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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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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-...