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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...

Bellingham’s Parking Reform Pilot Pays Off May 01, 2024

Old Town's first new building project has more than double the number of homes and less parking than the city's old code would have allowed. The rest of the city might follow suit.
Bellingham's industrial Old Town district is finally beginning its transformation into the walkable neighborhood city planners have long envisioned - thanks, in part, to a decision last year to try giving builders full flexibility over parking counts in that area.
The experiment has paid off. The first building proposed since the regulatory change will have more than twice the number of homes as would have been allowed last year.
"The shift to no parking minimums was a clear win in this case,"
wrote Ali Taysi, a land use consultant for the project.
The six-story building, located on the former recycling facility at 707 Astor, will house a mix of 84 studio and one- and two-bedroom apartments, with 1,600 square feet of commercial space on the ground floor. Permits are expected to be filed in May, with builders hoping to break ground early next year. The project is likely the first of several coming to the neighborhood, after the city signed a development agreement in 2023 for the eight city blocks that used to serve as scrapyard.
Now, the parking reform is being considered citywide.
UNLOCKING THE POTENTIAL OF OLD TOWN
Old Town's transformation from industrial scrapyard to walkable mixed-use neighborhood has been anticipated since 2008 when the area was designated as the city's second "urban village," after downtown. At the time, planners estimated that 1,100 homes could be added there by 2022. Today, only 44 have been built.
The Parberry family, who first started salvaging metals along Whatcom Creek in 1923, owned 46 percent of developable land in the district, or about eight city blocks. Their initial plans to relocate the recycling facility were scuttled by the 2008 recession, but in recent years they discontinued their Old Town operations.
Building in Old Town is no easy feat. Decades of dumping refuse along the tidal mudflats of Whatcom Creek created 13 acres of landfill by the 1950s. The Department of Ecology remediated the area in 2005, removing tons of solid waste and capping the remaining contaminated soil. Excavation work can be prohibitively expensive, and restrictions on ground floor living and daycare centers remain in place. Future residents will also have to contend with the freight trains that run parallel to the district that sound their horns throughout the night.
But at a Planning Commission hearing on April 20, 2023, it seemed like Old Town's future might finally have arrived.
"I wish it would have happened a little bit quicker,"
said Tara Sundin, Manager of Community and Economic Development for the city.
"But I'm just thankful that we have people that have been willing to come forward into one of our riskier parts of town."
Developers Curt O'Conner and Pete Dawson, who both grew up in Bellingham, have paired up for the undertaking by purchasing all but one of the Parberry properties.
A PARKING REFORM PILOT TAKES SHAPE
To make building in Old Town feasible, builders proposed changes to the zoning code with the local Planning Commission. One modification was reducing parking mandates to be consistent with the city's other urban villages. Instead of mandating a parking spot for every studio apartment, for example, the city would only require one parking space for every two.
"The conversation on 'no parking minimums' hadn't really crossed our radar,"
said Taysi, the developers' consultant.
"We thought it might be a bridge too far.
Members of the planning commission, though, thought Old Town might be the perfect place to give builders full flexibility over parking.
"This could be an opportunity to try to go further,"
Commissioner Rose Lathrop proposed.
Another commissioner, Mike McAuley, agreed:
"If we want to pilot something, this would be an amazing place to do that,"
he said.
"If we're forcing the market to pay for a $60,000 park...

Seattle Deserves a Better Comp Plan Apr 19, 2024

The city can make three critical fixes to its 20-year growth plan: Let middle housing be bigger, allow apartment buildings in more places, and legalize car-free homes everywhere.
Seattle is in the process of updating its Comprehensive Plan, its 20-year roadmap for growth. Chief among the policies it charts is, of course, housing. Seattle's chronic shortage of homes and the harm that has done to lower-income residents and communities is no secret to anyone.
Unfortunately, the draft plan falls far short of what's necessary to create a Seattle that welcomes households of all incomes. In short, it doesn't make enough room for more homes.
If adopted as proposed, more and more people will continue to be priced out of the city for decades to come. And the city will also fall further behind on goals to reduce climate pollution and sprawl.
The critical fix is straightforward: loosen zoning rules to allow more homes of all shapes and sizes. And Seattle can improve its draft Comprehensive Plan to make that happen in three key ways. (I cover them briefly in the numbered sections below, then expand on each in the rest of the article.)
1. LET MIDDLE HOUSING WITH MORE HOMES BE BIGGER
Allowing middle housing - small-scale homes like fourplexes - in places once reserved for detached houses is an imperative for creating more homes that more people can afford in lower-density neighborhoods.
The good news is that the 2023's Washington state bill HB 1110 requires Seattle to legalize middle housing in areas currently reserved for single-detached houses. Three-quarters of Seattle's residential land will be opened up to more housing, creating the potential for tens of thousands of new homes.
The bad news is that just allowing more homes per lot doesn't by itself guarantee anything will get built. That's because middle housing construction is usually not financially feasible unless zoning rules allow the buildings to add indoor space as their unit count goes up. Seattle's proposed Comprehensive Plan (Comp Plan, for short) doesn't do that, and instead would impose the same cap on buildable capacity as what currently applies to single-detached houses with accessory dwellings. This limitation would not only suppress the construction of middle housing but would also prevent any feasible projects from having family-sized homes.
The solution is to emulate Spokane's best-in-the-US middle housing zoning, which grants generous development capacity and flexibility. Or, at minimum, implement the middle housing capacity recommendations of Washington's Department of Commerce, which stipulate workable increases in capacity.
2. ALLOW LARGER APARTMENT BUILDINGS IN MORE OF THE CITY
Apartment buildings five stories and up, near job centers, transit hubs, mixed-used nodes, schools, and parks, are essential for providing the level of density that both reduces cost and adds homes at the scale needed to address Seattle's shortage. Large multifamily buildings in compact, walkable, low-carbon neighborhoods also yield the biggest dividends on reducing climate pollution and sprawl.
Seattle's draft Comp Plan proposes only a modest amount of upzoning for apartment buildings. It recommends four- to six-story buildings in 24 newly designated "neighborhood centers" confined to just an 800-foot radius, and eight stories in a new urban center at the 130th Street light rail station. Otherwise, it proposes no apartment upzones anywhere else, excepting some slivers of land currently zoned for low density in designated centers, and possibly some 1/2-block strips along arterials.
Seattle's plan could rise to the moment by allowing highrise towers in all regional centers and near all light rail stations, eight-story buildings in all urban centers, and six-story buildings near frequent transit stops and other community amenities like parks. It could also designate more and larger neighborhood centers with apartment zoning.
That may sound like a lot of change, but it's still not European-...

Aging Solutions Are Climate Solutions Apr 19, 2024

Adapting communities to better serve growing elderly populations also makes those places more climate-resilient. A new book charts the path to making this connection.
When climate disasters like wildfires, flooding, heat waves, or polar vortexes grip communities, they hold a sharper threat for older adults, whose numbers in the US and Canada are growing. And even beyond these more headline-grabbing events are the everyday activities that may prove more challenging for older adults to perform independently in a warmer world. In Cascadia, that might look like being able to afford air conditioning to keep cool as the summers get hotter. Or so one can close the windows against wildfire smoke to keep indoor air safer for breathing, especially for those with respiratory ailments.
Housing expert and community resilience advocate Danielle Arigoni argues in her new book that adapting our communities to better serve the needs of older adults - generally defined as those 65 and older - in fact makes our communities safer, more livable, and more climate-resilient for everyone. Climate Resilience for an Aging Nation draws on her long experience in urban planning and community development to offer a new process and framework for how towns and cities can approach both disaster recovery as well as everyday decisions about how they'll build and change.
Sightline interviewed Danielle about her findings. Her book is available from publisher Island Press and other places books are sold.
YOU'VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT AND WORKING ON THESE ISSUES FOR DECADES. WHAT PROMPTED YOU TO START WRITING THIS BOOK?
I was compelled to dive into this topic after seeing some statistics that showed older adults dying at much higher rates than the rest of the population in a slew of disasters: Hurricanes Katrina, Florence, Maria, Ian, and Ida. But also in Winter Storm Uri, the California Camp Fire, and then again in the Pacific Northwest heat waves of 2021 and 2022. In all these cases (and more), older adults represented upwards of 50 percent, two-thirds, or even 85 percent of the people who died. When you think about the fact that Katrina was nearly 20 years ago - when 70 percent of the people who died were over 65 - and that the rate of fatalities for older adults is virtually unchanged since that time, it's pretty sobering. And maddening.
I have to credit AARP for really helping me to understand the impacts of our built environment on older adults, which invariably fuels the disaster rates we see here. I am an urban planner and have worked at the intersection of housing, transportation, and infrastructure for 20-plus years - always with an eye to ensuring that it could be improved to deliver better environmental and social outcomes - but I confess that I had some blind spots about the needs of older adults and people with disabilities. My five-year tenure as Director of Livable Communities at AARP really opened my eyes and helped me recognize the connections between the climate resilience work I had done previously at EPA and HUD, and the opportunities to better align that work with the needs of older adults.
I realized that there was virtually no information out there that connected the dots between two massive trends: climate change and our rapidly aging population. My hope was that I could start to create a common understanding of those connections in ways that would compel work in both the aging and climate fields. That is the gap that I hoped to fill with this book.
HOW DO CLIMATE IMPACTS ESPECIALLY AFFECT OLDER PEOPLE IN OUR COMMUNITIES?
Climate impacts older adults in so many ways, some of which are unique to them, but many of which are shared with people with disabilities, low-income people, and disinvested communities.
For example, extreme heat impacts everyone, but for older adults it is especially deadly. 2023 was the hottest year on record on Earth so far, which of course affects everyone - but not equally. Extreme heat is now the leading cause of we...

Boise’s New Zoning Code Sparks Surge in Permits for ADUs Apr 19, 2024

Rules about who can live in them and where they can park were key barriers to backyard cottages.
Removing regulatory barriers to building small homes drives new construction, but it can take years to see the full impact. For example, after Seattle adopted a new zoning code removing regulatory barriers to accessory dwelling units, ADU production doubled in year two, tripled in year three, and quadrupled the original baseline in years four and five. Yet Seattle's success with ADU reform since 2019 may be outpaced by another city in Cascadia that has just unleashed a surge of permits for relatively inexpensive infill housing.
In the three-and-a-half months since its own new zoning code took effect on December 1, 2023, the City of Boise had 27 people per month apply for permits to build accessory dwelling units (ADUs) on their property - also known as backyard cottages, granny flats, or in-law apartments. That compares to a permit rate of just over 3 per month in the 12 months before the new code took effect. The rate of permit applications for ADUs under the new code is nearly nine times the rate of approvals in the year before the new code took effect.
For comparison's sake, Boise's 95 ADU permit applications since December put it on track to exceed Seattle's ADU production in 2019, even though Boise has barely a third of Seattle's population.
Some pent-up ADU projects may have waited for the new code to submit their permits, so it is still too early to estimate the full scale of the effects of the zoning changes. A year or two of permit data will allow meaningful comparisons in the actual construction of ADUs before and after the change in Boise's zoning code. But whatever the final magnitude of the increase, the recent jump in permit applications shows that the new zoning code made production of these small infill homes much more attractive for homeowners.
Byron Folwell is a Boise architect whose practice includes providing owners feasibility assessments for building ADUs on their lots. After meeting with over a hundred owners interested in adding them, Folwell believes three key changes in the new code spurred the increase in permit applications.
THE 3 CHANGES THAT UNLOCKED BOISE'S ADUS
1. Removing bans on renters
Boise's prior zoning code barred owners from renting out both the main house and the rental unit together. This rule prevented all existing landlords from adding a backyard cottage to an existing rental even though these owners had experience renting and managing rental housing. The rule also created risk for current owner-occupants who might need to leave their home for an extended period and need rental income to help cover the mortgage.
2. Removing off-street parking requirements
Under the old code, a home had to have two off-street parking spaces, which made ADUs infeasible on many of the city's smaller lots. Either there was no place to put the two parking spots, or creating them would add costs that made the project too expensive.
One of Folwell's clients had to get a special decision from the city planning director to build an ADU. While the lot had two parking spaces, one space was in front of the garage and therefore didn't count under the old rules. No special pleading would be required for this project under the new code.
3. Alignment among elected officials, planning and permitting staff, and most Boise citizens on a shared vision for infill development
The new zoning code was the result of a multi-year public process followed immediately by elections for the city council and mayor. The pro-housing forces won the day. With clear direction in the new code, planning staff are now empowered to process permits efficiently and make timely approvals.
Boise had made an initial step towards easing the barriers to ADUs in 2019 but maintained parking and residency requirements that blocked many projects. This earlier, more timid effort to embrace granny flats helped prime the market. So when those barriers fell...

It’s (Past) Time for British Columbia to Legalize Roommates Apr 18, 2024

Another piece of the puzzle to make housing more affordable in the province - and keep up with southern neighbors Washington and Oregon.
In 2018, University of Victoria student Emma Edwards and her six roommates were evicted from their Saanich home. Their offense? Seven of them were living together under one roof, and the local government had a legal limit of four unrelated people per house. This house had seven bedrooms and plenty of space, but the law was the law. Saanich mayor Fred Haynes explained the move at the time, saying that "Neighborhoods are concerned about the impacts on the qualities of their lives."
So these seven young women had to scramble and find new accommodations in a municipality with a minuscule 1.6 percent rental vacancy rate, in the middle of the school semester. This was, according to the mayor, all in the name of safeguarding quality of life in Saanich.
Since then, Saanich has increased the legal limit on roommates to six---progress, but too little too late for Ms. Edwards and her roommates.
Their story illustrates the need for British Columbia to follow the examples of Washington and Oregon and remove roommate caps provincewide (those states did so in 2021). As Sightline Institute has written previously, roommate caps are "tools that privileged people use to exclude from their neighborhoods people without much money, such as immigrants and students."
In November 2022, on just his fourth day in office, BC premier David Eby removed rental restrictions in condominium buildings, opening up thousands of homes to renters. In the same spirit, British Columbia can remove roommate caps province-wide. This, too, could create or preserve homes for thousands by simply allowing the use of bedrooms currently sitting empty. And it would also put an end to the cruel, discriminatory practice of evicting people just because they want to share a big house with roommates to whom they aren't legally related. The Province advanced housing policy in late 2023, permitting fourplexes Province-wide, and up to 20-storeys near transit, making it possible to build a lot more bedrooms. Simply allowing people to make full use of existing bedrooms, then, should be a no-brainer.
ROOMMATE CAPS DISCRIMINATE AGAINST NON-TRADITIONAL HOUSEHOLDS
Why did cities restrict occupancy to related people in the first place? The historical reason was a core goal of zoning: enshrining the nuclear family in law. The Bartholomew Plan, Vancouver's very first land use plan from nearly a century ago, states in its introduction, "The retention of Vancouver as a city of single family homes has always been close to the heart of those engaged in the preparation of this plan."
Banning diverse and unconventional households and setting aside vast swaths of land for conventionally defined nuclear families has long been a priority of North American land use policymakers. In 1976, in Gross Point, Michigan, for example, a rule against unrelated people living together was used to evict two gay men.
It is hardly different in British Columbia today. As in Saanich, neighbors can wield the complaint-driven process to target for eviction people like students, economically sharing a house. Same goes for a group with any characteristic that you (or your nosiest neighbor) might find objectionable. This selective enforcement of roommate caps facilitates discrimination not just based on family status, but also on whatever quality (race, age, gender, sexual orientation, political belief) any concerned neighbor might personally dislike.
BLAME THE LANDLORDS, EVICT THE TENANTS
Policymakers have offered a wide range of rationales to justify roommate caps: safety, traffic, noise, moral uprightness, neighborhood character, the prevention of crowding, and the protection of tenants from slumlords.
Protecting vulnerable tenants from unscrupulous landlords who overcrowd their rentals may sound legitimate. But scratch the surface, and this stated concern often masks the customary gr...

What’s Misunderstood about Indigenous Cultural Fire Is Sovereignty Apr 18, 2024

Lessons from the Karuk Tribe.
"The piece that is misunderstood about Indigenous cultural fire is sovereignty."
That was one of the first things Bill Tripp, director of Natural Resources and Environmental Policy for the Karuk Tribe, said to me when I interviewed him for Sightline's research series on wildfire solutions.
Each year, wildfires cost the United States tens to hundreds of billions of dollars. Policymakers are finally acknowledging what Indigenous peoples have been saying for decades: most forests need more fire, not less. Government agencies are scrambling to reverse the dominant paradigm of aggressively suppressing wildfire and its legacy of fuel-choked forests primed to burn. This includes recognizing the role of Indigenous land stewardship and extensive burning. Importantly, this shift is also a doorway to that larger issue Tripp named: sovereignty.
This article explains the relationship between cultural burning and Tribal sovereignty for the Karuk Tribe, whose homelands straddle the California-Oregon border. It describes recent wins in their struggle for others to understand and recognize their sovereignty - specifically new policy in the California Legislature and agreements with the US Forest Service that clarify who has a right to burn and where. Interviews with Tripp heavily informed the discussion below.
KARUK FIRE TRADITIONS UNDERGIRD THEIR SOVEREIGNTY
For millennia, like other Native Americans across the United States and Canada, Karuk people have used fire to tend their homelands as an abundant garden landscape. They burn to cultivate tanoaks, acorns, mushrooms, hazel, and elk habitat, to name just a few of the hundreds of species that together support Karuk ways of life. And, along with lightning-sparked ignitions, their low-intensity fires clear out understory ladder fuels that could otherwise kindle severe wildfires that could wipe out their communities.
Colonization, genocide, and ensuing assimilation as well as forest management policies, however, shifted the forest from being productive for people and wildlife to being productive for timber. For more than a century, state and federal laws essentially outlawed Indigenous burning and mandated immediate suppression of natural ignitions. Law enforcement could jail Native people caught burning. Many people still hunt, fish, and gather, but without fire, the habitats and species that are central to Karuk ways of life have significantly diminished.
Hence, even to the degree that the Tribe can make and enforce its own laws and take other actions of self-governance (legal sovereignty), repressing fire has significantly impacted their cultural sovereignty and forced many to assimilate into store-bought foods and Western culture. Karuk cultural biologist Ron Reed explained that
"without fire, the landscape changes dramatically. And in that process, the traditional foods that we need for a sustainable lifestyle become unavailable…so we're not getting the nutrition that we need. We're not getting the exercise that we need."
For food, health, and spiritual connection
Huckleberries, for example, are a first food whose phytochemicals and micronutrients may help prevent cancer and diabetes and may aid eye, heart, and cognitive health. Regular burns boost huckleberry productivity by clearing competing vegetation, opening the canopy to let in more sunlight, releasing nutrients into the soil, removing overgrown branches, and spurring the growth of new shoots. In the past, regular cycles of burning yielded bountiful harvests of two to eight gallons of berries per person per day.
But stewarding first foods and fibers yields more than nutrition and exercise; it also nourishes the spirit and community. As Reed articulated,
[Without fire,] the reason we are going back to that landscape is no longer there. So the spiritual connection to the landscape is altered significantly. …When we don't go back to the places that we are used to, accustomed to, part of our lifestyle is...

The Election Calendar Is Cheating Idaho and Montana Voters Apr 03, 2024

But neighboring Wyoming offers a solution.
The eastern Cascadian states of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming are about as similar as any three states can be. They are neighboring, lightly populated states in the Rocky Mountains, with major agriculture, energy, mining, and tourism industries. Among the reddest of red states, they have Republicans in every state executive office, Republican supermajorities in every legislative chamber, huge majorities for Republican presidential candidates every four years, and, with the sole exception of US Senator Jon Tester (D-Montana), Republicans in all their Congressional seats.
But on one measure of politics, the three states diverge. Montana and, especially, Idaho lag Wyoming badly in voter turnout in local elections.
The reason has little to do with voter ID laws or get-out-the-vote campaigns, with electronic voting machines or any of the other hot-button topics that fuel partisan controversy and distrust about American elections. The reason is much more prosaic: the states' election calendars.
Idaho and Montana conduct municipal elections in November of odd-numbered years, separate from state and federal elections. Wyoming lets its cities choose when to conduct their elections, and most of them do it on the same ballots they use for federal and state elections, on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November in even-numbered years. That is, on the date that voters think of as capital-E, capital-D Election Day.
Simply by consolidating elections, Wyoming dramatically boosts turnout. And the consequences include better representation by age; strengthened government accountability to mainstream voters; and saved public funds.
Consolidated elections deliver nearly double the voter turnout
Sightline gathered data from the largest cities in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, finding in each municipality the citywide race with the most votes cast in recent municipal elections. Wyoming voters cast far more ballots in their 2022 municipal elections, which coincided with state and federal elections, than did their Idaho counterparts in 2021 off-cycle elections, when little else was on the ballot. On average, the Wyoming cities listed in the figure drew 37.3 percent of voting-age citizens to the polls to vote in 2022. In Idaho, meanwhile, the comparable figure was 19.5 percent. In other words, Wyoming's turnout was almost double Idaho's, a neighboring state that is otherwise a political twin.
Just so, Wyoming's municipal voting turnout is substantially higher than Montana's. Montana's odd-year elections brought out more voters than did Idaho's, but that's because Montana voters are routinely more active, across the board. In fact, Montana ranks sixth among all US states for its presidential turnout since 1976. Given the much higher voting baseline in Montana generally, you would expect Montana's municipal turnout to be at least 6 percentage points higher than Wyoming's. That's the average gap in presidential elections between the states. Instead, Wyomingites outvoted Montanans by 4.3 points in municipal elections, averaging 37.3 percent turnout to Montanans' 33 percent. By running local elections with national ones, in other words, Wyoming closes the deficit and goes far beyond.
Another way to see the Montana gap between on-cycle and off-cycle voting is to look at the two Montana communities that vote on cycle. By law, all counties in Montana---as in 40 states---vote on-cycle, so the two Montana cities that are run by consolidated city-county governments, Anaconda (Deer Lodge County) and Butte (Silver Bow County), are natural tests of what happens with on-cycle municipal elections. The on-cycle cities boast almost twice the turnout of their off-cycle peers. Average turnout per citizen of voting age in the highest turnout municipal race in each city in the seven off-cycle Montana cities was 33 percent; turnout in the two on-cycle city/county elections was 62 percent.
Still another way to see the imm...

Nonpartisan Open Primaries Let Alaskans Choose Values Over Party Apr 03, 2024

More than half of voters in the 2022 midterm primaries split their tickets between candidates from across the political spectrum.
In 2022, Alaska voters for the first time used nonpartisan open primaries to choose candidates for the general election. Every voter, regardless of political registration, received the same ballot. And every ballot listed every candidate in every race.
In this style of primary, voters could support a mix of Republicans, Democrats, independents, and third-party candidates, or they could vote along party lines. Our analysis of 2022 primary election data found slightly more than half of Alaska's 192,061 voters opted to split their tickets in the races for US Senate, US House, governor, and state legislative offices.
The combinations of candidates spanned the political spectrum, which was unsurprising given that Alaska has the highest percentage of independent voters in the nation. The cast vote record from the Alaska Division of Elections shows what combination of candidates each Alaska primary voter chose. From this data, we cross-referenced candidates' self-described political affiliations to determine how many Alaskans split their ticket between candidates of different parties.
One of the more popular multipartisan combos, chosen by 24,350 voters, was an independent gubernatorial candidate, a Republican for US Senate, and a Democrat for US House. Less conventional combinations also surfaced. For instance, 5,606 Alaskans voted for Republicans in the three statewide races and chose at least one Democrat to serve in the legislature.
And very small numbers of voters simultaneously supported conservative and progressive candidates whose platforms appear to have little overlap. The debut in August 2022 of nonpartisan open primaries brought voters unaffiliated with either party closer to squaring their numbers with their political clout. Lawmakers from the two major parties dominate Alaska's political scene, yet only 37 percent of registered voters in the 2022 primary belonged to the Democratic or Republican parties.
Nearly two-thirds of Alaska voters were (and continue to be) independents, a combination of nonpartisan and undeclared voters. The chance to express independent political preferences is a defining feature of Alaska's open primary system. All Alaskans, whether party-registered or not, are free to look beyond party when deciding which candidates they want to see in the general election.
ALASKA'S PRIMARY ELECTION RULES HAVE A HISTORY OF CHANGE
Since statehood, Alaska has vacillated between so-called "blanket" primaries and semi-closed primaries. From 2004-2020, the two major parties settled into a pattern for organizing their primaries. Republicans held semi-closed primaries, meaning only Republican and independent voters could participate, but not Democrats. Democrats and third parties offered a combined ballot open to all registered voters. In Alaska's 2022 nonpartisan open primaries, though, all candidates appeared on a single ballot available to all voters, regardless of party.
Allowing all voters the chance to vet all candidates in a state-funded election made sense. Voters could pick one candidate per race to advance to the general election. The top four vote-getters in each race then moved on to the ranked choice general election. The open primaries apply to races for governor, US Senate, US House, and both chambers of the Alaska legislature. They do not apply to the presidential primaries, which are funded by political parties.
Notably, 49 percent of all voters chose a Republican in at least one race and a candidate of a different party in another contest. The old Republican primary rules forced voters to choose from a menu of Republican candidates only, making such combinations impossible.
When given the chance to choose candidates freely, tens of thousands of Alaska primary voters did just that.
A MAJORITY OF ALASKA'S PRIMARY VOTERS CHOSE A MIX OF CANDIDATES FROM DIFFERENT PARTIES
Ab...

Washington’s 2024 Short-Session Housing Wins Mar 28, 2024

Three innovative bills carry forward the momentum of 2023 and complement its measures to legalize less expensive housing.
Washington lawmakers racked up some solid wins for housing abundance this year, passing bills to legalize co-living homes, increase parking flexibility, and revamp building codes for middle housing.
These wins overcame the challenges of both a "short session" (only two-months long) and the risk of complacency following 2023, which became known as Washington's "year of housing" in recognition of all the bills passed to help reduce the state's housing shortage.
Indeed, 2024 was not without casualties. Three bills to boost housing supply that didn't survive: HB 1245 to legalize house lot splitting, HB 2160 to allow more homes near transit, and HB 2113 to establish local accountability for housing production. And the legislature still has much work to do on the other two pillars of housing policy: stability for tenants and subsidy for below-market rate homes.
Still, in 2024, Washington achieved more on zoning reform bills than in any previous year other than 2023. And the debate and coalition building around the bills that died will create a more solid foundation for progress on them next year.
Here's a cheat sheet for the three key bills that passed, followed by sections digging into the details on each.
HB 1998 establishes a new best-in-the-US standard for statewide zoning reform to allow co-living homes, which are small apartments with shared kitchens. Co-living is a low-cost housing option requiring no public subsidy that most cities have all but regulated out of existence.
SB 6015 creates new statewide standards to give builders more flexibility in complying with local parking mandates. The first stand-alone parking bill ever passed in Washington, its reforms will make homebuilding easier and less expensive - especially for middle housing and accessory dwellings.
HB 2071 sets in motion a process to modify the residential building codes so that it can apply to the construction of middle housing projects up to six units. It's a critical cost-saving follow-up to 2023's HB 1110 that legalized middle housing.
CO-LIVING HOMES: NATURALLY AFFORDABLE, FLEXIBLE, AND COMMUNITY-FORWARD
Co-living homes are a low-cost, multifamily housing option in which each resident has a small, private room and shares with other building residents a common kitchen and other spaces. Policymakers also refer to it as single-room occupancy (SRO), congregate housing, or rooming houses. Rents in newly constructed, market-rate co-living homes in the Puget Sound region can be affordable to people earning as low as 50 percent of area median income, without any public subsidy.
Co-living was once far more common. In the 1950s, it accounted for up to 10 percent of the rental stock in some US cities. Soon after that, however, local governments began adopting restrictive zoning and other rules that increasingly banned co-living, both new and old, and its numbers plummeted.
In a first for any US state, last year Oregon passed legislation to legalize co-living homes on all residential lots in urban areas. A weakness in Oregon's bill, though, is that it doesn't apply a co-living-specific method for counting its units - i.e., counting their "sleeping units" as fractions of standard "dwelling unit" apartments that they are so as to fit well within designated residential zones.
Washington's co-living bill, HB 1998, raises the bar by establishing this better-suited unit-counting method and by establishing other guardrails to prevent cities from indirectly preventing co-living development. Here's what it does:
Requires cities and counties to allow co-living homes everywhere that they allow multifamily housing with six or more units per lot on land inside urban growth areas (the six units aligns with the middle housing bill HB 1110)
Prohibits a sleeping unit from counting as more than one-quarter of a dwelling unit for density limits
Eliminates parking ...

Washingtonians Will Soon Enjoy Cleaner Heating and Cooling Options Mar 21, 2024

HB 2131, to allow thermal energy networks, unanimously passed in the 2024 legislative session. It's a win for consumers, the climate, pipeline workers, and electric grids.
The possibility of connecting your home or business to a clean heating and cooling network could be coming to your neighborhood soon.
Washington lawmakers have opened up a new realm of climate-friendly business opportunities for the state's energy utilities. With the unanimous passage of House Bill 2131, introduced by Representative Alex Ramel (D-40), electric and gas utilities may now sell thermal energy, delivered via a thermal energy network (TEN); gas utilities can win grants for the first TENs pilots; and neighborhood-wide decarbonization with TENs can take off. (Note: this policy is not to be confused with geothermal energy, which the state will also be exploring thanks to Senate Bill 6039.)
"The innovation proposed in this bill is to work with gas utilities - companies that already install pipe, manage rights of way, distribute energy to buildings, and work under the regulatory authority of the UTC,"
said Rep. Ramel.
"The skill sets and talents of those trained workforces can have an important role to play in decarbonizing our building energy system."
In line with Washington's 2023 Biennial Energy Report, which recommended that natural gas utilities plan for the long-term transition to clean heat, this new law will smooth the way for transitioning buildings across the state off of fossil fuels and onto highly efficient, zero-carbon, thermal energy networks. Washington is now the fifth state to pass legislation to allow or mandate that utilities pilot thermal energy networks, and it's the first to remove legal barriers for neighborhood-wide decarbonization.
Thermal energy networks use a network of water pipes and ground-source heat pumps to transfer heat in and out of buildings to provide heating, cooling, and often, domestic hot water. Buildings on the network can exchange heat with a number of hyper-local, non-combusting, non-emitting energy sources - whatever is available nearby. Sources could include lakes and rivers, energy-intensive buildings like data centers, wastewater systems, or the stable temperature of the ground just a few yards down. And these networks can be designed for any size and can scale up over time, starting as small as two buildings sharing thermal energy and growing to full community-sized or regional-sized systems.
THERMAL ENERGY NETWORKS ARE A WIN FOR THE CLIMATE, ELECTRIC GRIDS, PIPELINE WORKERS, AND WASHINGTON FAMILIES
Thermal energy networks can solve some thorny challenges of the clean energy transition: electric grid expansion, gas pipeline workforce redeployment, and equitable access to clean energy. Which helps explain why some unusual bedfellows - building and construction unions, environmental nonprofits, gas utilities, and grassroots activists - all advocated for advancing this policy in Olympia this year.
One of the most striking benefits of TENs is their modest impact on the electric grid due to their ultra-high efficiency. Washington already faces a formidable challenge in trying to build enough electric transmission and generation to power its clean energy transition.
A recent US Department of Energy study examined the electric grid impacts of various decarbonization approaches and found that decarbonizing with ground-source heat pumps was the best electric grid cost reduction strategy, reducing transmission line expansion requirements by over a third and generation requirements by 13 percent. An earlier study examined the impact to electricity demand of various building electrification scenarios for space conditioning and found that TENs using ground-source heat pumps were the best option for minimizing demand on the electric grid.
Gas workers and their labor unions have been worried about how electrification efforts could eliminate their high-quality, living-wage jobs. Yet TENs offer a pathway for these wo...

Unlock Middle Housing with Parking Reform Mar 18, 2024

As long as parking is required, smaller, lower-cost homes are still illegal.
In January 2024, the Washington Department of Commerce published model ordinances for cities that will be updating their zoning codes to include new state-legalized "middle housing," from duplexes to sixplexes to cottages clustered around a shared courtyard. But when it came to parking minimums, the model ordinances sidestepped best-in-class policies to defer to status quo politics. In other words, unless your property is near a major transit stop, the state still recommends one or two parking spaces for every new home.
That's a problem, because between small lot sizes or navigating around an existing house, even one more parking spot is a bar that many middle housing projects just can't clear.
Daniel Parolek, who coined the term "missing middle housing," has been saying this for years.
"Requiring off-street parking has the biggest impact on small-lot residential infill,"
Parolek wrote in his book Missing Middle Housing. It's no surprise, then, that it's the jurisdictions where off-street parking is voluntary for new backyard cottages that they're sprouting up left and right.
To truly restore the right to build a diversity of housing options, from duplexes to a mother-in-law apartment over the garage, cities need to free these future homes from the tangle of regulations governing parking spaces.
ON SMALL LOTS, PARKING CAN BE A BIG PROBLEM
The problem with mandating off-street parking comes down to basic geometry. Cars take up a lot of space.
For lots 7,500 square feet or smaller, Parolek writes,
"the space needed to fit off-street parking on the site typically makes it physically impossible to provide the required amount of parking and get multiple units on the site. If an architect can make the parking fit, oftentimes there is not enough development potential to make the financial sense to pursue."
Parolek illustrates the difference. To make way for four parking spots, a future fourplex would need a parcel of land twice as large as the same fourplex without any off-street parking.
The real estate needed to park a car far exceeds the asphalt it sits atop. Driveways and additional space for a car to turn around on-site take can cover a large fraction of a lot's buildable area. David Foster, an architect in Tacoma, Washington, illustrated how just reducing driveway widths from 20 feet to 10 feet could grow a housing project from three homes to four, even while maintaining a parking space for each one.
When designing around an existing home, even finding room for one more parking space can be an impossible task. Last year, when Kent, Washington, was updating its zoning codes for accessory dwelling units (ADUs, a.k.a. backyard cottages or granny flats), it made a startling discovery. Eighty-five percent1 of single detached homes couldn't build an ADU because of the additional parking space required - one reason why less than 30 of these lower-cost housing options have been built there since 1995. Regulations on parking location, driveway widths, and curb cuts all ate away at possible parking options until they devoured the feasibility of a new home.
With most homeowners unable to physically add parking, the city changed course instead. By reversing a policy of not counting garage spaces towards the parking requirement, homeowners found themselves with double the number of legal parking spots overnight. No bulldozers required.
THE SECRET INGREDIENT TO ABUNDANT BACKYARD COTTAGES? PARKING FLEXIBILITY
In place after place that has granted flexibility over parking, property owners have taken up the opportunity with gusto. For instance, since Seattle eliminated parking mandates for backyard cottages in 2019, permit applications have more than tripled.
Meanwhile in California, one in seven new homes is now an ADU. Between 2016, the last year Golden State cities could require parking for all ADUs, and 2022, permits for these more budget-friendly dwellings incr...

How Governor Inslee Can Rebalance Washington's Utility Decarbonization Bill Mar 14, 2024

HB 1589 favors investors over ratepayers---and state climate goals. A section veto would go a long way to fix the bill.
Washington state leaders set out again this legislative session to move the state's utilities forward on a path toward electrification and away from gas. House Bill 1589 - a bill that passed in the 2024 session and is to be delivered to Governor Jay Inslee's desk any day now - is a move in that direction.
This bill, initiated by Puget Sound Energy (PSE), Washington's largest electric and gas utility, requires the utility to proactively plan for the transition from gas to clean energy. The coalition of climate and consumer advocates who helped usher it to passage knew that to get PSE to retire its existing gas infrastructure, the bill would have to include sweeteners for the utility, likely in the form of financial benefits to be paid by ratepayers.
However, the final version of the bill, as amended during this year's legislative session, overplays the PSE incentives piece, upsetting a delicate balance between climate benefits, ratepayer protections, and enticements for the utility. Further, overly generous financial boons to PSE could hamper the state's future negotiating power with the utility on important, additional decarbonization moves.
The two outsized financial benefits to PSE include accelerated depreciation (Section 7) and earnings on large electric projects still in construction (Section 5.2.d). These upsides for PSE are set to become law by the end of March 2024, but Governor Inslee could rebalance this bill in the next few days, using his veto authority to remove specific sections.
Below we outline what's good about the bill and what needs to be cut in order to retain the spirit of the original decarbonization solution - balancing perks for PSE with the provisions that step the utility toward a thoughtful and systematic transition to clean energy - and away from fossil fuels - keeping on track with the state's climate commitments.
A CRITICAL STEP TOWARD DECARBONIZATION: HB 1589 REINFORCES WASHINGTON'S CLIMATE PRIORITIES
This bill goes a long way toward putting PSE on a path toward decarbonization - an essential piece in Washington's carbon emissions puzzle if the state is to meet its 2050 goals. In particular, Section 3 of the bill calls for PSE to undertake comprehensive decarbonization planning.
The policy sets up an entirely new planning framework for the utility, folding together most of its existing planning requirements on both the gas and electric sides of its business into a single integrated system plan and orchestrating a holistic approach that prioritizes substantive decarbonization. Here are the most important planning updates that the bill puts in motion:
Sets up expansive new electrification programs to help transition PSE customers off gas
Prioritizes money and expertise to help electrify the homes of lower-income ratepayers
Drives PSE to assess potential to electrify entire neighborhoods as an alternative to aging pipeline replacement and as an opportunity to decommission sections of the gas system
Requires PSE to evaluate a suite of alternatives to additional investment in the gas pipeline system
Increases the annual commitments for electricity conservation and demand response to offset some of the expected new electric loads
How would these policies help PSE's lower-income consumers? Well, the utility receives cash from auctioning off its carbon allowances in the state's carbon market. House Bill 1589 would prioritize those funds for bill assistance and electrification incentives for low-income households. In addition to replacing gas appliances with electric ones, these incentives would also help pay for electric panel upgrades, new circuits, and even weatherization.
VETO THE ACCELERATED DEPRECIATION PROVISION TO REBALANCE THE CLIMATE UPSIDES WITH THE FINANCIAL PERKS FOR PSE
Buried deep in a section in HB 1589 is a provision called "accelerated depreciation." Accelerated depr...

The Missing Piece of Oregon's Housing Package: Legalizing Apartments Mar 07, 2024

Gov. Kotek's SB 1537 will do several useful things, but no longer directly lifts any local bans on apartment buildings. What happened?
It's hard to imagine a building more compatible with Oregon Governor Tina Kotek's stated goals than the Owens II Apartments.
A four-story apartment building that'd sit next to another four-story apartment building in central Astoria, the proposed mixed-income project would be priced entirely for low-income and very-low-income seniors thanks to millions of dollars in federal subsidy that have already been lined up. Sitting in the walkable core of a small city where home prices are up 48 percent in the last four years, the 50 new homes would replace a mostly empty parking lot.
However, the site is directly downhill from three Airbnb rental units that describe themselves as "riverview" and charge $181 a night for the chance to watch cargo ships humming up and down the Columbia River, just across that mostly empty parking lot.
In public hearings and legal filings for more than a year now, the owners of those Airbnbs and another family that owns a house across the street have raised first one issue about the proposed apartment building, then another. It's been a very expensive game of chicken for the dueling lawyers hired by the site's neighbors and the Northwest Oregon Housing Authority, which wants to build those 50 homes. Regardless of how this legal battle ends, the delay has postponed the project and could end up killing it.
In short, the Owens II Apartments would be exactly the sort of building Gov. Kotek seems to want to dedicate much of her governorship to helping create. So why, after more than a year of policy development, will Kotek's top-priority housing bill do so little to help it - and thousands of other potential buildings like it - get built?
50,000 MISSING APARTMENTS IN OREGON
To be clear, Gov. Kotek's Senate Bill 1537, which passed the state legislature Monday, might help the Astoria project claw its way over the finish line and provide permanently stable homes to 50 low-income senior-led households in northwest Oregon. One notable provision of the bill: if the people trying to stop the project lose their legal argument, the new law could eventually require them to pay attorneys' fees for both sides.
But that outcome is not certain, and would come only after a long and risky legal battle.
A different section of SB 1537, the subject of much quiet debate within Oregon's government over the last year, might have been a much bigger help. An earlier version would have automatically approved requests by housing developers for exceptions, or "adjustments," to various zoning rules. For their Astoria project, the Northwest Oregon Housing Authority would have automatically been allowed to build a much smaller parking lot, avoiding the need for excavation that's become the latest focus of the legal battle.
But during the lead-up to Oregon's 2024 legislative session, that section of Kotek's bill was largely gutted in the face of opposition by various Oregon cities.
Subsidized housing like the Owens II aren't the only homes at stake. Gov. Kotek has set a high-profile goal of accelerating the state homebuilding rate between 50 and 100 percent, enough to both keep up with future growth and to add 66,000 homes to the housing stock that, had they been built over the last 20 years, would have prevented Oregon's current shortage.
That will inevitably require figuring out how to bring homes to market at lower prices, and therefore how to develop market-rate homes with lower costs. Of those 66,000 missing homes, more than 50,000 would need to be at prices that only multifamily buildings, with their shared land, roofs, and utilities, can generally meet.
These are the low- to mid-price market-rate homes that the millions of Oregonians who live in market-rate housing rely on to keep housing market prices within reach. When more apartments get built, as they have been in almost unprecedented numbers in...

On Even-Year Elections, Trust Voters - and Evidence Feb 26, 2024

Vastly higher turnout in even-numbered years drowns out down-ballot drop-off, and more representative results indicate voters have the information they need.
For supporters of democracy, the equation should be simple. Higher turnout = better representation.
Research bears this out. Aligning local elections with higher-profile state and national races - in even-numbered years - boosts voter turnout more than any other change that election scholars have studied. Sightline's recent analysis comparing 2021 and 2022 turnout in Washington showed that fully 62 percent more people - 1.2 million Washingtonians - voted in the even-year election over the odd.
The sheer numbers speak for themselves; a democracy serves communities when more voters participate.
And digging into the academic studies regarding how voters understand and communicate their preferences confirms this conclusion, despite fears from critics. When more people vote, more people vote on local issues, and their ballots largely reflect their values and ideas - leading to better representation and a more responsive democracy.
To build a more representative democracy, then, we should do everything we can to increase voter participation when we have a choice.
WHAT WASHINGTON VOTERS AND LEADERS NEED TO KNOW ABOUT EVEN-YEAR ELECTIONS
1. Washington state could see far higher turnout for local offices - contrary to the naysayers
With House Bill 1932 in the 2024 legislative session, Washington state legislators have an opportunity to significantly increase participation in local elections across the state. HB 1932 would allow (but not require) cities and towns to move their elections to even-numbered years if they wish to do so. For jurisdictions that make the switch, turnout for mayor, city council, and other city offices would likely double, or more. Local government leaders could take advantage of the much greater turnout and govern with a clearer mandate from their constituents.
Opponents of this legislation are raising concerns that moving local elections to even-numbered years will result in voters who are uninformed about local issues or who will stop filling out a long ballot. KUOW reported in December that Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs "opposes the move to even-year elections. He argues that voters won't have time to learn about local races, and there will be a lot of undervotes. He also thinks candidates for smaller races won't be able to break through in grabbing voter attention." These comments were echoed in public testimony last month from Secretary Hobbs' office opposing HB 1932. Sec. Hobbs is not the only one - Seattle City Council president Sara Nelson, for example, has espoused similar views, as has the Seattle Times editorial board.
Concerns about undervotes and about voter attention and information are unwarranted. Evidence reveals that the increase in voter turnout in even years completely swamps any undervotes. And when people turn in a ballot, they are able to effectively communicate their interests - including on local issues, when the ballot is long, and with scant available information.
2. More voters means more votes for local offices - far more votes, not undervotes
The data show that undervotes are not a reasonable concern. More people vote for local offices during even years, not only on high-profile positions like US President or Senator.
Sightline has previously explored the issue of "undervoting," also known as down-ballot drop-off - when voters stop voting for the races farther down the ballot, which tend to be local offices. We found that while drop-off occurs in almost all elections, the switch to even-year elections results in an increase in the total number of votes cast in local races: greater overall participation vastly outweighs the small amount of individual ballot drop-off. Oregon's turnout for local elections is double that of Washington's, after taking ballot drop-off into account.
If cities in Washington switched thei...

Now Fully Funded, Portland's Affordability Mandate Should Be a Model Feb 23, 2024

Underfunded inclusionary zoning fails, but fully funded programs can be a boost to below-market housing and a fiscal bargain.
Hey, here's some cash. While you're at the store, would you grab me some eggs?
That's the simple, efficient premise behind the housing policy just approved by Oregon's most populous city and county. Here's some cash. While you're building those apartments, set aside some of them to be rented at less than the market rate.
In a 3-2 vote Thursday, the Board of Multnomah County Commissioners followed up on a unanimous Jan. 31 vote by the Portland City Council to fully fund this concept in the form of Portland's inclusionary housing program for rental projects.
Together, the two votes will remove what has been a major obstacle to new apartment buildings in close-in Portland neighborhoods. In most of the city, what had been an underfunded mandate will no longer be underfunded.
"It just makes our entire city more equitable,"
Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson, an East Portland resident who spearheaded the county action, said Wednesday.
"People at many different income levels have opportunities to live close to where their jobs are."
YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR
It's easy to overthink "inclusionary zoning" programs like Portland's, but the concept is not complicated: New buildings should include homes priced for a mix of different incomes.
The problem is how to get a good quantity of mixed-income apartment buildings to exist. If you required 30 percent of homes in every new building to be priced at less than the cost of building them, you wouldn't get a mixed-income building; you'd get nothing at all. Thirty percent of zero would be zero.
With this round of changes that takes effect March 1, Portland has faced that problem head-on and come up with a relatively simple answer. Fully fund the gap between costs and prices.
Don't just ask for the eggs; pay for the eggs.
"We only get those homes if private-sector projects move forward, and they only move forward if the financials make sense,"
Portland Commissioner Carmen Rubio, who steered the reform through City Hall, said last month.
Portland's program in brief: For new apartment buildings of 20 or more homes, at least 10 percent must be set aside for people earning no more than 60 percent of the metro area's median income. (Currently, that 60 percent limit comes to $54,180 for a household of two, for example.) Those homes' rents, meanwhile, must be capped at levels those households can afford. (No more than $1,250 a month or so for a one-bedroom, for example.)
The government then makes up for that reduced revenue, mostly with a temporary property tax break, to keep the project in the black.
There are a few other options for new buildings to comply, such as putting below-market homes in a comparable location elsewhere. But with this being the only option that's fully funded in higher-rent parts of the city, it's expected to be by far the most common choice.
If you do the math to calculate the public's cost per home, the below-market housing created via fully funded inclusionary housing is less expensive than a comparable home created by a local housing bond. That's presumably because the affordable homes hitch a ride on a project that was already being financed.
"WE HAVE TO GO WHERE THE DATA TELLS US"
The city's inclusionary housing program had already been fully funded for years in Portland's "central city," the approximately one-mile radius around Pioneer Courthouse Square. But outside central Portland, the program's funding had been tightly limited by the city and county, which must both sign off on any tax abatement.
The result of this underfunding over the last seven years had been that many projects bent over backward to avoid the program. The share of new homes in 12--19-unit buildings, those just below the program's threshold, had approximately doubled. Hundreds and maybe thousands of other homes likely weren't built at all, in part because of cost...

British Columbia Just Took First Place in Pro-Housing Policy Feb 23, 2024

In just one month in 2023, the province legalized fourplexes, allowed apartment buildings up to 20 stories near all transit stations, eliminated public hearings for plan-compliant buildings, ended parking requirements in transit-oriented districts, and announced that it is considering single-stair reform.
While other Cascadian jurisdictions have been struggling to adopt piecemeal housing reforms - reducing parking requirements in Washington, or legalizing duplexes in Oregon, duplexes and lot splits in California, and fourplexes in Portland - British Columbia just enacted all of this and more, in a single month: November 2023.
By legalizing apartment buildings up to 20 stories next to all Skytrain stations, legalizing fourplexes province-wide, eliminating parking requirements near transit, and proposing single-stair apartments, British Columbia has set a new standard for zoning reform in North America. More locally, it has created a framework for the construction of some of Canada's best neighborhoods in the near future.
As Alex Armlovich, housing analyst at the Niskanen Center, recently tweeted about BC housing minister Ravi Kahlon:
"Nobody in the last 60 years has ever successfully decriminalized construction of multifamily homes near mass transit in a large North American city. And this guy just walks in, presses the "houses aren't illegal anymore" button on his ministry desk, & carries on with his day"
THE LEGALIZATION OF APARTMENTS IN BC HAPPENED GRADUALLY, AND THEN SUDDENLY
For years, the opponents of transit and infill housing in British Columbia mostly had their way. Some development was allowed on old industrial sites, but a formidable dam of zoning regulations held back new homes and transit. Zoning rules preserved the built form of single-detached house neighborhoods, even as prices rose, making homeowners millionaires many times over.
The system may have reached its apogee in the year 2000 when Kerrisdale resident Pamela Sauder uttered her now-infamous opposition to a transit line:
"We are dentists, doctors, lawyers, professionals, CEOs of companies,"
she said, explaining why the area was unsuited to public transportation.
"We are the crème de la crème in Vancouver."
Sauder and her fellow opponents of the proposed "Arbutus Line" won that fight, and the city routed both the transit line and accompanying new homes well to the east of Kerrisdale, along Cambie Street. The dam held.
In 2017, in the same style, media executive David Radler wrote in opposition to a seniors' home proposed for Vancouver's wealthy Southlands neighborhood. Radler wrote that Council "would be allowing one of the last upper-scale residential areas of the city close to the airport to be commercialized" if it approved the rezoning, harming the economy by ruining an area of "executive housing." Despite this, Council approved the senior center, and construction is almost finished. A leak in the dam, perhaps. And the economy? Arguably not ruined by this one seniors' home.
"You're dropping the ghetto in Kitsilano…we are one of the treasures of the city."
This was the reaction of Kitsilano homeowner Judy Osburn to a proposed five-story apartment building in 2019. After 25 hours of heated debate over three days, Vancouver's City Council voted eight to three to approve the building. An apartment building was allowed on a quiet, low-density street on Vancouver's west side. The leak had become a trickle.
Four years later, in November 2023, the dam finally burst.
Under the leadership of Premier David Eby, Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon introduced and the Legislature passed Bills 44, 46, and 47, remaking British Columbia's housing landscape.
"The housing system as we have it now is not working,"
Minister Kahlon told The Tyee.
To remedy this, BC's government has enacted a wealth of reforms for residents to unlock much-needed new homes, in all shapes and sizes, across robustly transit-connected neighborhoods:
Legalizing 4-20-story buildings near bus, rail, an...

Lawmakers Across the Political Spectrum Should Help More Alaskans Vote Feb 19, 2024

A host of laws to make voting easier would benefit Independent, Republican, and Democratic constituents.
Conventional political wisdom says that laws to make voting more convenient help Democrats, but not Republicans. That doesn't appear to be the case in Alaska, where voters across the political spectrum would stand to benefit from policies that smooth the way to casting their ballots.
Why does this matter? Because the Alaska legislature can still mobilize to get a big voter access bill over the line in 2024, after two consecutive years of attempts. But the sticky false narrative of how it would help the left and not the right blocks passage of these common-sense voter laws.
The truth is that in Alaska, registered Republicans, Democrats, and especially independent voters could all stand to gain from pro-voter laws like same-day registration and a cure process for mailed ballots. Similarly, at the federal level, more reliable mail service would help all voters across the political spectrum (and not just during elections).
For the third year in a row, lawmakers in Juneau have the legislation before them to make it happen.
ALASKA HAS A HISTORY OF MIDDLING VOTER TURNOUT
In Alaska's most recent six elections, statewide voter turnout ranged from a low of 17 percent in the 2016 primary election to a peak of 68 percent in the 2020 general election. If voter participation statewide were graded using the Anchorage School District system, the report card would say "N" for "Needs Improvement."
Several factors contribute to patterns in turnout:
Public awareness of high-profile campaigns: High-profile contests, particularly the US presidency (starred on the chart below), motivate voters to go the polls, causing peaks during presidential election years and troughs at the midterms.
General versus primary elections: More voters show up for general elections, when their votes will lead directly to a decision about who is elected, as opposed to primary elections, which narrow the candidate field but don't produce a winner.
Lead time for voters and officials: Special elections often have the lowest turnout because the date isn't set until a few weeks before the election. Election officials have less time to publicize information about the election, and voters have less time to plan when, where, and how they'll vote. Alaska had one special election in 2022 to choose a replacement for U.S. Rep. Don Young, who died in office after representing Alaska in Congress for 49 years. The special primary occurred in June 2022. The special general election was on the same ballot as the regular primary election in 2022.
Voter profile: More experienced voters tend to pay more attention to the timing of elections and are more likely to vote. For that reason, special election voters tend to be more politically active and older than the average registered voter in the same district.
Aside from the factors listed above, turnout in individual elections can vary significantly for other reasons. On one hand, turnout could go up if the election were conducted fully by mail (indicated by white dots on the chart above), improving convenience for voters, or if a candidate or contest received a lot of media coverage and inspired more voters to come out. On the other hand, turnout could go down if the only statewide office on the ballot one year had a popular incumbent running uncontested, so voters didn't feel the need to show up, or if candidates discouraged voters from participating.
Case study: The 2022 midterm election
Consider 2022, a midterm year when the absence of a high-profile presidential contest means fewer voters typically participate. That year, Alaska posted strong turnout for the primary and slightly lower than usual turnout for the general election. Attributing turnout numbers to any one factor would be a huge mistake, but listing the factors that might have played a role is kind of fun.
In 2022, Alaska's electoral landscape underwent dramatic changes ...

A Housing Agenda for Oregon: More Homes without Higher Prices Feb 07, 2024

The most familiar way to get more homes built is the one most people don't want.
Oregon is basking in a bit of bipartisan consensus. The state, most people agree, needs more homes.
That's it. That's the extent of the consensus. As the state's brief 2024 legislative session launched this week, Oregonians on left and right were girding for battle over what, exactly, to do about this shared housing shortage. In the middle of the battlefield was a bill developed by Gov. Tina Kotek, which includes various ideas from left, right and center aimed at accelerating homebuilding.
But as many lawmakers and interest groups try to tug the contents of that bill in their direction, it's also worth stepping back to ask: What, in the broadest sense, caused this decades-long underproduction of housing that we can all agree exists? Before Oregonians start negotiating over specific policy goals like quick-and-dirty sprawl allowances or revolving zero-interest loan funds, they should understand in some more general way why this problem, unlike shortages of toilet paper or baby formula, seems unable to solve itself.
The answer to that question - what actually causes housing shortages? - is the starting point for a new Sightline series that begins today. In the weeks and months to come, we'll lay out a housing agenda that Oregon could achieve under its most housing-focused government in many years.
But first, as so often happens in the first U.S. state to impose state-level urban growth boundaries, we need to talk about urban sprawl.
TO AVOID GROWING OUT, GROW IN. BUT WHAT STOPS INFILL?
For decades, many Oregonians have claimed that the simple answer to Oregon housing problems is that in Oregon, developers are not allowed to build subdivisions wherever they can afford to. Instead, gradually expanding "urban growth boundaries" around every city let the state and regional governments dictate where new suburban development is allowed.
To which other Oregonians have long replied: but there's lots of space for more homes inside urban boundaries. It's in backyards, abandoned malls, half-empty parking lots, and the sky.
Damon Motz-Storey, head of Oregon's Sierra Club chapter, spoke for many environmentalists on Sunday.
"I see empty lots in popular, central Portland neighborhoods all the time,"
Damon Motz-Storey, head of Oregon's Sierra Club chapter, spoke for many environmentalists on Sunday. "I see empty lots in popular, central Portland neighborhoods all the time," Motz-Storey wrote. Motz-Storey was right; as right as they'd said it about Hillsboro, Salem, Monmouth, or Burns.
But Motz-Storey's accurate observation also raises a question. Why does one see empty lots all the time? If these would be good locations for housing, why weren't homes built there already?
The answer, once you clear away all the details, is not complicated. The thing that stops homes from being built in a housing shortage is that the cost of building them outweighs the revenue they would bring in.
Pointing at an empty lot or shopping mall isn't, in itself, an answer to a housing shortage. To actually create more infill housing in a market economy, one or both of these two things needs to happen:
the cost of building infill homes needs to go down, or
the amount of money to be made by building infill homes needs to go up.
Those are the options. There aren't any others.
WE WON'T STOP RENT HIKES UNTIL WE CUT THE COST OF BUILDING HOMES
A market economy, of course, can include governments and public programs. And that's one way to solve for the two-factor equation above: with public housing subsidies.
When the government spends tax money to subsidize a poor person's rent, or to hire people to build and manage a new below-market apartment building, that's a form of option (2) above. This can be good. But it's only as good as we can find public money for it - and there are always plenty of competing ideas for how to spend public money. (On Wednesday, state economists estimated that Orego...

Inside Minnesota’s People over Parking Act, with Chris Meyer Feb 02, 2024

Making the case for statewide elimination of parking mandates.
If Minnesota becomes the first state to end parking minimums, it'll be thanks in large part to Chris Meyer.
Since he read the High Cost of Free Parking over a decade ago, Chris Meyer has been on a mission to liberate new homes and businesses from costly parking mandates - rules that dictate every building have a pre-determined minimum number of parking stalls.
From writing about parking minimums in his college newspaper, the Minnesota Daily, to handing out copies of Shoup's book to Minneapolis City Council members, Chris has been sowing the seeds of reform wherever he is. "I've never met anyone that is as excited about parking than Chris Meyer," US Representative Ilhan Omar said at the bill's press conference, recounting the years she worked at city hall leading up to Minneapolis's 2015 transit-related parking reform. Meyer went on to serve on the Minneapolis Planning Commission, which added the City of Lakes to the list of cities who fully repealed parking minimums in 2021.
Now, as legislative assistant to state Senator Omar Fateh, he is behind an ambitious new bill in Minnesota that would prohibit parking mandates across the state: All cities, all uses. Sightline called him up to learn more.
Catie Gould: How did the People over Parking Act originate?
Chris Meyer: I suggested it to my boss [Senator Fateh]. He was persuaded it was a good idea, because he cares a lot about housing affordability and climate action. This was a good way to take on both of those issues.
You took a pretty bold stance. No minimums at all, no exceptions. What is your thinking around the politics of that versus incremental reform - like no minimums for certain uses or around transit? Those approaches seem more common.
A more modest version would probably have an easier time passing but - first, the reception has been pretty good! The Star Tribune, the big paper here, their editorial board wrote an opinion piece in support of the bill. And a GOP legislator just came out in support. Opposition has been more muted than anticipated. But even if it hadn't been, I felt like it was important to make the case for the full-fledged elimination of parking minimums, across the board.
I know a lot of other places started with removing them around transit stations. That's how Minneapolis did it as well in 2015. But I feel the case against parking minimums is just as strong regardless of whether it's a small-town, suburb, or a big city, and regardless of how car dependent the place might be. I'm from a small town of 6,000 people. We have a nice downtown main street. It would be illegal to build as it is under parking minimums. There would be too much parking required between buildings for it to be a nice, walkable, main street. In small towns it makes sense to get rid of these. It makes sense to get rid of them everywhere.
Parking minimums are only ever bad or pointless. If you set requirements low enough that they would be building it anyway, it's a pointless requirement. If you set it above what they would be building otherwise, then you're forcing unnecessary parking to be built. So regardless of the situation, we felt that it was important to communicate that these parking minimums are bad policy everywhere.
Has statewide parking reform ever been attempted in Minnesota before?
Not to my knowledge. If it has, no one knows about it because it seems like everyone is being introduced to the idea for the first time.
Will this bill have an impact on people's everyday lives?
It'll be a gradual one. Minneapolis, St. Paul, and now Duluth also eliminated parking minimums as well. As we did that there wasn't any dramatic change overnight. But gradually it did reduce housing costs pretty substantially. There was national coverage of how Minneapolis was keeping inflation low because rents were staying low. That was largely because of reforms like this, that allowed more housing to be built.
Why does the state n...

Anchorage Removes Barriers to Small Multifamily Homes Jan 25, 2024

City leaders take another step toward allowing more new homes, in more sizes and varying price points, in Alaska's largest city.
The Anchorage Assembly has removed major impediments in city building and land use rules that have long discouraged builders from putting up tri- and fourplexes. The changes are the latest in a series of reforms that could spur more infill housing in a wider variety of styles and price points in Alaska's largest city.
City code saddled tri- and fourplexes with a raft of extra requirements, like having to pave over enough land for a vehicle to make a three-point turn. They were also subject to extra landscaping, lighting, drainage, and architectural requirements. A one- or two-unit home on the same lot of the same size or even larger, even if built to house fewer people, didn't have the same requirements, making them cheaper to build.
No surprise, then, that Anchorage developers have been leaving a significant number of units on the table. No more than five triplexes have gone up in Anchorage in a single year since 2001, according to data provided by affordable housing developer Cook Inlet Housing Authority. Some years, no developer has built a single triplex.
A working group consisting of officials from across the municipality, from the fire marshal to the planning department, along with local developers and community members, spent about a year hammering out changes. They consulted with officials from Shelby County, Tennessee, which reclassified structures of three to six units as residential instead of commercial under its building code. The process resulted in two sets of reforms, one in the municipal land use code (Title 21) and the other in the building code (Title 23).
Developers have long known about the regulatory impediments to small multifamily homes. But only in the last couple years have high home prices, low inventory, a homelessness crisis, a trend toward smaller, more numerous households, and a shrinking working-age population propelled these and other housing supply fixes to the forefront of city priorities.
The land use and building code reforms for tri- and fourplexes are the latest in a series of pro-housing ordinances passed with healthy majorities in the 12-member assembly. The assembly has done away with parking requirements, removed key regulatory barriers to accessory dwelling units, and changed zoning rules to encourage more residential construction downtown. In October 2023, the assembly hosted Housing Action Week headlined by Charles Marohn of the urban reform organization Strong Towns and unveiled a strategic action plan for housing. It's considering further changes in the summer of 2024 to bring zoning rules into greater conformance with the pro-housing goals stated in Anchorage's 2040 Land Use Plan.
Both ordinances went into effect in January 2024. But before construction can really get going, developers are waiting for additional action by the city to change drainage requirements and walk back rules passed this summer dictating where on a site parking is allowed.
LAND USE CHANGES WILL TREAT SMALL MULTIFAMILY MORE LIKE SINGLE-FAMILY HOMES
In an 11-1 vote, the assembly on December 19 passed updates to Anchorage zoning code that eliminated a few of the major differences between how Anchorage code treats single-detached (a.k.a. "single-family") homes and small multifamily homes.
The minimum lot size for triplexes now matches that of single-family homes and duplexes in a residential zone known as "R-2M," where triplexes are already allowed. Triplexes can go up on lots measuring 6,000 square feet or more, where they previously required an 8,500-square-foot lot. R-2M zones exist throughout the city: along the Chester Creek greenbelt and near Westchester Lagoon, the U-Med district and Campbell tract, Sand Lake and Campbell Lake, and Muldoon.
The assembly also changed the allowed gross density of R-2M to 30 dwelling units per acre in accordance with Anchorage's 2040 Land Use ...

Washingtonians May Get a Democracy Upgrade in 2024 Jan 16, 2024

State leaders are considering measures to allow ranked choice voting, even-year elections, statewide democracy vouchers, and more.
Washington State leaders are eyeing a suite of democracy and elections upgrades that would help ensure representation of communities, boost voter turnout, streamline administrative procedures, and offer more diverse candidate choices to advance the priorities of everyday Washingtonians. The legislature has considered ranked choice voting, moving to even-year elections, and other improvements in the past, gaining familiarity with these reforms although not yet passing them.
But interest in and execution of such advances is growing across the US, with jurisdictions from Alaska to Arizona, Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Portland, Oregon, offering examples of their benefits in action. The issues before Washington lawmakers are gaining the momentum they need that may finally usher them across the finish line in 2024.
SMOOTHING THE PATH FOR LOCAL GOVERNMENTS WANTING TO ADOPT RANKED CHOICE VOTING
Washington legislators face a different opportunity regarding ranked choice voting (RCV) than they did in years past. The question is no longer if Washington will use RCV, but rather how the state will use it. Will it be inconsistent, varying from one county to the next? Or will it follow choreographed steps based on what we've learned works well? Washington state law prohibits most local jurisdictions - except for charter cities and counties, like Seattle and Clark County - from changing their election code. This restriction means that they have been prevented from using systems like RCV.
In June 2023, however, the Washington State Supreme Court issued a ruling that specified that ranked choice voting is a remedy for violations of the Washington Voting Rights Act (WVRA). Because changes to local laws under the WVRA are allowed regardless of other state laws, the ruling opened the door for any governing body - from school district to city - to adopt RCV in response to a violation or potential violation of voting rights, as defined by the WVRA. This pathway for opting into RCV is an important acknowledgement of the power of the voting method to improve representation of community interests. Yet it could result in a wide variety of implementation procedures and voter education materials across the state, with each county effectively inventing its own wheel of getting RCV up and running for the community.
HB 2250 (and companion SB 6156), the Washington VOICES (Voting Options, Implementation, Compliance, Education, and Standards) Act, sponsored by Rep. Gregerson, would clarify standards for local governments and convene a workgroup to help the Secretary of State create statewide guidelines for RCV implementation. The legislation would improve efficiency and consistency for local election administrators while ensuring that voters have the tools they need 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.
Three bills will address this issue this session: SB 5723, sponsored by Sen. Valdez (and companion HB 1882, sponsored by Rep. Farivar), would amend the state's election code to allow cities and towns to hold elections in even years if they choose. This 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 sup...

With Ranked Choice Voting Coming to Washington State, It’s Time to Coordinate Rollout Jan 09, 2024

State legislators can support local jurisdictions with streamlined implementation guidelines.
The time has come for the Washington legislature to act on ranked choice voting.
Washington lawmakers are just making their way back to Olympia for this year's legislative session. And though they've explored ranked choice voting before, they now face a different opportunity than they did in years past. The question is no longer if Washington will use ranked choice voting, but rather how the state will use it. Will it be inconsistent, varying from one county to the next? Or will it follow choreographed steps based on what we've learned works well?
Whether or not the legislature steps in this year, people across the state are pursuing ranked choice voting (RCV) for the many benefits it offers communities. Back in 2020, plaintiffs in Yakima requested that their county implement RCV under the Washington Voting Rights Act (WVRA), and in June 2023 a state Supreme Court case explicitly named RCV as a legal remedy for voting rights violations. Charter counties and charter cities can switch to the voting method anytime they like, and Seattle voters took advantage of the opportunity in a 2022 ballot measure.
In addition, the upcoming implementation of RCV in Portland, Oregon, which partners with the same voting equipment vendor as many counties throughout the Pacific Northwest, means that voting equipment across Washington will also soon be capable of tabulating RCV, clearing a major technical hurdle.
While RCV is clearly on its way, statewide legislation could still help clarify standards for local governments and smooth the path for county auditors and administrators who might have to manage conflicting rules, ballot design, and reporting requirements across cities, ports, and school districts as more and more places look to adopt the electoral method.
For years, lawmakers have considered a "Local Options Bill," which would allow all local jurisdictions to choose to use RCV, even without a potential voting rights violation. Last year they also took up the idea of using RCV for presidential primaries. Legislation relating to RCV has not yet made it across the finish line in Olympia, but this year the need for legislative guidance is much more urgent.
THE WASHINGTON VOTING RIGHTS ACT GREENLIGHTS RCV
Ranked choice voting, particularly the multi-winner proportional form, has been shown to improve representation of community interests. Acknowledging this benefit, a recent Washington State court case lit the way for any local government to employ RCV in the interest of voting rights.
Passed in 2018, the Washington Voting Rights Act (WVRA) expands on the protections of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, intending to prevent voter exclusion in the face of polarized voting (when voters in a "protected class" - members of a race, color, or language minority group - prefer different candidates or election outcomes than the rest of the electorate). The law empowers a county, city, or special district to change its electoral method to respond to a violation or a potential violation of the law, superseding other state laws that would otherwise prevent that shift. Notably, under the WVRA, jurisdictions don't need to be sued to implement an electoral change; they are permitted to institute a remedy even for a potential violation, in collaboration with affected community members.
In other words, a town council could proactively change from an at-large, plurality, winner-take-all election to another form of voting without going through an extensive court battle if they found that another method would improve voter representation.
And RCV is recognized as a method that would achieve that goal.
In 2020 plaintiffs in Yakima County filed suit under the WVRA and requested that the county switch to RCV to elect members of the Board of Commissioners. While their court case eventually settled with single-member districts, replacing the previous at-large repres...

Washington Bill Would Legalize Low-cost “Co-living” Homes Jan 05, 2024

Co-living is an affordable, flexible, community-forward type of housing that serves diverse needs for people in all stages of life.
The remedy for Washington's dire housing shortage is more homes of all shapes and sizes. Co-living homes - small apartments with shared kitchens - are a low-cost housing option that most communities lack because local zoning laws make them illegal or otherwise impractical to build. A new Washington bill, HB 1998, aims to fix that by setting standards to legalize co-living homes statewide.
The potential affordability payoff is big. Rents in newly constructed, market-rate co-living homes in the Puget Sound region can be affordable to people earning as low as 50 percent of area median income, without any public subsidy. From 2014 to 2016 in Seattle, co-living accounted for fully 1 in 11 of total new homes built, before the city's ill-advised raft of new restrictions all but killed off co-housing construction. We can learn a lot from that instance - and apply the lessons statewide in a way that's right for the variety of Washington communities.
In this article, Sightline lays out:
What co-living homes are (and aren't);
Their benefits of co-living homes for residents, local businesses, affordability, community-building, and the environment;
Why Washington doesn't see as many of these homes on the market as it historically enjoyed;
The current obstacles to building more of this flexible, affordable housing option;
Examples of the wildly variable restrictions on co-living homes from one city to another;
A breakdown of legislation introduced for the 2024 session to unlock co-living homes for Washington, plus a comparison with co-living laws passed in Oregon last year;
A back-of-the-envelope calculation of how many co-living homes the Washington legislation could open up; and
How we get it passed.
WHAT ARE CO-LIVING HOMES?
Co-living homes are a low-cost, multifamily housing option in which each resident has a small, private living and sleeping room and shares with other building residents a common kitchen and other spaces. The housing type is also known as single-room occupancy (SRO), congregate housing, rooming houses, micro-housing, or residential suites.
Technically, the defining feature of co-living homes is that individual rooms - "sleeping units," in building code-speak - do not have full kitchens (but often have their own "kitchenette," with a mini-fridge, double burner, and/or microwave). In co-living homes built within the past couple decades, the sleeping units almost always include their own full bathroom, though historically, shared bathrooms were not uncommon. Modern buildings often also have shared recreational spaces. The private sleeping rooms are typically 150 to 230 square feet.
Over recent years in Washington, what little new construction of co-living homes that has occurred has been in Seattle, along with a sprinkling in a few nearby cities. The buildings can be large, with up to a few hundred sleeping units, but more commonly fall in the range of 20 to 40, built on small infill lots. Occupancy rates tend to be similar to standard apartments. See examples in Seattle (here and here), Kirkland, Redmond, and Shoreline.
CO-LIVING HOMES: GOOD FOR PEOPLE, POCKETBOOKS, AND THE PLANET
Co-living homes are a housing choice that's desirable for people in a variety of stages of work and life, like:
Renters who want a small, low-cost rental, possibly while saving to purchase a home;
Residents who wish to trade off square footage for location in a neighborhood they couldn't otherwise afford;
People who like shared community spaces, like courtyards, kitchens, and lounges, that facilitate social connections;
Single seniors who want to downsize and appreciate the alternative mobility options often available near co-living homes (AARP, for one, also supports Washington's co-living bill); and
Individuals who want a more private alternative to living with roommates in a traditional rental, which frees u...

180 Sites Account for a Quarter of Cascadia’s Carbon Pollution Jan 04, 2024

The region has a lot more cleaning up to do, even in its greenest corners.
Cascadia chalked up major climate wins in 2023, from Washington's renewed commitment to eliminating gas appliances in new buildings to Montana youth's historic court win for a clean and healthy climate. At the same time, many Northwest climate hawks are gearing up for new challenges in 2024, including a likely bitter fight to defend Washington's landmark climate law, the Climate Commitment Act, from a rightwing repeal effort.
Still, as policy debates rage, it can be easy to forget that every day, scores of huge polluters continue to dirty Cascadia's air, making the worst effects of climate change ever more difficult to stave off. Cascadia counts 180 stationary facilities that each spew more than 100,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) into the atmosphere every year.
(For the purposes of this article, Cascadia refers to Alaska, British Columbia, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington. The analysis covers the entirety of the states and province for data simplicity, not only the Cascadian bioregion.) The biggest emitters range from coal-fired power plants to sugar processing plants, from electronics manufacturers to pulp and paper mills, from landfills to oil refineries to zinc mines.
Across the region, power plants, oil and gas facilities, and the forest products industry top the list of biggest stationary polluters, as shown by the charts below, the first broken by down state and industry, the second simply by industry, and the following broken out for each state or province.
Collectively, these establishments emit roughly 80 million metric tons of carbon pollution annually from fossil fuels, about a quarter of Cascadia's total greenhouse gas emissions. These facilities' emissions rise to more than 103 million metric tons of carbon pollution annually - more than comes from driving 23 million gasoline-powered cars in a year - when biogenic emissions are included.
(For context, the United States counts 278 million registered vehicles.) Nearly half that carbon comes from just 20 facilities in Cascadia, indicated by the boxes at right in the chart below.
Cleaning up these institutions is no simple task. Few can easily decarbonize with current technology. Some employ hundreds or even thousands of people. Still, policymakers can't afford to ignore them in their efforts to address climate change and improve air quality.
That's especially important in British Columbia, Oregon, and Washington, which many consider to be the greenest jurisdictions in Cascadia yet are home to 120 of the region's 180 top polluters. While all three state or provincial governments have passed policies to reduce emissions from big stationary sources, notable loopholes remain. The first step, though, is understanding who the top polluters are and what exceptions to climate laws they enjoy today. With that in mind, Sightline offers four takeaways for Cascadian policymakers.
1. COAL MAY NOT POWER OREGON OR WASHINGTON FOR LONG, BUT IT COULD DIRTY CASCADIA FOR DECADES
Far and away Cascadia's biggest polluter is the gargantuan coal-fired power plant in Colstrip, Montana. Emitting more than 10 million metric tons of carbon annually, it spews nearly three times as much CO2e as the next biggest polluter on the list. In fact, it releases so much carbon from burning coal to make electricity that it carries the dubious distinction of being one of the top emitters in the entire United States.
Today, six utilities across the Northwest - Avista, NorthWestern Energy, PacifiCorp, Portland General Electric (PGE), Puget Sound Energy (PSE), and Talen Energy - co-own the plant. But Washington and Oregon passed laws requiring utilities in these states to remove coal from their portfolios by 2025 and 2030, respectively. PGE demolished Oregon's last coal-fired plant near Boardman in 2022, and TransAlta will shutter Washington's last coal-fired plant by 2025. As such, residents in western Cas...

One Year In and One Year Out: An Update on Portland Charter Reform Dec 19, 2023

For followers of democracy reform, Portland offers a rough blueprint.
It's been just over a year since Portland voters approved Ballot Measure 26-228 to completely revise the city charter. And we're now less than a year away from the first time residents will exercise the city's new proportional ranked choice voting (RCV) system to elect their new government. What do Portland voters and democracy reformers around the country need to know about the ongoing construction of this pioneering model?
In brief, the city's transition is on track, and Portland's transition team and leadership have (mostly) been looking for the most effective pathways to implement the will of the voters. With the help of independent commissions and many partnerships, the city has crafted new districts, revised election rules, planned for voter education, and designed a new organizational structure. Candidates are already lining up to represent their communities.
While the city's transition team still has more to build, Portland's progress so far demonstrates that intentional processes and continuous community involvement can create a solid foundation for a representative and effective government.
BACKGROUND: AN OPPORTUNITY FOR CHANGE BUT NO GUARANTEE
Every ten years, the city of Portland reexamines its charter, the document that lays out how city leadership is structured and how it gets elected. The city council appoints a Charter Commission composed of volunteers from across the city to research and recommend changes to city voters.
Many Portlanders have long been interested in change (and indeed advocated to institute regular charter review, which began in 2010), knowing that city council is not representative of residents' diverse interests and that the current form of government impedes effective governance across the city, from trash to parking. Advocates for change paid close attention to opportunities for involvement in the Charter Commission, and many commission members (whom the city selected from a record-breaking pool of almost 300 applicants) hoped to use the process to forge a more representative government.
In 2022, after more than a year of research and hundreds of hours of public comments, the commission recommended a suite of reforms (many of which Sightline previewed in 2017), including allowing voters to rank candidates, creating four new districts that will each elect three council members (aka proportional multi-winner districts), and replacing the commission form of government with a city council that sets policy and a city administrator who, along with the mayor, runs the city's day-to-day operations. These changes, collected into Ballot Measure 26-228, passed in November 2022 with 58 percent of the vote.
BIG CHANGES IN GOVERNMENT STRUCTURE MOVE FORWARD
City staff started planning implementation of the reforms almost immediately after the measure passed and published an annual report in November 2023 of progress thus far. A city transition team is managing the project, and a Government Transition Advisory Committee (GTAC) comprising community members advises the overall process. The city created a webpage and newsletter that tracks the transition and, in July 2023, published a full work plan that includes specific opportunities for public input and feedback.
To guard against potential bias within controversial elements of the revisioning process, the charter amendments directed the city to appoint an Independent District Commission to draw the four new geographic districts and an Independent Salary Commission to establish salaries for the new officeholders. Both commissions prioritized input and representation from historically underrepresented groups, including communities of color and East Portland residents.
This past July, the Salary Commission finalized the new councilors' salaries, based on the thriving wage calculator from MIT and market data so that leaders will be fairly compensated for their service. Then in August, th...

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