Even for someone closely following the roller coaster ride of the last legislative session, it would have been easy to miss the last minute passing of the groundbreaking House Bill 2001 dictating that Cities over 10,000 in population essentially ban single family zoning. It failed the first time around and only at the last minute on the last day of the session did it pass.
The facts are that over 77% of Portland’s residential land is set aside for single family zoning. And in the suburbs, this percentage is even higher. This law would require that this land is available for building duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes and “cottage clusters”. The theory is that by building this “missing middle” inventory…developments that are between a single family home and an apartment building, we can provide more options for folks, build housing where the transportation and jobs are, develop more environmentally sustainable buildings and end years of segregation.
While the emphasis of the bill was to increase the inventory of housing and make housing more affordable to more income levels, by doing so, it could also accomplish much more. The fact is that exclusive zoning as we know it has been used for decades to segregate us by race, income levels and abilities. It has created areas of town that were by design unavailable to folks that could not afford to buy or rent a single family home. In his book, “The Color of Law”, Richard Rothstein outlines the statistics and they are telling. Before the Supreme Court struck down Government-instituted racial zoning policies in 1916, there were only 8 cities with zoning ordinances. Twenty years later there were 1246. While racial zoning was struck down, municipalities were able to get around it by creating exclusive zoning. Cities simply replaced racial zoning with land use zoning
I understand folks’ concern about changing the character of our neighborhoods, developers scraping small homes in order to build expensive duplexes and the increase in density that this will bring. But I think we have to reconcile that with the fact that we no longer have the luxury of leaving certain folks out of the housing solution. And exclusive zoning has always left folks out who don’t have the income to participate.
Wouldn’t we be better off if we could live in communities where the chef at the local restaurant, our senior relative on a fixed income and our grown children could afford to be our neighbors? I think so, and I think this is a step in the right direction.
