to be at fault - "fire everyone and start fresh," as one recent US survey respondent summarized - is more productively interpreted as a nudge to explore the structures that incentivize politicians to act the way they do.
With that framing, it's clear that candidates that get elected into office aren't always the most responsive to the will of the people. Limited voter participation means that politicians tend to primarily attend to the desires of people who actually vote, who aren't representative of the overall public (especially in lower-turnout elections like those in odd-numbered years and primaries).
Some primary elections intentionally exclude voters, creating candidates who are accountable only to a narrow partisan base. When more than two people run, there's a good chance that one of them will be elected without majority support, and candidates find easy ways to game the system to gain political power. (Sightline has a whole book covering these systemic flaws - and solutions to fix them.)
Stymied climate policy action is what got Sightline into democracy and elections issues in the first place. Since then, Sightline has extensively researched election topics from money in politics to voter registration to proportional representation.
So how might some of these electoral reforms help us make bigger, faster progress on reducing emissions and adapting to a changing climate?
This article will focus on ranked choice voting, one electoral upgrade that's been gaining attention and traction nationwide - but anything we do to build a more representative and functional democracy will likely offer similar benefits to climate policy as those listed here. And while assessing the causes of policy change is notoriously difficult, there are plenty of reasons why ranked choice voting could help climate policy take off.
How ranked choice voting can accelerate climate action
1) Majority-supported leaders put majority views first
Most Americans want more progress on climate action, so anything that makes our democracy more representative will likely help expedite policy action on the issue.
Ranked choice voting better aligns politicians with their constituents because the victor of a (single-winner) ranked choice voting election has to earn more than 50 percent of the votes. So leaders elected under ranked choice voting are much more likely to represent the views of the people in their community than those elected under plurality pick-one voting, who might have very little support (especially if they were elected in a primary).
If elected leaders have better incentives to listen to their constituents' concerns about climate change, for example, they might be more likely to punish toxic spills, update building codes, and advance clean energy.
2) Third parties such as the Green Party can showcase their support
Ranked choice voting reduces entry barriers for third-party candidates, including those focused on specific issues. A Green Party candidate, for example, can run without fear of taking votes away from a similarly positioned major-party candidate, because voters who choose the Green Party candidate first can have their second choice count if their first choice doesn't get enough initial votes.
In a ranked choice voting election, environmentally focused candidates can also bolster their platform by demonstrating their level of support to the candidate who does win. Say there are three candidates running - a Democrat, a Republican, and a Green Party candidate. If the Green Party candidate wins 20 pe...

Blazing a Trail: The Vital Role of Wildfire Hazard Maps Aug 08, 2024

Sophisticated and high-resolution maps such as Oregon's are essential tools for thriving in a fiery future.
Oregon and Washington are currently fighting 32 major wildfires, and over 9,000 people are under an evacuation notice in Oregon. It is a blistering wildfire season but one we knew to expect. And thanks to technology and wildfire hazard maps, we also know where to expect intense fires.
Hazard maps are a key piece in the wildfire crisis puzzle that we're racing against time to finish. While it's true that wildfires can destroy homes anywhere (as we learned when the Tubbs Fire burned through urban Santa Rosa, California), they are much more likely in certain predictable places. These places are where geography, climate, and vegetation make the likelihood of severe fire high and where dwellings are near wildlands or intermingle with them (the so-called wildland-urban interface, or WUI [pronounced WOO-ee]). Scientists now have the modeling technology to identify where intense fires are likely to occur, and wildfire hazard maps can display this likelihood (or hazard score) for individual properties.
It's easy to miss just how important these maps are. While scientists cannot predict where the next potential conflagration will occur each year, maps anchor our individual and collective strategies for thriving in the new wildfire normal. Without maps, states do not know where to focus the limited aid for property owners that can inspire changing awareness and social norms; house-seekers and developers gamble on where to buy or build; and public policy will continue to subsidize building in high-hazard places and restrict building in safe cities and towns.
Most states need better wildfire hazard maps. All US western states have some kind of statewide map and national maps exist as well, but only Oregon and California's maps reflect advanced modeling and data integration and display the hazard score at the property level (although Washington does have a map in development). It's time for other states to consider these models. Oregon and California use their maps to guide mandatory wildfire building codes and, in Oregon, a defensible space code as well. However, while mandatory codes save billions in firefighting, emergency response, post-fire cleanup, and economic aid, states that are not ready to enforce codes can greatly benefit from using hazard maps to guide public resources and private decisions.
The wildfire crisis: Three causes and two solutions
The West is in a wildfire crisis that is not going to ease. In British Columbia, tens of thousands were evacuated during the 2023 wildfire season. In Oregon, the 2020 Labor Day wildfires destroyed more than 4,000 houses and businesses, causing an estimated $4 billion in damages. In Washington, the 2023 Gray and Oregon Road fires left hundreds homeless. In California, the 2018 Camp Fire took 85 lives. The list goes on. People are mourning. State and federal lawmakers are performing backflips to refill hemorrhaging coffers. Property owners are losing their insurance or swallowing steep rate hikes. Without action, suffering and runaway public expenditures will only get worse.
The first step is understanding what is causing the crisis so that leaders can address its roots. Two causes---climate change and a buildup of forest fuels---get most of the attention. But there is a third and equally important factor: building houses where wildfires naturally burn every 15 to 20 years---places where homes would inevitably burn down without expensive wildfire protection.
The best solution to the wildfire crisis is to not build houses where they are likely to burn down. Scientists who are looking at climate forecasts and related heating up and drying out of the land say that building houses in the fire-prone WUI should be our biggest concern.
The second-best solution, for existing dwellings and any new construction, is to make homes fire-resistant---in other words, fire-hardening the structure an...

Washington State Leads in Climate-Friendly Building Policies—For Now Jul 31, 2024

How two ballot initiatives would affect Washington's clean building efforts and how the state can maintain its lead.
Buildings make up a quarter of Washington state's carbon emissions, polluting more than any other sector except transportation. To change this grim statistic and achieve state climate goals, Washington has put in place some of the strongest building decarbonization policies in the United States.
Washington has mandated that the state's electricity come from carbon-free sources by 2045. It has passed leading energy efficiency requirements for its biggest polluting institutions. It has created innovative pathways for utilities to help their customers electrify. And it has incentivized builders to install high-efficiency electric appliances instead of polluting gas-fired ones in new construction.
Two statewide initiatives on the November 2024 ballot could undo some of this robust policy and regulatory apparatus. So, Sightline analyzed the proposals and assessed how they would (or would not) affect Washington's building decarbonization efforts.
Initiative 2117 to repeal Washington's Climate Commitment Act would take with it more than $442 million that the state legislature has authorized to clean up existing buildings. Initiative 2066 would prevent the state, cities, and counties from actions that "prohibit, penalize, or discourage" the use of gas for heating or other appliances, which could affect Washington's new energy code and Seattle's new Building Emissions Performance Standard. Initiative 2066 would also repeal parts of HB 1589, a new policy to help customers of Washington's largest utility, Puget Sound Energy (PSE), go electric.
In the meantime, other US states are putting in place ever more ambitious building decarbonization policies and regulations, such as stronger building performance standards and more support to help residents make the switch from gas to electric appliances. To maintain lead, Washington can look to states such as Colorado, Maryland, and New York for inspiration.
WASHINGTON HAS LAID A STRONG POLICY FOUNDATION TO CLEAN UP ITS EXISTING BUILDINGS
The state's carbon-free electricity mandate will nearly halve existing building emissions
Buildings pollute the climate in two primary ways: running on electricity from a not-yet-carbon-free grid and burning fossil fuels (mostly gas) directly for space and water heating. In Washington, these two sources each make up about half of the state's emissions from commercial and residential buildings.
In 2019 the state legislature tackled the first of these drivers by passing Washington's clean electricity mandate, the Clean Energy Transformation Act (CETA). CETA requires that electric utilities' portfolios be greenhouse gas-neutral by 2030 and completely carbon-free by 2045. Washington's grid is already about two-thirds non-emitting, but utilities still burn gas and coal for at least 20 percent of the state's power.
Once fully implemented, CETA will erase about half of the emissions from existing commercial and residential buildings by eliminating carbon pollution from electricity.
Performance standards will further drive down pollution in big buildings
Complementing CETA, in 2019, Washington also passed the Clean Buildings Act, which established the United States' first statewide building performance standard. Following Washington's lead, Colorado, Maryland, and Oregon have since established their own building performance standards.
Washington's Clean Buildings Performance Standard (CBPS) requires existing commercial buildings larger than 50,000 square feet (office buildings, universities, and shopping malls, for example) to meet an energy efficiency target tailored to their building type and climate zone. More than 8,000 buildings will need to comply with the new standard, with compliance for the largest buildings beginning in 2026.
The CBPS does not direct buildings on how to meet the energy efficiency target. But in practice, adherence to the stan...

Proportional representation in just three (brutally hard, agonizingly slow) steps! Jul 30, 2024

Is there a better way to get there in the United States?
In an old Irish joke, a lost traveler hollers to a farmer in a field for directions. The farmer ponders for a moment and then yells back, "If I was going there, I wouldn't start from here." For those of us who aim to make American democracy (and especially Congress and other legislative bodies) live up to their promise, the same droll advice seems to apply: Don't start from here.
Here (the status quo) seems FUBAR. Congress careening toward government shutdowns, mutual contempt between (and within) the party caucuses, legislative gridlock, gerrymandered districts, pervasive disinformation, whole committees that spend their time not governing but pandering to extremists on YouTube, hundreds of electeds who sane-wash the political violence of January 6, and withering public distrust for (even disgust with) politicians…all these dynamics make reform seem like a long shot (maybe even a moonshot). And the odds against amending the US Constitution make it seem like a cow-jumping-over-the-moon shot.
And yet here we are, and the destination is too important for us to give up. What are the directions to a better democracy?
Proportional representation is needed but unlikely
To chart our course forward, we need to know not only where here is but also where there is. What does better legislative democracy look like? In short, it looks like legislative bodies that can reliably and efficiently solve hard problems for the public, from stumbling school systems to a broken immigration regime, and from climate change to the national debt.
It looks like bodies that set priorities, digest the best available information, strike balances among competing values and interests, and negotiate complicated agreements among conflicting factions. At the federal level, it looks like a Congress that becomes, as intended by the framers, the first branch among equals, no longer subordinated to the judicial and executive branches by its own paralysis.
To achieve such outcomes, a growing body of reformers is assembling around the proposition that proportional representation (the way that legislative bodies in most of the world are chosen) is the gold standard. Proportional representation would unstick American lawmaking and thereby let Americans move forward toward the future they deserve. Unfortunately, it also has little chance of winning adoption soon---at least in its most common forms employed abroad.
Paths that go directly from here to proportional representation are daunting; in the best case, they will take decades.
On the other hand, a different electoral reform---an improved version of the existing and flawed US system of majoritarian elections---has intriguing possibilities. It's not proportional representation (in fact, it can seem like the opposite), but it is attainable now in many places, and somewhat surprisingly, it may prove the best way to accelerate the arrival of proportional representation.
This reform consists of upgrading existing elections to ranked choice voting, which is now used in Maine and on the ballot statewide in Oregon this November, or combining ranked choice voting with variants of unified (all-party, all-candidate), top-four primaries, which are now used in Alaska. In November, this latter reform is on the ballot in Nevada and may be on the ballot in Colorado, Idaho, and Montana.
In other words, if proportional representation is there, we shouldn't start from here. We should start by charting a fresh course down a recently blazed trail to ranked choice voting and unified top-four primaries.
Long story short, that's my conclusion; now I'll make the short story long.
Proportional representation is the ultimate destination
In political science literature, there is little contest: proportional representation is better. Compared with the current US system of winner-take-all races in single-member districts, proportional representation (a family of election methods that ens...

Five Flaws That Would Destine WA’s TOD Bills to Backfire Jul 19, 2024

Unfunded inclusionary zoning would do more harm than good in legislation to legalize apartments near the state's transit investments. But there's a way forward!
To dig out of the state's deep shortage of homes and control the crisis of high prices and rents, Washington legislators have passed a slew of bills in the past two years to boost housing production, including the re-legalization of accessory dwellings, middle housing, and co-living homes. But for two years running, the legislature has reached an impasse on a remaining zoning reform that's critical for curbing sprawl, cutting pollution, and making Washington communities affordable for all incomes: legalizing apartments near transit.
Known as transit-oriented development, or TOD, allowing lots more homes in apartment buildings where employment and transportation choices are abundant would make the most of public investments in transit and give people of all incomes more affordable options to live closer to their jobs, schools, and other neighborhood amenities. This in turn brings compounding benefits for local economies, the environment, and housing equity.
TOD has the potential to yield the high quantity of new homes needed to remedy the state's massive housing shortage. It can help reverse the historic pattern of exclusion in land use that's walled off our cities' middle income and low-wage community members. It's the most effective way to create low-carbon cities and towns. And it's an essential formula for preventing sprawling development into Washington's farmland and forests.
TOD is also popular. Statewide polling by Sightline in 2023 found that 82 percent of Washington voters---east, west, rural, urban, and suburban---support allowing more kinds of housing, including taller apartment buildings, near frequent bus and rail stops.
Getting past the TOD impasse
But while reforms have opened up formerly sacrosanct single-detached zoning to middle housing throughout most of Cascadia, only British Columbia has passed strong TOD legislation. It's the same story in the rest of North America: middle housing wins have been piling up, but only Massachusetts and Colorado have managed to get TOD bills through.
Middle housing reforms have passed with the support of unusual multisector bipartisan bedfellows, but those coalitions tend to scatter when it comes to legalizing large-scale apartment buildings. In particular, left and center legislators often deadlock over the question of whether statewide zoning changes to allow apartments should be coupled with statewide mandates for inclusionary zoning (IZ), the requirement that new apartment buildings offer a share of homes at reduced rents that are affordable to residents with incomes below a certain threshold.
Most lawmakers and advocates agree on the goal of creating mixed-income neighborhoods in transit-rich, job-rich cities that provide affordable housing options with good access to transit. And the intent of IZ is to attain that goal. Unfortunately, the IZ as proposed in Washington's 2023 and 2024 TOD bills would go against the broadly shared vision of connected transit communities with housing choices for people of all incomes---it would do more harm than good.
The inherent problem with unfunded IZ is that its cost impedes the production of housing. It's a preventative tax on housing when what we need for affordability is far more housing. Sometimes, when market conditions are just right, that tradeoff can be worth it---if it yields some affordable homes and doesn't reduce the overall supply by much. But in many cases, IZ backfires entirely, thwarting the construction of both market-rate homes and income-restricted homes.
The IZ in Washington's TOD bills was a formula for serious statewide backfire, especially in communities already struggling to attract homebuilding. Moreover, because the legislation targets IZ in TOD areas and not elsewhere, the extra burden of IZ would drive new housing construction away from transit. F...

Ranked Choice Voting Is Simple—Election Laws Are Not Jun 26, 2024

A field guide to ranked choice voting in primaries, general elections, and more.
General elections in Alaska. Closed party primaries and the general election in Maine. Certain party primaries in New York City and Virginia. City offices in Minneapolis and San Francisco. Military and overseas voters in Alabama and Arkansas. Ranked choice voting applies in all these varied contexts - and many more!
In 2024, however, millions of US voters will choose their leaders using the method known as plurality voting. Plurality voting is still the most common voting method in the US, even though it doesn't always foster the best outcomes for the majority of voters: unpopular or extreme candidates can win with less than majority support and personal attacks work better than discussion of issues, on the campaign trail through to the halls of power.
Multiple cities, states, and other governing bodies have sought out and demonstrated another way: ranked choice voting.
Ranked choice voting is simple. In trials and testing in advanced democracies throughout the world, the method has evinced benefits in partisan primaries, nonpartisan general elections, and others: it ensures that winners have the support of a majority of voters, prevents spoiler candidates from warping election outcomes, punishes negative campaigning, and encourages more diverse and less established candidates to jump in and run for office.
It's also adaptable. The variations in our numerous elections in the US mean that ranked choice voting can and has been used in a large variety of contexts: sometimes for local offices, sometimes just in presidential primaries, sometimes only in a general election.
As more and more states and localities look to adopt ranked choice voting, Sightline is here to walk you through how different voting methods can combine with different types of elections, with a focus on specific scenarios here in Cascadia. Voting methods include plurality voting (currently used in most US elections), ranked choice voting, and many others that Sightline has previously described in detail. Types of elections include general elections, runoffs, and primaries, the last of which can be further classified into nonpartisan or partisan, closed, open, or some blend.
This article will cover single-winner elections - executive offices like mayor or president. For more on multi-winner, proportional elections and legislative bodies, see Sightline's evergreen glossary for electing legislative bodies.
As a "field guide," this piece is longer than some of Sightline's articles and is intended as a reference. If you'd like, you can skip to the explainers of regional scenarios.
VOTING METHODS: PLURALITY AND RANKED CHOICE
Plurality voting: The status quo in most US elections
Many US elections determine winners through plurality voting. With plurality voting, also called "first-past-the-post" or "winner-take-all," each voter votes for one candidate. The candidate with the most votes wins, even if they only won a plurality (more than any other candidate) and not a majority (more than half) of the votes.
This method can lead to unrepresentative outcomes when there are more than two people running. If three candidates are competing for one position, they might all split the vote and the winner could be elected with as little as 34 percent of the vote. That means that fully two-thirds of the electorate wanted someone else in the office instead! With more candidates in the field, a winner might earn even less support.
Spoiler candidates have shown up in plurality elections time and time again. One of the best-known national examples is when votes for Ralph Nader in 2000 outnumbered the margin that Al Gore needed to win in key battleground states, allowing George W. Bush to win the US presidency even though Nader and Gore had more similar positions and a higher combined vote total.
There are plenty of regional examples, too: in Montana in 2012, Democratic Senator Jon Tester won reelection...

When Do Cities Hold Elections? Jun 10, 2024

A US Dataset on Election Consolidation
The best-kept secret of boosting voter participation is election consolidation. Moving local elections to the same ballot as national ones increases turnout more than any other election upgrade, often doubling participation in local races. Synchronizing elections is popular with voters, for whom it saves time and hassle. When asked whether to consolidate elections, voters almost always vote yes by large margins.
Consolidation also improves representation of voters who are working-age, renters, and less wealthy; dilutes the political influence of special interests; is more effective than unsynchronized elections in selecting local officials whose actions align with the wishes and beliefs of local majorities; enhances the accountability and legitimacy of local government; does not favor one political party over the other, nor any particular political ideology; and can save millions of taxpayer dollars.
At present, though, a large majority of US cities and towns hold their elections out of sync with national elections, a practice elite reformers started more than a century ago to dampen the influence of ethnic voters and their political "machines." These "off-cycle" elections are relegated to a wide range of dates that are locked in by state or local laws.
A trend toward election consolidation has emerged in recent decades and has picked up speed, with scores of cities rescheduling their elections to ride the turnout coattails of national voting and save money. Nationwide in the United States, more than 50 large cities (including almost all cities in Arizona, California, and Nevada) have consolidated their elections in the past two decades. In 2022 alone, a dozen localities passed ballot measures to move their voting to the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.
Until now, no one has assembled a reliable directory of when municipal elections are held in major American cities and what laws dictate those schedules. Consequently, leaders, journalists, reformers, and scholars have been hard-pressed to understand the dimensions of off-cycle voting or track its trends.
This report presents and summarizes Sightline's Municipal Election Consolidation Dataset, a new dataset on election timing in all 50 US states and the District of Columbia, and an associated interactive map.
The dataset details what state law says about municipal election schedules. It also includes election timing information for 420 large US cities---home to more than 102 million people. These cities include the five most populous cities in each state and all US cities of more than 100,000 residents.
By examining state constitutions and laws for all states plus municipal charters and ordinances for all these cities, Sightline identified not only when elections are currently scheduled but also the legal basis for those calendars. In other words, Sightline pinpointed what statutes leaders would have to revise to move elections from their disparate off-cycle dates to national election day.
All but five states (Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, and Virginia) conduct their state elections on-cycle with national elections, and all but 10 states schedule all or virtually all county elections with national elections, according to scholar Sarah F. Anzia in her book Timing & Turnout.
Election information website Ballotpedia recently studied school board elections and found a distribution of dates similar to what Sightline found for municipalities: 25 mostly off-cycle states; 14 mostly on-cycle states; the remainder a mix. This report focuses on municipal (or city) elections, specifically city council elections.
A recent working paper from scholars at Boston University found a similar distribution of mayoral elections. In a smattering of cases, elections in US cities are consolidated with or identical to those for county governments. Among these, for example, are Arlington, Virginia; Butte, Montana; Columbus, Georgi...

Voter Participation Jumped When Alaska Opened Its Primaries Jun 03, 2024

2022 turnout for every candidate contest reached a decade high.
In Alaska's 2022 primary election, turnout in every candidate race rose to the highest rate in a decade. Larger shares of Alaska voters cast ballots in the races for governor, Congress, and the state legislature than in any of the previous five elections. Participation peaked across the political spectrum. Republicans, Democrats, independents, and third-party voters all cast ballots at higher rates in 2022 than the previous decade's average.
The increase coincided with the debut of nonpartisan open primaries, where all candidates appeared on a single ballot available to all voters, regardless of party. Alaska appears to have followed a pattern seen in other states, where opening the primaries came with a turnout boost of at least a few percentage points.
Other factors that may have boosted turnout include an unusually large number of campaigns unfolding across the state, voter interest in high-profile candidates, competitive races, and exposure to election news coverage. Voter participation is a temperature check on American democracy. High turnout signals that citizens are engaged in public life and democracy is thriving, while low turnout indicates the opposite. Yet low voter turnout in primary elections is the default across the country.
In 2022, no state exceeded 50 percent primary election turnout. And only four states have reached 35 percent turnout at least once in the past four nonpresidential primary elections, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center. In that context, Alaska's 37 percent turnout among eligible voters was commendable and ranked as the third-highest voter participation rate of all states in 2022.
Still, Alaska has ample room to improve voter turnout across the political spectrum and in the selection of presidential candidates, a process controlled by the Democratic and Republican parties. Continued low turnout in Alaska's 2024 presidential primaries, where the reforms don't apply, provides a strong contrast to the rest of the state's primary races.
PRIMARY ELECTION TURNOUT IN ALASKA INCREASED IN 2022 FOR EVERY CONTEST AND EVERY PARTY
The 2022 midterm primary elections in Alaska grabbed voters' attention. Turnout for all statewide races (governor, US Senate, and US House) exceeded 35 percent. Voter participation for the legislative races rose above 30 percent for the first time in the past decade. A vacant seat in the US HouseThe US House race unexpectedly took the spotlight following the death in March 2022 of US Representative Don Young, who had represented Alaska in Congress for 49 years. Young's death triggered a special primary in June to decide who would serve out the remainder of his term. The regular primary followed, as scheduled, in August. Both used the new nonpartisan open primary format.
Turnout in the regular primary for the US House race hit 36 percent, a record high for the decade. The race attracted a huge field of 22 contenders. All voters, regardless of political party registration, were free to choose any one of those candidates. The leading candidates also created significant buzz and media attention through their charisma, cross-partisan platforms, and name recognition. The top four vote-getters (Mary Peltola, Sarah Palin, Nick Begich, and Tara Sweeney) moved on to the ranked choice general election, which Peltola won.
An incumbent defends her seat in the US Senate
The US Senate primary came down to moderate versus conservative Republican politics. A seasoned incumbent, Senator Lisa Murkowski, faced 18 challengers. Murkowski had survived a 2010 Republican primary ouster to win a write-in campaign in the general election with the help of Democrats. She needed them again to push her over the line.
Her positions in Congress, a mix of support for abortion rights and opposition to President Donald Trump, while also protecting Alaska's oil and mining production and gun ownership reflected that. Murkowski's closest challe...

Spoiler alert! Majority winners are not a guarantee May 30, 2024

Oregon's past statewide and federal elections are full of spoiler candidates and non-majority winners.
No one likes spoilers. Spoiled food, spoiled plans…and spoiled elections.
In 31 contests over the past dozen years, candidates for statewide or federal office in Oregon have celebrated victory without first winning majority support.
In other words, in almost one-sixth of Oregon races (16 percent), more voters selected non-winning candidates than cast ballots for the ultimate winner.
Take the most recent governor's race. Democrat Tina Kotek won with 47 percent of the vote---about 67,000 votes more than her main competitor, Republican Christine Drazan. But nonaffiliated candidate Betsy Johnson received 168,000 votes, which was more than enough to swing the election.
Similar cases pockmark state election records. Third, fourth, or even more candidates have complicated over half of Oregon's gubernatorial races in the past twelve years. They have done the same in races for US representative, secretary of state, and state treasurer.
In all these cases, it's not clear if the person who won was actually preferred by the voters. If different candidates had run or if a spoiler candidate had dropped out, the outcome might have shuffled. These "plurality winners" may not represent the will of the people and might push ideas at odds with the desires of the bulk of the electorate.
Some states, such as Georgia, employ separate runoff elections to avoid this predicament. California and Washington use top-two general elections for the same reason. And Oregon could, like its cities of Portland and Corvallis, use ranked choice voting to ensure that winners earn a majority of votes.
Indeed, the availability of simple solutions like ranked choice voting makes the prevalence of the spoiler problem grate even more.
In general elections, third parties change the game
Third-party candidates influenced three of the past five general elections for Oregon's governor. And in a fourth case, the winner only barely logged a majority.
Even before the 2022 governor's race, Democrats worried about Johnson's candidacy spoiling the election for Kotek. They had seen a similar dynamic unfold in both 2010 and 2014 but in the inverse: it helped the Democrat.
Democrat John Kitzhaber won in 2010, with a margin of victory of about 22,000 votes more than Republican Chris Dudley but just short of a majority. Two third-party candidates each received almost enough votes to make up the difference between Kitzhaber and Dudley: Greg Kord (Constitution Party) with 20,475 and Wes Wagner (Libertarian) with 19,048. Either candidate could almost have been a spoiler, pulling voters away from Dudley; together, they very likely changed the election outcome just by running.
In 2014 Kitzhaber won reelection with 49.9 percent of the vote, which was much closer but still not a majority.
The 2018 governor's race barely ended with a majority winner. Although Democratic incumbent Kate Brown received more votes than her closest competitor, she had just 1,999 more than the total votes cast for other candidates.
Spoiler candidates show up on ballots besides those for governor. In 2016 Republican Dennis Richardson won the race to be Oregon's secretary of state with 78,580 votes more than the next candidate, Democrat Brad Avakian, ending Democrats' fourteen-year hold on statewide offices. But four other candidates received almost 175,000 combined votes, which was more than enough to change the outcome.
The same year, Democrat Tobias Read earned 42,000 more votes than his Republican opponent, Jeff Gudman, to win the race for state treasurer. But two additional candidates received many more votes than Read's modest edge: Progressive Chris Henry with more than 90,000 votes and Independent Party nominee (and former Republican state senator) Chris Telfer with more than 173,000. In 2020 Telfer seemed to realize that she might have diverted votes from Gudman, chose not to run, and endorsed Gudman fo...

The Bizarre Red-Blue Politics of Election Consolidation May 23, 2024

And the chance for stronger democracy it creates.
In a 2012 state legislative hearing, the lead proponent of a bill to consolidate local elections in November of even-numbered years said:
This bill would do one thing and one thing only. It would make Election Day uniform throughout the state…[it] ought to be a non-controversial topic. …This bill saves money. It increases voter turnout. …If we believe in representative democracy…we should support this bill.
Was the speaker progressive or conservative? A Republican or a Democrat?
What about the champion of a similar bill in a different state who said this in 2015?
"There is one major contributing factor to low voter turnout - the timing of elections - that could be addressed with a relatively simple policy change."
And how about the legislative sponsor of a 2023 bill in yet another state who proposed to move "every single type of election in the state…to our regular even-year elections" because "doubling turnout - that's all for the good"?
BIZARRE-PARTISANSHIP
The first speaker was the Arizona arch-conservative Clint Bolick, co-founder of the libertarian Institute for Justice. The second quote is from the arch-liberal interest group California Common Cause. The third is from of Montana state representative Mike Hopkins (R).
Is election consolidation (moving local elections to the same November ballot as national elections) a rare political case, then? Is it a reform where the left and right work together?
Not at all. To date, it's been more bizarre-partisan than bipartisan. In these states and others, proponents and opponents recite the same arguments for and against election consolidation. Indeed, if you go online and watch hearings on these bills (as I have done for five states) or comb through media coverage from a half dozen other states considering the idea, you'll learn that the scripts are almost verbatim but the parties keep trading parts.
SWAPPING SCRIPTS
An example from the pro side:
"It's better to have 60 percent of the people rather than 30 or 40 percent of the people choosing,"
Kansas state senator Damon Thayer (R) said in 2020 as he argued against unified Democratic opposition for consolidated elections. Three years later, New York state senator James Skoufis (D) argued incredulously for election consolidation against a phalanx of Republican opponents.
"You have 20 or so percent of voters deciding the outcome for the entire jurisdiction,"
he said.
"Why are you so afraid of 50, 60, 70 percent of voters determining who should hold these local positions?"
And one from the con side:
"[Democrats] will stop at nothing to manipulate the system to rig themselves into total and permanent power,"
state Republican party chair Nick Langworthy of New York complained in 2022. A year later, Tennessee House Democratic caucus chair John Ray Clemmons called a Republican's election consolidation bill a way to
"manipulate the democratic process for the sole purpose of consolidating even more power."
Watch enough of these hearings and you'll experience a singular combination of déjà vu and whiplash.
ROLE REVERSALS
Leaders' actions matched their words. Almost every state election consolidation proposal in living memory has split legislators along party lines. In red states, Republicans vote yea and Democrats vote nay. In blue states, vice versa. It's an unusual pattern that's possibly unique.
Often, the proposals were almost identical, even borrowed. In 2012, for example, the Arizona legislature passed the bill Bolick was testifying for (HB2826 2012). Championed by the conservative Goldwater Institute and supported by GOP mainstays like the Arizona Chamber of Commerce & Industry, the bill won with three-fourths of Republican senators and four-fifths of Republican representatives voting yes. Republican governor Jan Brewer signed the bill, which almost all Democrats opposed, into law.
Three years later, in 2015, neighboring California considered a similar bill (SB 415). One innovation...

Audit Stretches to Find Trouble in Portland's Affordability Mandate May 17, 2024

Should people who qualify for subsidized housing get to have home offices? And other odd questions.
On Wednesday, the Portland city auditor's office released an investigation of Portland's inclusionary housing program, the affordability mandate that applies to new buildings of 20 or more homes.
The audit makes some good arguments and some confusing arguments. It found one fairly glaring problem in the program: a two-year backlog in the city's work to check that landlords and tenants are in compliance. Then, to make things more confusing, The Oregonian decided to make a seemingly scandalous headline of something the auditors hadn't even recommended changing---the fact that the program has covered part of its own administrative costs using the relative trickle of money it collected directly.
Because Sightline has a long history of caring deeply about inclusionary zoning and wanting Cascadian governments to get it right, I decided to dedicate a throwback Thursday to a bloggy point by point response to some findings and recommendations of this audit.
I'm going to try to minimize technical language, but things may still get a little obscure. In classic blogger fashion, I'd be happy to talk more in the comments.
Okay, without further ado:
"Improve Program goals so they are specific to the Program, attainable based on who the Program is designed to serve, and measurable."
Sightline's take: yep.
Portland's inclusionary housing program ("IH") was put together in a hurry, in an environment of justifiable urgency that verged on panic. In 2014 and 2015, a construction collapse followed quickly by a migration boom had sent Portland rents and displacement soaring at the fastest rates in many years. In November 2016---the same day they funded the city's first local affordable housing bond---voters would take matters into their own hands by putting tenant advocate Chloe Eudaly, a thoughtful bookstore owner who barely campaigned but happened to be really upset about rising rents and really good at Facebook, on the incoming city council.
In the months leading up to that transfer of power, inclusionary housing, re-legalized by the state legislature one year prior, was Something the City Could Do. The unfortunate result of this enthusiasm was that the city essentially started with a set of desired program specs and retroactively filled in a rationale for them, without ever clearly defining the program's goals.
Yesterday, the auditors found that those original goals "were not effective performance measurement tools and did not accurately convey the Program's purpose."
It's a good point. Better defining success was one of our four recommendations last year for improving the program. New program language (approved this year, after the research for yesterday's audit had already been conducted) is a modest improvement, but the key language ("support the production of units") is still too vague to be a very useful test of whether or not the program is working as intended.
"Fees are intended to fund affordable housing development and preservation, but according to the Bureau, as of June 2023, this had not yet happened. Instead, the fees have gone solely towards Program operating costs."
Sightline's take: More transparency here would be good, but the existence of administrative costs isn't a scandal.
One of the so-called "sideboards" placed on local inclusionary housing programs by Oregon law is that they must offer a "fee-in-lieu option." Developers must have an option to pay cash to the city as an alternative to providing affordable housing themselves. The state doesn't restrict how cities can use this cash, and until this year the city didn't formally promise to use it in any specific way, though it was understood to be intended for affordable housing programs.
Instead, the city apparently used this money to fund its affordable housing program ... in other words, it used the trickle of cash revenue generated by inclusionary housing to cover the exp...

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