62 ms·

Oregon Just Voted to Legalize Duplexes on Almost Every City Lot

376 points by jseliger 7y ago

aaronbrethorst 7y ago
Washington next please. I’ll settle for just Seattle for now, and I plan to vote and have been donating accordingly in this year’s city council races. Relatedly, fellow Seattleites: the primary for city council races is in August, and ballots go out in just under three weeks. Make sure your voter registration information is up to date! https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/ https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/
- suff 7y ago
  Washington already allows this
- seattle_spring 7y ago
  Seattle is very close to approving backyard cottages on all SFH-zoned properties [1]. They're also very close to approving a pretty major city-wide upzone [2], though it largely just makes mutli-family zoning denser and doesn't affect SFH zones much. [1] https://seattle.curbed.com/2019/5/13/18619101/adu-dadu-backyard-cottage-law https://seattle.curbed.com/2019/5/13/18619101/adu-dadu-backy... [2] https://seattle.curbed.com/2019/2/26/18240535/mha-hala-zoning-citywide-upzones https://seattle.curbed.com/2019/2/26/18240535/mha-hala-zonin... (* No affiliation with Curbed, they were just the first articles to pop up on my search that weren't paywalled).
  - aaronbrethorst 7y ago
    ADUs are great and MHA is fine, but both of these packages literally took years to pass. The city council needs to move faster.
    - closetohome 7y ago
      Quite a few of this year's candidates are proposing eliminating single-family zoning entirely. It could be on the agenda during the next couple of years.
      - aaronbrethorst 7y ago
        It's great to see this! But they need to make it through the primaries and then win in the general, and this is not an insignificant lift.
Lazare 7y ago
Excellent. Fingers crossed it works well and provides a blueprint for other cities and states.
chrisco255 7y ago
Ship it. Restrictive zoning laws are choking the poor and middle class and causing cities to stagnate. Hopefully CA follows suit.
- nerdponx 7y ago
  Also duplexes really don't do much harm to the "suburban" feeling of a neighborhood. A nice, big duplex feels as much like a home as any other. If anything, I feel like it helps make neighborhoods more dynamic by increasing the population density without increasing the physical density of buildings and roads. That said, parking will be important (need enough room for garages or lots of on-street parking) since I assume these areas won't have great mass transit.
  - mywittyname 7y ago
    I personally think multiplex homes look way better than the rows of snout houses you find in 99% of modern suburban development.
- dcosson 7y ago
  IIRC the latest revisions of sb50 in California would have rezoned the whole state to allow fourplexes (while still upcoming even higher to 5 stories along transit corridors). But it was blackholed for at least a year by the supreme chancellor of the senate (or whatever her official title is) even though it likely has enough votes to pass if it would have gone to the floor. That’s democracy I guess?
  - masonic 7y ago
    Not democracy at all, just the Democrat leadership. Democrats have supermajorities in CA.
burlesona 7y ago
Thankfully this is beginning to look like a trend. Minneapolis adopted a similar deal (redefining all single family to be residential up to three units) late last year, and more of these kind of upzonings are in the works across the country. Ref: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/12/12/three-cheers-for-minneapolis-the-3-is-for-triplex https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/12/12/three-cheers-...
- H8crilA 7y ago
  Wonder how long will it take for prices to take notice, doesn't seem to be happening yet: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MNXRSA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MNXRSA
  - bluGill 7y ago
    In Oregon? 60 years if ever. You can't get a building permit to build anything without your lawyers ($$$) spending years getting you through the process. Or so I've heard. In Minneapolis I expect it will start to make a difference in 5 years. In Minneapolis a building permits for something allowed in code takes an hour from the time you park your car to the time you drive away, and no lawyer needed. Note that we will never really know that a difference was made: there are any other factors involved in housing prices with no way to control for any of them. Thus no matter what happens you will be able to reasonably argue from data whichever side you want.
    - Frondo 7y ago
      People exaggerate. Portland's already been transformed by row houses, lots of apartment and condo structures, and dense building. Unsurprisingly, a lot of old-timers hate it, and their complaints all boil down to "it's different from when I was a child/raising a family here". The dense building is already taking place, in every neighborhood in the city. Getting a permit is no problem; my little brother, an engineer with no background in building, got a permit to build a four-unit building on one of the sites where they were already allowed (before this law was passed) in 8 weeks; the normal time for any permit approval for construction, he says, and in his engineering work he did a lot of work with permitting for customer projects, too, so I'd guess he knows. Portland's already been changing and it's made the city so much more pleasant to walk through. Neighborhood after neighborhood of single-family detached housing is boring, tiresome to drive or bike through, and an environmental disaster (as the ODOT study recently confirmed). If the rest of Oregon can now follow suit, this is only a good thing. The funny thing is, driving through old towns in Oregon or anywhere, where most of the building was done before these zoning laws made everything into the same boring city planning style, architecture and construction used to be a lot more interesting and visually pleasing. It's neat to drive through places with variety of structure. These laws are one of the most pointless things, that's done a great deal of damage, the US has done.
AlexanderNull 7y ago
NOT IN MY BACK YARD!!! err sorry, thought I was my parents for a moment there...
vvvij 7y ago
Upcoming: White flight in Oregon; Authorities confused.
NN88 7y ago
this is the step towards the USA matching the infrastructure development in the rest of the world.
TomMckenny 7y ago
Fantastic. I hope with all my heart that rezoning at least slows down price increases. It should certainly be done as widely as possible. But in the end I think we need to keep in mind that there will need to additional aggressive legislation to even keep prices flat relative to wages let alone reduce them.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
  On that note, does anyone know of any economist(s), or thinkers, who a have a comprehensive plan to change the way the housing market works?
  - dvtrn 7y ago
    Not strictly limited to housing, but Vishaan Chakrabarti[1] speaks about urban development at large, and his book "Country of Cities"[2] is an engaging read. [1] https://www.arch.columbia.edu/faculty/74-vishaan-chakrabarti https://www.arch.columbia.edu/faculty/74-vishaan-chakrabarti [2] https://www.amazon.com/Country-Cities-Manifesto-Urban-America/dp/1935202170 https://www.amazon.com/Country-Cities-Manifesto-Urban-Americ...
  - klipt 7y ago
    Henry George had some interesting ideas about the Land Value Tax.
  - ajmurmann 7y ago
    Alain Bertaud might have the opposite of what you might want to call a "comprehensive plan". He makes great suggestions on how to give control back to the market and achieve better outcomes than the quasi, soviet-style, planned economy that our housing market is in the US (my words not his). Great interview with him on econtalk about his new book: http://www.econtalk.org/alain-bertaud-on-cities-planning-and-order-without-design/ http://www.econtalk.org/alain-bertaud-on-cities-planning-and... Edit: typo in author name.
georgeburdell 7y ago
Seems reasonable, but being a Portland resident I'm already annoyed at how hard it is to find parking. Portland's mass transit is a joke (I can bike downtown end-to-end faster than MAX can crawl through it) and so people have no choice but to drive. What's the point of putting duplexes in neighborhoods without good transit and roads at capacity? California had a much more reasonable solution in SB827 and now SB50 [1] in that density increases would have only happened near transit. I don't think the law will have the intended effects. Home prices tend to be sticky, and I'm not aware of any North American city that successfully built its way out of a housing affordability crisis. Wealth inequality is such that current property owners, and real estate speculators, will make out handesomely. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Senate_Bill_827 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Senate_Bill_827
- chrisco255 7y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean about no U.S. city building its way out of an affordability crisis...but cities like Dallas and Houston have reasonable housing prices at $245K and $185K median home price respectively. Price is a function of supply and demand.
  - Tiktaalik 7y ago
    It can be tough to compare cities directly. Often apples and oranges. Houston for example sprawls out to the horizon, which surely makes new development simpler, but this isn’t a path than most NW cities such as Vancouver BC, Seattle and Portland would follow.
    - davidw 7y ago
      We do have the technology to stack dwellings vertically, and not just sprawl.
- aaronbrethorst 7y ago
  I just spent the weekend in Nob Hill in NW Portland (just off 23rd and Flanders), and had no trouble finding parking even though it was a dense residential area and had a ton of businesses nearby. Felt much easier to park there than in Capitol Hill in Seattle.
raldi 7y ago
If you're afraid (or overjoyed) that this might change the city overnight, you might want to read this story about an area of Portland that repealed its apartment ban 39 years ago. Even without exclusionary zoning, neighborhoods change very slowly. https://www.sightline.org/2019/06/21/this-is-what-a-street-looks-like-39-years-after-legalizing-fourplexes/ https://www.sightline.org/2019/06/21/this-is-what-a-street-l...
- davidw 7y ago
  Same author :-) He worked his ass off - like a lot of people - to get this passed.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  Anyone who is worried about the neighborhood "changing overnight" should be worried about immigration and not the international kind. It's wealthy people from the next city or state over who change things when they move in because they have the money (which is convertible to political power although the conversion is not 100% efficient) to change things how they want.
zerotolerance 7y ago
Like most things they do in Oregon, this will certainly not have the desired effect. Infrastructure in Portland is stressed enough without doubling density. Turning 1 $600K home into two $500k homes isn't going to help anyone but the speculating developers.
- geezerjay 7y ago
  Your hypothetical example assumes that this measure leads available housing to double while prices fall about by about 15%, and even so your conclusion is that this doesn't help anyone?
  - epistasis 7y ago
    This is a very common view in certain areas that otherwise have progressive views. In these terms, the profit of developers is an evil that exceeds the benefit of any person having housing. In particular, new people are often considered nuisances or a burden or something that is bad for the neighborhoods, even.
- epistasis 7y ago
  Turns out that the people that can afford $500k but not $600k are people, and they will be helped by this. Higher densities will enable more efficient public transit, greatly helping our environment, and helping people get their commutes back under control. Also helped will be future generations that will get to live in denser communities, with more neighbors and more kids that their children and be friends with. And of course it will help in the walkable neighborhoods to give more people access to them. And I think you under estimate the ability of more duplexes to moderate the most exploitive aspects of the housing markets. In demand, high expense areas have prices that rise spectacularly, turning every single family home owner into a speculator. Ironically, developers of duplexes and fourplexes are not speculators, certainly not to any degree that the homeowning residents are. Developers perform a service, enable more people to live in a place. The residents just get to benefit from others' hard work at making an area more desirable.
Tiktaalik 7y ago
It’s a sensible move. Vancouver BC is studying moving to allowing fourplexes on most detached residential lots too, and I hope that city takes steps toward implementing that. A great outcome from this is that now that cities are finally implementing these policies, we can study their impacts. At this point in YIMBY urbanist circles policies like this have taken on somewhat of a mythical panacea quality, so it’d be good to finally be able to ground the affordable housing discussion with hard data.
- onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
  I really don't understand why we can't also allow bodega-type stores at least on the ends of residential streets. Nobody is going to drive ten miles to go to your local bodega. It's not going to increase traffic. You're not going to need more parking. You can even make it illegal to sell cigarettes and alcohol entirely there.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    Making cigarettes and alcohol illegal makes them illegal. There is a reason you find tiny stores that sell just alcohol and cigarettes all over in poor neighborhoods: they are the only thing high enough margin to work out. If such stores can sell the high margin products they then have enough money to stock lower margin things as well. Besides, with the problems of drinking and driving, you should want alcohol stores nearby to drinkers can get their fix without having to drive to the store.
CoconutPilot 7y ago
The problem people don't want to address is these neighborhoods were not designed to handle this many people. They don't have the power, water, natural gas, sewerage, parking, etc to handle these many people. As a result everyone's quality of life is degraded. The city loves the taxes though.
- ng12 7y ago
  That's such a cop out. Do you imagine Manhattan and Tokyo went from being uninhabited wilderness to concrete jungles in one go? No, it was constant iteration over decades. These are all solved problems. We know how to build denser cities, we just need the political will to do so.
  - CoconutPilot 7y ago
    Cop out? Its the truth. Infrastructure can be upgraded but today it isn't. There is no plan to upgrade infra!
    - geezerjay 7y ago
      So you acknowledge that infrastructure in fact can be updated. What's bothering you then?
      - CoconutPilot 7y ago
        Whats bothering me? I guess the inability of anyone to have a usable discussion on the lack of strategic planning in initiatives like this... Holy cow I wish I had never "spoken up" in the first place.
        yholio 7y ago
        Infrastructure is demand driven. You don't plan a business district and start to dig subway tunnels under agricultural land. The city develops until it needs a subway, which is then dug under the most dense areas. Property up-zoneing is such a slow and predictable process that no competent utility provider should have a problem in estimating future demand and upgrade accordingly. If infrastructure is failing left and right, it's because the public and private providers are incompetent and improperly regulated, not due to "excessive urban growth". The exception to these are public services that require land, for example roads and parks, which are very expensive to re-acquire and demolish afterwards. For these purposes, land is typically set aside by the local urban planner and building on certain plots is not allowed.
cheriot 7y ago
This is great in another way that isn't talked about much. As housing prices and commute times go up so does the price of everything that involves human labor. Bus drivers, plumbers, wait staff, etc all have to be paid enough to live in the city or suffer a long commute. So anyone struggling to make ends meet has it even harder.
- oceanghost 7y ago
  “Every increase in the real wealth of the society, every increase in the quantity of useful labour employed within it, tends indirectly to raise the real rent of land.” -Adam Smith, “The Wealth Of Nations”
  - ajmurmann 7y ago
    Yes, that's why we need to get more bang out of the same land.
    - epistasis 7y ago
      And perhaps tax away those ground rents, removing the hugely inefficient speculative drive: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
      - noobermin 7y ago
        I did some digging into this at some point seeing it mentioned on a Strong Town's article. It looks like a city that tried to do it had it repealed because it didn't work as a merely city level tax[0], amongst other issues. [0] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-short-life-of-pennsylvanias-radical-tax-reform https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-short-life-of-pennsyl...
        zzzzzzzza 7y ago
        there's many more examples of lvt than just altoona https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/comments/68mvkh/examples_of_success_under_a_lvt/ https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/comments/68mvkh/examples_o... not all the examples listed were permanently successful, e.g. both pittsburg and taiwan allowed their property valuations to fall far behind the true value of the land (in pittsburgs case once they reassessed the value of the land to reflect market value, the lvt ended up being repealed; in taiwan this behavior has contributed to a huge property bubble) other examples are missing, e.g. possibly the best historical example of lvt (since it was the only tax levied), is kiatschou/tsingtao, the germany holding in china prior to ww1.
davidw 7y ago
This was super stressful to follow along the whole path in the legislature. We turned out some YIMBY's to meet our state rep here in Bend to support it back in... January I think it was. It kept going in fits and starts, and really came down to the wire today, with a failing vote before it went up again and passed, before the legislative session expired. I'm happy to have played a very small part... our Republican state senator was one who voted in favor; maybe our calls and emails had a positive effect. Hats off to the people in the legislature and some of the advocacy groups around Oregon like "1000 friends of Oregon" who worked really hard to get this through.
- Aloha 7y ago
  This is often the path that a lot of legislation takes thru the legislature.
  - davidw 7y ago
    The bit where the first vote failed because one of the senators who ended up voting in favor didn't feel comfortable being in the same room as one of the Republicans who had been hiding in Idaho to deny the senate a quorum, and who had threatened to kill Oregon State Police if they were sent to find him was kind of over the top though.
    - pacoWebConsult 7y ago
      Really? Sounds like they don't have the spine to represent their constituents properly if they're willing to let legislation fail because a colleague is making empty threats. Kinda sad that they were too uncomfortable to do their job because someone else was too insane to do their job...
      - davidw 7y ago
        She showed back up. I don't have a lot of details so we'll wait and see what shakes out. The important thing is the bill passed. There will be disciplinary hearings of some kind for the R who made the threats. Because of the walkout, everything got compressed into two final days, so I don't think they had time for that beforehand, which was unfortunate, as he certainly wasn't doing his constituents a favor with that kind of talk. Anyway, it was pretty crazy and a real nail-biter.
refurb 7y ago
They kind of do this in SF with ADUs, accessory dwelling units. Want to convert your garage to a separate unit? City will help you with all the permitting.
- luckydata 7y ago
  But you agree that's not even close? You have one good house and a subpar living arrangement that can be only temporary or last resort, while in the other scenario you get two units that can both host a family without loss of dignity or comfort. It's night and day.
  - refurb 7y ago
    I’ve seen some beautiful ADUs in SF which basically removed the garage and converted the ground floor to a 2nd unit of the same size as the upper floor - AKA turned it into a duplex!
huevosabio 7y ago
This is a fantastic step towards affordable housing. We need more state-level interventions like these to remove the hurdles that impede building new housing. I hope that government officials in California follow a similar path. The only sustainable way to affordable housing is to make market rates affordable.
- geezerjay 7y ago
  Why haven't they simply rezoned some areas to allow higher density housing? This sort of blanket change doesn't grant much control on which zone should increase density.
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    That’s the point. Granting control on which zone should improve density has worked very well for land owners, not so much for anyone else. They haven’t set duplexes as a ceiling but as a floor on density.
    - sokoloff 7y ago
      In what way does this provide a floor on density? It seems that building single-family residences is still legal in areas where it was before.
  - cycrutchfield 7y ago
    Because leaving it up to local governments to decide which areas to upzone will result in perverse outcomes, as entrenched interests will simply seek to protect their assets instead of provide the most good for the most people. Removing the element of control prevents this from happening.
    - geezerjay 7y ago
      Local government have insight on the capacity of services currently available in some regions, and also which growth strategy they could follow to avoid very expensive investments with very negative externalities (i.e., congestioned freeways whose capacity can't be extended). Allowing high-density residential construction near public transportation hubs creates more value than allowing urbam sprawl to grow indefinitely. The single most important reason why people are forced to waste their lives in long commutes is allowing residential neighborhoods to spring up in the middle of nowhere in places where their only way in and out of their homes is through a long congestioned road served by no public transportation service.
luckydata 7y ago
Well done neighbors, I hope some of your good sense infects us.
ajxs 7y ago
Disclosure: I don't live in Portland. I live in Sydney, which has a much higher population and much higher real estate prices. The population density is hard to compare, since Sydney has a very large and sprawling metropolitan area of 4,775.2 square miles. The first thing I think of when I read this is that while this kind of development may superficially look to benefit those looking to purchase property, urban consolidation will benefit property developers much more so than consumers. Sydney is undergoing considerable urban consolidation and we're hardly seeing any reduction in property value at all. We've seen all manner of predatory practices on behalf of property developers occurring in this city to ensure that the price is kept artificially high. One practice that is all too common is developers buying up property and only releasing it onto the market slowly to maximise commercial gain, as ridiculous as it sounds, anecdotally this is quite common. I wouldn't celebrate just yet.
- ggm 7y ago
  Sydney, like S.F. is a highly distorted market (but for different reasons, and in different ways: what is similar, is that it is distorted, not how its distorted)
  - ajxs 7y ago
    Yes, you're completely right. Sydney has some severe problems in this area that there's no incentive for regulators to resolve. I can't comment on S.F, however.
- cycrutchfield 7y ago
  Who cares? Once equilibrium is reached, prices will be lower (or at least, rise more slowly). That’s simple supply and demand. Those property developers are taking on a considerable amount of inventory risk. One hiccup in the housing market and they go bankrupt. If that’s the game they are willing to play, then so be it.
  - nitrogen 7y ago
    There's not a whole lot of risk in being first in line to buy up all of the XBoxes and scalping them to desperate parents. Or to buying up enough aluminum that you can hoard it. Or owning enough land that you choose the price. When you control the supply of an essential resource, you can name your price. Great way to make money, terrible way to make a society.
DoreenMichele 7y ago
There are some comments about infrastructure deficiencies here. Reality: Sprawl is more of a burden on municipal jurisdictions because infrastructure, including roads, has to be extended to it and it's not dense enough to adequately cover the cost involved. If you play SimCity, you can kind of model this by creating a new city from scratch and creating an urban core. Place a fire department and police department at the center and build out to roughly the perimeter of their coverage. Keep improving development within that footprint until you have an economically viable city, then add a satellite suburb following a similar pattern. Not everything needs to be in that footprint. You can have farms outside of it, for example, and you can have some industry with only fire coverage, no police. But if you build a sprawling low-density city, you will find it is impossible to provide adequate services. You can't afford to pay for them. You wind up with high rates of poverty and crime. Missing Middle housing also helps get an area to residential densities that help make public transit make sense. It also helps improve walkability. A lot of the problems we have currently are because America sprawls. These problems likely won't be made worse by gently increasing densities. Increasing density in a good way should start to remedy a lot of these issues.
- meddlepal 7y ago
  Eh... Don't buy it. At least in SC4 I've found the west coast urban planning style or suburban styles produce highly profitable and $$ or $$$ res/comm/industrial cities that don't fail. SimCity is a fun game but it's really broken for modelling real world stuff.
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    SC4 is broken. Try it in SimCity 3000 or 2000. SC4 intentionally made it stupidly easy to make the city work financially and also killed what I thought of as "the game god." It's all ooh, shiny and can be fun in a largely superficial manner. But I don't think it works well as an actual city simulation anymore. (SC4 followed the company acquisition. It has a more polished, corporate feel and it's cool that it has things like recycling centers. But I am not really a fan.) I cannot find an article about it, but one city uploaded it's data to SimCity and got surprisingly solid city modeling results. This was before the joke that is SC4. Edit: Geez, can we not downvote the comment I'm replying to? I left out the fact that I primarily play SimCity 3000. It's a perfectly reasonable reply that prompted me to fill in missing details that I hadn't thought to include in my original comment.
jquery 7y ago
As an SF homeowner I look forward to Cali passing the equivalent so my home (near BART) shoots up in value. Win/win.
- oberservant 7y ago
  That's great
xivzgrev 7y ago
Fucking finally. I can’t wait for California to get their shit together on this. Now supporters there will have an analogy over the next 5-10 years
noobermin 7y ago
I really wish the rest of the US would take note, both conditions as well as climate change really need reduction of sprawl but it really won't matter if OR legalizes this while FL puts up five times more exhurbs.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  Except for some coastal areas and larger cities housing density is way down the list of priorities because it's simply not a problem.
  - drngdds 7y ago
    It might not be seen as a problem, but it is a problem. It makes forms of transportation other than cars non-viable, which is awful for the environment. Cheap electric cars will happen eventually, but we don't exactly have time to waste.
    - sempron64 7y ago
      I'm all for raising density, but cheap electric cars will happen a LOT faster than rebuilding all of America with higher density housing and infrastructure, besides the carbon emission that that refactoring entails. Cement and steel emit way more co2 than individual transport.
      - 0815test 7y ago
        "Cheap electric cars" will have range problems for a long time. Electric transport (not just "cars", either) works very well with increased density, and not so well with the low-density status quo.
        bluGill 7y ago
        Range doesn't matter. People tend to have a half hour commute range. Electric cars have long been able to replace gas for commute for nearly everybody already. (range anxiety has been about the exceptions - once a month I do X and the electric car can't do that...)
eecc 7y ago
Another article linked from within the same one posted here [1] is so batshit insanely heartbreaking and infuriating. Much of today’s nonsense becomes so much clearer when you learn what was par for the course merely a century ago. [1] https://www.sightline.org/2018/05/25/a-century-of-exclusion-portlands-1924-rezone-is-still-coded-on-its-streets/ https://www.sightline.org/2018/05/25/a-century-of-exclusion-...
- 0815test 7y ago
  The article itself is of course fine; what's "batshit insane" and heartbreaking is the blatant unfairness it describes. Newsflash - exclusionary zoning leads to exclusion, which often has its hardest impact on vulnerable minorities. Who would have guessed? There is a common stereotype that segregation and exclusion can only result from fuzzy "structural" forces or from private action by opportunistic and unethical individuals - but in fact, these things can endure because they're often enforced by a morass of laws and regulations, though sometimes in remarkably devious and opaque ways.
  - eecc 7y ago
    It’s an adverb and it refers to the heartbreak, not the article itself. I’m afraid you misread my comment ;)
loser777 7y ago
To what extent does the number of families in a building change with the law vs. just evolving as the environment evolves? I'm currently staying temporarily in the bay area, and it seems that many homes here have been "converted" from single family homes to full-time airbnb's with extra bedrooms and bathrooms tacked on in any way that they can manage. Functionally it's probably common for a suburban neighborhood to be a bunch of "4, 5, 6-plexes" when appearing to be a typical suburb of single family homes on the outside.
- masonic 7y ago
  full-time airbnb's with extra bedrooms and bathrooms tacked on in any way that they can ... which is exactly a risk of killing "zoning" (capacity limits) restrictions. It's now far riskier for a property owner to rent to traditional tenants (especially with the threat of Section 8 acceptance becoming mandatory) than to cash out into the AirBnB market.
_whm1 7y ago
When i moved to the US i had no idea about the amount of zonening laws, construction regulations and building codes. Coming from europe i naively thought that since the US is the "land of the free" people could basically build whatever they want on the piece of dirt they owned. Reality is, the amoung of regulation is far more than i have encountered in my hometown in Poland.
- masonic 7y ago
  people could basically build whatever they want on the piece of dirt they owned. Europe lacks fire and earthquake codes?
  - icebraining 7y ago
    What sparkling is saying is that we Europeans have an image of the US having fewer regulations than in our home countries.
  - rjmunro 7y ago
    Here in the UK, we have building regulations and planning permission. Building regulations cover making sure the building won't fall down and hurt someone, including regulations about fire safety etc. Planning permission is where old people who want to keep house prices inflated as they already own property can go to council meetings and object to anything new. Young people can't take part because they have to go to work and stuff, and don't have time to go to council meetings.
  - 9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago
    I don't live in Poland but here in Europe where I do live there are definitely less rules and zoning is most definitely more relaxed.
  - sparkling 7y ago
    Obviously anything safety-related is regulated. But nobody is going to tell you what type or color of roof shingles you need to buy.
jbb123 7y ago
So what is a duplex? Nowhere does it say and it's not a term I've ever heard used in the UK? I guess "semi-detached" would be closest but not sure?
- CalRobert 7y ago
  Two end of terrace houses next to each other. If you want a standard "semi-detached" house in the US it's normally called a townhouse (or similar).
  - souprock 7y ago
    To be a duplex, it needs to be 2 homes on one property that are touching. It is expected that the wall would be shared and that the two homes would be mirror images of each other. There exist houses that touch each other but are on separate lots; these are not duplexes. A townhouse is 2-story and it touches another one. It could be a duplex, but it might be on a separate lot or it might be part of a group of more than 2.
    - CalRobert 7y ago
      I wasn't aware of the lot distinction. I believe we agree otherwise, though. In the UK, Ireland, etc. a "terraced" house is essentially what we'd call a townhouse - they can be in groups of 2, 3, 20, etc.
- icebraining 7y ago
  I think a semi-detached is a duplex, but the latter term is more broad, covering also two-story apartment buildings and such: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplex_(building) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplex_(building)
  - vidarh 7y ago
    'Semi-detached' can be used about the end unit of a long chain of terraced houses, so while a semi-detached can be part of a duplex, it might also not be.
podunkPDX 7y ago
I’m not certain that this will create any affordable housing in any of the metro areas (Portland, Eugene, Bend). I suspect that this will end up opening the doors for the investor class to fund massive amounts of development in anything resembling an urban core, turning the resulting housing into permanent rentals, tranching those rentals into the next investment instrument to be sold &c. I’m from Portland, and I wish that this would increase the availability of affordable housing, but I feel that this is a lot of feel good, and it’s just going to make my home town that much worse. Here’s to hoping I’m wrong.
- sfifs 7y ago
  Even if there's a massive investor driven housing development, ultimately the units have to be rented out which will put pressure on rentals down and make housing more affordable. If rentals are lower, yield for ownership will also go lower leading to lower prices.
fortran77 7y ago
This is a great idea! I hope California follows. Wherever a single family detached house stands, a two-family home should be allowed in its place.
reallydontask 7y ago
In the UK, semi-detached houses are probably the most common middle class type of dwelling, so it's interesting to see that there is some sort of debate about this. Loads of differences between US/UK but still
- arethuza 7y ago
  Aren't most council houses semi-detached - I wouldn't describe it as a middle class thing?
rvp-x 7y ago
As a non-north american I was initially confused at the replies because surely duplexes are low density construction for a city.
- Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
  Yeah, my reaction was... are things that bad there that this is significant good news?
  - noobermin 7y ago
    American history, specifically of racism and hatred of the poor, runs deep and probably stumps most outsiders.
- jasonwatkinspdx 7y ago
  This is specifically about allowing duplexes and similar small multiplexes in neighborhoods that are currently zoned exclusively for single family dwellings. So yes, this is actually an increase in density. There are plenty of condo/apartment towers going up in Portland too, but this bill addresses the much larger areas of the city where those aren't viable.
- akavi 7y ago
  Nope, American single family home zoning is really that out of control. Even San Francisco (inarguably an area that should be densely urban) bans duplexes (or denser) in over 30% of the city's residential areas.
baybal2 7y ago
America should follow the example of progressive countries. Point 1. Residential highrises should become the main housing option Point 2. Stop subsidising suburban lifestyle for the rich Point 3. Massive public investments into infrastructure Point 4. Replace zoning regulations with something less extremely specific or go for sanitary code type regulation Point 5. Stop requiring people without cars to buy unneeded parking space on their own plot
- tcbawo 7y ago
  There is a book that examined this over a century ago, Progress and Poverty (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_and_Poverty https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_and_Poverty), which was hugely influential in it's day. It seems as though it could have been written today. Yet, it's interesting that the solution proposed is nearly the exact opposite of what was enacted in California.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Point 2. Stop subsidising suburban lifestyle for the rich The average price of a house is $226500. (https://www.zillow.com/home-values/ https://www.zillow.com/home-values/). Almost anyone can get an FHA mortgage with 3.5% down. The thought that only rich people can afford a home is not true for most of the country.
  - efa 7y ago
    Yup. You can buy brand new houses where I live (San Antonio) for $150k (even less).
  - sampleinajar 7y ago
    True, but "rich" is fairly subjective. I also don't think that point was implying that only rich people could afford homes, but that the suburban "lifestyle" and the associated costs of infrastructure were being "subsidized". For the most part, cities subsidize less urban areas.
    - scarface74 7y ago
tunesmith 7y ago
We're in a single-family home HOA in Portland that prohibits duplexes and DADUs, and everyone's confused about whether this supersedes the HOA rules. I think it doesn't; HOAs can still prevent something the law allows, but I'm not certain on that.
- CalRobert 7y ago
  With luck the law will crush this HOA silliness. Maybe eliminate HOA's altogether.
- logfromblammo 7y ago
  It depends on the wording of the law, I think. Many HOA agreements have severability clauses and also large antenna bans. But federal law explicitly allows antennas, so that antenna-ban clause is silently severed. It remains in the agreement text, so a naive homeowner might believe it remains in effect, and the HOA might attempt to enforce it using the same forms as all the clauses they can lawfully enforce, but they will always lose if the dispute goes to court. The federal 1996 Telecommunications Act, and OTARD rule in the implementing regulations, explicitly prohibits rules preventing over-the-air reception antennas "by homeowner, townhome, condominium or cooperative association rules, including deed restrictions, covenants, by-laws and similar restrictions". So the law proposed by HB 2001 could sever the clause preventing duplexes or render the entire HOA agreement invalid (if no severability clause), and therefore make duplexes allowed in HOA neighborhoods. But... it does not. It only reaches down to the "local government" level, which is the municipal or county zoning restrictions. The NIMBYest of the NIMBYs will already have HOA agreements that match or make more restrictive the zoning requirements of their municipalities. The effect will probably be to increase the prevalence of HOAs to impede progress, in lieu of zoning. I am not a lawyer or legislator, but the bill should have been amended to burn out anti-density covenants, deed restrictions, and association by-laws.
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rwmj 7y ago
I find it odd that this is something that the government can regulate. Surely it's nobody's business if a single building is split between two families?
pacoWebConsult 7y ago
Is anyone else concerned that this will lead to conditions like the beginning of the 20th century where 2 or 3 large families would live in a single residence, often times with 10+ people living and sleeping in the same room? Rezoning a residence to house twice the people without any adjustment in required square footage is a slippery slope towards turning low income housing into slums.
- i_am_nomad 7y ago
  This isn’t about re-zoning the use of existing houses, it’s about what can be built in the future.
OliverJones 7y ago
About time. Over the last generation almost all US cities have failed to add enough new housing to handle the growing population. Want to reduce homelessness? Build homes. Want to reduce ridiculously overpriced homes? Build homes.
rhacker 7y ago
Is this going to make a LOT of people rich on cottage rents? Pull in a trailer, hook it up, make $1000 / mo? I'm guessing the contractors in Portland, Bend, Eugene are getting calls now.
- pcwalton 7y ago
  That's not how ADU legislation has worked out here in California. There are significant restrictions on the ADU that prohibit just "pulling in a trailer", and I imagine the Oregon legislation looks similar. Here's an article explaining some of the restrictions in San Francisco, with some photos of garage conversions: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/New-use-for-San-Francisco-garages-upscale-13778164.php#photo-17238670 https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/New-use-for-San-...
sharadov 7y ago
The Bay area needs this badly. But the NIMBYs will not let this pass.
psadri 7y ago
Is this primarily aimed at building duplexes on bare land? Or to convert existing single family homes to duplexes? For the latter, how are the economics? It is not cheap to prematurely tear down a house to build a duplex instead.
- jandrese 7y ago
  It may not be a common case, but there should be places where oversized homes can be divided into two units for a modest cost. Have to plumb in a second kitchen, redo some of the electrical, etc... but maybe cheaper than building a whole new house from scratch, especially if permitting on new construction is an obstacle. It needs a lot of custom engineering for every house though, which is expensive. In the end you'd probably have to set it up as the world's smallest condo for tax and maintenance purposes.
sunshinelackof 7y ago
As long as they don't touch the UGB.
edoo 7y ago
This will have a few predictable results: The developers that pushed this through will make a fortune. The government taxes will increase immensely as they can now squeeze in more people. The city will generate much more pollution than it did. At what point do you say enough is enough. Exponential growth is unsustainable. The best communities I've ever seen were zoned for minimum size 1 acre single family lots.
- firethief 7y ago
  > The best communities I've ever seen were zoned for minimum size 1 acre single family lots. That isn't scalable enough without a major population correction. There are about 3.5 billion acres of arable land on the planet[1]. If we devoted all of that to rearing human families, we'd have to eat them. (1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arable_land#Arable_land_area https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arable_land#Arable_land_area
  - edoo 7y ago
    What they are doing isn't scalable without a major population correction. You hit the exact same issue someday no matter what. By encouraging exponential growth it just ensures when we do hit a true limit the losses are orders of magnitude worse. Also an increase in density is a decrease in quality of life. Why not live sustainable lives with a comfortable amount of resources instead of exponentially reproducing until everyone has nothing. If the plan doesn't scale 50k years into the future it is an abject fraud designed for short term profit at the expense of others. Math always wins.
mgleason_3 7y ago
Seems like a pretty immediate solution for housing and rental shortages. I was just talking to a A developer who mentioned that it costs so much to build in LA&OC California that it only makes sense to target the high end/luxury segment with new construction - at least for single-family homes. IDK what the economics for new-construction of apartments is like, but I have to image its similar. Certainly more constructive than Governor Newsom suing Huntington. ref: https://abc7.com/society/gov-newsom-suing-huntington-beach-over-lack-of-low-income-housing/5107431/ https://abc7.com/society/gov-newsom-suing-huntington-beach-o...

376 points by jseliger 7y ago

Washington next please. I’ll settle for just Seattle for now, and I plan to vote and have been donating accordingly in this year’s city council races. Relatedly, fellow Seattleites: the primary for city council races is in August, and ballots go out in just under three weeks. Make sure your voter registration information is up to date! https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/ https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/

suff 7y ago
Washington already allows this
seattle_spring 7y ago
Seattle is very close to approving backyard cottages on all SFH-zoned properties [1]. They're also very close to approving a pretty major city-wide upzone [2], though it largely just makes mutli-family zoning denser and doesn't affect SFH zones much. [1] https://seattle.curbed.com/2019/5/13/18619101/adu-dadu-backyard-cottage-law https://seattle.curbed.com/2019/5/13/18619101/adu-dadu-backy... [2] https://seattle.curbed.com/2019/2/26/18240535/mha-hala-zoning-citywide-upzones https://seattle.curbed.com/2019/2/26/18240535/mha-hala-zonin... (* No affiliation with Curbed, they were just the first articles to pop up on my search that weren't paywalled).
- aaronbrethorst 7y ago
  ADUs are great and MHA is fine, but both of these packages literally took years to pass. The city council needs to move faster.
  - closetohome 7y ago
    Quite a few of this year's candidates are proposing eliminating single-family zoning entirely. It could be on the agenda during the next couple of years.
    - aaronbrethorst 7y ago
      It's great to see this! But they need to make it through the primaries and then win in the general, and this is not an insignificant lift.

Lazare 7y ago

Excellent. Fingers crossed it works well and provides a blueprint for other cities and states.

chrisco255 7y ago

Ship it. Restrictive zoning laws are choking the poor and middle class and causing cities to stagnate. Hopefully CA follows suit.

nerdponx 7y ago
Also duplexes really don't do much harm to the "suburban" feeling of a neighborhood. A nice, big duplex feels as much like a home as any other. If anything, I feel like it helps make neighborhoods more dynamic by increasing the population density without increasing the physical density of buildings and roads. That said, parking will be important (need enough room for garages or lots of on-street parking) since I assume these areas won't have great mass transit.
- mywittyname 7y ago
  I personally think multiplex homes look way better than the rows of snout houses you find in 99% of modern suburban development.
dcosson 7y ago
IIRC the latest revisions of sb50 in California would have rezoned the whole state to allow fourplexes (while still upcoming even higher to 5 stories along transit corridors). But it was blackholed for at least a year by the supreme chancellor of the senate (or whatever her official title is) even though it likely has enough votes to pass if it would have gone to the floor. That’s democracy I guess?
- masonic 7y ago
  Not democracy at all, just the Democrat leadership. Democrats have supermajorities in CA.

burlesona 7y ago

Thankfully this is beginning to look like a trend. Minneapolis adopted a similar deal (redefining all single family to be residential up to three units) late last year, and more of these kind of upzonings are in the works across the country. Ref: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/12/12/three-cheers-for-minneapolis-the-3-is-for-triplex https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/12/12/three-cheers-...

H8crilA 7y ago
Wonder how long will it take for prices to take notice, doesn't seem to be happening yet: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MNXRSA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MNXRSA
- bluGill 7y ago
  In Oregon? 60 years if ever. You can't get a building permit to build anything without your lawyers ($$$) spending years getting you through the process. Or so I've heard. In Minneapolis I expect it will start to make a difference in 5 years. In Minneapolis a building permits for something allowed in code takes an hour from the time you park your car to the time you drive away, and no lawyer needed. Note that we will never really know that a difference was made: there are any other factors involved in housing prices with no way to control for any of them. Thus no matter what happens you will be able to reasonably argue from data whichever side you want.
  - Frondo 7y ago
    People exaggerate. Portland's already been transformed by row houses, lots of apartment and condo structures, and dense building. Unsurprisingly, a lot of old-timers hate it, and their complaints all boil down to "it's different from when I was a child/raising a family here". The dense building is already taking place, in every neighborhood in the city. Getting a permit is no problem; my little brother, an engineer with no background in building, got a permit to build a four-unit building on one of the sites where they were already allowed (before this law was passed) in 8 weeks; the normal time for any permit approval for construction, he says, and in his engineering work he did a lot of work with permitting for customer projects, too, so I'd guess he knows. Portland's already been changing and it's made the city so much more pleasant to walk through. Neighborhood after neighborhood of single-family detached housing is boring, tiresome to drive or bike through, and an environmental disaster (as the ODOT study recently confirmed). If the rest of Oregon can now follow suit, this is only a good thing. The funny thing is, driving through old towns in Oregon or anywhere, where most of the building was done before these zoning laws made everything into the same boring city planning style, architecture and construction used to be a lot more interesting and visually pleasing. It's neat to drive through places with variety of structure. These laws are one of the most pointless things, that's done a great deal of damage, the US has done.

AlexanderNull 7y ago

NOT IN MY BACK YARD!!! err sorry, thought I was my parents for a moment there...

vvvij 7y ago

Upcoming: White flight in Oregon; Authorities confused.

NN88 7y ago

this is the step towards the USA matching the infrastructure development in the rest of the world.

TomMckenny 7y ago

Fantastic. I hope with all my heart that rezoning at least slows down price increases. It should certainly be done as widely as possible. But in the end I think we need to keep in mind that there will need to additional aggressive legislation to even keep prices flat relative to wages let alone reduce them.

TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
On that note, does anyone know of any economist(s), or thinkers, who a have a comprehensive plan to change the way the housing market works?
- dvtrn 7y ago
  Not strictly limited to housing, but Vishaan Chakrabarti[1] speaks about urban development at large, and his book "Country of Cities"[2] is an engaging read. [1] https://www.arch.columbia.edu/faculty/74-vishaan-chakrabarti https://www.arch.columbia.edu/faculty/74-vishaan-chakrabarti [2] https://www.amazon.com/Country-Cities-Manifesto-Urban-America/dp/1935202170 https://www.amazon.com/Country-Cities-Manifesto-Urban-Americ...
- klipt 7y ago
  Henry George had some interesting ideas about the Land Value Tax.
- ajmurmann 7y ago
  Alain Bertaud might have the opposite of what you might want to call a "comprehensive plan". He makes great suggestions on how to give control back to the market and achieve better outcomes than the quasi, soviet-style, planned economy that our housing market is in the US (my words not his). Great interview with him on econtalk about his new book: http://www.econtalk.org/alain-bertaud-on-cities-planning-and-order-without-design/ http://www.econtalk.org/alain-bertaud-on-cities-planning-and... Edit: typo in author name.

georgeburdell 7y ago

Seems reasonable, but being a Portland resident I'm already annoyed at how hard it is to find parking. Portland's mass transit is a joke (I can bike downtown end-to-end faster than MAX can crawl through it) and so people have no choice but to drive. What's the point of putting duplexes in neighborhoods without good transit and roads at capacity? California had a much more reasonable solution in SB827 and now SB50 [1] in that density increases would have only happened near transit. I don't think the law will have the intended effects. Home prices tend to be sticky, and I'm not aware of any North American city that successfully built its way out of a housing affordability crisis. Wealth inequality is such that current property owners, and real estate speculators, will make out handesomely. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Senate_Bill_827 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Senate_Bill_827

chrisco255 7y ago
I'm not sure what you mean about no U.S. city building its way out of an affordability crisis...but cities like Dallas and Houston have reasonable housing prices at $245K and $185K median home price respectively. Price is a function of supply and demand.
- Tiktaalik 7y ago
  It can be tough to compare cities directly. Often apples and oranges. Houston for example sprawls out to the horizon, which surely makes new development simpler, but this isn’t a path than most NW cities such as Vancouver BC, Seattle and Portland would follow.
  - davidw 7y ago
    We do have the technology to stack dwellings vertically, and not just sprawl.
aaronbrethorst 7y ago
I just spent the weekend in Nob Hill in NW Portland (just off 23rd and Flanders), and had no trouble finding parking even though it was a dense residential area and had a ton of businesses nearby. Felt much easier to park there than in Capitol Hill in Seattle.

raldi 7y ago

If you're afraid (or overjoyed) that this might change the city overnight, you might want to read this story about an area of Portland that repealed its apartment ban 39 years ago. Even without exclusionary zoning, neighborhoods change very slowly. https://www.sightline.org/2019/06/21/this-is-what-a-street-looks-like-39-years-after-legalizing-fourplexes/ https://www.sightline.org/2019/06/21/this-is-what-a-street-l...

davidw 7y ago
Same author :-) He worked his ass off - like a lot of people - to get this passed.
dsfyu404ed 7y ago
Anyone who is worried about the neighborhood "changing overnight" should be worried about immigration and not the international kind. It's wealthy people from the next city or state over who change things when they move in because they have the money (which is convertible to political power although the conversion is not 100% efficient) to change things how they want.

zerotolerance 7y ago

Like most things they do in Oregon, this will certainly not have the desired effect. Infrastructure in Portland is stressed enough without doubling density. Turning 1 $600K home into two $500k homes isn't going to help anyone but the speculating developers.

geezerjay 7y ago
Your hypothetical example assumes that this measure leads available housing to double while prices fall about by about 15%, and even so your conclusion is that this doesn't help anyone?
- epistasis 7y ago
  This is a very common view in certain areas that otherwise have progressive views. In these terms, the profit of developers is an evil that exceeds the benefit of any person having housing. In particular, new people are often considered nuisances or a burden or something that is bad for the neighborhoods, even.
epistasis 7y ago
Turns out that the people that can afford $500k but not $600k are people, and they will be helped by this. Higher densities will enable more efficient public transit, greatly helping our environment, and helping people get their commutes back under control. Also helped will be future generations that will get to live in denser communities, with more neighbors and more kids that their children and be friends with. And of course it will help in the walkable neighborhoods to give more people access to them. And I think you under estimate the ability of more duplexes to moderate the most exploitive aspects of the housing markets. In demand, high expense areas have prices that rise spectacularly, turning every single family home owner into a speculator. Ironically, developers of duplexes and fourplexes are not speculators, certainly not to any degree that the homeowning residents are. Developers perform a service, enable more people to live in a place. The residents just get to benefit from others' hard work at making an area more desirable.

Tiktaalik 7y ago

It’s a sensible move. Vancouver BC is studying moving to allowing fourplexes on most detached residential lots too, and I hope that city takes steps toward implementing that. A great outcome from this is that now that cities are finally implementing these policies, we can study their impacts. At this point in YIMBY urbanist circles policies like this have taken on somewhat of a mythical panacea quality, so it’d be good to finally be able to ground the affordable housing discussion with hard data.

onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
I really don't understand why we can't also allow bodega-type stores at least on the ends of residential streets. Nobody is going to drive ten miles to go to your local bodega. It's not going to increase traffic. You're not going to need more parking. You can even make it illegal to sell cigarettes and alcohol entirely there.
- bluGill 7y ago
  Making cigarettes and alcohol illegal makes them illegal. There is a reason you find tiny stores that sell just alcohol and cigarettes all over in poor neighborhoods: they are the only thing high enough margin to work out. If such stores can sell the high margin products they then have enough money to stock lower margin things as well. Besides, with the problems of drinking and driving, you should want alcohol stores nearby to drinkers can get their fix without having to drive to the store.

CoconutPilot 7y ago

The problem people don't want to address is these neighborhoods were not designed to handle this many people. They don't have the power, water, natural gas, sewerage, parking, etc to handle these many people. As a result everyone's quality of life is degraded. The city loves the taxes though.

ng12 7y ago
That's such a cop out. Do you imagine Manhattan and Tokyo went from being uninhabited wilderness to concrete jungles in one go? No, it was constant iteration over decades. These are all solved problems. We know how to build denser cities, we just need the political will to do so.
- CoconutPilot 7y ago
  Cop out? Its the truth. Infrastructure can be upgraded but today it isn't. There is no plan to upgrade infra!
  - geezerjay 7y ago
    So you acknowledge that infrastructure in fact can be updated. What's bothering you then?
    - CoconutPilot 7y ago
      Whats bothering me? I guess the inability of anyone to have a usable discussion on the lack of strategic planning in initiatives like this... Holy cow I wish I had never "spoken up" in the first place.
      - yholio 7y ago
        Infrastructure is demand driven. You don't plan a business district and start to dig subway tunnels under agricultural land. The city develops until it needs a subway, which is then dug under the most dense areas. Property up-zoneing is such a slow and predictable process that no competent utility provider should have a problem in estimating future demand and upgrade accordingly. If infrastructure is failing left and right, it's because the public and private providers are incompetent and improperly regulated, not due to "excessive urban growth". The exception to these are public services that require land, for example roads and parks, which are very expensive to re-acquire and demolish afterwards. For these purposes, land is typically set aside by the local urban planner and building on certain plots is not allowed.

cheriot 7y ago

This is great in another way that isn't talked about much. As housing prices and commute times go up so does the price of everything that involves human labor. Bus drivers, plumbers, wait staff, etc all have to be paid enough to live in the city or suffer a long commute. So anyone struggling to make ends meet has it even harder.

oceanghost 7y ago
“Every increase in the real wealth of the society, every increase in the quantity of useful labour employed within it, tends indirectly to raise the real rent of land.” -Adam Smith, “The Wealth Of Nations”
- ajmurmann 7y ago
  Yes, that's why we need to get more bang out of the same land.
  - epistasis 7y ago
    And perhaps tax away those ground rents, removing the hugely inefficient speculative drive: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
    - noobermin 7y ago
      I did some digging into this at some point seeing it mentioned on a Strong Town's article. It looks like a city that tried to do it had it repealed because it didn't work as a merely city level tax[0], amongst other issues. [0] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-short-life-of-pennsylvanias-radical-tax-reform https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-short-life-of-pennsyl...
      - zzzzzzzza 7y ago
        there's many more examples of lvt than just altoona https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/comments/68mvkh/examples_of_success_under_a_lvt/ https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/comments/68mvkh/examples_o... not all the examples listed were permanently successful, e.g. both pittsburg and taiwan allowed their property valuations to fall far behind the true value of the land (in pittsburgs case once they reassessed the value of the land to reflect market value, the lvt ended up being repealed; in taiwan this behavior has contributed to a huge property bubble) other examples are missing, e.g. possibly the best historical example of lvt (since it was the only tax levied), is kiatschou/tsingtao, the germany holding in china prior to ww1.

davidw 7y ago

This was super stressful to follow along the whole path in the legislature. We turned out some YIMBY's to meet our state rep here in Bend to support it back in... January I think it was. It kept going in fits and starts, and really came down to the wire today, with a failing vote before it went up again and passed, before the legislative session expired. I'm happy to have played a very small part... our Republican state senator was one who voted in favor; maybe our calls and emails had a positive effect. Hats off to the people in the legislature and some of the advocacy groups around Oregon like "1000 friends of Oregon" who worked really hard to get this through.

Aloha 7y ago
This is often the path that a lot of legislation takes thru the legislature.
- davidw 7y ago
  The bit where the first vote failed because one of the senators who ended up voting in favor didn't feel comfortable being in the same room as one of the Republicans who had been hiding in Idaho to deny the senate a quorum, and who had threatened to kill Oregon State Police if they were sent to find him was kind of over the top though.
  - pacoWebConsult 7y ago
    Really? Sounds like they don't have the spine to represent their constituents properly if they're willing to let legislation fail because a colleague is making empty threats. Kinda sad that they were too uncomfortable to do their job because someone else was too insane to do their job...
    - davidw 7y ago
      She showed back up. I don't have a lot of details so we'll wait and see what shakes out. The important thing is the bill passed. There will be disciplinary hearings of some kind for the R who made the threats. Because of the walkout, everything got compressed into two final days, so I don't think they had time for that beforehand, which was unfortunate, as he certainly wasn't doing his constituents a favor with that kind of talk. Anyway, it was pretty crazy and a real nail-biter.

refurb 7y ago

They kind of do this in SF with ADUs, accessory dwelling units. Want to convert your garage to a separate unit? City will help you with all the permitting.

luckydata 7y ago
But you agree that's not even close? You have one good house and a subpar living arrangement that can be only temporary or last resort, while in the other scenario you get two units that can both host a family without loss of dignity or comfort. It's night and day.
- refurb 7y ago
  I’ve seen some beautiful ADUs in SF which basically removed the garage and converted the ground floor to a 2nd unit of the same size as the upper floor - AKA turned it into a duplex!

huevosabio 7y ago

This is a fantastic step towards affordable housing. We need more state-level interventions like these to remove the hurdles that impede building new housing. I hope that government officials in California follow a similar path. The only sustainable way to affordable housing is to make market rates affordable.

geezerjay 7y ago
Why haven't they simply rezoned some areas to allow higher density housing? This sort of blanket change doesn't grant much control on which zone should increase density.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  That’s the point. Granting control on which zone should improve density has worked very well for land owners, not so much for anyone else. They haven’t set duplexes as a ceiling but as a floor on density.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    In what way does this provide a floor on density? It seems that building single-family residences is still legal in areas where it was before.
- cycrutchfield 7y ago
  Because leaving it up to local governments to decide which areas to upzone will result in perverse outcomes, as entrenched interests will simply seek to protect their assets instead of provide the most good for the most people. Removing the element of control prevents this from happening.
  - geezerjay 7y ago
    Local government have insight on the capacity of services currently available in some regions, and also which growth strategy they could follow to avoid very expensive investments with very negative externalities (i.e., congestioned freeways whose capacity can't be extended). Allowing high-density residential construction near public transportation hubs creates more value than allowing urbam sprawl to grow indefinitely. The single most important reason why people are forced to waste their lives in long commutes is allowing residential neighborhoods to spring up in the middle of nowhere in places where their only way in and out of their homes is through a long congestioned road served by no public transportation service.

luckydata 7y ago

Well done neighbors, I hope some of your good sense infects us.

ajxs 7y ago

Disclosure: I don't live in Portland. I live in Sydney, which has a much higher population and much higher real estate prices. The population density is hard to compare, since Sydney has a very large and sprawling metropolitan area of 4,775.2 square miles. The first thing I think of when I read this is that while this kind of development may superficially look to benefit those looking to purchase property, urban consolidation will benefit property developers much more so than consumers. Sydney is undergoing considerable urban consolidation and we're hardly seeing any reduction in property value at all. We've seen all manner of predatory practices on behalf of property developers occurring in this city to ensure that the price is kept artificially high. One practice that is all too common is developers buying up property and only releasing it onto the market slowly to maximise commercial gain, as ridiculous as it sounds, anecdotally this is quite common. I wouldn't celebrate just yet.

ggm 7y ago
Sydney, like S.F. is a highly distorted market (but for different reasons, and in different ways: what is similar, is that it is distorted, not how its distorted)
- ajxs 7y ago
  Yes, you're completely right. Sydney has some severe problems in this area that there's no incentive for regulators to resolve. I can't comment on S.F, however.
cycrutchfield 7y ago
Who cares? Once equilibrium is reached, prices will be lower (or at least, rise more slowly). That’s simple supply and demand. Those property developers are taking on a considerable amount of inventory risk. One hiccup in the housing market and they go bankrupt. If that’s the game they are willing to play, then so be it.
- nitrogen 7y ago
  There's not a whole lot of risk in being first in line to buy up all of the XBoxes and scalping them to desperate parents. Or to buying up enough aluminum that you can hoard it. Or owning enough land that you choose the price. When you control the supply of an essential resource, you can name your price. Great way to make money, terrible way to make a society.

DoreenMichele 7y ago

There are some comments about infrastructure deficiencies here. Reality: Sprawl is more of a burden on municipal jurisdictions because infrastructure, including roads, has to be extended to it and it's not dense enough to adequately cover the cost involved. If you play SimCity, you can kind of model this by creating a new city from scratch and creating an urban core. Place a fire department and police department at the center and build out to roughly the perimeter of their coverage. Keep improving development within that footprint until you have an economically viable city, then add a satellite suburb following a similar pattern. Not everything needs to be in that footprint. You can have farms outside of it, for example, and you can have some industry with only fire coverage, no police. But if you build a sprawling low-density city, you will find it is impossible to provide adequate services. You can't afford to pay for them. You wind up with high rates of poverty and crime. Missing Middle housing also helps get an area to residential densities that help make public transit make sense. It also helps improve walkability. A lot of the problems we have currently are because America sprawls. These problems likely won't be made worse by gently increasing densities. Increasing density in a good way should start to remedy a lot of these issues.

meddlepal 7y ago
Eh... Don't buy it. At least in SC4 I've found the west coast urban planning style or suburban styles produce highly profitable and $$ or $$$ res/comm/industrial cities that don't fail. SimCity is a fun game but it's really broken for modelling real world stuff.
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  SC4 is broken. Try it in SimCity 3000 or 2000. SC4 intentionally made it stupidly easy to make the city work financially and also killed what I thought of as "the game god." It's all ooh, shiny and can be fun in a largely superficial manner. But I don't think it works well as an actual city simulation anymore. (SC4 followed the company acquisition. It has a more polished, corporate feel and it's cool that it has things like recycling centers. But I am not really a fan.) I cannot find an article about it, but one city uploaded it's data to SimCity and got surprisingly solid city modeling results. This was before the joke that is SC4. Edit: Geez, can we not downvote the comment I'm replying to? I left out the fact that I primarily play SimCity 3000. It's a perfectly reasonable reply that prompted me to fill in missing details that I hadn't thought to include in my original comment.

jquery 7y ago

As an SF homeowner I look forward to Cali passing the equivalent so my home (near BART) shoots up in value. Win/win.

oberservant 7y ago
That's great

xivzgrev 7y ago

Fucking finally. I can’t wait for California to get their shit together on this. Now supporters there will have an analogy over the next 5-10 years

noobermin 7y ago

I really wish the rest of the US would take note, both conditions as well as climate change really need reduction of sprawl but it really won't matter if OR legalizes this while FL puts up five times more exhurbs.

dsfyu404ed 7y ago
Except for some coastal areas and larger cities housing density is way down the list of priorities because it's simply not a problem.
- drngdds 7y ago
  It might not be seen as a problem, but it is a problem. It makes forms of transportation other than cars non-viable, which is awful for the environment. Cheap electric cars will happen eventually, but we don't exactly have time to waste.
  - sempron64 7y ago
    I'm all for raising density, but cheap electric cars will happen a LOT faster than rebuilding all of America with higher density housing and infrastructure, besides the carbon emission that that refactoring entails. Cement and steel emit way more co2 than individual transport.
    - 0815test 7y ago
      "Cheap electric cars" will have range problems for a long time. Electric transport (not just "cars", either) works very well with increased density, and not so well with the low-density status quo.
      - bluGill 7y ago
        Range doesn't matter. People tend to have a half hour commute range. Electric cars have long been able to replace gas for commute for nearly everybody already. (range anxiety has been about the exceptions - once a month I do X and the electric car can't do that...)

eecc 7y ago

Another article linked from within the same one posted here [1] is so batshit insanely heartbreaking and infuriating. Much of today’s nonsense becomes so much clearer when you learn what was par for the course merely a century ago. [1] https://www.sightline.org/2018/05/25/a-century-of-exclusion-portlands-1924-rezone-is-still-coded-on-its-streets/ https://www.sightline.org/2018/05/25/a-century-of-exclusion-...

0815test 7y ago
The article itself is of course fine; what's "batshit insane" and heartbreaking is the blatant unfairness it describes. Newsflash - exclusionary zoning leads to exclusion, which often has its hardest impact on vulnerable minorities. Who would have guessed? There is a common stereotype that segregation and exclusion can only result from fuzzy "structural" forces or from private action by opportunistic and unethical individuals - but in fact, these things can endure because they're often enforced by a morass of laws and regulations, though sometimes in remarkably devious and opaque ways.
- eecc 7y ago
  It’s an adverb and it refers to the heartbreak, not the article itself. I’m afraid you misread my comment ;)

loser777 7y ago

To what extent does the number of families in a building change with the law vs. just evolving as the environment evolves? I'm currently staying temporarily in the bay area, and it seems that many homes here have been "converted" from single family homes to full-time airbnb's with extra bedrooms and bathrooms tacked on in any way that they can manage. Functionally it's probably common for a suburban neighborhood to be a bunch of "4, 5, 6-plexes" when appearing to be a typical suburb of single family homes on the outside.

masonic 7y ago
full-time airbnb's with extra bedrooms and bathrooms tacked on in any way that they can ... which is exactly a risk of killing "zoning" (capacity limits) restrictions. It's now far riskier for a property owner to rent to traditional tenants (especially with the threat of Section 8 acceptance becoming mandatory) than to cash out into the AirBnB market.

_whm1 7y ago

When i moved to the US i had no idea about the amount of zonening laws, construction regulations and building codes. Coming from europe i naively thought that since the US is the "land of the free" people could basically build whatever they want on the piece of dirt they owned. Reality is, the amoung of regulation is far more than i have encountered in my hometown in Poland.

masonic 7y ago
people could basically build whatever they want on the piece of dirt they owned. Europe lacks fire and earthquake codes?
- icebraining 7y ago
  What sparkling is saying is that we Europeans have an image of the US having fewer regulations than in our home countries.
- rjmunro 7y ago
  Here in the UK, we have building regulations and planning permission. Building regulations cover making sure the building won't fall down and hurt someone, including regulations about fire safety etc. Planning permission is where old people who want to keep house prices inflated as they already own property can go to council meetings and object to anything new. Young people can't take part because they have to go to work and stuff, and don't have time to go to council meetings.
- 9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago
  I don't live in Poland but here in Europe where I do live there are definitely less rules and zoning is most definitely more relaxed.
- sparkling 7y ago
  Obviously anything safety-related is regulated. But nobody is going to tell you what type or color of roof shingles you need to buy.

jbb123 7y ago

So what is a duplex? Nowhere does it say and it's not a term I've ever heard used in the UK? I guess "semi-detached" would be closest but not sure?

CalRobert 7y ago
Two end of terrace houses next to each other. If you want a standard "semi-detached" house in the US it's normally called a townhouse (or similar).
- souprock 7y ago
  To be a duplex, it needs to be 2 homes on one property that are touching. It is expected that the wall would be shared and that the two homes would be mirror images of each other. There exist houses that touch each other but are on separate lots; these are not duplexes. A townhouse is 2-story and it touches another one. It could be a duplex, but it might be on a separate lot or it might be part of a group of more than 2.
  - CalRobert 7y ago
    I wasn't aware of the lot distinction. I believe we agree otherwise, though. In the UK, Ireland, etc. a "terraced" house is essentially what we'd call a townhouse - they can be in groups of 2, 3, 20, etc.
icebraining 7y ago
I think a semi-detached is a duplex, but the latter term is more broad, covering also two-story apartment buildings and such: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplex_(building) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplex_(building)
- vidarh 7y ago
  'Semi-detached' can be used about the end unit of a long chain of terraced houses, so while a semi-detached can be part of a duplex, it might also not be.

podunkPDX 7y ago

I’m not certain that this will create any affordable housing in any of the metro areas (Portland, Eugene, Bend). I suspect that this will end up opening the doors for the investor class to fund massive amounts of development in anything resembling an urban core, turning the resulting housing into permanent rentals, tranching those rentals into the next investment instrument to be sold &c. I’m from Portland, and I wish that this would increase the availability of affordable housing, but I feel that this is a lot of feel good, and it’s just going to make my home town that much worse. Here’s to hoping I’m wrong.

sfifs 7y ago
Even if there's a massive investor driven housing development, ultimately the units have to be rented out which will put pressure on rentals down and make housing more affordable. If rentals are lower, yield for ownership will also go lower leading to lower prices.

fortran77 7y ago

This is a great idea! I hope California follows. Wherever a single family detached house stands, a two-family home should be allowed in its place.

reallydontask 7y ago

In the UK, semi-detached houses are probably the most common middle class type of dwelling, so it's interesting to see that there is some sort of debate about this. Loads of differences between US/UK but still

arethuza 7y ago
Aren't most council houses semi-detached - I wouldn't describe it as a middle class thing?

rvp-x 7y ago

As a non-north american I was initially confused at the replies because surely duplexes are low density construction for a city.

Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
Yeah, my reaction was... are things that bad there that this is significant good news?
- noobermin 7y ago
  American history, specifically of racism and hatred of the poor, runs deep and probably stumps most outsiders.
jasonwatkinspdx 7y ago
This is specifically about allowing duplexes and similar small multiplexes in neighborhoods that are currently zoned exclusively for single family dwellings. So yes, this is actually an increase in density. There are plenty of condo/apartment towers going up in Portland too, but this bill addresses the much larger areas of the city where those aren't viable.
akavi 7y ago
Nope, American single family home zoning is really that out of control. Even San Francisco (inarguably an area that should be densely urban) bans duplexes (or denser) in over 30% of the city's residential areas.

baybal2 7y ago

America should follow the example of progressive countries. Point 1. Residential highrises should become the main housing option Point 2. Stop subsidising suburban lifestyle for the rich Point 3. Massive public investments into infrastructure Point 4. Replace zoning regulations with something less extremely specific or go for sanitary code type regulation Point 5. Stop requiring people without cars to buy unneeded parking space on their own plot

tcbawo 7y ago
There is a book that examined this over a century ago, Progress and Poverty (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_and_Poverty https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_and_Poverty), which was hugely influential in it's day. It seems as though it could have been written today. Yet, it's interesting that the solution proposed is nearly the exact opposite of what was enacted in California.
scarface74 7y ago
Point 2. Stop subsidising suburban lifestyle for the rich The average price of a house is $226500. (https://www.zillow.com/home-values/ https://www.zillow.com/home-values/). Almost anyone can get an FHA mortgage with 3.5% down. The thought that only rich people can afford a home is not true for most of the country.
- efa 7y ago
  Yup. You can buy brand new houses where I live (San Antonio) for $150k (even less).
- sampleinajar 7y ago
  True, but "rich" is fairly subjective. I also don't think that point was implying that only rich people could afford homes, but that the suburban "lifestyle" and the associated costs of infrastructure were being "subsidized". For the most part, cities subsidize less urban areas.
  - scarface74 7y ago

tunesmith 7y ago

We're in a single-family home HOA in Portland that prohibits duplexes and DADUs, and everyone's confused about whether this supersedes the HOA rules. I think it doesn't; HOAs can still prevent something the law allows, but I'm not certain on that.

CalRobert 7y ago
With luck the law will crush this HOA silliness. Maybe eliminate HOA's altogether.
logfromblammo 7y ago
It depends on the wording of the law, I think. Many HOA agreements have severability clauses and also large antenna bans. But federal law explicitly allows antennas, so that antenna-ban clause is silently severed. It remains in the agreement text, so a naive homeowner might believe it remains in effect, and the HOA might attempt to enforce it using the same forms as all the clauses they can lawfully enforce, but they will always lose if the dispute goes to court. The federal 1996 Telecommunications Act, and OTARD rule in the implementing regulations, explicitly prohibits rules preventing over-the-air reception antennas "by homeowner, townhome, condominium or cooperative association rules, including deed restrictions, covenants, by-laws and similar restrictions". So the law proposed by HB 2001 could sever the clause preventing duplexes or render the entire HOA agreement invalid (if no severability clause), and therefore make duplexes allowed in HOA neighborhoods. But... it does not. It only reaches down to the "local government" level, which is the municipal or county zoning restrictions. The NIMBYest of the NIMBYs will already have HOA agreements that match or make more restrictive the zoning requirements of their municipalities. The effect will probably be to increase the prevalence of HOAs to impede progress, in lieu of zoning. I am not a lawyer or legislator, but the bill should have been amended to burn out anti-density covenants, deed restrictions, and association by-laws.
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rwmj 7y ago

I find it odd that this is something that the government can regulate. Surely it's nobody's business if a single building is split between two families?

pacoWebConsult 7y ago

Is anyone else concerned that this will lead to conditions like the beginning of the 20th century where 2 or 3 large families would live in a single residence, often times with 10+ people living and sleeping in the same room? Rezoning a residence to house twice the people without any adjustment in required square footage is a slippery slope towards turning low income housing into slums.

i_am_nomad 7y ago
This isn’t about re-zoning the use of existing houses, it’s about what can be built in the future.

OliverJones 7y ago

About time. Over the last generation almost all US cities have failed to add enough new housing to handle the growing population. Want to reduce homelessness? Build homes. Want to reduce ridiculously overpriced homes? Build homes.

rhacker 7y ago

Is this going to make a LOT of people rich on cottage rents? Pull in a trailer, hook it up, make $1000 / mo? I'm guessing the contractors in Portland, Bend, Eugene are getting calls now.

pcwalton 7y ago
That's not how ADU legislation has worked out here in California. There are significant restrictions on the ADU that prohibit just "pulling in a trailer", and I imagine the Oregon legislation looks similar. Here's an article explaining some of the restrictions in San Francisco, with some photos of garage conversions: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/New-use-for-San-Francisco-garages-upscale-13778164.php#photo-17238670 https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/New-use-for-San-...

sharadov 7y ago

The Bay area needs this badly. But the NIMBYs will not let this pass.

psadri 7y ago

Is this primarily aimed at building duplexes on bare land? Or to convert existing single family homes to duplexes? For the latter, how are the economics? It is not cheap to prematurely tear down a house to build a duplex instead.

jandrese 7y ago
It may not be a common case, but there should be places where oversized homes can be divided into two units for a modest cost. Have to plumb in a second kitchen, redo some of the electrical, etc... but maybe cheaper than building a whole new house from scratch, especially if permitting on new construction is an obstacle. It needs a lot of custom engineering for every house though, which is expensive. In the end you'd probably have to set it up as the world's smallest condo for tax and maintenance purposes.

sunshinelackof 7y ago

As long as they don't touch the UGB.

edoo 7y ago

This will have a few predictable results: The developers that pushed this through will make a fortune. The government taxes will increase immensely as they can now squeeze in more people. The city will generate much more pollution than it did. At what point do you say enough is enough. Exponential growth is unsustainable. The best communities I've ever seen were zoned for minimum size 1 acre single family lots.

firethief 7y ago
> The best communities I've ever seen were zoned for minimum size 1 acre single family lots. That isn't scalable enough without a major population correction. There are about 3.5 billion acres of arable land on the planet[1]. If we devoted all of that to rearing human families, we'd have to eat them. (1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arable_land#Arable_land_area https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arable_land#Arable_land_area
- edoo 7y ago
  What they are doing isn't scalable without a major population correction. You hit the exact same issue someday no matter what. By encouraging exponential growth it just ensures when we do hit a true limit the losses are orders of magnitude worse. Also an increase in density is a decrease in quality of life. Why not live sustainable lives with a comfortable amount of resources instead of exponentially reproducing until everyone has nothing. If the plan doesn't scale 50k years into the future it is an abject fraud designed for short term profit at the expense of others. Math always wins.

mgleason_3 7y ago

Seems like a pretty immediate solution for housing and rental shortages. I was just talking to a A developer who mentioned that it costs so much to build in LA&OC California that it only makes sense to target the high end/luxury segment with new construction - at least for single-family homes. IDK what the economics for new-construction of apartments is like, but I have to image its similar. Certainly more constructive than Governor Newsom suing Huntington. ref: https://abc7.com/society/gov-newsom-suing-huntington-beach-over-lack-of-low-income-housing/5107431/ https://abc7.com/society/gov-newsom-suing-huntington-beach-o...