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Diana Lind — founder & author of The New Urban Order newsletter — joins us to discuss her extensive career writing on urban planning, zoning, and American housing policy. She talks about the evolution of urbanism and architecture media, and how it has shaped public discourse surrounding growth, housing crises, and city development. The conversation reaches into her book Brave New Home, where she tackles alternatives to single-family zoning and the social implications of various housing models. We get into the specifics of a few recently published newsletters.We discuss:00:00 The journey into writing about urban planning.03:50 On the housing crisis.05:48 The New Urban Order and writing on Substack.07:37 The American context in urban planning.10:41 Montana's housing reforms.19:39 The role of language in urban policy.21:26 Writing for different audiences.25:45 Challenges in writing about housing.28:49 Federal lands and housing solutions.30:33 Challenges of single family zoning.34:56 Alternative housing development models.39:41 Government property conversions.46:54 The appeal of Philadelphia.52:46 The New Urban Order newsletter.54:32 Favorite commute and final thoughts.For context:On converting public lands to housing (the referenced newsletter).On Montana's sweeping housing reform (via Sightline Institute).Connect with Diana:www.dianalind.com.The newsletter - The New Urban Order.On LinkedIn.

Vancouver currently bans apartment buildings on 75% of its residential land. The city says that its current infrastructure wouldn't be able to accommodate high-density housing — and that upgrading the infrastructure to allow for apartment buildings would be way too expensive. But this is just another rationale for NIMBYism, according to Danny Oleksiuk of The Sightline Institute and Alex Hemingway of CCPA-BC. We speak with Danny Oleksiuk.

We must talk about your parking regulations. In fact, we must mock them. In no other area of life do head spins quicker, and people's opinions take on truly bizarre forms, than we we talk about parking. I get it, we are a culture obsessed with driving and parking. It's part of nearly adult's daily routine. In this episode, Tony Jordan of the Parking Reform Network and I have some fun with it, while also diving into the nitty-gritty of how to make change in your community.As a bonus, Tony describes some of the most bizarre, and most hilarious parking requirements he's run across.Here's a link to Donald Shoup's article, “Roughly Right or Precisely Wrong.”Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin's Substack page.Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you'd like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.Intro: “Why Be Friends”Outro: “Fairweather Friend”Transcript:Kevin K (00:00.92) Welcome back to the Missy City podcast. This is Kevin Klinkenberg. Today we're going to talk about everybody's favorite topic, parking. The bane of my existence for most of my professional career, but we've got Tony Jordan here with us today from the Parking Reform Network. And I'm really looking forward to this conversation so we can get into the weeds a little bit on what's actually an incredibly important topic. So Tony, welcome. Tony Jordan (00:28.617) Thanks so much. Happy to be here. Kevin K (00:31.064) Well, it's a pleasure to have you. I ran into you in Cincinnati at the Strong Towns National Gathering and seeing you and we were chatting over a couple of beers and it just seemed like, you know, as soon as we start talking, it feels like, well, this probably should be a podcast. You know, we should spend more time getting into things. So I'm grateful you were able to make some time to be able to join. Tony, before we go too far, why don't we tell me what is the Parking Reform Network and how... How long has it been around? Tony Jordan (01:03.081) the parking reform network is a, 501 C three organization that was founded, founded in the spring of 2019 and we launched in March of 2020. and it, yeah, it was actually okay for organizing a national organization because everything moved online. Like we, we, people were much more amenable to slacking and, using zoom calls, but we, the idea behind. Kevin K (01:16.92) Good timing. Tony Jordan (01:33.641) The need I saw, I had been doing parking reform locally in Portland, Oregon, where I'm from, or where I live, for years, helping to get rid of parking mandates that had been added back in and removing them entirely from the city and worked on upzoning projects too. And the whole while I really felt like one of the things that was missing in advancing parking reform was, having an advocacy organization and a community that really was helping to educate the public and advance these policies. The practitioners and the city council even often knew that these policies were bad, the existing ones, but the public support wasn't there. So founding the Parking Inform Network, it's a community of practitioners, academics, activists, policymakers who... We exist to kind of build a community and a movement around educating the public about parking policy and accelerating reforms. And we do that through a number of research and outreach and advocacy avenues. Kevin K (02:47.352) That's cool. So how did you, what was your background then getting into this? Were you in planning or transportation or talk a little bit about like how you came to this, to this spot. Tony Jordan (02:57.641) Yeah, I mean, I grew up in Los Angeles in San Pedro, the port of LA, and went to school at Santa Cruz and got a politics degree. And then I moved up to Portland and I mostly worked in tech for most of my career, web design, backend, server services programming. And I also, but I also did a couple, I worked at a couple of jobs as a labor organizer. So my background was not at all in planning. I got rid of my car. We got rid of our household's car in 2008. I had a two year old. We had another child in 2010. And I feel like that kind of primed the pump. I started looking around transportation a little differently. And then in 2010, I read a blog post very randomly on a website called Metafilter that was about the high cost of reparking, about Professor Shoup's book that had come out years before. And I am the kind of person, if I hear something interesting, I'll go look up the Wikipedia or I'll look into it. And so I got the book on inner library loan and started reading it. And I was just like, my mind was blown. Shoop has asked me, you know, one time, what did you think when you read the book? And I was like, man, I felt like I was eating a hamburger and reading the jungle. Like it was really like, what is going on? You look once you your eyes are open to this, you look around. I live across the street from a parking lot. I worked overlooking a parking lot and I just like your. to understand why, how much these things cost and then why they're there was just like, why doesn't everyone know this? I looked at my own zoning code in Portland and actually at the time Portland was a pretty, was pretty Vanguard city. We had no parking mandates on our corridors, on our bus, our frequent service corridors that had passed in 2002 kind of to little fanfare. And, but then a couple of years later, In 2012, all of a sudden, they started building apartments on a couple of these corridors. Division Street was one, North Williams. And they were building like 30, 40, 50 apartments in a building with no parking. And they were leasing up. And then someone proposed someone got permitted at 81 unit building on the street with no parking and the neighborhood just went nuts. And they started petitioning the city council to add parking mandates back. Tony Jordan (05:18.633) And so there was a pro they started considering this and I said, Hey, I just read this book a couple of years ago and I started going to city council and I met people who were interested, but they weren't really very organized. And so I started just like creating a mailing list and, and, you know, we lost, they actually added parking mandates back in, but that kind of got me totally started. That was when I first reached out to professor Shoop. He wrote an op ed. And I started just that, that really kicked off. the fuel of like, okay, we need to be better organized on this and next time we're not gonna lose. Kevin K (05:52.152) Interesting. So if I could go back like you said in 2008, you got rid of your car. What prompted you all to, and you had a two -year -old. So what, do you like hate America so much you decided to get rid of your cars? What was that all about? Tony Jordan (06:06.665) You know, the check engine light went on and I took it into, I just afford focus 2004 focus second car ever owned. I took it to the dealer and I mean not to the dealer to the repair shop and they thought, this is the transmission. I thought, man, that transmission on that car has always been weird. Sure. And they, it was going to be $2 ,000. And, and I said, okay. And then they called me back and said, you know, it's not the transmission. We looked at it. Like we haven't charged you anything, but we think it's the computer maybe. So here. Kevin K (06:10.104) Ha ha ha. Tony Jordan (06:36.233) put this little dongle on and drive around for a week. And I said, how much does the computer cost? And they said, $2 ,000. And I was like, okay. And then I drove around and they came back and they said, nah, it's not the computer. We think it's this. How much is that? And I was like, they said engine or something, engine rebuild. And I was like, $2 ,000. And I was just like, man, if I pay for this to get fixed, I obviously expect that either the computer or the transmission will break next. And that will, so I just thought like, this is going to be a never ending money pit. So I told my wife and I discussed it and we had. We lived in Portland, we lived near Transit, I had a bike, we lived near Zipcar, right? Zipcar, it was kind of in the center of Zipcar. And so we said, let's put the car in the garage and just try six months without driving it. And we did. And then at the end of six months, I sold it to the dealer for $2 ,000. And so I was up $4 ,000. And then I never really looked back at buying a... Kevin K (07:22.52) What a cool idea. Kevin K (07:34.936) And that's just, hey, I really like, I mean, that's a great way to just like, let's test it out. Let's see if we can handle it for a while. And so then in terms of like having small children, I know myself having small children, it's not the easiest thing in the world because it's just, you know, there are so many things that you might want to take your kids to that you just need a car to get around. How did you manage that? Tony Jordan (07:55.945) I mean, some of it, we just didn't do as many things. My son took offense to this when I told him when he was older, but I said, one of the nice things was it does kind of make some decisions for you. It simplifies your life. So you're probably only gonna go to one birthday party in a weekend unless they're very close to one another, right? Like, or in a day, right? So some of it, initially we used Zipcar quite a bit and... Kevin K (08:15.608) God, that sounds magical. Tony Jordan (08:24.489) you know, tapered that off over time. And obviously with small, small kids, it's a little bit harder, but we know we carried the kids on our carriers. We never did, you know, when they got a little older, I had a bike trailer I would take to preschool. But it does, you know, you kind of adjust your life over time. It's not, it's not easy. I feel like we are a bit of like, you know, first adopters, still people who are voluntarily living in solidarity with people who can't drive. or can't own vehicles, right? Those people exist in our communities. And so, you know, I experience a lot of the same frustrations voluntarily, but I also have the capacity to try and, you know, argue for it. So, I mean, I think that, you know, my kids do sports or my daughter dances, my son does ultimate frisbee and other things, and he rides his bike to work now at Trader Joe's, and they take the bus, and they're just very independent. And I'm sure there are, you know, opportunities that... we can't do, but I mean, that's kind of life. You make decisions and in exchange, they really are, you know, they know how to get around. And I think they're gonna, I think it's gonna really give them a good leg up when they get to, you know, college or, you know, as the world has to adapt and reduce car dependency, you know, it's not gonna be as painful for them, I think, as you make these changes. Kevin K (09:51.224) How do you know, do you notice much of a difference then between like them and their friends and just other families that they, that you might run around with and like just their own habits and behaviors in that regard? Tony Jordan (10:01.769) Yeah, I mean, a lot of even though we live in a place that's pretty walkable, like obviously a lot of the other parents do drive frequently. I don't begrudge them that. My children get rides with other parents sometimes, too. I mean, we're you know, I don't think we'll offer to pay sometimes. Or, you know, like it's it's not like we're trying to be complete moochers or freeloaders on this. But, you know, like I think it on one hand, like my daughter, When she started middle school, other parents were often driving and we said, hey, we're not going to drive, so let's get our kids riding the bikes. And so our kids had their own mini bike group. And then as she didn't want to ride as much anymore, she would take the bus and other kids would learn to take the bus with her. So there is, I think, by just living a lifestyle that is less car dependent, sometimes I think people find it grating, like, these holier than thou. anti -car people, but at the same time, like it is an example. Like you can see it being done and other kids do it. My son now is 17. So he, you know, some of his friends are getting driver's licenses, but a lot of them aren't. One of the bigger conflicts is he's in film class and a lot of film is done. Well, not only logging, lugging gear around, but obviously, but it's a very common set piece, right? Is to be in a car or driving a car from point A to point B and Kevin K (11:28.248) Hmm. Tony Jordan (11:30.313) So one of his frustrations is he doesn't have a card to do these film transitions, you know, but it's, you know, I think it's worked out mostly okay. Kevin K (11:39.512) Have you ever tried to like quantify, you know, like how much money this has saved you over the years? Tony Jordan (11:47.337) I mean, I have not, other than the initial calculus I did where it was like, I'm up $4 ,000 on, and I can use that for zip car or whatever. I mean, I know it does. It definitely, I don't, I'm not the best budgeter, honestly. So I don't keep a spreadsheet, but I mean, the fact that we haven't owned a car for these years has definitely, you know, we take cheaper modes. And to some degree you do less, you do just do less stuff and that. Kevin K (12:04.26) Yeah. Tony Jordan (12:16.873) you know, simplifies your life and makes it a little bit cheaper. Kevin K (12:21.912) Yeah, I mean, I promise I'll get off on other topics, but I just find it's interesting when people are able to live in a way that we're told you can't live. So have you found that not having the car has opened up ways for you to spend money on other things in your life that maybe you wouldn't have been able to do otherwise? Tony Jordan (12:25.705) No problem. Tony Jordan (12:45.289) once again, I don't sure specifically like how much it impacts that. I mean, obviously the cost of buying some nice bikes is, you know, still much cheaper than, than spending on a car or the gas. I still have to pay for insurance. I mean, I still voluntarily pay for insurance. I don't have to, but I have a non -name donor policy, which is kind of expensive. you know, I think more, it just, it just, I find it is a much. more, it's a much more peaceful and relaxing way to live in most times. Like driving is so stressful, especially if you live in a larger city. Like it's, at least to me, it's scary. You, you, if you think about it, it's not like you're kind of making life difficult for everyone else who's not in your car at the expense of your convenience for the most part. And so I just find the ability to not have to like one of the best dividend is I never have to worry about like, you know, like that responsibility or that pressure or that inconvenience. If I'm on the bus, even if it's in traffic, I can be on my phone or be talking to who I'm with and not be worrying about piloting. Kevin K (14:00.408) Yeah, and you don't have to sweat finding a place to park wherever you're going. So that's kind of a nice thing. So then were you working in tech pretty much all the way up through the beginning of forming the Parking Reform Network? Tony Jordan (14:03.209) Exactly, yeah. Tony Jordan (14:14.025) Yeah, I mean, mostly, even when I worked for, so I worked two times for unions. I worked for the University of California, professional technical employees before I moved up to Portland. And then I worked for AFT organizing nurses. In both those jobs, I still often did the backend database or the website. And then I spent the 13 years before that working at a company that did online admissions applications. So yeah, I was mostly in. Kevin K (14:19.256) Okay. Kevin K (14:38.52) Okay, that's really cool. So then when you formed this nonprofit, who else kind of formed it with you or was this pretty much like you're taking this initiative on or were there others that really said they wanted to jump on board with you? Tony Jordan (14:51.561) I had been in discussions. So Portland has a great advocacy scene. So I had initially formed or after where I left off the story about the losing and parking mandates coming back. A couple of years after that, I started an organization called well, initially it was called Portland Shoopistas and then at Shoop's suggestion, we changed it to Portlanders for Parking Reform. And that was kind of just a low, I had a blog, a website, a newsletter, you know, an advocacy org that worked in partnership. Kevin K (15:02.488) Yeah, yeah. Tony Jordan (15:19.657) with other coalitions to just kind of like keep an eye on what was happening with various, you know, on street and off street parking policies in Portland and in the region and, you know, organize testimony and events and just kind of build awareness. So in that process, I worked with many. Portland has just, you know, freeway fighter this year. We have, you know, housing activists. It's a great scene. Michael Anderson from Sightline Institute and I had been talking about the concept of he proposed we should have a green lane project, which was a project of people for bikes to propose protected bike lanes. He said, you know, we should have, there should be some sort of project for parking similar. Like the idea was like, maybe get a cohort of cities together and take them on a discovery trip. And then they pledged to go review their parking code. And so we had pitched, he helped pitch that around to a couple of places and no one was really interested in hosting a similar project. that kind of consensus was it's hard to fundraise for parking reform, which is true. And so a couple of years later, I was in Chicago speaking at the Parking Industry Expo with these two women, Jane Wilberding and Lindsay Bailey. And... we kind of started hatching a concept around like, you know, like what, how do we, like, what would be a larger organization or, you know, a movement around this. And then I went to APA in San Francisco in 2019, Shoop was talking and there was, you know, a bunch of parking people there. And we met another student, we met a recent grad, Mike Kwan, who had graduated from Santa Cruz and now lives in DC. And so I said, you know, I asked, basically we were out at, at, at dinner with Patrick Sigmund, who is the original Chupista. And kind of we're just talking about like, you know, I think there just should need there needs to be something there needs to be an organization that is focused holistically on parking reform, not just the mandates of the on street management. And and really, I wanted to bring this organizing capacity. So we agreed you need three, you need four people to start a nonprofit organization. And so Mike and Jane and Lindsay were the. Tony Jordan (17:44.073) three original board members and it took a couple months to get the certifications and then set up a website. And then, you know, we went public with it in March and started bringing more people on March, 2020. I mean, yeah. Kevin K (17:57.08) That's terrific. That's terrific. So obviously, one of the big pushes has been in the parking reform world has been to remove or reduce minimum parking mandates. As you've talked about these things, what are the arguments that you are using or you see other people using that are most successful in sort of moving the needle related to that issue? Tony Jordan (18:23.305) I think the problem we've had is largely just lack of information, low information about what these mandates are, what we're talking about. So what are we talking about? We're talking about rules from the seventies, sixties, fifties that are anachronistic and completely based on nothing that are these like, Sorry, hold on. Just one second. Kevin K (18:57.048) No problem. Tony Jordan (19:12.297) I might need to take a redo on that section in one second. Kevin K (19:14.552) No, it's fine. Go ahead. Kevin K (19:24.504) All right, so talk about the most effective arguments. Tony Jordan (19:25.481) Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what we're talking about are these anachronistic rules that are based on nonsense from the 70s. But, yes, and we're talking about just getting rid of these mandates and not eliminating existing parking, you know, generally not severely restricting the ability of people to build parking in their new developments or with their businesses. But I think the other key is really showing people like, how much parking costs, how much space it takes up, what are the other impacts on things they care about, fiscal viability of their cities, the tax -based stuff, water runoff management or urban flooding and pollution, urban heat effects, just walkability, all these things come back to these rules. And what I found really effective lately is to just, you present that information, but in the context of, you know, I'll go look at, for example, bowling alleys. I'll draw a circle of a hundred miles around a city and find examples of bowling alley parking requirements, which are hilarious in themselves because it kind of shows you when they were written. And you'll find one per lane, two per lane, three per lane, four per lane, five per lane, six per lane, seven per lane, right? In just like an area around. And so it's like, what could be the difference between a bowler in this city? where they require two per lane and this one was seven or funeral homes. Like you'll, I, it's not uncommon to see one city require one parking space for 50 square feet, which is a pretty high requirement. You're talking the parking lot is going to need to be six to eight times bigger than the funeral home. And then another place will, will require only one per 500. So that's like a, you know, or, you know, like that's a pretty large difference. You know, 10, we'll find 10 to 12 times difference in. a city that's just 50 miles from another city. And I think that when people see that, that contrast, it really undermines the faith in like, why do these numbers exist? And their first reaction is, well, maybe we can just fix them. And you're like, no, like you can't, like just X them out and get working on the real work that it takes to repair your city, right? The parking mandates is just like... Tony Jordan (21:48.713) That's just clearing a hurdle. It doesn't actually change anything. That requires a developer -friendly zoning code, or it requires transportation management on the ground. But you're never going to get anywhere if these rules exist. Kevin K (22:06.072) Yeah, I was thinking about, and I think we may have talked briefly about this, but obviously, you know, Shoop's book, The High Cost of Free Parking is kind of like the gold standard for the field. It's a really, it's an incredible book. But I remember years before that, he wrote this little magazine article called Roughly Right or Precisely Wrong, which was maybe like three or four pages. But just that alone was such a devastating takedown of the stupidity of most minimum parking requirements and where they come from. And it's always wild to me that people think that those requirements are actually based in something real. Tony Jordan (22:48.169) Yeah, I mean, I have a slide that's called roughly right, precisely wrong based on that same concept. And it highlights this poor little town in Georgia, Woodbury, Georgia, that is really very small. And they have so many land uses with parking requirements and they have like, they're specific to two significant figures for things like, you know, hospital employees, like 1 .26 or 1 .72 for students. And then this place has two requirements. Like they have a separate land use requirement for parking for a hella port and a hella stop. Two, like it's different. Hell if I know what the difference is, right? And it's like, I like you point these out or North Carolina, when we went to CNU last year, we were looking at North Carolina cities because it was in, you know, it was in Charlotte. And there's all these parking requirements in cities in North Carolina for drive -in movie theaters. Like, and they literally are like, Kevin K (23:23.992) What is that? What the hell is that? Tony Jordan (23:46.569) one per speaker box. So it's like you're like telling a drive -in movie theater, which once again, no one's building them, that they have to have a parking space for every park. Like what is going on? One of my favorites is in Dallas, there is a parking requirement for sewage treatment plants. And it's one parking space per million gallons of capacity at the sewage treatment facility, which, and if you look at, Kevin K (24:12.264) my god. Tony Jordan (24:14.409) There's a sewage treatment facility. If you look at it on Google, it has this gigantic parking lot and there's like 20 cars in it because it's like it has like 300 million gallon capacity. So the parking lot is and this is the city telling it's who builds a sewage treatment plant, right? Like the city. But a water treatment plant in Dallas, like for drinking water, only requires two parking spaces. And you look at the you look at a satellite picture of the parking of the water treatment plant and there's like 20 spaces they didn't just build two. They built what they needed. Right. And so like this is really it's like. Kevin K (24:27.032) Yeah, no kidding. Tony Jordan (24:44.009) why are cities even saddling themselves with these requirements? It's insanity, right? Like something really went wrong in, you know, what in the urban planning profession and it just is kind of, we're trying to stop the bleeding and, you know, yeah. Kevin K (25:02.616) Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's just hilarious, some of this stuff. When you detach yourself from it and you're just like, it's so, some of it's just so utterly ridiculous. But I think there's something you said that was really important there, which is like, you know, you're really, you're trying to just go about the business of like clearing a hurdle. So like you're not trying to say this is going to solve every problem. But what this is doing, you're trying to remove an impediment to. especially to more like walkable urban style development that really prevents a lot of good things from happening in cities all over the country. Tony Jordan (25:40.649) Right. I mean, it's it. I use an analogy sometimes like if you want to grow a garden, the garden in this case being like a walkable community, you can't go throw, you know, vegetable seeds in your lawn and expect it to work. You've got to remove the rocks and the weeds in the grass first. That's getting that's your parking mandate removal is just prepping the zone. You still have to do all the other stuff. You have to, you know, create the zoning code and you have to. manage on street parking so that it doesn't create spillover or whatever. So it's really a first step. The other great thing is that it's not just housing, right? Like this is a policy, one of the reasons I work on it. I can hardly find a better way to spend my time than one policy area that works on housing, transportation and climate, right? Like it's a piece of, if you have a climate action plan, it's not gonna work. with parking mandates. If you have a transportation plan to build more transit or get people to use other modes, it's not going to work if you have parking mandates. If you have a housing plan, it's not going to work if you have parking mandates. So this one thing, it doesn't fix everything, but it unlocks and makes your other plans actually gives them a fighting chance at success. Kevin K (26:58.2) So then how do you respond to, I mean, I can probably, I'm probably going to test like some of the arguments that people, that I hear all the time and I'm sure you hear them all the time too. but I'm just curious and it's good for the audience to kind of hear how you think about these things. But you know, one thing that I certainly hear a lot is, well, you can eliminate that, but people, people are still going to drive. So what's the point? You know, we live in a big city in a big region that's spread out and people, people drive. That's what they do. So, you know, that, and that seems to me like that's a common. objection that people have to removing some of those standards. Tony Jordan (27:31.561) Right, well, I mean, it's kind of ironic because your arguments are either it's not going to have an impact or it's going to be a disaster and it can't be both at the same time, right? So I think that's true. And to that I say, yes, the world is currently, most of our country is built for people who want to drive. And so on one hand, that should be comforting to the person who's worried about. I've got kids and I don't want to take them on the bus or, you know, my grandma likes to shop at this Walmart. Like the Walmart's still going to be there unless they just close it and build a bigger Walmart farther away, right? Like, I mean, they're still going to, these places still exist that people will drive to. Your house still has a parking space. So no one's asking you to change. We know that there's intense demand for a different way to live. That's why walkable communities are very expensive because... people want, there's not enough of them and people want to live in them. So I think like this just, it makes it possible to build these places. And then we'll see whether it's just consumer preference shows that, you know, people see these places and they want to move into them and we can build more of them or retrofit more of our communities to be like this way. Or frankly, there's a distinct possibility that we will be forced to make some decisions about not driving as much, you know, based on, you know, climate or just geometry issues of traffic. So like one way or the other, I think we have to come up with a solution. And this is, you know, it's just stop digging. First, the first thing is stop digging. And these parking mandates are just requiring everyone to dig the hole a little bit deeper every time they start a business or build a building. And, you know, so that's, I think that's one argument is, you know, well, if the demand is not there, then what do we have to lose by trying, you know, like these. the rules are just in the way of even trying to provide that thing that people seem to want. Kevin K (29:32.696) So another thing that I hear a lot, especially this is much more so like in urban communities, this is where these issues really come up more often anyway. You don't really find a ton of this discussion in a lot of our suburban communities. But I mean, there's some of that, but not a lot. But like in the parts of town where I live in the more urban part of Kansas City, one of the really common objections, let's say there's a large new apartment proposal or there's a commercial. There's a business that wants to go in and if they want to have no parking or very little parking, one of the objections as well, people are still going to drive and all they're going to do is they're just going to park up all the streets in front of my house in the neighborhood nearby. And they're just going to spill over into that. So you're really just making my life more miserable by taking parking away from our streets. Tony Jordan (30:25.449) Mm hmm. Yes. This is the spillover issue can be real, right? I mean, obviously, if you have successful businesses that have parking and they attract more people, since we know these numbers are incorrect, right? There's nothing that says a restaurant, the minimum ratio is actually providing enough parking for the customers or not. Right. I mean, so there's spillover anyway. But, you know, so there's one I would say. The. The solution to that is cities need to mind their own business when it comes to parking. They own the curb. The community owns the curb. It's a public asset or liability, depending on how you look at it. And, and, you know, if sure, if it's free or underpriced, then people will take advantage of that. So manager, you know, the city also knows when permits are coming in for new businesses or for new buildings and should be able to pretty readily anticipate that demand might increase in an area. and create a permit district or a meter district or some other management, which are great because they actually can return revenue to the community to help, you know, make things more walkable with more lighting or crosswalks and help people actually get to these places in other ways. I think that it's also what this gets to me really interesting is just like, I'm often asked like who opposes these reforms and why, and, and it's incumbents, right? Like incumbents, people who, already are using the business that doesn't have enough parking supposedly, right? Like if, hey, you want these ratios because supposedly they provide enough parking. So if you support them, provide the ratio for your own business, and then you don't have a problem. But no, you're using the on -street parking. You're using the asset, and you're worried that another business is going to come in and attract more customers than you do. That's a business issue. Or you know, you... want to park on the street, you know, or you're develop, you know, you're using the asset already that exists, you're using this thing. And so you want to moat. I think one of the things people think developers fund this work. and I wish they did, but the fact is, I don't think current, the developers that are making a lot of money or building a lot of projects, they usually are, they've evolved to exist in the ecosystem that includes parking. Tony Jordan (32:44.265) Do they really necessarily want someone else coming in that's got a more nimble business model that's going to compete with their buildings? I don't know. I think that's one of the reasons why some of this has taken longer is like, you know, you're competing with a status quo and everyone who exists, they've evolved to operate in status quo. And this is a disruptive change potentially. This could change, you know, how your main street works. And so I think there's a natural pushback there, but the... You know, the solutions are easy. We know how to manage parking. So like, if that's really your concern is just that there might be congestion on the curb. Well, we've got a solution for that, right? It's, yeah. Kevin K (33:27.96) Yeah, it's funny because I think about like my own neighborhood, which was largely built in the first two decades of the 20th century. And so it has that sort of a neighborhood main street and that there's a portion of the main street that is built with sort of classic American early 20th century buildings, you know, right up to the sidewalk, very popular. numbers of restaurants and everything else. And it's a really popular little area. And it's been popular for years and years. But on that same exact street, like if you wanted to build a new restaurant, the zoning would require a minimum of 10 spaces per thousand square feet, which would make it completely impossible to actually build what's there today. And there's this really funny disconnect that. we've talked about forever, which is we have these places that people obviously really love for very human reasons. It's great to be in a place where you can just like walk around and see other people and you can sit at a table and just enjoy the street life and activity. And so these places are extremely popular in most places where they exist, yet our rules and regulations don't allow you to build it again. Tony Jordan (34:52.137) Right. Yeah, I think, yeah, it's true. I show a picture of, you know, like of Main Street. I have a slide where I show a picture of Main Street and then just a shopping center. And like you can't this isn't I am not the first person to do this, but you count up the number of businesses in there and they're roughly the same number of businesses in a big shopping center as opposed to like one block of a Main Street. Of course, the bigger businesses are bigger, but partly that's because they have to they have to support because we don't allow. We don't allow localized commerce either. I mean, that's a whole big part is there's a lot of the talk is around residential parking requirements and allowing more infill housing, but we need a lot more infill commercial too, right? I mean, my friend Neil Heller, you know, with his accessory commercial units, like, why don't we allow these, like, if you think about trip reduction, cities will spend so much money to try and get someone to take the bus to go get their hair done, where if you allow someone to open a hair, you know, just. Kevin K (35:35.64) Yeah, yeah. Tony Jordan (35:50.857) do hair in their basement or in their garage, you know, legally or open a little storefront, the person might just walk or ride a bike to that. You're reducing the trip for free. Kevin K (36:01.528) it out. So what is what's going on then? One of the things that you all do is you track what's happening nationally in terms of parking reform state by state. What are some of the most encouraging things that are happening across the country that you're seeing? Tony Jordan (36:16.041) Well, for one, I think we're just seeing more and more cities get rid of their parking mandates entirely or do large scale reforms. This is obviously, you know, just a drop in the bucket. Municipal, you know, we've got I think I was just looking at it yesterday and we're right around. There's like 70 or 71 cities that we know of in the United States that have gotten rid of their parking mandates citywide for all uses. Most recently, Tualatin, Oregon, I think was the most recent. when we've added to the list. So that's great because it shows other places that they can do it. It shows that the sky's not falling, there's momentum behind this, these cities are, you know, someone will say, well, we have, I was in La Crosse, I was talking to people in La Crosse, they said, well, we have snow. I said, well, you can talk to the people in Duluth or the people in Anchorage. They also have snow. You know, so there's, we're getting more and more comps. We finally just got a city in the center of the country in Colorado, like, you know, Longmont, Colorado just did it, so it's. Kevin K (37:13.08) Okay, good. Tony Jordan (37:13.705) It's great to see that momentum, because I think it emboldens people. And then that starts to trickle up into the statewide and regional planning areas where we're seeing the conversation start in, you know, Minnesota. They had people over parking act, which proposed to eliminate mandates statewide. Oregon has pretty strong reforms that are requiring. That's why we have so many cities with no parking mandates, because the state's kind of making requiring cities to make a choice between getting rid of their mandates or managing their off street parking. So I think that the encouraging thing is that the conversation is moving forward. The solutions are much less incremental at this point. There's a recognition that like we don't have time to mess around, you know, checking every couple of years. It takes so long to build things is one thing. It's like, you know, I tell people, it's like, you know, you're not going to see the impact of this for years. We don't have time to wait. So that's, I think that just the general awareness, all of these reforms then. create buzz or opportunity for buzz. And so just, you know, every time someone hears about this, there's an opportunity for another Tony Jordan to get hooked on the topic and get active in their local community. So like, you know, you hear about the city next door and maybe you're going to go down to planning commission next and start banging the drum around parking reform. Kevin K (38:35.672) What are some of the larger cities that have done dramatic reform? Tony Jordan (38:40.201) The largest in the US is Austin, which did it last year. In North America, Mexico City has no mandates. Toronto, Edmonton, Montreal is about to do so. San Francisco, in the United States, you got San Francisco. I'm trying to think of who's on the, St. Paul in Minneapolis. San Jose was, is a, is a large city that's done it. Portland has no parking mandates and Portland, because of our statewide rules, many of our suburbs are also starting to have no mandates. So we're starting to build a metro area that we'll have, which I think will be very useful to see how that interplays. Cause that's one thing, you know, Dallas could get rid of the parking mandates tomorrow, but you know, the Dallas Fort Worth metro area is such, or Los Angeles, you know, there's so many other cities that are requiring it and cars don't. car demand doesn't stop at the city border, right? So there's a bit of where everyone kind of needs to make a commitment together, you know, to not like, you can get rid of parking mandates in your downtown, but if all of your surrounding community is car dependent, it's going to be very hard to redevelop parking lots in your downtown because the demand is just going to be there. So I think like, you know, we're starting to, these larger areas will, will, will be helpful, but I, but it's also great to have smaller cities get rid of mandates too, because. That's the majority of cities in the United States are smaller places that aren't megopolises. Kevin K (40:13.56) Are you able to track like winds that come from the policy change at all, like in terms of maybe development activity, other stuff that would have happened, would not have happened without the reform? Tony Jordan (40:26.161) Starting to, so some of our partners like Sightline, Katie Gould at Sightline who covers parking the best. She covers this in the Northwest and in some other places. We just actually are, we have a blog post that's about to come out tomorrow based on a Twitter thread where someone was highlighting changes in Anchorage. One of the issue here is, you know, many of these, I mean, when we talk about 70 cities, There were about 15 cities at the end of 2020 in the United States, maybe 13, maybe it's 13, somewhere, you know, not many more than 10 that had gotten rid of their mandates citywide. So we've, you know, had about 55 cities do this reform just in the last four years. Seeing what happens, I mean, there are, Katie Gould has shown some great examples of, you know, projects that, you know, immediately when the reform has gone in. will go in and submit a redesign that doesn't punch a hole through the middle of the building to access the parking lot or adds a certain number of apartments or homes. There was great examples out of Fayetteville, right? When Fayetteville was an early adopter of no commercial mandates, they need to catch up on the residential side. But, you know, where buildings were getting reused all of a sudden that had been vacant for many years. So that's going to be, we're trying to track that. We're a small and growing organization and so capacity to do that. But, Those stories are the critical ones, I think, to show people the benefit of doing this. Kevin K (42:02.584) What about anecdotally from Portland, which you're most familiar with, where you didn't have mandates and you did have mandates and then you went back to not having mandates? Have you seen some good wins there? Tony Jordan (42:13.897) Well, I mean, in a way, the best example from Portland is in the opposite direction, right? We had, as I mentioned, buildings going up on this division street that had 30, 40, 50 apartments. They were very numbers, right? You look at the permits, the number of apartments being built, and they were all over the place between 30 and 80, right? What we did in Portland was we instituted a When they took a step back, they said, okay, you can build up to 30 units with no parking. But if you build 31, you have to have a 0 .2 parking ratio, one for every five apartments, which is relatively low, but it was retroactive to the whole building. So you had no parking to 30 units. And then the 31st apartment, you had to have six parking spaces on site. And what did we see? No one's gonna study on this, but I looked back, you know, you saw a haircut. All of a sudden, a bunch of apartments had exactly. 30 units. I think this marginal impact, it's harder to quantify, but I think honestly, the biggest thing is if you think of every apartment that's been built in the United States over the last 70 years, and you know, they might still, even if you say they built the exact same amount of parking that exists right now, if developers were allowed to just max out what was practical apartment -wise on that site with that same amount of parking, we'd have 10, 20, you know, five to 20 new apartments. in every apartment building in the United States. We would have no housing crisis if we had just let that happen, even with parking being built. So I think those marginal increases where you're just adding five or 10 apartments in a building that would have had a lower number because they couldn't meet the parking requirement, that's kind of the invisible benefit, I think, that is harder to quantify but is already, I'm sure, taking place, right? Cities with no mandates. They still build with parking, but they build a bit more housing. And that's, you know, that's important, you know, is to build. And then over time, maybe they start building a lot more housing and a lot less parking. But initially right away, you know, you might just add two or three more units because you can, or you might add bedrooms on the units because a lot of times the parking requirements are based on bedrooms. So you're going to build studios because they have a lower parking requirement. You know, I mean, I know there's many factors to layouts, but that's one of them sometimes. Kevin K (44:41.752) Yeah, it seems like it's probably a classic like hockey stick, you know, adjustment curve where it'd be really slow and minimal for a number of years potentially, or just kind of modest. But then there comes a point where there's an inflection and other things, other things that don't really work well right now, you know, like better public transit, better bike, but just better alternative transportation all of a sudden starts to work more. And, and you probably get more things that are within a walking distance that you didn't have before. What do you say to people who say, well, you know, the parking requirements really don't matter because the investors, the lenders are going to require a certain amount anyway. And that's really where the stumbling block is. What do you, what do you say to that argument? Tony Jordan (45:28.585) I mean, I think if we're talking about apartments with zero parking, sure. I mean, I think that's, you know, it took, it took 10 years for Portland to find a developer who was willing to build a large, a mid -size apartment building with no parking. Once they did and it rented, then the investors were very happy to do it. So some of it is just the market's not proven. This is what I mentioned before, the inertia of, of just these people have business models. They have relationships with bankers, they have funding streams, people understand the product and so they know what to invest in. You're trying to change that. To build an apartment building with much less parking requires not just the developer but brokers. There's a lot of players that have to align. So in a way, yes. Now the fact is that we can't even start working on fixing those other problems that the parking mandate still exists. So like, if you know, like it's absolutely worth it. They're just overhead on your city too. I mean, like they just cause city staff spend time on this that they could be spending approving other permits. So like get rid of them and you know, if nothing changes, then nothing changed. But if we are actually then can, can be successful in, you know, I think a lot of the work like incremental development Alliance or other people who are, you know, trying to, you know, there's a whole set of education and building capacity for building these kinds, remembering how to build these kinds of communities. And so that's going to take a little while to build that capacity. But if we haven't prepped the garden, once again, that can't take root. That can't happen. Kevin K (47:12.792) You know, it's always so funny also when I think about like the politics of some of these things and the politics of this issue. I mean, you're talking about something which is essentially removing a requirement from your local government, which is typically thought of as like a conservative political approach. And yet almost all the reform happening is in blue states and blue cities, which is just kind of bizarre. I always think about it, it shows how upside down a lot of people's thinking is in regards to these issues. So, I mean, that being said, obviously, you know, a lot of the places you've mentioned, you know, are pretty dyed in the wool blue places politically. What are you seeing as any kind of positive trend in more like conservative or red states as well? Tony Jordan (48:08.553) It surely is confusing, right? Why some people would support these regulations. I think there's a bit of just team opposition that goes into this. Whoever proposes the policy first might receive opposition. Yeah, I think some of the reason why these reforms took root first in... Kevin K (48:23.832) Yeah, sure. Kevin K (48:28.216) I've got to be against it. They're my enemy. I've got to be against it no matter what. Tony Jordan (48:38.761) in liberal, more liberal or blue places was, well, that happens to be where the housing crisis hit first. There also are, there are very good reasons for every one of every political stripe to support parking mandates, but there may be more reasons if you are politically, if you're, you know, liberally aligned, you might believe, you know, you might be more concerned about climate change, right? And you might be more concerned about transit access. So those issues tack on to the, you know, you know, general market problem. and they give you a little more reason. There's more coalition members. I think, you know, now that said, Anchorage is an example where, you know, it was a mixed city council that had broad political support from both conservatives and liberals. You know, there are a lot of Midwest cities that are doing this that are not necessarily very liberal. I think it's just the messaging is taking a little... it's a little harder, you know, because of just coding to break through, but this should definitely be an issue that we can win on across the political spectrum. I think it's just, it has to be intentional and continue that education around what we're actually talking about here. And to some degree it finds out if people are really for real about what they say about, you know, markets or business, you know, activity. I... Kevin K (50:01.4) Yeah. Tony Jordan (50:06.121) If you're in chamber of commerce or something, I had a woman complained to me. She came up to me in Chuck Morrone in Minneapolis and St. Paul and said, you know, I'm from the such and such Avenue business association. I said, and she was opposing the bill in, in, in Minnesota. And I said, do you, does your association just, it only supports existing businesses, right? Like you don't care about entrepreneurship. Do you? And, and, you know, she was like, well, of course, but I was like, no, of course you wouldn't. I will say one group that is on the. like kind of more conservative side of the spectrum. You know, some like I went to a conference in Arizona, a one day symposium that was about like doing business in America. And it was from like kind of like a, you know, economic, you know, libertarian side. And some of those folks really understand the parking mandates. Like they get that this and, and the like Institute for Justice is like they work not only on parking mandates, but just other barriers to people being economically free, like, you know, licensure requirements for hair braiding and things. It's one of those things that kind of fits into this, you know, once you see what this is being used for, which is often manipulation, right? Cities want to keep the parking mandates in place so they can sometimes just have more control over what businesses get to open or where they get to open. So. Yeah, exactly. And no one wants to give up their power, right? Like, that's one of the reasons it exists is because. Kevin K (51:26.04) Yeah, or leverage for negotiations. Tony Jordan (51:34.377) Yeah, people use them to decide where a restaurant can go as opposed to, it's not really about parking, right? Because they'll grant the variance somewhere else. They just don't want to have the bar next to where they like to hang out. Kevin K (51:50.072) Well, I mean, I do notice that on your map, Missouri and Kansas are not represented. So I hope that at some point we are within the next couple of years, we're working on some stuff to try to get us there locally. But yeah, it's a big hole. You're right. That's right. Branson eliminated theirs. Branson, interestingly enough, also has no building code. Or they were like, Missouri was one of the few states. Tony Jordan (51:59.817) What? Branson, Branson's got no mandates, right? Kevin K (52:18.712) God, my memory is going to fail me now because this has been a few years since I've thought about this issue. But for a long time, they were one of a handful of states that had no statewide building code adopted. And so cities and counties had to actually opt in to adopt one. And Branson did not have one for forever for a long time. So it's pretty interesting. Tony Jordan (52:28.329) huh. Tony Jordan (52:40.297) I think we're going to see a lot more activity. There's a lot of cities too. I know this isn't, you know, there's cities that have like Norman, Oklahoma is not on the map as a red dot because they maintain parking mandates for frat houses and some other housing alignments. So we're, we're pretty strict about who gets to be on the, on the dot. And, but there are a lot of places that are, that have done significant reforms. Hopefully we can tell more of those stories and highlight that. We just hired a policy director, Dan O 'Hara guess from, from strong towns. Kevin K (52:56.888) Okay. All right. Kevin K (53:08.312) Yeah, yeah. Tony Jordan (53:10.345) And we have an intern working this summer on kind of helping us to get more of an idea of where we can have a bigger impact in providing education and resources to the people on the ground. So I'm very excited about the potential for, you know, to see these. Right now reforms happen. Sometimes we know, like we knew Birmingham was going to, was working on getting rid of their mandates, but then other cities pop up where we haven't even had any contact. They might use our product, our maps or our resources, but. I wanna know, I wanna really, like I wanna know where the heat is coming from next so we can really, you know, hype it up and celebrate it. Kevin K (53:47.224) Yeah, I know. It's going to create like an impossible test for you since there's so many municipalities around the country. But there are those like, you know, the one I'm in, in Kansas City, Missouri, we have actually had some pretty good, I would say incremental reform at the city government level. And especially in Oregon, so it was passed last year that really is very helpful for infill residential development, sort of missing middle scale that basically just waived all parking requirements for that, which was nice. But we still have pretty onerous stuff in other parts of the city or other parts of the code. So it's very much piecemeal. Tony Jordan (54:27.561) Yeah, I think, I mean, obviously there's statewide reform progress and I know people are mixed, you know, that's tough because the cities want their local control. I think like, obviously if we're going to really deal with this problem, you know, that's probably necessary in a lot of places. It helps certainly to have a number of cities though, get rid of your mandates initially so they can be examples. And even I think anything that requires cities, I like it like if you can just get a city to open up and. and actually examine what these are and reckon with it. Shoop says one of the best pieces of advice he has to like someone who wants to get their city to get rid of mandates is take that paper, the pseudoscience of parking reform and, or pseudoscience of parking mandates, sorry, whoops. And, and give it to, you know, have a, have a planning commissioner, a city council person direct the staff to read this paper and prepare a memo as to why it's correct or wrong, right? Like, Kevin K (55:19.896) Hmm. Tony Jordan (55:20.393) I like it until like you go in your garage and you open up an old cooler and sometimes there's something really bad that you forgot in there. These mandates are like a fish that someone left in a cooler for 60 years, right? Like it's bad. You open it up and if you can force people to actually defend it, like I think that's what we need to do is say, okay, you don't want to get rid of these mandates, then it's on you to tell me why that they are correct. And so if we can shine some light on it, I think we'll start to see, you know, cities. in other communities get rid of them more readily because, you know, no one's going to want to step up and defend them anymore. Kevin K (55:59.928) It's pretty hard to defend. So when I think about Shoup and the work that he's done, especially if I go back to Pasadena, which is one of his favorite examples he loves to use in downtown Pasadena, I think about as much about parking management as anything and sort of balancing the on -street and off -street needs and figuring out the economics of it so it actually makes sense. How much of the parking management side do you all get into or track as part of your work? Tony Jordan (56:35.241) Well, one of our first things we ever put together was a or one of the first products we released that we actually are very proud of is a guidebook on parking benefit districts. It's a handbook for activists, right? And so this was written by one of our first interns, Evan Kimler. And it's like, I felt there was a need to. You have parking in the city, you have high cost free parking, you have, you know, various papers, but they're not. Kevin K (56:45.432) Okay. Tony Jordan (57:03.113) necessarily accessible or activism oriented. So we do promote parking. Parking benefit districts are a great idea. It's there's not it's such a synergistic thing. You know, you charge for parking, which would which helps to manage the demand and then you reinvest, which helps drive the demand lower. And then ideally, some point in the future, you don't have much more revenue because no one's parking, but you don't need it because you spent the money on making it more walkable. Great. We promote that. I talk about parking management every time I give a lecture. It's harder to track. We're starting to do this. We were just talking with some folks at IPMI, like, where are the data sets for this? How do we know? And so trying to figure out where there's good examples of data -driven parking management and good examples of permits. It's also a problem, potentially a problem. A lot of states have rules that prohibit cities from you know, actively manage their curb, maybe in a best practice. Like they don't allow them to, you know, charge parking for people with disability placards, which is leads to a lot of placard abuse and makes streets unavailable for people. Or they limit them from using demand -based pricing for permits. The permits can only be cost recovery, or they limit what they can spend money on, you know, from parking. Like you maybe you can only spend it on. parking garages, or maybe you can only spend it on, I mean, transit's not a bad thing, but San Francisco, I think, spends a lot of its net revenue from SF Park on transit. That's great, but there's also other things that maybe could be more impactful at a local level. So I think that's one case where I think we need to find out what the lay of the land is and then really start to highlight these examples. It's a harder political press because... Charging for things is not popular. But I think the other thing is that I think cities a lot of times don't go far enough. So they charge you, but you're not getting a value, right? If you paid a park and you still can't find a place to park, you're not happy. If you paid a park and you had a good experience, you know, that you're not, of course, I don't want to pay for anything in my life. I don't want to pay for a cup of coffee, but if I pay for one and it's bad, I'm upset. If I didn't pay for one and it's bad, you know. Tony Jordan (59:27.305) I'm not as much. So I think like once you're charging, go all the way and charge enough that there's an open space on every block, right? Like Shoop says, you know, maybe 85 % or whatever it is so that someone driving down the street can find a space, even if they have to pay for it. Like we're willing to pay for things as American consumers. We do it all the time. Kevin K (59:46.168) Yeah. So it does seem to me like this kind of work is the sort of work that developers and investors and lenders would want to support. But you say you're not really seeing much of that at this stage? Tony Jordan (59:59.945) Yeah, I think that, I mean, the funding in general for this is tough because we're a national organization. A lot of people are locally focused, a lot of developers, right? They're locally focused. So they want to see, like they're more concerned about what's going on in their community. And if they either, you know, if they have parking mandates, you know, like we can't promise we're not an organization that comes in and drops people out of a helicopter to like, you know, to work on something. We're helping to build just a national environment and movement to make these policies happen better. So, and I think once again, the developers that make a lot of money right now make it in the current regulatory environment, right? Like that's the end the ones. So we need the small scale developers as they start to, or the incremental or the ones that get it, as they start to maybe prove this point, maybe we'll see some people paying it forward. Kevin K (01:00:45.848) Do you know? Tony Jordan (01:00:58.377) you know, on what it is. But I recognize like, you know, yeah, the people who get it, they're just trying to get their, they can't build the projects that will make them the money because they're, you know, they're not legal yet. Kevin K (01:00:59.256) Yeah. Yeah. Kevin K (01:01:12.216) Yeah, that is an interesting twist. It probably is more of like the smaller and mid -sized developers who stand to benefit the most from parking reform. The large ones are going to negotiate their projects no matter what anyway. It's a different animal. But the smaller and mid -sized ones are less likely to have the kind of extra cash sitting around to support these efforts. Tony Jordan (01:01:23.881) Right. Tony Jordan (01:01:33.769) Right. I mean, and I'm not saying that the bigger developers, they don't fight the reforms at least generally. They're just not, they're not at contrary. I think this is, we find this across the whole housing zoning reform spectrum. You know, everyone thinks that it's developer, you know, developers financing this and it's, it's not, it's, I mean, mostly it's not even finance. Most of this work is done by people who care passionately about the place where they live or the, there's the, the future of, you know, for their children. And they're driven by that passion. And we're just all trying, you know, the more we can fund these endeavors, they have a ability to have a larger capacity because not everyone can, you know, can spend their time on these things without being paid. So I think, you know, I think the awareness is getting there, you know, and eventually, you know, I think we'll start to see more resources. put towards this, you know, some of it is just similar to when it took a lot of people. People wanted to see a building work in Portland before they would build more without parking. People want to see this as a viable organizing area. They want to see the successes coming and then, you know, then the, then they'll invest in it. Right. You kind of kind of prove, prove the point first on it when you're doing something a different way. Kevin K (01:02:58.2) Yeah. Well, Tony, this has been great. I really appreciate the conversation. Before we wrap up, I have to know, so how many Don Schupe posters or bobbleheads do you have? Tony Jordan (01:03:10.825) Those things don't really exist, unfortunately. I don't have nearly the collection of parking paraphernalia as I'd like. I've got an Andy Singer cartoon, you know, No Exit, that's about parking that I got. I have a weird poster on my wall here that's of a mural someone did on a garage door in Seattle. It's Jesus. Kevin K (01:03:14.264) I'm out. Tony Jordan (01:03:36.521) trying to find a parking space because there's a church across the street from this person's house and the people would park in their driveway. So they made this mural.

SB 1537, which Gov. Tina Kotek asked lawmakers to introduce, will make advances for more housing by allowing cities to expand their urban growth boundaries. An earlier version of this bill that failed last year would have given developers automatic exceptions for various zoning rules, including things like parking requirements for apartment complexes. Michael Andersen, the director of cities and towns at the Sightline Institute, wrote about this “missing piece” of the current bill. He joins us with more details.

The case against required parking. Catie Gould, Climate and Transportation Researcher for the Sightline Institute, joined the podcast to talk about trends in parking reform. Catie shared the problem with minimum parking mandates and how abolishing them impacted the cities of Seattle and Buffalo. She also discussed how parking regulations impact housing supply and how State legislatures have been getting involved with challenging parking mandates. Host: Ben Kittelson

Soundside host Libby Denkmann discusses the details of Washington State House Bill 1110 with Sightline Institute's Dan Bertolet, then talks about the impacts of the bill with representatives from Seattle, Bellevue, and Redmond.We can only make Soundside because listeners support us. Make the show happen by making a gift to KUOW: https://www.kuow.org/donate/soundside

If you feel like it's getting harder and harder to find a parking space in Portland, you're not crazy: at the beginning of the year, Oregon adopted new laws that have reduced the number of parking spaces some new developments need to build. And the city could do away with ALL requirements that new buildings provide parking later this year. But with new buildings popping up all over the city, what tools does the city have to distribute curb space equitably? Today on the show, lead producer John Notarianni talks with Catie Gould of the Sightline Institute. She's a senior researcher who focuses on transportation. Who would you like to hear on City Cast Portland? Shoot us an email at portland@citycast.fm, or leave us a voicemail at 503-208-5448. Still want more Portland news? Then make sure to sign up for our morning newsletter, Hey Portland, and be sure to follow us on Twitter and Instagram.  Looking to advertise on City Cast Portland? Check out our options for podcast and newsletter ads at citycast.fm/advertise. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Portland voted for a new form of government. It's a huge deal and bike advocates need to understand why — and more importantly — how to take advantage of it. In this episode, host Jonathan Maus talks to two people with important insights into what lies ahead: former policy advisor for City Commissioner Mingus Mapps Matt Glazewski (who was interviewed in ep. 18), and researcher/writer at Sightline Institute and former BikeLoud PDX leader Catie Gould.***LINKS:Charter reform coverage on BikePortlandOur Podcast music was provided by The Podcast Host and Alitu: The Podcast Maker app.

Host: Anne HillmanGUESTS:Gail Fenumiai, Division of ElectionsJeannette Lee, Sightline InstituteLinks:Division of Elections websiteMake a Plan to VoteLearn about ranked choice votingCandidate Comparison ToolAlaska Public Media elections coveragePARTICIPATE:Call 550-8433 (Anchorage) or 1-888-353-5752 (statewide) during the live broadcast (10-11 a.m.)Send e-mail to hometown@alaskapublic.org before, during or after the live broadcast (E-mails may be read on air).Post your comment or question below (Comments may be read on air).LIVE: Monday, October 31, 2021 at 10 a.m.RE-AIR: Monday, October 31, 2021 at 8 p.m.PODCAST: Available on this page after the program.]]>

This week we're joined by Catie Gould of the Sightline Institute, to talk about Oregon's plans for reducing parking regulations in cities. We chat about case studies from Portland OR and Fayetteville AR and the impact of parking lots on the urban heat island. Follow us on twitter @theoverheadwire Support the show on Patreon http://patreon.com/theoverheadwire Buy books on our Bookshop.org Affiliate site! 

This episode features edited highlights from an excellent panel discussion on parking reform that took place at the YIMBYtown 2022 conference in Portland, Oregon. YIMBY stands for 'yes in my backyard', referring to supporting housing development within existing urban areas, and YIMBYtown was all about abundant housing advocacy. The panel, Parking Reform: from theory to practice, was moderated by Catie Gould of the Sightline Institute. She was in our March 2022 episode. The panelists were: Martha Roskowksi, transportation and mobility consultant in Boulder, Colorado and author of 'Ideas to Accelerate Parking Reform in the United States' John Bauters, Mayor of Emeryville, California and also chair of the Alameda County Transportation Commission and the vice chair of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. Tony Jordan, our Parking Reform Network President Leah Bojo, land use consultant, formerly worked on land-use, transportation and parking at Austin City Council, and author of a chapter on Austin's first Parking Benefits District in Donald Shoup's 2018 book, Parking and the City. Read more details here.  Follow Paul Barter on Twitter. Reinventing Parking is now the official podcast of the Parking Reform Network! Why not join?

In this episode of the Dive Podcast, host Brianna Wheeler applies Terry Pratchett's boot theory of socioeconomic awareness (nerd alert) to our city's current state of affairs before unpacking Portland's housing crisis with  Michael Anderson,  a senior researcher for regional sustainability think tank,  Sightline Institute.Brianna also shares what she learned from the current edition of Willamette Week,  including a roundup of safety nets and tenant protections  for Portland renters,  the dubious fate of the Pop Blocks, and which of our gubernatorial candidates understands what systemic racism is.

Alon speaks with André Lightsey-Walker, Policy Transformation Manager of The Street Trust and temporary legislative aid during the recent short session. In the second half, Alon talks to Catie Gould of the Sightline Institute. Catie is also a member of the Portland Bicycle Advisory Committee and a leader of Bike Loud PDX.

Fayetteville in Northwest Arkansas abolished all of its commercial parking minimums. Benefits quickly emerged but no drama or problems. Fayetteville's story is an excellent reminder that parking reform is not just for large, transit-rich cities. Reinventing Parking this month features a discussion between me, Catie Gould of the Sightline Institute and Quin Thompson, who was one of the city staff behind the reform. Read all the details here.  Follow Paul Barter on Twitter. Reinventing Parking is now the official podcast of the Parking Reform Network! Why not join?

Today Crystal is joined by Laura Loe, Founder and Executive Director of Share The Cities, which both educates around and advocates for affordable housing and reasonable housing policies that serve the communities they're in. Discussions include the continued legacy of racially motivated redlining, the controversy of golf courses, and how Legos and The Sims have formed a new generation of city planners. As always, a full text transcript of the show is available below and at officialhacksandwonks.com. Find the host, Crystal Fincher on Twitter at @finchfrii and find more information about Share The Cities at @STCActionFund and @sharethecities.More info is available at officialhacksandwonks.com.   Resources Share The Cities Community Education: https://sharethecities.org/about “Acronyms for Action: ADU DADU EIS” by Chrystine Kim, Matt Hutchens, and Laura Loe from The South Seattle Emerald: https://southseattleemerald.com/2018/06/21/op-ed-acronyms-for-action-adu-dadu-eis/ “Segregated Seattle” from the Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project from the University of Washington: https://depts.washington.edu/civilr/segregated.htm “Are golf courses the solution to affordable housing?” by Bill Radke from KUOW: https://www.kuow.org/stories/are-golf-courses-the-solution-to-affordable-housing “Five Steps to Prevent Displacement” from the Sightline Institute: https://www.sightline.org/2020/08/03/five-steps-to-prevent-displacement/ “Post-election Seattle has housing density on the agenda” by David Kroman from Crossut: https://crosscut.com/news/2021/11/post-election-seattle-has-housing-density-agenda “Must Reads: From video game to day job: How ‘SimCIty' inspired a generation of city planner” by Jessica Roy from The Los Angeles Times: https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-simcity-inspired-urban-planners-20190305-story.html   Transcript The transcript will be uploaded as soon as possible.

Alan Durning is the founder and executive director of Sightline Institute, a think-tank for sustainability in the Pacific Northwest. We chat about how to make housing abundant. https://www.sightline.org/2021/02/25/the-contradiction-at-the-heart-of-housing-policy/ patreon.com/rhyslindmark www.roote.co/

In today's episode, I interview Michael Andersen. Michael is a housing policy researcher for the Sightline Institute, a think tank focusing on policy research and analysis in the pacific northwest. Michael and I talk about the capacity for state-level housing policy to adequately address Oregon's housing shortage. If you're interested in getting the researcher perspective on housing policy, you're gonna like this episode. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/athomeinor/support

Michael Andersen: Thanks for the invitation. Kol Peterson: I'm just gonna start by having you say a few more words about yourself that are not covered by your bio, that you would like for people to know about you. You've done a lot of things over the years that are relevant to the questions we'll be talking about today is so provide a little context for things about you that we should know.Michael Andersen: Sure. I, I became obsessed with housing policy and transportation sort of in tandem. When I was a reporter in suburban Portland covering Clark county, Washington I was covering county government and like two parts of county government are covering poor people who are interacting with the criminal justice system and covering rich people who are building new homes or even middle class people who are building new homes on the fringe of the urban landscape.And I was seeing all these poor people, but get being screwed by the fact that they were being forced to live in [00:03:00] places without that we're not designed for people without cars. And then they would own a car, but it'd be a crappy car. And then their car would fall apart. Then their life would fall apart.And I was like, there's got to be better. Our solution. Meanwhile, I was spending time with all my 20 something, friends in Portland who didn't have cars and they didn't care. Like, and so I was like, it's not as simple a story as that. Like there's a lot of privileges both ways, but that was sort of what got me thinking about transportation and housing.So since I've been working on public transportation, journalism and biking journalism, and since more recently housing advocacy, I've been sort of doing content in various ways. Kol Peterson: So tell us a little bit about your own family's experience, living in an ADU. Michael Andersen: Yeah. It started with just trying to continue to live with our housemates.So I was interested in living with housemates when I started a little business 10 years ago because I was new, I was going to be socially isolated otherwise, and I needed to save money it worked in both dimensions. And then my wife moved in and then our housemates had a kid and then we were going to have a kid.We [00:04:00] were like, this is too much for this 1942 building. And we're gonna have to figure out some way to do it. And we decided that best way was for us to keep them whole while they built an ADU. And so we lived as tenants for several years. And it was great. It was a perfect setup for both of our kids to grow up together as best friends and the they had to move for a job recently.So we've relocated since, but it was a really rewarding thing. Kol Peterson: All right, so you have some direct personal experience with ADUs in particular, and we're going to talk about ADUs for sure, but we're also going to focus on this broader conversation of middle housing today. So let's start off with talking about Sightline Institute first. Tell us a little bit about what Sightline Institute is and what's the mission of Sightline Institute? How would you describe it to other people for those who are not familiar with it? Michael Andersen: Sure. We're a sustainability think tank founded in 1993 based in Seattle, but covering the Pacific Northwest.So my, my boss's big idea is that you can't get people to care about their planet. The evidence seems to suggest, but maybe you can get people to care about their [00:05:00] ecosystem. And so we focus on the Pacific Northwest as an ecosystem across the border states and nations, and write about the ways that we can make it the best, most welcoming, most sustainable version of itself as a model to other ecosystems.Kol Peterson: Is there any other examples of similar Sightline Institute types of think tanks out there in other regions or comparable institutions that you can think of in the United States. Michael Andersen: We're definitely weird, but Rocky Mountain Institute is a little bit similar. There are a lot bigger now founded in Colorado, I think.And there's my my colleague Eric is trying to working on creating one for Appalachian actually. So there may be more.Kol Peterson: Cool. All right. So how tell us about the scope of the material that you cover for the Sightline Institute. Michael Andersen: I write mostly about housing, a little bit about transportation and that overlap, which is parking, which I love talking about parking, in the Portland and Oregon areas.So mostly focusing on the statewide level and regional level and what we can do there, but also a little bit of Portland stuff to the extent that it's [00:06:00] like a model for other cities. Kol Peterson: And how does the material that you cover for Sightline Institute fit into the institutes larger mission? Michael Andersen: I think one of our niches is that we are a sort of environmental organization that is really into economics and harnessing the power and insights of economics for our progressive sustainability sort of vision.And one of our insights, or one of our decisions, our perspective is that we desperately need to reduce the need for energy over the longterm without making it feel like we're giving anything up. And the way to do that is to allow urbanization, but we've banned urbanization because of zoning laws that have made it impossible for people to basically choose where they want to live, which is good for lots of reasons.So we try to work to undo that while also not being blind to the other complications that creates for disruption and so on. Kol Peterson: You previously wrote for a bike blog, local [00:07:00] bike blog. That's quite beloved, quite popular called Bike Portland. Can you talk about the material that you wrote for Bike Portland and how it relates to what you covered at the Sightline Institute?Michael Andersen: Yeah. So when I came to Bike Portland, it was just 2013. Portland was sort of swinging into a big boom in home building was coming out of a four year, like plateau, like almost no home building. So like there was, it was obvious that there was going to be some sort of a rent crisis. We already had a rent shortage and then the rents were starting to climb.And I was really interested in like, we should be solving this problem, but we should be solving it in a way that makes things more proximal. Like if you look at the greatest biking cities in Southeast Asia or Northern Europe, they're all full of these little close together homes. And that's the bedrock.People are not biking that many miles, they're just biking a lot because there are a lot of short trips. And the only way we create short trips is by building ADUs and attached homes and apartment buildings that are all close to jobs and everything [00:08:00] else. So that was the case I was making. And I had a weekly column about that and got more and more obsessed with sort of that side of how to improve biking and by living in the places where biking is already good.Instead of having to spend all our wheels, trying to make biking great in more and more places, which we should be doing both of.Kol Peterson: This is off topic, but in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and I would imagine Europe electric, motor scooters are becoming more common, right? That's not really taking off in the US.I mean, those little like ride on hop on scooters are really taking off, but not like the kind of ride on scooters that give you longer distances. And they're electric. What are your thoughts about electric scooters and their potential. Are those as good as bikes or what are the differences? What are the ways in which like electric scooters are?Provided serving the same role that bikes could play. And how does that deal? How do you think about that in terms of urban form? Yeah, that's a good question. I don't really have a strong perspective, I guess. But they're better than cars. They're worse [00:09:00] than bikes. Bikes are better than scooters and worse than skateboards.Michael Andersen: So yeah, I mean, I think it's like if a, if a tool is going to work, you should be able to use it. I'm pro transportation to the extent that it infringes on the other types of trends of more efficient transportation, that's a problem. So like when those, when like a motor vehicle is using a bike lane to the exclusion of it, being comfortable for people to bike or scoot in, then that's a problem.But I don't know exactly where you draw that line. Kol Peterson: Yeah. Okay. I've just been, I have an electric ride on scooter. I love it. And I'm just surprised that it's there's so few of them in the U S wherein, I would imagine they're that they're quite popular now. Michael Andersen: Yeah. I don't know why. I mean, it's taken over in Northern Europe too, I think.Yeah. Not taken over, but there's a lot of it Kol Peterson: Anyway, that was a side topic, but I figured you'd have some thoughts about that. All right. So what sources do you rely upon for staying abreast of the latest legislative policy discourse related to [00:10:00] housing nationally? Michael Andersen: My main filter is Twitter. So I use Tweet Deck as like a Twitter app that lets use like organize it all by, you know, most recent first.And so it takes away some of the poisonous dunking fixation that the Twitter algorithm pushes you towards. So I highly endorsed that. And then it lets you segregate by topic. So I can have a column for housing people and a column for transportation people. If anybody's interested, you can look at my housing list on Twitter, it's a public list.And I use that to constantly update that. Kol Peterson: I bet you people are interested in that. Cause the fire hose is a real deal. I guess if you're not a reporter, it's like, it's just overwhelming. So I guess my, I guess my question is like following up on that, is there a primary source of like information source that TweetDeck tends to push you towards, or is it individual DIY blogs out there across the, across the internet? Michael Andersen: Yeah, I used to, so I once heard, you know, [00:11:00] William Gibson, the William, but no, no, this was David Carr, the times, his old, New York times, his own media columnist. He said that like Twitter is like dipping a teacup into a glittering sea of information.And that's how he likes to enjoy it. And you don't worry about the sea as it flows by you just dip your tea cup and you enjoy that information. So I knew I liked that, metaphor.Kol Peterson: That it's apt. But does it do to my question, is it you're dodging the question young man. No , is there a primary news source that you tend to be directed towards?Michael Andersen: No. No, it's just, it's just a painstakingly building, figuring out who's smart on this stuff. Kol Peterson: All right. So you've recently written about a lot more recently about state level zoning standards. What do you believe are some appropriate frameworks for when states attempt to reform local zoning statewide?It's evident to me based on my observation of the ADU market, that the legislation that has occurred [00:12:00] in Oregon and California has been extremely effective. Tell us your thoughts about that. Yeah. Michael Andersen: So you're going to talk more about that this week, I know in Oregon. But the both in Oregon and California, and to some extent in a few other states, Washington, Connecticut, just recently Utah there've been laws that sort of set of basic standards for like you can, you have, you have control over a lot of your zoning, but you're not allowed to ban the following options.And you know, the following options is a different list based on which state you are. In Oregon, we've had an accelerating pace of state level actions to set certain pro-housing standards at the local level. First with ADUs a few years ago then followed up with middle housing, duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, cottage clusters and then just in the last session just weeks ago when that allows lot division for middle housing, which is as you were talking about yesterday with Jake, hugely useful to get it actually built.So we've also passed some like statewide level affordable housing [00:13:00] mandates on a sweeping bipartisan basis that say that like, you're like you have to give extra space and unit count to projects that provide regulated affordability. So I think that essentially makes that possible, no matter the zone which is also great for building an integrated city.So Yeah, I think I'm really bullish about this trend of using the state to solve this problem that we created piecemeal city by city, by city, but we create everywhere. So like, I've got like, I can, I can kind of go into like, sort of the game theory of it. Kol Peterson: Yeah. Michael Andersen: So it seems to me that the, you know, like it's, it's a prisoner's dilemma, right? So if you're familiar, like two people constantly lose if they are purely self interested, but if they can act together in concert, then they can win mutually compared to the constant losing. And that's essentially, I think how the vision for state zoning action works. You've got, so if you think about the county.You've got. So if you look at all the cities around Puget sound, for [00:14:00] example. You've got a wide variety of different amounts of land zoned for attached housing and to the Seattle and Tukwila having about half of their land and a few cities like richer cities, almost none of that land. With various cities in the middle, if say, Tukwila decided we are going to try and relegalize cities, we're going to say, you can live wherever you want in our city.You can build a home here. And we are gonna also, that's going to create a tax windfall and we'll use that property tax windfall to spend, to make sure that poor people can live here as well. And we'll build this wonderful situation. It would not solve the problem because Tukwilla would also need every other city around Puget sound to be doing something similar or else it's a drop in the housing bucket.Like it could not solve the problem on its own. And so, as a result, if you're an elected official in Tukwilla, you're thinking, well, I could do this and I have an incentive to solve this regional housing shortage, but I don't have the means to do it. So why would I ever try? Like, why would I go through the political cost of doing so, and the state level, [00:15:00] the politicians have, not just the incentive, not just a motive, but they also have the opportunity, they have the means.So that's the puzzle that state level action solves. Yeah. Interesting way to frame it. Thank you for putting it in those like game theory terms. So in Connecticut they recently passed ADU legislation that allows cities to opt out. Maybe you can describe that a little bit for us before you answer the question I'm about to pose, but presumably this legislation was a form of political compromise in, in an idealistic, you know, ADU legislative bill.Kol Peterson: How do you feel about this particular legislative political tactic? Michael Andersen: Yeah. So I don't know a ton about Connecticut. My impression is, and I've seen some of the advocates work on this is one of the most zoning segregated states in the country. There's very few like either regulate affordable or market affordable homes in a lot of the state and especially where the jobs are rich and the fight -the bill that [00:16:00] was just passed a law legalizes ADUs up to, I think, a thousand square feet on almost any residential property.And, but it says, and also does other good things like it removes like. You know, and it does on other, other more abstract, good things. But the, the key provisions on ADUs and parking, it says that if a city wants to opt out on the ADU legalization, it has to get a two thirds vote of its planning commission followed by a two thirds vote of its legislative body as town council or whatever by a certain date.I think it's the first of 2023. And if they don't do it by then, then they lose their opportunity. So they have to like line it all up, but it also takes effect the first day of 2022. So unless cities are really Johnny on the spot on this, they're going to be theADUs. They're going to be legal. The sky will not fall.Some people will hear about the fact that you can build them and get pissed off if they don't get to do it. So I think that is a clever way to structure a thing that lets people [00:17:00] sort of think about how, oh, this won't, we can still stop this if we need to. But then like creates the conditions in which we have these local discussions, which I think are sometimes the most important part of the thing is like forcing a discussion.And then sometimes housing will win in those discussions. So I think it's clever. I it's also like, obviously, like if a city is built on economic segregation, as I think some municipalities in Connecticut are, they may indeed act on this and they may keep it out. And then like the game is if we want to solve that problem, we get every other city who has already opted in to be like, no, no, we're taking that away from you now you don't get to opt out anymore and that'll be easier once every other city has opted in.Kol Peterson: So yeah, I, I think you're right about this notion that if you kind of get the gold level ADU regulations in place, the sky will not fall. And and that, that, that will effectively normalize lower barriers to [00:18:00] ADU development. And so I think you're right. That even if it's only in effect for one year, Serve a big role in kind of catalyzing more aggressive or easier adoption of, of higher level ADU standards in the future.So what are some suggestions that you would have for policy makers and advocates if they're considering pursuing statewide legislative approaches to promote ADUs and middle housing?Michael Andersen: One thing that so I've got all kinds of opinions, I'm mostly a language person. I'm not really a, like a technician in any way.I'm a more of a blogger. So that's where my expertise is if anywhere, but I will say politically, some things we've noticed in Oregon, the core of the campaign to get this stuff done was affordable housing developers. So I think affordable housing developers this is an insight by my former colleague, Madeline Kovacs andEli Spevak, who's been a shaker you've worked with on all this stuff, I think and used to work in affordable housing himself. I think [00:19:00] the formula they hit on was that the affordable housing developers have expertise, they've got the incentive. They've got the sort of moral authority and credibility just to like try and get good zoning laws passed.In some cases like they actually would prefer this to also apply to market rate because they want to work in the market rate system sometimes because of this last paperwork they don't need any more constraints in their deeply regulated careers. And and in some cases, the people who do this stuff, they just understand the need for a broader set of solutions to a housing shortage.So building on the sort of political support of affordable housing developers and sort of going outward from there to a broad coalition of in for private developers, environmental groups justice groups all sorts of folks. We've been able to sort of communicate to elected officials that this is not a narrow issue.This is a very, very broad issue. And you may hear from near the narrow interest of the small minority of homeowners who are deeply opposed to this, but they [00:20:00] are like not anywhere close in scale to the benefits that you will get from all these different spectrums. If you can allow more housing where people want it in urban areas.So that's been like, I think probably the key to it. We also, and I'm talking mostly about the democratic side, really important thing. I think about Oregon and California and Washington. What we've seen is that a fair number of Republicans are also on this. And in fact, in Oregon, and I think in California, what we've needed, we, if we didn't have the Republican votes on the bills, they wouldn't have passed.There were too many Democrats from the suburbs in general that were voting against these bills even in these democratic super majority states. So like building. Purely partisan argument, which you could totally do for legalizing housing, you know, fighting economic segregation. The that's like unimportant part of it.But if that's the only argument you're making, if you're not also making a property rights, people [00:21:00] should get to do what they want. Sort of you know, this is a market-based way to advance, you know, material benefits of many, many people, all that's also true. If you're not also making that, then you are less likely to succeed I thinkKol Peterson: What legislative bills are you tracking that excites you? I should say state the state level bills of any. Michael Andersen: Sure. Yeah. Well, I'm, I'm very eager to see if California finally posts a win with the parking reform, they proposed near transit, I think removing parking requirement mandates near transit.Also I think it SB 9 in California is a middle housing legalization that allows duplexes on any lot and also a lot of split. So theoretically four units. And also if you want to do a duplex, you can split it. So that's great, or, you know, narrow house. Those are both great bills.And then in North Carolina, there's an exciting middle housing legalization bill that also [00:22:00] includes ADU. And is similarly bipartisan. It would be really great to get something I think on the east coast or the Southeast that sort of is on the same lines because it's a whole different media universe there.Kol Peterson: So let's move away from state level legislation at the moment and focus in on where, you know, for practical reasons, a lot of the kind of housing politics are going to play out at a local level. Is there any suggestions that you would have for local level policy makers and advocates, if they're considering trying to pursue better municipal regulations to promote ADU and middle housing?.Michael Andersen: Yeah. I think Portland, like, so I was, as part of, I was like the several hours a week content person for Portland for Everyone, which was a campaign is, is a campaign is a program of Thousand Friends of Oregon, which is an anti sprawl sort of environmental organization. Former colleague Madeline was the political mastermind of that.And I think. [00:23:00] Like, she just spent a ton of time. She, she first won the funding and Thousand Friends committed their own funding to like get her to meet thousands of people face to face and like build a gradual alliance of folks. One of her cool things that I've been trying to spread the word about was that when she was building the coalition, she didn't let anyone sort of brand take over.So she didn't want it to be all affordable housing developers are all market rate housing developers are all environmental groups. She would say, I'm going to meter admission to this club. I'm going to say, we'll take one of these, one of these, one of these. And when you do that, nobody feels excluded.Nobody feels like it's not their group. It's not for them. So if you have a really like bespoke coalition early on, you can build yourself a really longterm coalition, a hopefully a big tent which is what you need to defeat the people who flip out about this stuff.Kol Peterson: Outside of the city of Portland, where there's been this really effective mobilization of these [00:24:00] interests to kind of get the Residential Infill Project passed, which we will focus on a lot this week and, and today also. But what other particular local bills are you seeing outside of Portland?Michael Andersen: Like other municipal stuff. Kol Peterson: Yeah. Municipal bills. Yeah, Michael Andersen: Sure. The I mean, I've been really impressed by the wave of California cities that are talking about middle housing legalization. I think it's like seven of them, including San Jose and San Diego and Oakland like Sacramento. And I think that's caused by a combination of like this rhetorical battle happening in the national discourse and the state mandates that are saying you need to come up with locations for actual homes. And it turns out that like middle housing is one of the less controversial ways to increase the supply. So, okay. The dumb, I think Seattle's ADU legalization is sort of underrated.Like it goes up to a thousand square feet. You can have two of them on any lot [00:25:00] and it doesn't end there. It doesn't apply at the, the floor area ratio cap doesn't apply. So it's basically free space. So there's a huge incentive to put an ADUs anytime a lot turns over. And in fact, the ADU like production has gone way up.So it's like, it was a stealth triplex legalization in many ways. And I feel like it hasn't gotten the credit deserves for that. Kol Peterson: What are some federal rules or laws or other national policies that you and or aSightline are supporting to help bolster small infill? Michael Andersen: I think I, I'm not super optimistic about the payoff of federal efforts in this.Like, I think it's really hard to write a law that is going to redound in the right ways down to the local stuff. If you like, you can lead a city to water, but you can't make it drink. The, but the and it's easier for states just because the conditions are more similar. I am sort of, I wish that there were more conversation at [00:26:00] the federal level about incentivizing state legislation.Like I right now the federal things in the, the Biden ministration has put out on this. They're great. It's like here's some money to do a planning process. Okay. If you don't wanna do a planning process or use. Get you to do a planning process, make it cheaper. And then there's a sort of proposal to tie.I think some transportation, like here's some additional transportation money you get, if you reform your zoning and their correct direction, you know, in a more inclusive direction. And there some nuances there. I don't think either of those is the total game changer. I, like I said, I wish that the, there were only 50 states there, I don't know, 20,000 cities.So like, it would be much more efficient to incentivize the states to take action along the lines of Oregon's for example. But the I do really like the idea of tying it specifically to transportation dollars because that's something I think every, for my time, as a suburban reporter, every local municipality desperately wants to add turn lanes, whether or not that's [00:27:00] good, that's going to get their attention if they aren't getting where if they could get federal money for that.So that's better than most ways to incentivize the stuff at the federal level. I think then there's also like the affordable affordable or sorry affirmatively furthering fair housing. Which looks more specifically at affordable housing and where, how that's well, that is distributed and as well as with the, the underlying zoning and that is a process we could be using a lot more than we are.I'm not sure it's ever going to scale up, like is essentially a punitive way to get cities to do stuff which is effective when it works, but like, it needs to be applied a lot before cities actually changed their behavior. Instead of just asking for apology rather than (transcription ends here)

The Pacific Northwest is one of North America's most naturally beautiful and resource-rich regions. But historically, not every resident has benefited from the land's bounty. Sightline Institute researches policy fixes that ensure everyone can participate in and benefit from life in the Northwest, regardless of their background or ethnicity. Find out how they champion sustainability, social justice and the environment. Want to support Sightline Institute? https://www.sightline.org Find the episode on Great.com: https://great.com/great-talks-with/how-can-we-empower-minority-voices-in-americas-northwest

In Whatcom County on Tuesday, a mile-long oil train derailed and caught fire as it was rolling toward a refinery in Ferndale. No one was hurt, and state officials say there have been no wildlife impacts. Eric de Place is an expert on oil trains and derailments. He's director of energy policy at the Sightline Institute -- a non-profit think-tank based in Seattle. He joined KUOW to talk about the dangers of transporting oil by rail.

Today, on The Local:Your Quick 6 news headlines, with an in-depth breakdown of the bills passed during the First Special Legislative Session; Barba Seaman at the Clark County Council -- an exchange between County Chair Eileen Quiring and Councilor Temple Lentz about how the Council will show support for racial justice. And, an interview with Alan Durning, the founder of Sightline Institute, the leading policy think tank in the Pacific Northwest. If Durning had three policy wishes for democracy in the coming few years, what would they be?

Today, on The Local: Your Quick 6 news headlines, including an insiders look at the special session; an in-depth look at Sacrifice Zones with Eric DePlace from Sightline Institute and Mike Selig from KXRW; and, an interview with Cameron Whitten & Salomé Chimuku with an update on the Black Resilience Fund.

In this episode, Erica talks with Peter Drury, Chief Strategy Officer for Wellspring Family Services, a nonprofit to end the cycle of family homelessness. They discuss:The idea that perception of value, more than the actual value, drives decisions about how we spend our money.Recognizing qualitative and quantitative factors other than cash value that impact your fundraising effectiveness.Becoming worthy of trust by going back to the basics of kindness, authenticity, and genuine and personal signs of gratitude.Reverse engineering, or “backcasting” to define what needs to happen to reach your goals. Key Takeaways:The frame beats the facts every time.Not all gifts of the same size have equal value.People will go with a charity they already know and trust, especially in unsure times.Go from the point of impact in the future and then cast back. Then you can figure out how to get there. "If we get really good with our messaging and our marketing, we are actually raising more money for less… It comes back to perception...words...frames. And it comes back to an invitation for a person to make a difference in the world, not to you but through you. And yeah, I think that's the work." —  Peter Drury More about Peter Drury: Peter currently serves as Chief Strategy Officer for Wellspring Family Services in Seattle, where he is charged with keeping Wellspring future-focused, aligned, growing, and increasingly wise. A social worker with a business education – plus years of innovative leadership and consulting for philanthropists, executives, and boards – Peter is uniquely positioned to facilitate strategy, planning, performance measures, and optimization of the whole. Peter has supported many high-performing organizations during critical stages of growth, such as Splash, Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic, Seattle Children’s, Sightline Institute, and Make-A-Wish. He is a member of the faculty in Seattle University’s acclaimed Master of Nonprofit Leadership Program and holds MSW, MBA, and M.Div. degrees from the University of Illinois, Seattle University, and Yale University. Beyond-Cash-Fundraising-Dashboard Try out the Wordifier FREE to see if you should stop using a word, use it with caution, or use it all you want? http://www.claxonmarketing.com/wordifier/CONNECT WITH PETER DRURY:Twitter: Peter Drury (@seattledrury)Website: Wellspring Family ServicesLinkedIn: Peter Drury - Chief Strategy Officer - Wellspring Family ServicesCONNECT WITH ERICA:Website: http://www.claxonmarketing.com/about-erica/http://www.claxonmarketing.com/http://www.wordifier.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/EricaMillsBarnLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericamillsbarnhart/Email: info@claxonmarketing.com

After the coronavirus pandemic hit the United States, millions of Americans received a stimulus check from the government to help weather the economic impacts of the virus. Margaret Morales and Michael Andersen, researchers for the Sightline Institute, are writing a series of articles arguing that the U.S. should more regularly use cash benefits to help people in need. They say that cash benefits are more flexible and more helpful than other social safety programs like SNAP or TANF. Morales and Andersen join us.

Spacious and affordable homes used to be the hallmark of American prosperity. But according to journalist Conor Dougherty, punishing rents and the increasingly prohibitive cost of ownership have turned housing into the foremost symbol of inequality and an economy gone wrong. Dougherty lead us on a fact-finding expedition to the West Coast epicenter of America’s housing crisis with perspectives from his book Golden Gates: Fighting For Housing In America. He was joined in conversation with Alan Durning, founder of Sightline Institute. Evoking the adage that California is a glimpse of our nation’s future, Dougherty and Durning tell a cautionary tale of the San Francisco Bay Area, where fleets of private buses ferry software engineers past a sea of tarp-and-plywood shanties. Dougherty outlined decades of history and economic forces that brought us to this pivotal moment, and introduced us to the activist uprisings that have risen in tandem with housing costs. He told the stories of a struggling math teacher who builds a political movement dedicated to ending single-family-house neighborhoods, a teenage girl who leads her apartment complex against their rent-raising landlord, a nun who tries to outmaneuver private equity investors by amassing a multimillion-dollar portfolio of affordable homes, and many more. Join Dougherty and Durning for a glimpse of a vast political realignment during this moment of rapid technological and social change that may redefine the lives and homes of Americans everywhere. Conor Dougherty is an economics reporter at The New York Times. His work focuses on the West Coast, real estate and wage stagnation among U.S. workers. Dougherty has covered economics and real estate on and off for a decade at both The Times and The Wall Street Journal. Alan Durning is the founder of Sightline Institute and co-author of more than ten Sightline books, including This Place on Earth 2002: Measuring What Matters, The Car and the City, and Unlocking Home: Three Keys to Affordable Communities. Recorded live in The Forum by Town Hall Seattle on February 25, 2020. 

In response to the second consecutive Oregon legislative session interrupted by Sente Republican walkouts, Kristin Eberhard from Sightline Institute discusses her proposal to eliminate the state Senate, along with other ideas to save democracy in Oregon.

This week: CoStar reports that multifamily investment has picked up again after a brief slowdown following the implementation of statewide rent control; Sightline Institute researcher Michael Anderson warns that Portland's Better Housing by Design initiative could be held back by parking requirements; and startups are aiming to disrupt security deposits by requiring less money upfront from tenants and providing insurance to landlords.

It's Cascadia Day! Ian gets together with a gang of the region's top subject matter experts to discuss how we define the region, how we think about the region, and what's next for the millions of people who call Cascadia home. Cascadia Magazine founder Andrew Engelson, Tarika Powell of Sightline Institute, Cascadia Rail co-founder Paige Malott, and iconic Cascadian poet Nadine Maestas take turns schooling Ian and the live audience on their perspectives about Cascadia's future.

Today on XRAY In The Morning: (1) Prerecorded interview with Eileen Reavey from National Popular Vote Inc. (2) Talk Media News with Bob Ney (3) News With My Dad with Jefferson and Joe Smith (4) Quick call in interview with Michelle Jones, from the Wayfinding Academy (5) Interview with Madeline Kovacs from Sightline Institute (6) Interview with Sara Nelson from the Association of Flight Attendants

Accessory dwelling units may be small, but they’re a big topic in the conversation about how to strengthen the housing supply in our communities. That’s because for many places, letting private homeowners build a granny flat above the garage or a tiny home in the backyard seems like a natural, low-risk next step to thicken up our stock of affordable homes. At Strong Towns, we’ve long advocated that breaking down barriers to building ADUs is a no-brainer in most cases—but sometimes, an interesting story comes our way that just might prove the exception to the rule.Or at least that’s what Strong Towns member and contributor Spencer Gardner thought when he read this story from the Sightline Institute about proposed ADU legislation in his home state of Washington. While WA legalized ADUs statewide way back in 1993, local regulations and zoning have still made them functionally impossible to build in many areas, stymying would-be micro-developers who can’t get around high utility connection fees, onerous setback requirements, and—the real kicker—hard and fast owner-occupancy requirements. But while removing all these barriers sounded good to Spencer when he considered his own community of Spokane, the fact that the state is the one lifting these restrictions—rather than Washington’s cities—gave him serious pause. So we invited him to be a guest on this episode of Upzoned to talk about his reservations.Will Washington’s ground-breaking bill lead to the kind of gentle and gradual gentrification—or, to use the buzzword of the moment, “gentlefication”—that can create affordable housing solutions without disrupting the physical, economic, and cultural fabric of neighborhoods? Or will it unleash a cataclysmic gold rush of new development—albeit in bite-size form—that can distort land values and become a recipe for decline? Are capping utility hook-up fees an overdue step to make it possible for would-be tiny homers to get basic services like water into their backyard apartments? Or are there good reasons to let cities set their own fees—like when that backyard shed just so happens to be located on a far-out rural lot that’s colossally expensive to service? And then in the Downzone, Mary Poppins Returns gets a second shout-out—this time from Kea—and Spencer gives you perhaps the weirdest downzone submission of all time. That’s right: it’s time to meet Jesus and the Angry Babies.

The show has been delayed for a bit but we are back!  On this episode of Talk to Seattle we have Kelsey Hamlin of the Sightline Institute. Sightline is cascadia's premier sustainability think tank. Thank you so much to Kelsey for coming on the show.   Guest Links Sightline Institute  

Hanna Scott on King County taking steps to curb gun violence // Marshawn Memories/ Sports InsiderDanny O'Neil's Beverly Hillbillies parody song about Oregon // Dan Bertolet from the Sightline Institute on backyard cottage laws // UW Prof Kristie Ebi, one of the authors of this week's climate change study // Bill Harwood live on this morning's rocket failure and emergency landing // Chris Sullivan's Chokepoint -- closures for the construction of a new light rail station

Guest Margaret Morales, Senior Research Associate, Sightline Institute, speaks with Diane Horn about how backyard cottages could help close the affordable housing gap and provide homes for extremely low income individuals.

Guest Eric de Place, Programs Director at Sightline Institute, speaks with Diane Horn about the status of fossil fuel development projects in the Pacific Northwest and the environmental implications for Northwest and global communities.  

The Sightline Institute's climate-change expert, Kristin Eberhard, joins The Overcast to break down the carbon-tax proposal heating up the Washington Legislature and the initiative campaign waiting to pounce if lawmakers don't act.

Cass Midgley and Bob Pondillo interview Valerie Torico. Dr. Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer with a passion for personal and social evolution. Today, we discuss Tarico’s book, Trusting Doubt:  A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light, offers personal insight into how we can apply “constructive curiosity” to our most closely guarded beliefs.   As a social commentator, Tarico tackles issues ranging from religious fundamentalism to gender roles, to reproductive rights and technologies. A primary focus is on improving access to top tier contraceptive technologies. To that end, in 2015, she co-founded Resilient Generation, a family planning advocacy hub based in Seattle, Washington. She serves on the board of Advocates for Youth, a D.C. based nonprofit with wide-ranging programs related to reproductive health and justice, and is a Senior Writing Fellow at Sightline Institute, a think tank focused on sustainable prosperity. Her articles have appeared at sites including the Huffington Post, Jezebel, Salon, AlterNet, and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and they are available at ValerieTarico.com. Bob and I (Cass) wish you a wonderful summer solstice, time with family and friends, the giving and receiving of gifts from loved ones, and however else you recognize these year end holidays. If you're going to be with family with whom there is religious tension, I encourage you to stick to humanist values when you're with them and be present as a healthy, mature version of yourself. To that end, I will now read excerpts from the third Humanist Manifesto and David Richo's declarations of healthy adulthood: As humans, you and your family members are an integral part of nature, the result of evolutionary change, an unguided process. Our ethical values are derived from human need and interest as tested by experience. Our fulfillment in life emerges from individual participation in the service of humane ideals. Humans are social by nature and find meaning in relationships. Working to benefit society, even a micro-society like your family gatherings, maximizes your own individual happiness. We humanists have respect for differing views in an open social context, as long as they are humane. And from Richo, in preparation for potentially incendiary encounters with family and friends, say these to yourself before you engage: I accept full responsibility for the shape my life has taken.I need never fear my own truth, thoughts, or sexuality.I let people go away or stay and I am still okay.I accept that I may never feel I am receiving – or have received – all the attention I seek.I acknowledge that reality is not obligated to me; it remains unaffected by my wishes or rights.One by one, I drop every expectation of people and things.I reconcile myself to the limits on others’ giving to me and on my giving to them.Until I see another’s behavior with compassion, I have not understood it.I let go of blame, regret, vengeance, and the infantile desire to punish those who hurt or reject me.I am still safe when I cease following the rules my parents (or others) set for me.I cherish my own integrity and do not use it as a yardstick for anyone else’s behavior.I am free to have and entertain any thought. I do not have the right to do whatever I want. I respect the limits of freedom and still act freely.No one can or needs to bail me out. I am not entitled to be taken care of by anyone or anything.I give without demanding appreciation though I may always ask for it.I reject whining and complaining as useless distractions from direct action on or withdrawal from unacceptable situations.I let go of control without losing control.If people knew me as I really am, they would love me for being human like them.I drop poses and let my every word and deed reveal what I am really like.I live by personal standards and at the same time – in self-forgiveness – I make allowances for my occasional lapses.I grant myself a margin of error in my relationships. I release myself from the pain of having to be right or competent all the time.I accept that it is normal to feel that I do not always measure up.I am ultimately adequate to any challenge that comes to me.My self-acceptance is not complacency since in itself it represents an enormous change.I am happy to do what I love and love what is.Wholehearted engagement with my circumstances releases my irrepressible liveliness.I love unconditionally and set sane conditions on my self-giving. So get out there and be your self. Your "self" and presence are precious. Someday you and all your family members will be dead, never to be experienced ever again. You and they will not be sitting around the dinner table someday. But this Christmas,  you and they will be there, together, in the same rooms, and that is valuable beyond measure. Bring your body, mind and soul into those rooms. As much as you're able and comfortable, be the miracle that you are with those people, whether they understand that or not. Be gentle with yourself. Don't do anything you don't want to do. Be as honest as you can and look for the magic moments, as brief and rare as they may be. And remember Bob and I and the relationships you've made through this podcast and the larger atheist community and that you are LOVED just as you are, even if your family is unable to do that. Happy Holidays my agnostic friends!   We taped the conversation with Valerie Tarico on November 19th, 2017. We interview people you don’t know, about a subject no one wants to talk about. We hope to encourage people in the process of deconstructing their faith and help curb the loneliness that accompanies it. We think the world is a better place when more people live by sight, not by faith. Please subscribe to our podcast, and leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. Also, you can support us monetarily in two easy ways: you can pledge one dollar per episode or more through Patreon; that’s www.patreon.com/eapodcast, or leave a lump-sum donation through PayPal at our website, www.everyonesagnostic.com. The smallest contribution is greatly appreciated. Credits:"Towering Mountain of Ignorance" intro by Hank Green https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3v3S82TuxU Intro bumper "Never Know" by Jack JohnsonThe segue music on this episode was created by Cass Midgley Thanks for listening! And be a Yes-sayer to what is.  https://valerietarico.com/ http://www.wisdomcommons.org/ Twitter: @valerietarico  The movie, "The Mask You Live In."   

Since 2003 a rash of proposals have surfaced in communities throughout the Northwest to export vast amounts of fossil fuels to Asian markets via Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. If these plans go through the Northwest would become home to the largest oil terminal in North America, the largest coal export facility in North America, and the largest methanol refinery in the world.] This week we present Part One of Sacrifice Zones (encore edition). It's the first in a two-part series on the pressure to transform a region of iconic landscapes and environmental stewardship into a global center for shipping fossil fuels. Bernstein investigates how proposals for petrochemical development in the Pacific Northwest threatens the region's core cultural, social, and environmental values. Credits:  Sacrifice Zones was written, narrated and produced by Barbara Bernstein. Sacrifice Zones was funded by the Regional Arts and Culture Council and the Puffin Foundation. Original music was composed and performed by Barbara Bernstein and Floating Glass Balls.  Special thanks to Dan Serres, Eric de Place, Carol Newman, Peter Seigel, Steve Early, KMUN Coast Community Radio, Melissa Marsland, Jerry Mayer, Jan Zuckerman and Bill Bigelow. Making Contact Host: Monica Lopez Staff Producers: Anita Johnson, Marie Choi, Monica Lopez, R.J. Lozada Executive Director: Lisa Rudman Audience Engagement Director: Sabine Blaizin Development Associate: Vera Tykulsker For More information: Sightline Institute  http://www.sightline.org/ 350.org Seattle  http://350seattle.org/ 350.org PDX  https://350pdx.org/ Audubon Society of Portland http://audubonportland.org/ Audubon Washington http://wa.audubon.org/ Climate Solutions  https://www.climatesolutions.org/ Columbia Riverkeeper  http://columbiariverkeeper.org/ Earthjustice http://earthjustice.org/ Friends of the Columbia Gorge https://gorgefriends.org/ Friends of the Earth http://www.foe.org/ Friends of the San Juans  http://sanjuans.org/ The Lands Council https://landscouncil.org/ Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility  http://www.oregonpsr.org/ Sierra Club Washington State Chapter  http://www.sierraclub.org/washington Sierra Club Oregon Chapter  http://oregon2.sierraclub.org/chapter Washington Conservation Voters https://wcvoters.org/ Washington Environmental Council  https://wecprotects.org/ Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility https://www.facebook.com/WashingtonPSR/ The post Sacrifice Zones – Part 1 (Encore) appeared first on KPFA.

Have you ever wondered why Vancouver developers prefer to build condos while Seattle developers build apartments? Margaret Morales from the Sightline Institute in Seattle joins us to chat about her recent article, "Why Vancouver Builds Condos, while Seattle Builds Apartments," providing some insight into this cross-border phenomenon.

Guest Eric de Place, Policy Director at the Sightline Institute, speaks with Diane Horn about his new report “Northwest Targets: Communities Threatened by Coal, Oil, and Gas.“

Since 2003 a rash of proposals have surfaced in communities throughout the Northwest to export vast amounts of fossil fuels to Asian markets via Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. If these plans go through the Northwest would become home to the largest oil terminal in North America, the largest coal export facility in North America, and the largest methanol refinery in the world. As the fossil fuel industry turns up its pressure to turn the Pacific Northwest into a fossil fuel export hub, a Thin Green Line stands in its way. This week we present Part Two of Sacrifice Zones by Barbara Bernstein. It's the last episode in a two-part series on the pressure to transform a region of iconic landscapes and environmental stewardship into a global center for shipping fossil fuels. Bernstein investigates how proposals for petrochemical development in the Pacific Northwest threatens the region's core cultural, social, and environmental values. Credits:  Sacrifice Zones was written, narrated and produced by Barbara Bernstein. Sacrifice Zones was funded by the Regional Arts and Culture Council and the Puffin Foundation. Original music was composed and performed by Barbara Bernstein, Floating Glass Balls, and Anna Fritz.  Special thanks to Dan Serres, Eric de Place, Carol Newman, Peter Seigel, Steve Early, KMUN Coast Community Radio, Melissa Marsland, Jerry Mayer, Jan Zuckerman and Bill Bigelow. Making Contact Host: Monica Lopez Staff Producers: Anita Johnson, Marie Choi, Monica Lopez, R.J. Lozada Executive Director: Lisa Rudman Audience Engagement Director: Sabine Blaizin Development Associate: Vera Tykulsker   For More information: Sightline Institute  350.org Seattle  350.org PDX  Audubon Society of Portland Audubon Washington Climate Solutions  Columbia Riverkeeper  Earthjustice Friends of the Columbia Gorge Friends of the Earth Friends of the San Juans  The Lands Council Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility  Sierra Club Washington State Chapter  Sierra Club Oregon Chapter  Washington Conservation Voters Washington Environmental Council  Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility The post Sacrifice Zones – Part 2 appeared first on KPFA.

Guest Margaret Morales, Senior Research Associate at the Sightline Institute, speaks with Diane Horn about how better zoning could help dismantle structural school segregation in Seattle.

Since 2003 a rash of proposals have surfaced in communities throughout the Northwest to export vast amounts of fossil fuels to Asian markets via Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. If these plans go through the Northwest would become home to the largest oil terminal in North America, the largest coal export facility in North America, and the largest methanol refinery in the world. This week we present Part One of Sacrifice Zones by Barbara Bernstein. It's the first in a two-part series on the pressure to transform a region of iconic landscapes and environmental stewardship into a global center for shipping fossil fuels. Bernstein investigates how proposals for petrochemical development in the Pacific Northwest threatens the region's core cultural, social, and environmental values. Credits:  Sacrifice Zones was written, narrated and produced by Barbara Bernstein. Sacrifice Zones was funded by the Regional Arts and Culture Council and the Puffin Foundation. Original music was composed and performed by Barbara Bernstein and Floating Glass Balls.  Special thanks to Dan Serres, Eric de Place, Carol Newman, Peter Seigel, Steve Early, KMUN Coast Community Radio, Melissa Marsland, Jerry Mayer, Jan Zuckerman and Bill Bigelow. Making Contact Host: Monica Lopez Staff Producers: Anita Johnson, Marie Choi, Monica Lopez, R.J. Lozada Executive Director: Lisa Rudman Audience Engagement Director: Sabine Blaizin Development Associate: Vera Tykulsker For More information: Sightline Institute  350.org Seattle  350.org PDX  Audubon Society of Portland Audubon Washington Climate Solutions  Columbia Riverkeeper  Earthjustice Friends of the Columbia Gorge Friends of the Earth Friends of the San Juans The Lands Council Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility  Sierra Club Washington State Chapter  Sierra Club Oregon Chapter  Washington Conservation Voters Washington Environmental Council  Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility The post Sacrifice Zones – Part 1 appeared first on KPFA.

Guest Eric de Place, Policy Director of the Sightline Institute, speaks with Diane Horn about the environmental implications of fracked fuel and petrochemical projects in the Pacific Northwest and the status of northwest coal and oil terminals.

Guest Eric de Place, Policy Director, Sightline Institute, speaks with Diane Horn about oil transport by rail in the Pacific Northwest and the implications for climate change.

Guest Alan Durning, Executive Director, Sightline Institute, speaks with Diane Horn about I-122, the Honest Elections Seattle Initiative.

Guest Eric de Place, Policy Director, Sightline Institute, speaks with Diane Horn about the implications of oil transport by rail in the Pacific Northwest.

Guest Kristin Eberhard, Senior Researcher, Sightline Institute, speaks with Diane Horn about putting a price on carbon in Oregon and Washington State to address climate change.

Finally, there is a light rail line connecting the Twin Cities. The Green Line, running 11 miles from Union Depot in downtown St. Paul to Target Field in downtown Minneapolis, cost $957 million and several decades to build. The process of choosing stations was contentious but eventually embraced the proposals of the low-income communities that wanted stations, and the line is already being looked at as a model. It's not the fastest way between the two downtowns, but it might be the best way. Jeff and Tanya discuss. Then we sink our teeth into the Sightline Institute's proposal to change the property tax structure in order to incentivize better uses of downtown space. That might help some cities with their parking crater problem. And finally, we rejoice at Calgary's decision to tear down a whole mess of parking outside one of its light rail stations, and we discuss the balancing act between preserving broad access to transit and creating walkable, compact communities where they belong: near transit.  We can't wait to read your thoughts in the comments. PS: Get us on iTunes, Stitcher or the RSS feed. 

Guest Lisa Stiffler, journalism fellow for Sightline Institute, speaks with Diane Horn about the threat of stormwater runoff to Puget Sound waterways and stormwater solutions.

We'll hear part one of a documentary called Heavy Weather, produced by freelancer Barbara Bernstein.  She'll explore the connections between the increase in extreme weather and our changing climate and landscapes.  ‘Heavy Weather' was written, narrated and produced by Barbara Bernstein and is a production of the Media Project and Feather & Fin Productions.  Barbara Bernstein and her program, ‘Heavy Weather' were provided funding by the Regional Arts and Culture Council, the Oregon Council for the Humanities, an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ralph Smith Foundation Featuring: Philip Mote, Oregon state climatologist, with Oregon Climate Change Research Institute at OSU; Mark Cook, Lewis County's former county engineer and public works director in Washington State & runs Cook Engineering, Chehalis, WA; Kathleen Sayce, Shorebank Pacific ecologist and science officer Ilwaco, WA; Emil Pierson, City of Centralia community development director; Eric De Place, Sightline Institute senior researcher, Seattle, WA; Mark Trenholm, Wild Salmon Center in Portland; Mark Labhart, Tillamook County Commissioner, OR; Mark Gervasi, Tillamook city manager, OR; Lisa Phipps, Tillamook Estuaries Partnership director; Mike Burrough, Tillamook RV Repair and Sales owner; Dean Marriott, Portland's Environmental Services director.   The post Making Contact – Heavy Weather (Part I) appeared first on KPFA.