Sightline Institute Research

Through the first decades of this century, the greater Seattle area had a secret weapon for fighting climate change: it let people choose to live closer to each other. Using a study of neighborhood-level carbon emissions, Sightline estimates that new residents to the Seattle area produced about 5 percent less greenhouse gases from 2000 to 2020. That's simply thanks to their metro area being better than any other in the United States at adding homes to existing neighborhoods. The region eliminated about 1 million tons of potential greenhouse gas emissions basically for free: no government spending, no tax credits for efficiency, no carbon trading market, no carbon tax. This public benefit came just from reducing red tape and letting construction workers build the kinds of homes that people want to live in. Building those homes created jobs. Letting people live in them created economic growth, more location choices, and lower energy bills. The metro might have done even better, of course, if it had allowed more homes throughout the region; and it can keep improving in the future. But for the economy of greater Seattle, this category of climate action has been better than a free lunch. It's been a lunch the region got paid to eat. In general, it's a simple relationship: when people live close enough together, they use less energy and emit less greenhouse gases. Take it from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: "compact and resource-efficient urban growth through co-location of higher residential and job densities, mixed land use, and transit-oriented development (TOD) could reduce GHG emissions between 23 percent and 26 percent by 2050 compared to the business-as-usual scenario." This effect comes from three main factors: less driving, more energy-efficient buildings, and less displacement of nearby ecosystems by energy-intensive objects like pavement. Cars and trucks are the leading source of greenhouse gas emissions in most states and provinces. Residents of the most compact neighborhoods—areas of apartments mixed with workplaces and shops, whether in cities or suburbs—drive much less than residents of spread-out neighborhoods of detached houses on large lots. "Infill housing reduces pollution by reducing driving," as UC Berkeley's Terner Center for Housing Innovation puts it. A Terner Center study finds that San Franciscans emit less than a third as much carbon from transportation as residents of the sprawling Bay Area exurb of Oakley, while making a similar number of trips for the same purposes. Another found that households in California's suburban, single-detached neighborhoods drive more than twice as much every weekday as households in urban neighborhoods with high transit usage. And public transit usage increases with population density (among other factors). In places where few people live close enough to walk to the bus stop, transit can even be less climate-friendly than personal automobiles. These emissions benefits also accrue to existing residents of a neighborhood that adds people, not just new residents moving in. When there are enough people in your neighborhood to support a grocery store or a new bus line, now you get to walk to the grocery store or take the bus to work instead of driving. There's no better insulation than another entire climate-controlled home on the other side of your wall. Urban neighborhoods are much more likely to have such wall-sharing multifamily housing, which one study finds uses 35 percent less energy for heating and 21 percent less energy for cooling than equivalent households in single-detached houses. (What's more, multifamily homes generally have smaller floorplans, which further reduce energy consumption from heating and cooling.) It takes energy to make stuff, and spread-out cities require more stuff. One researcher at Delft University of Technology found that "urban sprawl accounts for a third of all greenhouse gas emissions" via increased raw materi...

January 1, 2026, marked the conclusion of a remarkable experiment in American ranked choice voting. A bipartisan bill passed by the Utah legislature in 2019 led some of the state's reddest cities to adopt a ranked choice voting pilot, a program widely appreciated by their mostly Republican voters. These cities reduced their election costs by 40 percent, had fewer low-plurality winners, improved representation, and saw more positive campaigns. At the program's zenith, 23 Utah cities opted to use ranked choice voting methods in their elections, and voters largely approved. Polling found that a majority of voters enjoyed using ranked choice voting, more than 75 percent found it easy to use, a majority were more likely to vote for their preferred candidate, and a majority wanted to continue to use ranked choice voting in local elections. Out of the 23 participant cities, 13 were in counties that cast ballots for President Trump in 2024. In the two inaugural cities, nearly 70 percent of voters voted Republican. Moreover, most of the champions of the policy in Utah are card-carrying Republicans. Yet in recent years, the national Republican Party's official stance on ranked choice voting has soured. Increased partisanship on the issue led to the pilot project sunsetting in 2025, contrary to the values and wishes of its many conservative proponents. How and why did a very red state come to embrace ranked choice voting? What impeded its broader adoption? And as the pilot concludes, what lessons might fellow conservatives draw from Utah's experience? To find out, Sightline spoke with four key players who have helped bring ranked choice voting to the state. The Utah ranked choice voting experiment is notable not only for its popularity among conservative-leaning voters, but also for its origin story. While parties are becoming more polarized in their attitudes toward ranked choice voting today, Utah's experiment began with a notable display of bipartisanship in 2017. The bill to usher in ranked choice voting in Utah was the brainchild of the most progressive member of the state house—and the most conservative. Former Rep. Marc Roberts had been a proponent of ranked choice voting since using the method himself in Utah Republican Party caucus meetings: "In my neighborhood caucus, the precinct chair was a huge proponent of ranked choice voting. He was the one that introduced me to it. We would use it every now and then in our county convention and even the state convention. I loved it because, from a voter's perspective, I hated being stuck in a situation where I got to pick between the worse of two evils." Roberts attempted to advance the policy when first elected to office but faced strong pushback from county clerks, who argued that it would be far too expensive to implement, given the limitations of their voting equipment. Undeterred, when it came time to solicit proposals for new voting equipment, Roberts ensured the new machines would be ranked choice voting-compatible. Former Rep. Rebecca Chavez-Houck, who served as the Minority Whip for the Democrats at the time, became curious about ranked choice voting while serving on a commission to strengthen Utah's democracy. She viewed it as a way to increase Utah's voter participation levels and electoral competition in a state where a small number of Republican primary voters can effectively determine outcomes. The two lawmakers realized they were aligned on the issue when Chavez-Houk filed a bill on the topic. Roberts reached out, telling Chavez-Houck, "Look, I've been at this for three years. Here's the lay of the land, and here's what I've tried. I'm more than happy to help co-sponsor this thing." Roberts and Chavez-Houck joined forces. The bill sailed through the state house, backed by some of the most conservative members at the time, many of whom strongly favored local control of election methods. "It was awesome," recalled Roberts, and the novelty of the bipartisan collaboration h...

This January, dozens of Cascadians are sitting down for the first meetings of charter review commissions across the region with the same goal in mind: improving local government. They picked a great place to start. Municipal charter reviews—during which a panel of residents suggests amendments to what are basically local constitutions—can be a powerful and collaborative way to kickstart positive change. Healthier elections can ultimately mean better outcomes for voters and communities that achieve their local priorities. So, if election reform is a goal, where's a commissioner to begin? Sightline staff reached out to former commission members and researched past efforts to answer that question. The result is a list of six recommendations for getting election reform from initial commission discussions to a ballot measure in front of voters, spanning from whom to contact to how to frame the case for your community. Whether you just landed a seat on an upcoming charter review commission or want to stand out as one of the thousands of residents living in the cities and counties under review, this guide is here to help. More than half of US states allow municipalities to adopt home rule charters, which allow local governments and services to differ from what is laid out in state law. Essentially, the charter serves as a local constitution, dictating the government's design and setting ground rules for how it will run. Typically, amending the charter requires voter approval. Municipalities change over time. Populations and industries grow and shrink, and as such, a community's wants and needs may not be the same today as they were ten years ago. A charter review commission allows residents an opportunity to review the charter, take public input, deliberate on improvements, and suggest amendments to improve local government. Take Snohomish County, Washington, for example, where population increased by an estimated 43 percent from 2000 to 2024. That's about 258,000 new residents, more than the entire population of nearby Whatcom County! Snohomish County's 2016 charter commission posed seven charter amendments to the growing and diversifying voter base, which approved the establishment of an advisory commission on human rights and a new Office of Public Advocate to mediate community complaints (among other changes). Election reform is one avenue to reaching a commission's goal: a local government that better serves voters. (Other paths include government restructuring, rethinking public officials' roles, and creating, merging, or eliminating offices and divisions.) Depending on local and state law, electoral reforms may help solve specific problems. Here are a few examples: If an Alaskan municipality sees consistently low voter turnout, commissioners could consider changing the timing or frequency of local elections (thanks to flexible state statutes). Denali Borough, for example, aligns municipal elections with statewide ones. If residents are concerned with the sway of wealthy individuals in local politics, a commission might suggest a democracy voucher or small donor elections program. Or, in Alaska, Oregon, and Washington, forms of local ranked choice voting can address problems like spoiler candidates or a council that only represents one kind of voter. Past Cascadian charter reviews have delivered voters a fairer redistricting process for Snohomish County, a Portland City Council that finally reflects its population, and a prohibition on government interference in Whatcom County's ballot initiative process. Ushering an election upgrade from the ideas phase to action requires research, collaboration, and more than a little tact. Former local charter review commissioners from Oregon and Washington offered the following advice to those just kicking off the process: lay the groundwork, do your homework, and communicate how better elections can address real concerns from community members and leaders. If commissioners can agree on ...

One month after unprecedented floods surged across Washington, forcing tens of thousands of people to flee their homes, lawmakers will convene in Olympia to discuss climate policy. This latest climate change-fueled disaster, in an ever-extending string of them, is yet another reminder of what is at stake. Washington's climate ambitions hang on poles and wires. Electric transmission lines make it possible to carry cheap, efficient, reliable power from solar fields in California or wind farms in Montana to the people in Washington who rely on it every day. Without more grid capacity, the state risks relying for longer on polluting and increasingly expensive natural gas for electricity. Yet, Washington is only reviewing one (controversial) large transmission project. Meanwhile, the US federal administration is cutting support for the grid despite its claims to the contrary. Washington lawmakers can step up, including in the 2026 legislative session. They can empower the state to partner with experienced developers to build lines no one else will, saving ratepayers money. They can eliminate duplicative steps in project review processes, while preserving Tribal consultation rights and opportunities for public feedback. And they can ensure that local jurisdictions do not arbitrarily block or slow crucial projects. The alternative is sticking Washingtonians with an aging grid, which they will pay for in higher bills and forgone opportunities for clean, reliable power. Washington has few tools to build the transmission it needs. At present, the state is wholly at the mercy of individual utilities and the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), an independent agency of the US Department of Energy. The last major expansion of the transmission grid in Washington occurred a decade ago, when BPA energized three new 500 kilovolt lines. (One reason for the slow build-out, as Sightline has explained, is these entities do not want to pay for these large projects.) A state transmission authority would transform Washington from a hopeful observer to a proactive leader of its decarbonization journey. The authority would identify grid projects that Washington needs that neither utilities nor BPA want or plan to develop. It could then partner with experienced private transmission builders to erect the lines. And, if the legislature granted it revenue bonding power, it could build these lines more cheaply than private utilities, which in part rely on expensive equity to finance capital projects. Plus, unlike private utilities, the authority would not profit from grid projects. A recent study found that, in California, transmission projects financed with low-cost public debt could cost 57 percent less than projects financed by investor-owned utilities. Cheaper power lines mean lower monthly utility bills for customers. Lawmakers can look to New Mexico, Colorado, and California for guidance. New Mexico's transmission authority, which the legislature established in 2007, is developing 1,500 miles of transmission lines, with at least two lines under construction. It partners with private developers, such as NextEra Energy and Pattern Energy, to build them, and then leases or sells them to utilities or transmission companies. Revenues from projects New Mexico's authority develops cover its operating expenses. Colorado's transmission authority, which the legislature created in 2021, determined in its 2024 study that utilities' plans to expand the grid fell short of what the state needs; to decarbonize, the state requires more than 500 additional miles of high-voltage wires. The authority is now in discussions with potential partners to develop six priority projects to fill this gap. And in 2025, California enacted a major transmission policy, which, among other provisions, facilitates public debt financing and public ownership of grid projects with the goal of saving ratepayers money. While the bill doesn't create a transmission authority per se, it let...

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

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

When six-term US Senator Patty Murray is up for reelection in 2028, the Washington state leader will be 78 years old. If she does not retire on her own, she may well find herself challenged by younger Democrats, as is now happening to 79-year-old Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts. Gerontocracy is out of vogue among Democrats; many blame their party's loss of the presidency on 81-year-old Joe Biden's delay in stepping aside. If Murray forgoes the race, expect a stampede of eager Democrats hoping to succeed her. Her seat has not been vacant since 1992, so every ambitious politician in the Evergreen State will be eyeing it. Indeed, during her 2022 run for reelection, when no other big-name Democrats entered the race, Murray still drew 17 primary challengers. In Alaska that same year, when a US House seat opened for the first time in decades upon the death of Rep. Don Young, who held the office for 49 years, some 48 candidates threw their hats into the ring. Imagine how many will file if (and when) Murray steps aside. The line of Democratic contenders could resemble the throngs of hikers on the trail to Camp Muir on a summer weekend. In other words, it will practically be a mob scene. Unlike in Alaska's pioneering election system, though, platoons of candidates can be a problem in Washington - a big problem. That's because Washington's unusual top-two elections are haunted by a mathematical anomaly that could hand Murray's seat to a Republican, even in deep-blue Washington. Fortunately there are fixes, and one of them is about to debut in Seattle: unaltered top-two in general elections combined with a targeted occasional use of ranked choice voting in certain overcrowded primary elections. (For brevity, we'll call it "ranked top-two.") If the state legislature adopts this Seattle plan in 2026, it could be up and running statewide in time for the August 2028 US Senate primary. To understand ranked top-two, you need to understand the anomaly, in which top-two misfires and elects a less-popular candidate over a more-popular one. The easiest way to understand it is through the 2024 election of Dave Upthegrove, a veteran Democrat, to the state's public lands commissioner post. In that race, Upthegrove came within a hair's breadth of losing the primary, in which two Republicans and five Democrats faced off. The five Democrats gained 57 percent of the 1.9 million votes cast, but they divided their share many ways. During most of the vote-counting process, the two Republicans led, with 22 percent for Jaime Herrera Beutler and 21 percent for Sue Kuehl Pederson. Only when the final batch of ballots was tallied, days after the election, did Upthegrove's count exceed Pederson's - and by only 49 votes. Had he fallen short, the general election would have been between Republicans Beutler and Pederson, and one of them would be holding the office now. Instead, after clearing the primary, Upthegrove quickly consolidated Democrats' support and won the general with a five-point margin. A similar scenario unfolded in 2016, when three Democrats split the field for state treasurer, two Republicans advanced to the general election, and the state elected one of them, Duane Davidson. What's more, Davidson, who ended up being a one-term office holder, was the only Republican in that seat in six decades. The same thing could happen in an open US Senate race in 2028: a huge field of Democrats could hand the race to two Republicans. The Upthegrove anomaly in top-two is specific and mathematical. It's not just that both finalists are from the same party. That's normal in districts that lean red or blue. For instance, of the nine races for open congressional seats in Washington since the advent of top-two in 2008, three of them have paired two members of the same party. Most recently, in 2020, Marilyn Strickland and Beth Doglio, both Democrats, competed for the US House seat in District 10. Indeed, such same-party runoffs are a feature of top-two, not a bug...

Speed matters. And to people looking for a home today, it matters a great deal whether that home is built next year, or in ten. If Cascadia's leaders really believed in speed, then they would focus more on re-legalizing small, neighborhood-size buildings with 6 to 12 homes each. But despite recent reforms, small apartment buildings remain illegal almost everywhere in Cascadian cities and across North America. Meanwhile, advocates and leaders in the region have legalized medium-sized and large apartment buildings via transit-oriented development, which smartly co-locates new apartment homes alongside transit infrastructure. California now allows up to 9 stories next to major transit stops, Washington up to 6, and British Columbia up to 20. This is praiseworthy progress, but it's limited to larger buildings that will take many years to plan and build. An example from our pro-housing forbearers illustrates just how long we might wait for larger projects to materialize: in 2014, 31-year-old Graham Jones spoke hopefully to Vancouver City Council and then-Mayor Gregor Robertson, pleading for more homes at the old Oakridge Mall site. Jones asked council to, quote "please consider that this project will be phased in over the next 10-15 years. It will represent current city residents, but also many who are not represented today," endquote. That was 11 years ago; Robertson is now the federal housing minister; and no one has yet moved into the Oakridge development. The fastest way - the only fast way - to build a lot of homes is simple: re-legalize small apartment buildings, generally no taller than a mature tree, in all neighborhoods, just like they used to be. All other solutions ask today's beleaguered 31-year-olds to wait many years to see results. For politicians working within four-year electoral windows, moving fast means thinking small. It's the only way to deliver the new homes their constituents need within a single term of office. Small apartment buildings have been all but illegal to build here in Vancouver for nearly a century. City leaders began implementing zoning restrictions in the 1920s "largely to prevent the intrusion of apartment houses in single- or two-family areas," wrote Harland Bartholomew, who drew Vancouver's first zoning map. In the US, the Supreme Court justified zoning regulations in 1926, writing: "the apartment house is a mere parasite." As a result, much of Vancouver's planning energy has gone into transit-oriented towers, often on old industrial sites, limiting new homes to fewer centralized nodes. This political compromise has been in place locally for decades, known as The Grand Bargain: exclusively zoned land remains so, while towers on busy streets accommodate some growth, aka "high-rise density, low-scale suburbia, little in between." The Grand Bargain promises new homes. Just not built quickly, or in the nicest places, or at the lowest cost. It's an attempted sleight of hand by civic leaders: they promise greater access to nice homes in desirable neighborhoods, but they deliver large apartment buildings, slowly, on just 10 percent of the city's land. Large apartment buildings on busy streets are wonderful; this article was written in one. But zoning that proscribes the housing types between towers and single-detached homes leaves much of the land in our cities off-limits - and many residents or would-be residents without affordable options to call home. The redevelopment of False Creek's north shore by Concord Pacific is Vancouver's largest and most significant example of Grand Bargain planning. It was a visionary project that reshaped the city for the better and gave Vancouver its iconic skyline. But this project also underlines how long even successful megaprojects can take to deliver the full measure of homes they promise. At the site's eastern end, fully 40 years after it broke ground, 380,000 square feet of prime, waterfront land still sit barren and undeveloped. A similar story has played...

In 2024, Democrat-endorsed candidates swept all seven seats on the Bend Oregon, city council - even though city elections are technically nonpartisan. Democrats certainly outnumber Republicans in Bend, but 20 percent of city voters are registered with the G.O.P., and many more are not affiliated or are registered with smaller parties. Those voters don't get their views represented in their city government. In southern Oregon's Jackson County, the representation failure is reversed. Democratic or Independent candidates have won more than 40 percent of the vote for every county commissioner contest over the last five general elections - but Republicans consistently hold all three seats. Even though county voters are split between the two major parties, Democrats are locked out of county policy decisions. Sightline catalogued voting methods in all Oregon counties and the 50 most populous cities (view and download the list here). The findings: Almost all of Oregon's cities and counties operate with election methods that tend to fall into the same pattern of misrepresentation. These local governments use outdated, easily gamed voting methods. Fortunately, Oregon's constitution, unlike those of neighboring states, enables localities to choose a more effective path: proportional representation. Nearly all local governments in Oregon - every county and all but one of the state's 50 largest cities - use one of three methods of electing councils and commissions, or some combination. While each of them can, and often does, achieve adequate representation for residents, all three are susceptible to political manipulation and to oscillation between political extremes. Bloc voting can shift governing bodies wholesale based on whatever group turns out the most voters. At-large positions similarly give majority viewpoints unfair sway and set up additional avenues for political gamesmanship. And single-winner wards (or districts) put voters at the mercy of artificial lines, including gerrymandering. Voters in more than one-third of Oregon's 50 largest cities and many more smaller towns, from Baker City to Yachats and Lake Oswego to Redmond, are familiar with bloc voting, even if they don't know it by name; it's a common method for electing multiple people to city council at once. But those candidates are not assured to reflect the diversity of public preferences. With bloc voting, voters get the same number of votes as there are council seats up for election. In a three-seat election, for example, voters pick their three choices from the list of all candidates, and the three with the most votes win spots on the council. Some cities use bloc voting for all seats at once, while others elect some of their members in midterm years and the rest in presidential years. Bloc voting might seem like a simple method - choose three, elect three - but the outcomes can belie what voting is supposed to achieve. Instead of electing a council that can represent everyone, whichever group or faction gets the most votes can easily win all the seats. In partisan elections, bloc voting frequently means that the party with the most votes sweeps the board; in nonpartisan elections, candidates on either side of local wedge issues (like police funding or low-income housing) might win every single position even if voters are closely divided. A small shift in voter preference can flip half or all of a local council, so residents might have to endure dramatic policy swings; a policing or housing ordinance adopted one year could be reversed the next. Plus, when votes are close, there's no guarantee that the top vote-getters are actually the most popular candidates. Take the city of Forest Grove, for example. In 2024, six candidates ran for the three open seats in a bloc voting election, and all received between 12 and 19 percent of the vote. The third-place winner, Brian Schimmel, beat out next-place runner-up, Peter Truax, by less than half a percentage point. With few...

Meeting Cascadia's climate goals will require millions of households to stop burning fossil fuels for warmth. In Oregon and Washington, buildings emit more pollution than any other sector besides transportation. (The building sector is the third highest emitting in British Columbia and Idaho, and fifth in Montana.) Heat pumps powered by renewable electricity are what the International Energy Agency calls the "proven technology of choice to decarbonize heating," and several Cascadian jurisdictions are working hard to expand access to the technology. Oregon, for example, set itself a goal of heat pumps accounting for 65 percent of new residential heating, cooling, and water heating equipment sales by 2030. British Columbia resolved for all new space and water heating equipment sales and installations to be at least 100 percent efficient by 2030, a standard that favors heat pumps, which can exceed this threshold. Heat pumps have now outsold gas furnaces and central air conditioners for two consecutive years in Cascadia; nearly three heat pumps sold for every two gas furnaces in 2023. Still, heat pumps are prohibitively expensive in upfront costs, and that fact, coupled with tightening public budgets, could threaten their rapid scale-up, especially among low-income families. In this challenging context, leaders in Cascadia would do well to direct their limited treasuries of funds for public subsidies toward low-income households for whom heat pumps offer the biggest reductions in both utility bills and greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, policymakers can support creative funding models, such as tariffed on-bill investments and green banks, to help more households get heat pumps installed. They can also strengthen building codes to ensure heat pumps are installed in new homes, avoiding costly future retrofits. This multi-pronged approach stretches scarce public dollars, while still reaching families that stand to benefit most from these clean, cost-saving, and comfortable systems. Many families, particularly those with low incomes, cannot afford heat pumps. A medium-efficiency heat pump can cost between $14,000 and $22,000 in Cascadian states. The median heat pump costs $8,200 more than installing fossil-fuel heating equipment (such as a gas boiler) and air conditioning in Oregon; in Montana, that figure is $16,200. Steep costs stem from expensive manufacturing and labor, installer shortages and inexperience, the need for electrical upgrades in some homes, and the added cost of backup heating systems where required. Governments have stepped in to help. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) provides rebates of up to $8,000 for low-income households purchasing medium- or high-efficiency heat pumps. These rebates have so far withstood roll-back attempts by the Trump administration; Oregon and Washington have already secured hundreds of millions of federal dollars to launch their rebate programs. (Montana has paused its rebate rollout, while Idaho has provided no public timeline.) But the IRA rebates are a one-time, capped allocation, and the Trump administration eliminated tax incentives for energy-efficient home improvements in July 2025, including heat pumps. States and provinces also subsidize heat pumps, but tight budgets have led to substantial cutbacks. Washington scaled back funding for heat pump programs from $80 million in the 2023 budget cycle to $30 million in 2025. Oregon lawmakers appropriated $25 million to heat pump rebates in 2022 and added another $4 million in 2024, but allocated no new funds in 2025. British Columbia lowered its heat pump program budget from Can$150 million in 2024 to Can$50 million in 2025. (Idaho and Montana do not offer any state-funded heat pump rebates.) Several utilities in the region chip in heat pump rebates of their own, though amounts tend to be modest. For example, Puget Sound Energy offers $3,900 rebates to low-income households, and Idaho Power offers $500. Crucial as they a...

With 57 percent in favor of Proposition 1 (and 150,000 ballots in; last updated August 7, 2025), Seattle voters have reaffirmed their commitment to advancing a more democratic city government. Seattle's iconic Democracy Voucher Program will have funding for another ten years. This renewal means the city can continue to lead the way in the share of its population who contribute to city campaigns. Candidates will keep having more reasons to knock on doors rather than spend hours a day calling up the wealthiest people they know to fund their campaigns. And Seattle residents will get more choices in their elections and more power to express their views. Along with helping to design the initial policy, Sightline has documented the impressive effects from the program's first decade: The program has unlocked an "incredible explosion in participation" in campaign funding and empowered a much more representative group of people to become donors. It decreased large donations and elevated small ones, and it pushed away money coming from outside the city. For example, before the program was implemented, in the 2013 election cycle, gifts of $400 or more made up almost 60 percent of campaign dollars; in 2023, those large contributions plummeted to 9 percent of funds. The program even helped boost voter turnout, likely because of increased personal touches from candidates. While it couldn't put a damper on dark money (no one can, thanks to US Supreme Court cases including Buckley v. Valeo, Citizen United v. FEC, and McCutcheon v. FEC), the program also didn't cause a spike in those "independent expenditures" - PAC spending is up everywhere. Democracy vouchers have encouraged more diverse candidates to run and given them a pathway to win. Almost all viable candidates have participated in the program since it began, including people with viewpoints across Seattle's political spectrum. The program has done all that with "budget dust," a portion of the city budget you need a magnifying glass to see in a chart. Tuesday's vote shows Seattleites' confidence in the program and belief in the importance of doing everything possible to make their government representative and accountable. City residents face many daily challenges - and the stronger and more democratic our governments, the better equipped they are to understand and respond to what's happening in people's lives. One component of the measure that passed is a directive for the mayor, city council, and the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission (the SEEC, the entity that manages the program) to convene a workgroup to explore potential improvements to the program. While the SEEC has already tweaked some elements based on ongoing feedback, the workgroup will offer a more defined process for additional recommendations, considering input from candidates, campaign staff, consultants, advocates, and the SEEC. Commentators have already pointed to spending caps for possible modification, particularly given the large number of PAC funds that enter city races. Others have suggested shifting the timing of voucher mailings, improving outreach, and allowing candidates into apartment buildings to meet voters. Some might look beyond the program to other ideas for making political donors more accountable, perhaps following Maine's example (currently moving through the courts) to limit donations to super PACs. Future city elections will get another boost toward fairer representation: Seattle will start using ranked choice voting in city primaries in 2027, the next local primary election. Ranked choice voting offers similar voter-centric benefits as democracy vouchers: candidates benefit from knocking on more doors and talking to more voters because they seek out second-choice votes as well as first choices; more diverse candidates tend to run and win, because voters don't have to just pick the popular option while others get squeezed out; and voters get a more nuanced way to express their political choi...

Over the last eight years, a bipartisan coalition of Oregon lawmakers has led North America on a new trend: state-level zoning. As zoning restrictions spread across the continent almost exactly 100 years ago, state and provincial governments mostly delegated to cities all decisions about where and what sorts of housing should be allowed locally. During the century that followed, that led to problems. A big one: cities and towns deployed zoning to gradually ban the rooming houses, duplexes, triplexes, and small-scale apartment buildings that had always been, until then, the places you could live when you had a small household or a tight budget. At first, this wasn't an obvious problem. A city banning apartments might reason that inexpensive homes would still be legal in the next town over. Or they might observe that the next town over had offloaded its housing needs on them by banning apartments, so it was only fair that they do the same. It was all very rational, and contagious. And after a century of local rules upon local rules, the state's largest city looked like a muddled patchwork of zoning. The complexity of Portland's 779 distinct zoning categories, each one restrictive in its own ways and multiplied further across hundreds of other jurisdictions, has helped create a huge shortage of homes. That's especially true for the smaller and less expensive sorts of homes, since those are the ones most frequently banned by zoning. That housing shortage and the rising prices it drives have spiraled across city lines and ultimately left many thousands of people sleeping on couches, in parking lots, and in the woods. Starting in 2017 and with rising confidence in each year since, Oregon has been responding to this endless civic buck-passing by rethinking its 100-year-old decision to leave the details of zoning mostly up to local jurisdictions. Instead, much of the work on this statewide issue is now returning to the place it maybe should have always remained: the state. To see how far Oregon's consensus has moved, read a bill Governor Tina Kotek signed today. House Bill 2258 gives the state the power to override local zoning and allow any type of housing on standard urban lots. I'll read that last sentence again. The bill passed the state House 50-2, and the Senate 28-2. Kotek, its chief advocate, held a signing ceremony Monday for it and others. Aurora Dziadul, a legislative and policy analyst for the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development, said by email that her state agency plans to voluntarily apply "extra parameters" that narrow the scope of the program. But she said that yes, the bill does give the state the power to preemptively give zoning and building permit approval to any variety of housing project, from a backyard cottage to a skyscraper, on any lot that: allows housing of at least one type; falls within an urban growth boundary (a border that, in Oregon, defines the frontier between suburban and rural areas); is between 1,500 and 20,000 square feet has no more than a 15 percent slope; is outside areas officially designated as environmentally sensitive, naturally hazardous, containing significant natural resources, scenic, or open; and is vacant, including from a recent demolition as long as it results in more homes. A key phrase in the bill is in Section 4(2)a, which says that on such lots, the state may pre-approve only "attached or detached housing" - in other words, all housing. (That's one item in a list of qualifying factors that Dziadul said includes an implicit "or.") It's unlikely that the state will decide to use this power to legalize 4-story apartment buildings on every urban lot, for example. If it did, cities would have a strong incentive to look for ways to nullify the law - for example, with tight new regulations on demolition. Until any previous building on the site has been demolished, it wouldn't qualify for the de facto state zoning code created by HB 2258. Another issue: the staff...

Pop quiz: What do Bruce Harrell and Lorena Gonzalez have in common? Hint: It's something they also share with both Tammy Morales and Tanya Woo, as well as Ann Davison and Nichole Thomas-Kennedy, Cathy Moore and ChrisTiana ObeySumner, Dan Strauss and Heidi Wills, and many others besides. These candidates are mostly on opposite sides of Seattle's political spectrum. Each pair of competitors comprises one Seattle Times editorially endorsed candidate and one from the Stranger. So what's the common denominator? Democracy Vouchers. All these candidates (plus many more) took part in the city's innovative Democracy Voucher Program when they ran for office. Of the 42 eligible city candidates (for mayor, city council, or city attorney) who made it to the general election between 2017 and 2023, all but five used the program. Only two non-democracy voucher candidates have won office over those years, and they also don't share a lot of overlapping political space: Sara Nelson, the council's current pro-business, anti-tax president, and prior socialist firebrand councilmember Kshama Sawant. Both Nelson and Sawant have expressed support for the program though, and have offered varied reasons for not participating. (For Nelson, concerns about door-knocking during COVID and other logistics; for Sawant, that opposing corporate PAC funds would swamp what she'd be allowed to spend as a democracy voucher candidate. What does this mean for Seattle politics? Democracy vouchers are position-neutral, good for all kinds of candidates, and especially powerful for the voters of Seattle. Seattle voters have a chance to renew this popular, fruitful, and inexpensive program on the ballot this August. In the words of Council President Nelson: it's an "investment in democracy, the currency of your voice." Seattle's elections are nonpartisan, so they don't exhibit the same type of partisan polarization that threatens to overwhelm current state and US federal elections. But the city still has political sides - moderate vs. progressive, centrist vs. lefty, preservationist vs. YIMBY. Endorsements from the city's leading media outlets are a decent proxy for these lines of competition in Seattle politics. On one end is the Seattle Times, the city's moderate, largest news source. On the other side is the Stranger, Seattle's irreverent and unapologetically progressive alternative paper. The Seattle Times and the Stranger have only endorsed the same general election candidate in one city race since 2017 (plus one other contest where the Seattle Times didn't choose a candidate). Every other time, they've supported opposite sides of the local political options. Politicos might wonder then, whether a program like democracy vouchers benefits one side more than another. The answer? Nope! Those political distinctions melt away when examining who has benefited from democracy vouchers. Seattle Times-endorsed candidates have won using the program. Stranger-endorsed candidates have won using the program. And the two candidates who gained office without the program are from opposite political camps. What's more, vouchers fund a similar portion of candidates' campaigns, making up 32 to 88 percent of contributions to Seattle Times candidates and 35 to 88 percent of contributions to Stranger candidates. In 2023, all general election candidates used democracy vouchers. Mayor Bruce Harrell and councilmembers Rob Saka, Joy Hollingsworth, Maritza Rivera, Cathy Moore, and Bob Kettle all won with Seattle Times backing; Tammy Morales and Dan Strauss with a Stranger endorsement. In prior years the breakdown was inverted, and more Stranger-endorsed candidates have won; but they and their competitors have almost always also taken part in the voucher program. Even Ann Davison, who won election as Seattle's city attorney in 2021 while identifying as a Republican, used the program. Instead of advantaging one political group over another, the program has benefited a more important stakeholder...