No one is stopping all the armchair real estate developers on twitter who are convinced there's tons of easy money to be made creating new housing for people making $15/hour from stepping up and showing us all how it's done.
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Michael Andersen
@andersem
Believer, skeptic, humanist, typist & dad. Trying to make cities fairer as a senior researcher for . Views here: mine, all mine.
Michael Andersen’s Tweets
Conservatives Boycott Computers After Noticing Keyboard Can Be Used To Type ‘Trans’ bit.ly/3ofXv1p
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Denver's mayor said the city will "never, ever surrender local control to anyone" before state zoning bill was even public
not exactly itching for a seat at the negotiating table; not sure why this is news
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. has a new report on the enviro benefits of letting people live closer to each other if they want to.
Subject close to my heart
One insight: it saves water rmi.org/insight/urban-
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Opponents of parking reform assume that requiring zero parking means GETTING zero parking.
Catie shows that's mistaken. Even in these cities that totally embraced lower parking ratios, most buildings have parking.
The difference: they no longer had to OVERBUILD parking.
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Buffalo's newly legal homes were often in projects that got public support to retrofit the city's great old buildings & spaces as low to moderate price housing.
The parking reform made precious public dollars go further.
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"It’s hard to imagine two housing markets more different than Buffalo & Seattle," Catie writes.
And parking reform played out differently in each. It helped Seattle adjust to rapid investment; it helped Buffalo reverse disinvestment.
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Of course it's not quite that simple, as Catie notes in her article; if Seattle hadn't done its reform, many of those homes would have been built.
They'd just have had bigger parking garages- and higher rents to pay for them.
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Sometimes I see someone say "more homebuilding in 2022, that's success right? Stay the course on current policy!"
Dude, building rose in 2022 because prices rose 30% in 2 years, this is not the solution it is the *problem.*
The one way out: cut the cost factors of new homes.
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Can you imagine what the Amazon boom might have done to Seattle rents if there had been 10% fewer homes to absorb the job growth?
San Franciscans might be able to imagine it, actually
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Gabbe's data showed that five years after a 2012 parking reform, 10% of the residential housing stock of the ENTIRE CITY OF SEATTLE was homes in buildings whose parking ratios would have been illegally low.
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The answer was: in the years following elimination of parking mandates in much of Seattle & all of Buffalo,
HALF of ALL NEW HOMES built were in buildings that would have previously been illegal to construct
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In 2021 I asked to dig a factoid out of the data for his study of Seattle parking reform.
It shocked me.
Later, put the same Q to folks behind a similar Buffalo study. That answer was even more shocking:
it was the same answer
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More than half of new homes permitted after eliminating parking mandates in Seattle, WA, and Buffalo, NY, would have been illegal under prior codes. ’s :
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“There’s a tendency to try to identify a villain in these situations. But I think we instead need to be worried about our good intentions. We’ve created all these well-meaning policies. And now we’re seeing their cost.”
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It's almost like forcing people to build things they don't want is a bad policy.
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Wow: approximately 60 to 70% of homes built in Buffalo and Seattle since each city eliminated minimum parking requirements would have been *illegal* to build before parking reform. Another banger from @Citizen_Cate: sightline.org/2023/04/13/par
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" What comes after repealing parking mandates? Lots of newly legal homes. Studies from two cities observed that in the years following reform, 60 to 70 percent of new homes would previously have been illegal to build." ’s :
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Here’s the thing with population loss I try to make. Yes growing pains are real but managing decay is harder. Good luck deciding which 10 schools to close.
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Portland elementary school enrollment has plunged by 17.3% since the 2018-19 school year. Parents have an abundance of options.
It's a perilous time for the neighborhood school, a key component of what makes Portland special. @RachelLauren12 reports. wweek.com/news/2023/04/1
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Mandatory bar parking is on track to be eliminated from all Oregon metros in the next year, thanks to state parking reforms
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The fact that some places have parking minimums for bars is continually mystifying to me. austin.towers.net/raise-a-glass-
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Small cafes and corner stores should be allowed, by right, in every American neighborhood.
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Great piece about “strong link” problems (a rope is only as weak as its strongest thread) & “weak link” problems (a chain is only as strong as its weakest link)
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people sometimes agree & disagree about stuff in ways that don't correspond to party lines! even these days
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Replying to @andersem
semi-related factoid, the Idaho Style bill would not have passed in Oregon without some republican votes, I am not sure they really impacted the bill like in your example, but a lot of good ideas can't pass a party line vote.
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Personally I vote D, speak D, think D. But I know Ds don't always think of everything. My little piece of supply-side progressivism has convinced me that bipartisanship is possible & makes better policy.
Not because Centrism™ is right; because diverse perspectives are useful.
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In every talk I give about our middle housing law, I show the "yes" votes for middle housing.
Despite D supermajorities & backing by the House speaker, we had 1 vote to spare in the Senate & would have lost both without Rs.
& the Rs who crossed the aisle made the law better.
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Four years later, new "middle housing" being built under Oregon's law is mostly for-sale buildings (though so far it's often in small condos, turns out).
Thanks, Republicans! Good feedback.
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And here's the thing: the Rs had a great policy point! Triplexes often work better as for-sale products because it's a lot easier to sell them to homebuyers than to landlords. Nobody wants to spend all day driving around town to fix faucets etc in their 25 triplexes.
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This was because the Realtors are a key R interest group in OR. They wanted the bill to result in more for-sale products, not just more rental products.
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At the table, Rs made a few substantive requests. One was to add "townhomes" as a middle housing type.
What's the difference between a townhome & a triplex? Basically just a lot split. Townhomes sit on their own lots & sell separately.
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Small example close to my heart/expertise: Ds, (specifically, then-House Speaker Kotek) introduced a bill to allow middle housing.
Rs never would have introduced this bill themselves. It just doesn't fit their brand. But enough of them were open to the idea to join the table.
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I like this essay by but it doesn't describe the situation in Oregon, where:
- unions are powerful & won't negotiate on some stuff, but are open to policy change on other stuff
- bipartisan collaboration, though hard, is both valued & possible
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Breaking: Increased vacancies making landlords nervous about their bottom line.
First comes denial(complaining on ND.
Then bargaining (long times to rent).
Finally acceptance (lowering rent).
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We've all been waiting for the slowdown in rental inflation that we saw in private-sector data to show up in official statistics. Well (with the usual caveats around reading too much into one month of data), it's here: steep drop in the pace of rent increases in March.
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Not enough staircases
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Naomi Klein was spot on when she pegged conservative climate denial as arising from the understanding that if climate change is real, we’d have to significantly change society
The same is true of COVID, gun violence, & the myriad other problems that require a socialized response
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I've heard about pre-approved home designs at the city level but never thought about them at the STATE level. Are any states doing this?
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Congratulations, Washington!
🏘️🏘️🏘️
Joins Oregon, California & Maine in legalizing 2-4plexes at the state level
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HB 1110, the middle housing bill, passed on a big bipartisan vote of 35-14 in the Senate. 
Now the two chambers will have to decide how to proceed with two different bill versions. #Waleg @YesHomes4WA @jessdbateman @SenatorTrudeau
Now the two chambers will have to decide how to proceed with two different bill versions. #Waleg @YesHomes4WA @jessdbateman @SenatorTrudeauShow this thread
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