5 Things You Should Know About Portland's New Housing Reform
Image by Alfred Twu for the Sightline Institute. Used with permission. Click to view full size.
Image updated 8/17 to reflect a correction: the new Portland rules not only legalize one attached ADU and one detached ADU, they also legalize two attached ADUs.
Portland, Oregon has passed a landmark zoning reform intended to promote incremental development in the city’s neighborhoods and ease a serious housing affordability crunch. The Residential Infill Project—or R.I.P. (Portland’s nickname is “Rip City”)—passed on Wednesday, August 12th by a 3-1 vote of Portland’s City Council. Following in the footsteps of similar reforms in other cities, and improving on those reforms in crucial ways, Portland’s new policy legalizes up to four residential units on almost any lot citywide, with an added “deeper affordability” bonus that will allow you to build six homes if half of them are priced to be affordable to low-income Portlanders.
The Sightline Institute, a Pacific Northwest-based think tank that played a major role in advocating and organizing in support of the R.I.P., have published an extremely thorough guide to what the new rules accomplish, and the context surrounding this political victory. There’s a lot in there to be excited about if you’re a Strong Towns advocate. Here’s a quick run-down of 5 things to understand about what Portland has done.
1. It's part of a growing movement.
It’s easy to forget how quickly the Overton Window has moved with regard to this issue: ten years ago, essentially no one, anywhere in North America, was mounting a serious challenge to exclusive single-family zoning. Such regulations are perhaps better understood as apartment bans, since their effect is not to merely allow single-family homes, which would be plentiful regardless, but rather to prohibit literally any other type of home from being constructed in a neighborhood.
These days, there is bipartisan and high-profile attention to the negative consequences of exclusive single-family zoning rules. Portland follows in the footsteps of Minneapolis (a comprehensive plan overhaul passed in 2018 and implemented beginning in 2019) and partial or varied efforts at zoning reform in a number of other places: a focus on minimum lot sizes in Houston, accessory dwelling units in Seattle and an explosion of such backyard cottages in Los Angeles after changes in state law.
Portland’s R.I.P. also directly responds to state legislation passed in Oregon in 2019 which requires cities above a certain size to allow up to 4 residential units per lot. Portland goes above and beyond the state’s rules by eliminating some other practical obstacles to housing (more on that below) and allowing up to 6 units with affordability requirements.
The range of activists who pushed for this housing reform in Portland is startlingly broad, including affordability and tenants’ advocates, environmental organizations, public health organizations, both for-profit and nonprofit housing developers, and more. And although Portland is a famously liberal city, this is not a left or right issue. On the left, zoning reformers are often motivated by concern for affordability, racial equity, and mitigating climate change. On the right, the issues are more likely to be property rights, local economic strength and job creation, and removing market distortions. Our own Chuck Marohn recently wrote a piece in The American Conservative about why conservative-leaning Americans should support the movement to end exclusive single-family zoning and roll back the government-initiated, financially ruinous Suburban Experiment.
2. It's a return to normal, not a radical new idea.
Portland’s reform doesn’t invent anything new. It restores something that used to be utterly normal.
There was a time when nearly every American neighborhood was built with a wide range of home types all interspersed together, from detached houses to triplexes to small apartment buildings to cottage courts. Portland was no exception: the city is full of elegant examples of such missing-middle housing. These forms suit a wide range of different kinds of households with varied needs for affordability, accessibility, space, and community.
The movement to restrict neighborhoods to a monoculture of only detached single-family homes was actually a historically unprecedented experiment. It was undertaken deliberately: the eclectic mix found in traditional neighborhoods didn’t die out for lack of demand, but because it was banned. In Portland, the first apartment bans took effect in 1924, and in 1959 the city expanded the prohibition on attached housing to the vast majority of the city. In Portland, as elsewhere, a significant motivation for these bans was to exclude less well-to-do people from prosperous neighborhoods.
The effect was to push most new growth to one of two places: the suburban fringe, or a handful of high-rise districts. Most of Portland’s neighborhoods were left with little new development at all, except for teardowns of older homes to build large “McMansions” on the same lot—a rapidly growing and widely detested phenomenon in recent years that helped prompt the push to pass the R.I.P.
Image via Sightline Institute.
3. The details matter. Portland's working to get them right.
Just because your city technically allows a certain type of development does not mean anyone is going to find it practical or worth their while to build it. If the goal is actually to see housing built, then the details matter. A lot. The Sightline synopsis acknowledges this difference between something allowable on paper and something actually likely to get built in numbers, and makes the case that Portland’s latest reform puts new missing-middle homes in the latter category. Here are their reasons why:
Portland’s reform will build on similar actions in Vancouver and Minneapolis… Seattle,… and Austin. But Portland’s changes are likely to gradually result in more actual homes than any of those milestone reforms.
That’s because in both Vancouver and Minneapolis, city laws in low-density zones cap the size of new buildings no matter how many homes they create. In Minneapolis, for example, the interior square footage of a building can be up to half the square footage of its lot: 2,500 square feet of housing on a hypothetical 5,000 square foot lot.
Portland’s new rules set that same size limit for one-unit buildings. But Portland’s duplexes will be up to three-fifths the square footage of their lot, and triplexes and fourplexes up to 0.7.
The idea is for that extra square footage to work like a sluice gate for Portland’s housing market, rechanneling investment away from luxury remodels and McMansions and toward new homes that are affordable to the middle class on day one. Low-density parts of Vancouver and Minneapolis currently have no such distinctions.
As for Seattle, that city still bans new housing from the driveways of most primary homes, making infill geometrically impossible in many cases. Vancouver does, too.
Austin’s sixplex concept is a different matter. Splitting the fixed cost of a lot among even six homes doesn’t generally bring development prices low enough to be built without subsidy. So until Austin matches its excellent affordable-housing policy with a similar reform to market-rate housing, it’s tying its own hands behind its back.
Policies like this do, however, serve as a sort of force multiplier for nonprofits that are, like Habitat for Humanity, already developing modest homes at below-market prices.
As we wrote in January, legalizing sixplexes for regulated-affordable projects is the economic equivalent of cutting a check for $100,000 or more per affordable home. It alone may not be enough to make those homes appear, but it makes every existing subsidy go further. And it doesn’t take a dime away from other existing programs.
Another crucial difference-maker in Portland: the city has eliminated most parking minimums, and made home driveways optional for the first time since 1973. Requiring that precious land be devoted to car storage, even above and beyond what the owner desires or needs, is a huge driver of unaffordability. Portland has been a leader in parking reform for years now.
4. This is a reform tailor-made for incremental developers—and Portland has plenty who are ready to walk their talk.
Image by Neil Heller.
One important thing to understand, in light of the prospect of a new wave of infill development in Portland neighborhoods, is the kind of builder or rehabber likely to be attracted by the opportunities the R.I.P. opens up. It’s not the big, corporate developers who are building condo towers downtown. Portland has a thriving community of incremental developers who are creative, gutsy, and deeply committed to real placemaking in the neighborhoods where they live and work.
Neil Heller is faculty with the Incremental Development Alliance, and he has done painstaking work to demonstrate the financial feasibility of the “deeper affordability” provision in Portland’s new reform. Heller modeled the construction costs and return on investment of a 6-unit building with mandatory affordable units, and vetted his proof-of-concept with interested local nonprofits including the Portland branch of Habitat for Humanity.
Eli Spevak, another prominent supporter of the Residential Infill Project, has done pioneering work in cohousing, and was profiled a decade ago for it as “the coolest condo developer ever” per the Portland Mercury.
There are many more where Heller and Spevak come from. Portland is a city poised to show us how to change the answer to the question “Who develops?” And the kind of reform it just passed—broad flexibility across neighborhoods rather than turbocharged redevelopment in only a handful of spots—is absolutely essential to allowing many hands to shape Portland’s future.
5. This is a necessary (not sufficient) change to get to a healthy housing market.
The perpetual criticism of initiatives like this is that they won't have an immediate, earth-shaking impact.
"It’s not big enough."
"It will mostly produce market-rate housing, not affordable housing.”
“It won’t be affordable enough.”
”It won’t produce much housing at all.”
If your goal is broad housing affordability in Portland, it’s true that these infill rules alone won't do it. The same for protecting existing renters’ ability to stay in their neighborhoods. The same for fundamentally making the city less car-dependent. The same for providing it with a resilient tax base in perpetuity.
What it is is a necessary but not sufficient condition, because having well over half of the city's residential land legally reserved for only single-family homes was a condition that all but guaranteed unaffordability and guaranteed high levels of car dependence. Portland Neighbors Welcome, in its thank-you letter to supporters of the R.I.P., describes the program as a “Yes, And” approach, not a silver bullet but compatible with other priorities, and able to make those priorities a lighter lift.
Our take at Strong Towns has been consistent: this kind of broad but incremental upzoning is an important step for every city. It removes a distortion that has paralyzed our places and prevented them from evolving to better serve us the way they should to better serve us.
No neighborhood should be exempt from the next increment of change. Now, in one more city than was the case last week, no neighborhood is.
Modern zoning, building and fire codes make it impossible to build many of the types of housing that people actually want to live in. Reforming those codes to allow for single-stair construction can help undo some of this damage.