Sightline Institute Research

Through the first decades of this century, the greater Seattle area had a secret weapon for fighting climate change: it let people choose to live closer to each other.

Using a study of neighborhood-level carbon emissions, Sightline estimates that new residents to the Seattle area produced about 5 percent less greenhouse gases from 2000 to 2020. That's simply thanks to their metro area being better than any other in the United States at adding homes to existing neighborhoods.

The region eliminated about 1 million tons of potential greenhouse gas emissions basically for free: no government spending, no tax credits for efficiency, no carbon trading market, no carbon tax. This public benefit came just from reducing red tape and letting construction workers build the kinds of homes that people want to live in.

Building those homes created jobs. Letting people live in them created economic growth, more location choices, and lower energy bills. The metro might have done even better, of course, if it had allowed more homes throughout the region; and it can keep improving in the future.

But for the economy of greater Seattle, this category of climate action has been better than a free lunch. It's been a lunch the region got paid to eat.

In general, it's a simple relationship: when people live close enough together, they use less energy and emit less greenhouse gases. Take it from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: "compact and resource-efficient urban growth through co-location of higher residential and job densities, mixed land use, and transit-oriented development (TOD) could reduce GHG emissions between 23 percent and 26 percent by 2050 compared to the business-as-usual scenario."

This effect comes from three main factors: less driving, more energy-efficient buildings, and less displacement of nearby ecosystems by energy-intensive objects like pavement.

Cars and trucks are the leading source of greenhouse gas emissions in most states and provinces. Residents of the most compact neighborhoods—areas of apartments mixed with workplaces and shops, whether in cities or suburbs—drive much less than residents of spread-out neighborhoods of detached houses on large lots. "Infill housing reduces pollution by reducing driving," as UC Berkeley's Terner Center for Housing Innovation puts it.

A Terner Center study finds that San Franciscans emit less than a third as much carbon from transportation as residents of the sprawling Bay Area exurb of Oakley, while making a similar number of trips for the same purposes. Another found that households in California's suburban, single-detached neighborhoods drive more than twice as much every weekday as households in urban neighborhoods with high transit usage. And public transit usage increases with population density (among other factors). In places where few people live close enough to walk to the bus stop, transit can even be less climate-friendly than personal automobiles.

These emissions benefits also accrue to existing residents of a neighborhood that adds people, not just new residents moving in. When there are enough people in your neighborhood to support a grocery store or a new bus line, now you get to walk to the grocery store or take the bus to work instead of driving.

There's no better insulation than another entire climate-controlled home on the other side of your wall. Urban neighborhoods are much more likely to have such wall-sharing multifamily housing, which one study finds uses 35 percent less energy for heating and 21 percent less energy for cooling than equivalent households in single-detached houses. (What's more, multifamily homes generally have smaller floorplans, which further reduce energy consumption from heating and cooling.)

It takes energy to make stuff, and spread-out cities require more stuff. One researcher at Delft University of Technology found that "urban sprawl accounts for a third of all greenhouse gas emissions" via increased raw materi...

Since NW Tiny Homes opened on Columbia Boulevard in Portland, Oregon, last July, business has been good. By September, the company had already hit its sales goal for the year. It sells stylish park model RVs ranging from $49,900 to $83,000, making them great options for people who are otherwise priced out of the housing market. Unfortunately, owner Jimmy Hickey frequently has to deliver bad news to prospective customers: in their city, it's illegal.

Hickey told Sightline:

"Pretty much every week or every couple days, we're running into someone that's excited for one of these and then, 'oh sorry.'"

He recalls one family in Gresham, Oregon, that was hoping to move their mother out of a nursing home and have her live with them.

"We had tears of joy turned into tears of sadness in the same transaction."

Portland is one of the few cities that allows people to live in mobile dwellings on any property that already has a house. But elsewhere across Cascadia, local zoning codes prohibit them, forcing people with limited financial means into scarce manufactured housing parks or living under the radar and hoping for the best. City and state officials are trying to change that, with Washington State Representative Mia Gregerson leading the charge. Her proposal, HB 1443, would allow these low-cost dwellings in backyards around the state.

Living in RVs, like the ones NW Tiny Homes sells, has been allowed in Washington state for nearly twenty years, but only in manufactured housing parks. Opportunities to live in these communities are limited. The ten manufactured home parks in Bellingham, Washington, for example, can fit just two percent of the city's households combined.

Since the Great Recession, demand to live in these places has soared. Jax, who lived in White River Estates in Auburn, Washington, saw the change firsthand. The 204-home park had been purchased by a California company, which raised her rent every six months. Over the years, her monthly rate more than doubled, from $400 to $900. The financial strain was compounded by a car accident that left Jax disabled. She told Sightline,

"We realized, if we didn't do something, we were going to end up living in a car."

She estimated that by the time she left in 2015, only five families remained who had lived there prior to 2008. Even her three-bedroom trailer in the park had risen in value. She was able to sell it for $80,000, five times what she paid for it a decade prior.

Jax then purchased a tiny home for herself and her youngest son to live in for $45,000. Designed by an Oregon builder, their home is a certified RV that can go totally off-grid.

"Long story short, it has been the best thing we could have done. Our quality of life has been better because of that."

Since then, Jax and her son traveled regionally, towing their house behind them to Seattle, Gold Bar, and Seabeck, before buying a rural property of their own.

Despite the stability her tiny home has brought, what she's doing is technically not allowed.

"We own the land. We own the house. But technically, we're not living legally in either one."

Outside of manufactured housing parks, jurisdictions typically only permit RVs to be inhabited for a prescribed number of days or under special circumstances, like while you are building a permanent house nearby. This is a huge missed opportunity, according to Jax:

"Tiny homes are a perfect niche spot for affordable housing that is really not taxing on the government. You can put aging parents in the backyard and keep them out of the nursing home, and keep the corporate nursing home from stealing all the family income. I've seen too many of my friends lose their inheritance."

Jax warned this issue would worsen as the population ages.

"There are a lot of people who are seniors—in their 50s and 60s, a lot of Gen X—who are going to need tiny homes. We don't have retirement. We're screwed as a generation."

Jax has been advocating to legalize tiny homes for years, emailing legislators ...

January 1, 2026, marked the conclusion of a remarkable experiment in American ranked choice voting. A bipartisan bill passed by the Utah legislature in 2019 led some of the state's reddest cities to adopt a ranked choice voting pilot, a program widely appreciated by their mostly Republican voters. These cities reduced their election costs by 40 percent, had fewer low-plurality winners, improved representation, and saw more positive campaigns.

At the program's zenith, 23 Utah cities opted to use ranked choice voting methods in their elections, and voters largely approved. Polling found that a majority of voters enjoyed using ranked choice voting, more than 75 percent found it easy to use, a majority were more likely to vote for their preferred candidate, and a majority wanted to continue to use ranked choice voting in local elections.

Out of the 23 participant cities, 13 were in counties that cast ballots for President Trump in 2024. In the two inaugural cities, nearly 70 percent of voters voted Republican. Moreover, most of the champions of the policy in Utah are card-carrying Republicans. Yet in recent years, the national Republican Party's official stance on ranked choice voting has soured. Increased partisanship on the issue led to the pilot project sunsetting in 2025, contrary to the values and wishes of its many conservative proponents.

How and why did a very red state come to embrace ranked choice voting? What impeded its broader adoption? And as the pilot concludes, what lessons might fellow conservatives draw from Utah's experience? To find out, Sightline spoke with four key players who have helped bring ranked choice voting to the state.

The Utah ranked choice voting experiment is notable not only for its popularity among conservative-leaning voters, but also for its origin story. While parties are becoming more polarized in their attitudes toward ranked choice voting today, Utah's experiment began with a notable display of bipartisanship in 2017. The bill to usher in ranked choice voting in Utah was the brainchild of the most progressive member of the state house—and the most conservative.

Former Rep. Marc Roberts had been a proponent of ranked choice voting since using the method himself in Utah Republican Party caucus meetings:

"In my neighborhood caucus, the precinct chair was a huge proponent of ranked choice voting. He was the one that introduced me to it. We would use it every now and then in our county convention and even the state convention. I loved it because, from a voter's perspective, I hated being stuck in a situation where I got to pick between the worse of two evils."

Roberts attempted to advance the policy when first elected to office but faced strong pushback from county clerks, who argued that it would be far too expensive to implement, given the limitations of their voting equipment. Undeterred, when it came time to solicit proposals for new voting equipment, Roberts ensured the new machines would be ranked choice voting-compatible.

Former Rep. Rebecca Chavez-Houck, who served as the Minority Whip for the Democrats at the time, became curious about ranked choice voting while serving on a commission to strengthen Utah's democracy. She viewed it as a way to increase Utah's voter participation levels and electoral competition in a state where a small number of Republican primary voters can effectively determine outcomes.

The two lawmakers realized they were aligned on the issue when Chavez-Houk filed a bill on the topic. Roberts reached out, telling Chavez-Houck,

"Look, I've been at this for three years. Here's the lay of the land, and here's what I've tried. I'm more than happy to help co-sponsor this thing."

Roberts and Chavez-Houck joined forces. The bill sailed through the state house, backed by some of the most conservative members at the time, many of whom strongly favored local control of election methods.

"It was awesome,"

recalled Roberts, and the novelty of the bipartisan collaboration h...

A new proposal to create districts in central Oregon's Deschutes County illustrates all the flaws of the winner-take-all election model that predominates in Cascadia and beyond. It's also a case study of how much better our elections could be.

The Deschutes County Board of Commissioners recently proposed switching the county's election method from at-large numbered seats to single-member districts. The board-appointed committee tasked with drafting a possible district map, however, ran into a number of challenges in fulfilling its charge, including outdated data, unequal puzzle pieces, and a lot of concern over partisanship. In an increasingly liberal area, the conservative-majority committee ended up with a map that favors Republican voters.

Unfortunately, the current at-large winner-take-all model also fails to provide reliable representation for both majority and minority viewpoints.

But there's another solution that offers consistent representation for people of all groups, whether based on neighborhood, party, or another unifying factor: proportional representation.

Drawing districts inevitably brings up the specter of gerrymandering, but mapmakers didn't have to gerrymander to prove that districts are a poor solution to the problem of how to best represent county residents. It's difficult to draw districts fairly, and any mapmaking committee will trade some criteria for others.

Deschutes County currently elects county commissioners to numbered at-large positions in staggered terms. County board seats were partisan positions for most of Deschutes's history, but in 2022 voters approved a switch to nonpartisan elections, effective in 2024. Then in 2024, voters increased the number of commissioners from three to five, effective in 2026.

After the expansion proposal passed in 2024, the board of commissioners proposed an additional modification: abandoning the at-large numbered seats in favor of five geographic districts. Commissioners appointed a District Mapping Advisory Committee (DMAC) to draft a district map and set guidelines for the task. In early December 2025, DMAC proposed a five-district map to the county board, which appears likely to offer it to voters for approval in May or possibly November 2026.

The board may have tried its best to create a fair process. The problem? Bias is hard to escape.

The current board of county commissioners leans right. Tony DeBone and Patti Adair are Republicans, elected in 2022, before elections were nonpartisan; Phil Chang, the third member, was elected in 2020 as a Democrat and then reelected in 2024 in the technically nonpartisan race. These three commissioners appointed DMAC's seven members. DeBone and Adair each selected two members and Chang chose three, so the majority of the committee owed its seats to the conservative commissioners.

And the proposed map, with districts A through E, favors conservative voters.

In the 2020 presidential election, 53 percent of Deschutes County voters chose the Democratic candidate, Joe Biden. The same proportion selected Kamala Harris for president in 2024.

Yet under the proposed district plan, three of the five districts would reliably vote conservative, constructing a conservative-majority board of commissioners, contrary to the partisan leanings of county voters. Based on the precinct breakdown of the 2024 presidential results, more voters in proposed districts A, C, and E chose Donald Trump over Kamala Harris; the opposite is true in districts B and D.

Sometimes local elections contradict trends displayed in national races, when county candidates connect with voters on day-to-day issues and national partisan platforms hold less sway. Not so in Deschutes. For instance, in 2020, when Democrat Chang won his countywide seat with 53 percent of the vote, he would have lost in the same three conservative districts.

The same trend holds in voter registrations. In November 2025, as in every month since early 2020, the county saw more Democratic re...

This January, dozens of Cascadians are sitting down for the first meetings of charter review commissions across the region with the same goal in mind: improving local government.

They picked a great place to start. Municipal charter reviews—during which a panel of residents suggests amendments to what are basically local constitutions—can be a powerful and collaborative way to kickstart positive change. Healthier elections can ultimately mean better outcomes for voters and communities that achieve their local priorities.

So, if election reform is a goal, where's a commissioner to begin? Sightline staff reached out to former commission members and researched past efforts to answer that question. The result is a list of six recommendations for getting election reform from initial commission discussions to a ballot measure in front of voters, spanning from whom to contact to how to frame the case for your community.

Whether you just landed a seat on an upcoming charter review commission or want to stand out as one of the thousands of residents living in the cities and counties under review, this guide is here to help.

More than half of US states allow municipalities to adopt home rule charters, which allow local governments and services to differ from what is laid out in state law. Essentially, the charter serves as a local constitution, dictating the government's design and setting ground rules for how it will run. Typically, amending the charter requires voter approval.

Municipalities change over time. Populations and industries grow and shrink, and as such, a community's wants and needs may not be the same today as they were ten years ago. A charter review commission allows residents an opportunity to review the charter, take public input, deliberate on improvements, and suggest amendments to improve local government.

Take Snohomish County, Washington, for example, where population increased by an estimated 43 percent from 2000 to 2024. That's about 258,000 new residents, more than the entire population of nearby Whatcom County! Snohomish County's 2016 charter commission posed seven charter amendments to the growing and diversifying voter base, which approved the establishment of an advisory commission on human rights and a new Office of Public Advocate to mediate community complaints (among other changes).

Election reform is one avenue to reaching a commission's goal: a local government that better serves voters. (Other paths include government restructuring, rethinking public officials' roles, and creating, merging, or eliminating offices and divisions.)

Depending on local and state law, electoral reforms may help solve specific problems. Here are a few examples:

If an Alaskan municipality sees consistently low voter turnout, commissioners could consider changing the timing or frequency of local elections (thanks to flexible state statutes). Denali Borough, for example, aligns municipal elections with statewide ones.

If residents are concerned with the sway of wealthy individuals in local politics, a commission might suggest a democracy voucher or small donor elections program.

Or, in Alaska, Oregon, and Washington, forms of local ranked choice voting can address problems like spoiler candidates or a council that only represents one kind of voter.

Past Cascadian charter reviews have delivered voters a fairer redistricting process for Snohomish County, a Portland City Council that finally reflects its population, and a prohibition on government interference in Whatcom County's ballot initiative process.

Ushering an election upgrade from the ideas phase to action requires research, collaboration, and more than a little tact. Former local charter review commissioners from Oregon and Washington offered the following advice to those just kicking off the process: lay the groundwork, do your homework, and communicate how better elections can address real concerns from community members and leaders.

If commissioners can agree on ...