Sightline Institute

A new survey of Portland’s Cully neighborhood found that backyard tiny homes on wheels and RVs, together known as mobile dwelling units (MDUs), have increased 1.8x since 2020. MDUs have recently outpaced standard accessory dwelling units (ADUs, with in-ground foundations) as the preferred way for homeowners to add more living space to their property.

Wind turbines neighbor transmission lines, connecting clean energy to the homes and businesses that need electricity. Photo by Ian Dewar Photography, via Shutterstock. The electric transmission grid—the poles and wires spanning vast distances and delivering power to our homes and businesses—is essential energy infrastructure. Everyone relies on this electricity system, but few think about it.

While ranked choice voting introduces new elements to campaigning, the day-to-day operations of running a campaign are not much different from a plurality-winner, aka “first past the post,” election. Candidates and campaigners may foster a more collaborative political environment and will likely help educate voters about the process. Multnomah County, Oregon’s most populous county, is holding its first ranked choice election this year.

Three of Washington’s gas utilities intend to pilot clean heating and cooling projects, thanks to a 2024 state law legalizing thermal energy networks (TENs). The projects would enable two college campuses to stop burning polluting gas for heat—crucial for WA’s climate goals—and the city of Vancouver, Washington, to lessen new homes’ and businesses’ strain on the grid.

Multifamily zoning in the Portland area today is overly restrictive and disproportionately near polluted freeway corridors. Oregon’s neighboring states have been addressing this by allowing more home options near major public transit investments. A new web tool makes it easy to analyze different homes-near-transit scenarios in the Portland area. This guest post by Fischer Jemison was first published on his website, urbanpdx.blog.

How ground-source heat pumps and thermal energy networks can ease Cascadia’s grid crunch. Ground-source heat pumps are the most efficient heating and cooling technology available—even more so when they’re linked together in a neighborhood-scale thermal energy network (TEN).

The Vancouver Villages Plan aims to add more homes to 17 neighborhood centers throughout the city, allowing for four- to six-story apartment buildings in the three to four blocks of these areas. It has its first city council hearing July 14.

A recent competition invited architecture students to imagine single-stair apartment building design solutions for Portland, with winners announced in late May. “Single-stair” refers to multifamily buildings that have just one central stairwell. Unfortunately, despite the attractive and thoughtful designs, none of the submissions to the contest is currently legal to build in Portland—but a few smart policy and zoning changes could solve that.

This article is part of Wildfire Wednesday, a storytelling project from 1000 Friends of Oregon that explores how land use decisions shape Oregon’s wildfire risk. Sightline broke down the risk and costs to the entire Northwest region in a report earlier this year. Nearly 390,000 Oregonians, about one in ten people, live in census tracts with high or very high wildfire hazard, and more than 20,000 people moved into fire country between 2018 and 2023.

One in four Cascadians live in homes governed by community associations such as HOAs, condos associations, or strata corporations. But many associations hamper homeowners’ efforts to install heat pumps and access clean, efficient heating and cooling through procedural hurdles, restrictive rules, and, in a few cases, outright bans.