Sightline Institute Research

UPDATE, Dec. 4, 2025: The proposed rules discussed in this article were unanimously approved. This article was edited to reflect minor amendments and describe the rules as approved. Two-and-a-half years after a bipartisan bill promised "transformational" changes to Oregon's housing policy, Gov. Tina Kotek's administration has completed the blueprint of that transformation. As approved by a state commission on Thursday, the new housing production rules make Oregon the first US state or Canadian province to create a model statewide zoning code and then apply that statewide code to cities underperforming their peers. Most notably, the state zoning code would much more broadly legalize three- to four-story apartment buildings, especially on smaller parcels in neighborhoods already served by roads and pipes. The system will steer all of Oregon's 58 largest cities, plus those in tourism-heavy Tillamook County, to gradually make their local zoning codes no more restrictive than the state's. But the state standards will essentially become mandatory for cities flagged by the state for permitting fewer total homes, and/or fewer affordable homes, relative to their economic and/or geographic peer cities. Because Oregon has now pre-defined many of the zoning standards it will impose on underperforming cities, various cities may opt to meet those standards sooner as part of their local efforts to accelerate housing production. Known as the "Oregon Housing Needs Analysis," these new rules to accelerate home construction were ordered up by a series of laws in 2019 and 2023, inspired by a similar system in California. And in crafting the OHNA rules, Oregon's state land-use and housing agencies have been aiming to avoid some of the California's model's perceived pitfalls while creating a system that Oregon's many small, cash-strapped cities can readily use. Chris Elmendorf, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, who specializes in state-level zoning and housing statutes, tracked OHNA's administrative rules as they were being written. In an interview Monday, he called them "the next step in the evolution" of laws known as "builder's remedies." Such laws use state power to remove local housing barriers when a city has a local housing shortage. Oregon's new rules follow a national trend toward pre-defining a set of state zoning standards. Oregon pre-defines them more specifically than other states have so far. According to Elmendorf, "Because the rules are known, people can make reasonable decisions about how to plan these projects." Another unique thing about Oregon's approach: It evaluates cities based on actual homebuiliding performance relative to similar jurisdictions. Oregon, Elmendorf said, is "not saying you're subject to this remedial requirement because you didn't write a really pretty plan. You're subject to it because of outcomes. That's conceptually a big step forward." Mary Kyle McCurdy, associate director of the advocacy group 1000 Friends of Oregon, told Sightline, "The OHNA program is the most significant update to Oregon's housing rules since Oregon created its land use goals in 1974. The potential of OHNA is to actually live up to the promise of Goal 10, 'housing,' which is housing for all in every community, at the price point folks need, at the location they need, and the type of housing they need." Among the things OHNA and the associated model zoning code do: In Oregon today, the most common way to ban apartments from apartment zones is by limiting the number of homes a building can include. Take Tualatin, in Portland's southwest suburbs. The city has designated 18 acres near Hedges Creek for "high density apartment or condominium towers." But look in Tualatin's actual code for that zone, and you'll see that although a building on a 10,000-square-foot lot in this area is allowed up to six or seven stories, it could only have a maximum of two homes on it. A lot twice that size can host, at most, ten homes....

For the first seven years of its existence, Portland's inclusionary zoning program seemed to be working like the wrong end of a magnet. Housing projects skidded, twisted, and jumped away from the city's 2017 mandate that a share of homes in most new buildings be sold or rented for less than it had cost to build them. Tens of millions of dollars flowed instead to sites just outside the limits of Oregon's largest city, like the Tigard Triangle and Vancouver waterfront. Multifamily permit filing rates within Portland tumbled 40 percent from their 2016 peak. Portland's new affordable housing mandate wasn't the only factor in this. The city's population growth slowed in these years, then reversed in 2020-22. As a result, rents in Portland have been more or less flat since the huge run-up in Portland home prices that ended in 2017. But among the projects that did continue to flow into the city's permitting pipeline from 2017-2024, there was one very clear sign that the inclusionary zoning program was underperforming: new buildings got smaller. Because the city's program didn't apply to buildings with fewer than 20 homes, one simple way to avoid it was to stick to buildings of fewer than 20 homes, even if larger buildings would have been allowed. In one extreme example, a project came in with thirteen separate buildings just below the threshold. The problem wasn't just that a few developers were finding ways to underbuild; it was that sites like Northbound 30 Collaborative were canaries keeling over in a coal mine. If it was worth it for some projects to contort themselves to escape the program, an unknown number of other mixed-income buildings were completely vanishing from Portland's future. But new data shows that starting in 2024, Portland's affordable housing magnet seems to have flipped around. Immediately after a round of program changes that took effect in March 2024, new private apartment projects started jumping into Portland's affordable housing program. As we reported last year, projects worth hundreds of homes opted into it in the first six months alone. Even more promisingly, the city's trend toward underbuilt projects reversed, with the share of projects just below 20 homes falling sharply. What caused the change? The main difference: Portland funded its mandate. From the day the program launched in February 2017 until the end of February 2024, new mixed-income buildings outside Portland's central city received a relatively modest property tax break, enough to offset some of the revenue lost to discounted rents. But starting in March 2024, the city and Multnomah County both agreed to quintuple the size of that ten-year tax abatement for the neighborhoods ringing downtown. (Within the central city itself, the tax abatement had already been larger.) That balancing of the scales was effectively a subsidy worth something like $220,000 per below-market home, which is less than the $250,000 or so that it would have cost taxpayers to subsidize a comparably priced home in a 100%-affordable building. But in interviews, some homebuilders said it was enough to flip Portland's program from a dealbreaker to a deal-maker. Ian Lewallen of Deacon Development, whose Russell Street Apartments is set to open in 2026 with 16 below-market and 138 market-rate homes told Sightline, "The tax abatement changes were really the big change that brought Portland back in our mind. Without that, frankly we had shut down looking at Portland for 18-24 months. But after that went through in March and April, we started looking at sites." Reacting in June to an earlier look at these numbers, the Portland Housing Bureau's then-director Helmi Hisserich applauded the results of the 2024 reforms. "I am extremely proud of the rigorous work the PHB team put into the inclusionary housing program calibration," said Hisserich. "Local developers have leaned into producing larger housing projects under the updated program rules. … The impact will be felt by Port...

Delays, delays, delays. It takes forever to build the transmission lines that carry power from where it's produced to where people use it. Idaho Power and PacifiCorp can tell you. The two utilities thought they'd be starting construction back in 2018 on the Boardman to Hemingway (B2H) transmission line, which spans 290 miles of Idaho and Oregon. The project broke ground this summer, 19 years after the utilities initially proposed the project. Puget Sound Energy (PSE) can tell you. It flipped the switch on its 16-mile Energize Eastside transmission line upgrade project in 2024, a full six years after the utility needed the line in service to meet customer demand and ten years after the project's launch. State and local permitting alone ate up eight and nine years of each project's respective schedule, from environmental reviews to land use approvals. (B2H also required federal permits, extending the total permitting timeline for that project to more than 15 years.) Even now, three years after Oregon first granted Idaho Power approval to begin construction-a decision now twice upheld by the Oregon Supreme Court-Umatilla County still has not granted the utility all the permits it needs to break ground within its jurisdiction. These holdups don't come cheap. Permitting delays pushed Energize Eastside's project costs up by $52.4 million, increasing the total project budget by 11.5 percent. B2H's cost estimates ballooned by at least $300 million (from $1.0-1.2 billion in a 2018 estimate to $1.5-1.7 billion), at least in part because of permitting delays. And it's not utilities that suffer when projects stall; it's consumers: through higher electricity bills and dirtier, less reliable power. Transmission permitting delays beget higher project costs, and, later on, higher electricity bills in four main ways: When utilities want to build a transmission project, they must find a way to pay for it. Most utilities raise these funds by borrowing from lenders and by attracting investors who buy shares in the company, each expecting a return on their investment. Utilities add these financing charges to the project's construction costs and eventually, with regulatory approval, to customers' monthly bills. To make matters worse for ratepayers, federal utility accounting rules treat financing costs as a capital expense, which means that, in the peculiar universe of utility regulation, utilities get to profit from them. As a result, electricity customers end up paying twice: first through the interest accrued during construction and again when utilities earn a return on that same interest once the project enters the rate base. Put another way, utilities make money on project delays. In fact, utilities profit from -any- permitting-related cost increase, not only financing charges. Let's take an example. The above-mentioned Energize Eastside project by PSE, which upgraded 16 miles of transmission lines stretching between Seattle-area suburbs Renton and Bellevue, will keep power flowing reliably to several growing communities. Permitting delays increased the project's financing costs by $5 million, Sightline estimates, bringing the total permitting-related delay costs to $52.4 million. But Bellevue, Redmond, Renton, and Newcastle's slow approvals of Energize Eastside won't only cost ratepayers $52.4 million. Over 60 years (the approximate average lifespan of a transmission line), due to utilities' regulated rate of return, ratepayers will pay back around $167 million.2 In other words, for every $1 million in costs added to rate base, customers will pay PSE about $3.2 million. Ten years ago, Idaho Power estimated it would be able to energize the B2H line in 2021, enabling the Pacific Northwest and the Intermountain West to better share power, especially during the Northwest's winter peak and the Intermountain West's summer peak. Two years later, it revised that estimate to 2024, citing "ongoing permitting requirements." In its most recent quarter...

In 2024 Alaska Democrats were understandably incensed when Eric Hafner, a convict who had never lived in their state, ran for Alaska's US House seat as a Democrat. State and federal law allowed Hafner to seek the office, and state law let him register with the party he preferred. The state Democratic Party, for its part, could do nothing. It had no way to disavow him or indicate on the ballot its endorsement of incumbent Representative Mary Peltola. Come election day, Hafner got more than 3,500 first-choice votes from Alaskans who saw his name and party on the ballot but presumably had no idea that if elected, he would represent them from a New York prison where he was serving 20 years. Two years earlier, the state Republican Party was the one fuming. Sarah Palin and Nick Begich III, registered Republicans, both on the top-four general election ballot, were feuding on the campaign trail, refusing to cross-endorse each other as co-partisans typically do in ranked choice elections. The state GOP endorsed Begich early and never endorsed Palin. In the general election, Palin and Begich split Republican votes, as expected, pushing the election to Mary Peltola, who became the first Democrat in the seat in 49 years. (Two years later, with Palin out of the picture and New York prisoner Hafner siphoning off Democratic votes from Peltola, Begich reclaimed the post for the GOP.) Now both Republicans and Democrats in Alaska have a beef with a minor flaw in their state's ballot rules that lets candidates claim a party but doesn't let parties claim candidates. The same flaw fusses California and Washington, the two other states that use unified all-candidate primaries. In short, any candidate in these three states can claim any party, potentially confusing voters as to who really represents their values. And political parties can do nothing to stop them. The fix to this problem in all three states is easy: let parties indicate their endorsement of a candidate with two words: "[Democratic or Republican] Nominee." North Americans hate political parties (often including their own), and anti-party sentiment has been prevalent since the Progressive movement more than a hundred years ago. But political scientists concur that for all their disrepute, political parties are the essential intermediaries of democracies everywhere. They aggregate like-minded voters, assemble coalitions that can win, mediate disputes among coalition factions, articulate visions and platforms, and serve as shorthand identifiers on the ballot for time-strapped voters. Indeed, party identification is so valuable that in its absence, many voters lean on unreliable markers such as gender or surname to try to guess which right candidate is right for them. Giving parties space to claim their nominees on ballots in Alaska, California, or Washington would not change the states' election system in fundamental ways, but it would provide voters with more reliable information. Research by political scientist Cheryl Boudreau and her colleagues at the University of California, Davis, shows that informing voters of candidates' party endorsements helps them correctly identify candidates whom they agree with. In an experiment with voters in a nonpartisan mayoral election in which political parties had made endorsements, informing voters of candidates' party endorsements let voters find their best-matched candidate 59 percent of the time, compared to 53 percent of the time when they don't know the parties' endorsements. And that improvement came not with putting the party labels on the ballot but with a mailing sent to voters. A six-point gain in voters' alignment is modest, but in close races it could be decisive. Alaska already sends more information to voters than most states do. The state's Division of Elections prints and mails official voters' guides to all. These guides feature candidates' statements and often include the endorsements they have won from party organizations and w...

A surplus of candidates can ruin any political campaign, and it's happened twice in recent groundbreaking elections in Cascadia. Fortunately, neighboring jurisdictions have demonstrated the solution to this problem: raise filing fees. Alaska and Portland each recently debuted a new, much-anticipated ranked choice voting method. In both places, the trouble was that putting your name on the ballot was so easy (costing less than a tank of gas for a Ford F-150) that the elections were flooded with candidates. The result, in both Alaska and Portland, was an inaugural campaign that tried voters' patience with teeming lists of candidates, many of them narcissistic dreamers with no intention of campaigning, no support from key constituencies, and no chance of winning. One fix to this surplus is simple: charge candidates a filing fee large enough to dissuade dilettantes without deterring contenders. Montana, Alaska's closest cousin among the states, and Portland's urban counterparts in neighboring Washington charge filing fees more than ten times as high. That's why these Cascadian jurisdictions do not attract candidates like fishing derbies draw anglers. Alaska's 2022 inaugural election was run under its top-four law. In top-four, voters choose four finalists in a primary election and then pick among them in a ranked choice voting general election. Voters for an open US House seat confronted a ballot overloaded with 48 candidates (pictured on the website). The state's new election plan was supposed to make things better; instead, voters got a ballot as daunting as The Cheesecake Factory's menu. This race was a special election for the state's sole US House seat, unexpectedly vacated by the death of Rep. Don Young after 49 years in office. The absence of an incumbent and the novelty of the new rules recruited a bumper crop of candidates, and the nominal filing fee of just $100 did nothing to separate the chaff from the grain. For one Benjamin Franklin, you could get your name on every ballot and in every voters' guide in the state and - who knows? - maybe your candidacy would catch fire. However, most did not catch even a spark, and few candidates raised money or ran actual campaigns. Just one-fifth of candidates cracked 2 percent of the vote. At the bottom of the pack, some 19 candidates won fewer than 100 votes each. The same pattern emerged in Portland. The city 's 2024 election was the inaugural run of its new election system, which uses a single round of ranked choice voting for all races. Some 118 candidates surged into municipal contests. City Council Districts 3 and 4 each had 30 candidates for their three seats. (See sample ballots in the online version of this article.) Such races make voting a morass and campaigning a Black Friday crowd scene. At some debates, each candidate got speaking time measured in seconds. In the end, as in Alaska, voters ignored most candidates. In District 4, for example, only 11 voters picked L Christopher Regis. He had enough support to field a kickball team in one of Portland's adult co-ed leagues but fell 11,251 votes short of winning a council seat. Regis was not alone. In Districts 3 and 4 combined, only a quarter of candidates crossed the 2 percent threshold. Most of the also-rans did not actually run. They just made the process of voting feel like scrolling through the dross on Netflix. The sudden opening of every elected office in the city, all at the same time, brought the crush of candidates. Empty chairs attract aspirants. What's more, excitement about the new system itself drew participation, making more candidates believe they could compete. But the fact that securing a spot on the ballot cost nothing but $75 for council or $100 for mayor amplified the gold rush spirit. Low filing fees for open seats elsewhere have also attracted swollen fields of candidates. In 2003, for example, a special election recalled the sitting governor of California, Gray Davis, and voters' plurality winne...