Sightline Institute Research

Underfunded inclusionary zoning programs, which likely slowed housing production in the City of Portland from 2017 to 2024, are on track to be illegal in the Portland area. A bill that cleared Oregon's legislature on March 4 requires jurisdictions in the area to regularly self-evaluate these mandatory affordability programs, if they have them, and to keep them fully funded. The legislation gained...

As of 2023, nearly 1.6 million people in the Northwest lived in areas facing high wildfire hazard, a figure that climbed eight percent since 2018. In most Northwest states, population is growing fastest in the places most likely to burn. Yet the cost of continuing to build into fire-prone areas does not stop at the edge of fire country. About 80 percent of north-westerners live outside places subj...

It went down like a game of three-card monte, with Montana voters as the mark. Eight minutes before the June primary filing deadline, Kurt Alme, who until that day was the US Attorney for the District of Montana, put his name in the running for US Senate. Moments later, sitting Senator Steve Daines dropped out and announced his retirement. After that, he and President Trump quickly fired off coord...

How Threats to Voting by Mail Could Affect Cascadia Voting by mail has a long and proven track record. It increases turnout, gives voters more time to consider issues and candidates, and saves election administrators money. It's just as free from fraud as other methods of voting—which is to say, there's virtually none. Neither Democrats nor Republicans get a particular boost from expanding access...

Through the first decades of this century, the greater Seattle area had a secret weapon for fighting climate change: it let people choose to live closer to each other. Using a study of neighborhood-level carbon emissions, Sightline estimates that new residents to the Seattle area produced about 5 percent less greenhouse gases from 2000 to 2020. That's simply thanks to their metro area being better...

Since NW Tiny Homes opened on Columbia Boulevard in Portland, Oregon, last July, business has been good. By September, the company had already hit its sales goal for the year. It sells stylish park model RVs ranging from $49,900 to $83,000, making them great options for people who are otherwise priced out of the housing market. Unfortunately, owner Jimmy Hickey frequently has to deliver bad news t...

January 1, 2026, marked the conclusion of a remarkable experiment in American ranked choice voting. A bipartisan bill passed by the Utah legislature in 2019 led some of the state's reddest cities to adopt a ranked choice voting pilot, a program widely appreciated by their mostly Republican voters. These cities reduced their election costs by 40 percent, had fewer low-plurality winners, improved re...

A new proposal to create districts in central Oregon's Deschutes County illustrates all the flaws of the winner-take-all election model that predominates in Cascadia and beyond. It's also a case study of how much better our elections could be. The Deschutes County Board of Commissioners recently proposed switching the county's election method from at-large numbered seats to single-member districts...

This January, dozens of Cascadians are sitting down for the first meetings of charter review commissions across the region with the same goal in mind: improving local government. They picked a great place to start. Municipal charter reviews—during which a panel of residents suggests amendments to what are basically local constitutions—can be a powerful and collaborative way to kickstart positive c...

Seattle's new Mayor, Katie Wilson and I share more than a few things in common. We're both parents to toddlers. Scandalously, our children's grandmothers help cover a portion of sky-high Seattle daycare costs (though my daughter's 2026 daycare cost hike just swallowed my in-laws' contribution). We're also among the roughly 50 percent of city residents who rent. Seattle renters contribute less to c...

One month after unprecedented floods surged across Washington, forcing tens of thousands of people to flee their homes, lawmakers will convene in Olympia to discuss climate policy. This latest climate change-fueled disaster, in an ever-extending string of them, is yet another reminder of what is at stake. Washington's climate ambitions hang on poles and wires. Electric transmission lines make it p...

UPDATE, Dec. 4, 2025: The proposed rules discussed in this article were unanimously approved. This article was edited to reflect minor amendments and describe the rules as approved. Two-and-a-half years after a bipartisan bill promised "transformational" changes to Oregon's housing policy, Gov. Tina Kotek's administration has completed the blueprint of that transformation. As approved by a state c...

For the first seven years of its existence, Portland's inclusionary zoning program seemed to be working like the wrong end of a magnet. Housing projects skidded, twisted, and jumped away from the city's 2017 mandate that a share of homes in most new buildings be sold or rented for less than it had cost to build them. Tens of millions of dollars flowed instead to sites just outside the limits of Or...

Delays, delays, delays. It takes forever to build the transmission lines that carry power from where it's produced to where people use it. Idaho Power and PacifiCorp can tell you. The two utilities thought they'd be starting construction back in 2018 on the Boardman-to-Hemingway (B2H) transmission line, which spans 290 miles of Idaho and Oregon. The project broke ground this summer, 19 years after...

In 2024 Alaska Democrats were understandably incensed when Eric Hafner, a convict who had never lived in their state, ran for Alaska's US House seat as a Democrat. State and federal law allowed Hafner to seek the office, and state law let him register with the party he preferred. The state Democratic Party, for its part, could do nothing. It had no way to disavow him or indicate on the ballot its...

A surplus of candidates can ruin any political campaign, and it's happened twice in recent groundbreaking elections in Cascadia. Fortunately, neighboring jurisdictions have demonstrated the solution to this problem: raise filing fees. Alaska and Portland each recently debuted a new, much-anticipated ranked choice voting method. In both places, the trouble was that putting your name on the ballot w...

When six-term US Senator Patty Murray is up for reelection in 2028, the Washington state leader will be 78 years old. If she does not retire on her own, she may well find herself challenged by younger Democrats, as is now happening to 79-year-old Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts. Gerontocracy is out of vogue among Democrats; many blame their party's loss of the presidency on 81-year-old Joe Bide...

If you had a chance to overhaul your government, where would you begin? Last year, 38 Yukoners from every corner of the territory stepped up to answer that question in a citizens' assembly on electoral reform. Their recommendation? Upgrade the Yukon Legislative Assembly's first-past-the-post elections to ranked voting, much like Alaskans did in 2020. Voting is already underway for a statewide pleb...

Speed matters. And to people looking for a home today, it matters a great deal whether that home is built next year, or in ten. If Cascadia's leaders really believed in speed, then they would focus more on re-legalizing small, neighborhood-size buildings with 6 to 12 homes each. But despite recent reforms, small apartment buildings remain illegal almost everywhere in Cascadian cities and across No...

On September 4, 2024, Democrats across Washington State let out a collective sigh of relief. A recount of the primary election finally confirmed that one of their own, then-King County Councilor Dave Upthegrove, would appear on the November ballot. Even though Democrats had won 270,000 more votes than Republicans in the primary for Commissioner of Public Lands, Upthegrove squeaked into second plac...

In 2024, Democrat-endorsed candidates swept all seven seats on the Bend Oregon, city council - even though city elections are technically nonpartisan. Democrats certainly outnumber Republicans in Bend, but 20 percent of city voters are registered with the G.O.P., and many more are not affiliated or are registered with smaller parties. Those voters don't get their views represented in their city go...

The Maine family needed a cheaper place for one of them to live. And quickly. It was 2024. Synia Maine, 56, had just developed a back injury so severe that she had to retire from her career as a hairstylist a decade earlier than planned. Suddenly, she had increased medical bills and no income. Her daughter-in-law, Ember DeVaul, recounted that they'd explored multiple options to try to keep Synia i...

Meeting Cascadia's climate goals will require millions of households to stop burning fossil fuels for warmth. In Oregon and Washington, buildings emit more pollution than any other sector besides transportation. (The building sector is the third highest emitting in British Columbia and Idaho, and fifth in Montana.) Heat pumps powered by renewable electricity are what the International Energy Agenc...

Cascadia's transition to safe, healthy, gas-free homes and businesses is not moving quickly enough, and the region's gas utilities bear much of the blame. Consider a few recent examples: In 2022 Oregon's gas utilities sued the state over its landmark Climate Protection Program, setting back implementation by at least a year. In 2023 NW Natural funded a campaign in Eugene, Oregon, to repeal the cit...

With 57 percent in favor of Proposition 1 (and 150,000 ballots in; last updated August 7, 2025), Seattle voters have reaffirmed their commitment to advancing a more democratic city government. Seattle's iconic Democracy Voucher Program will have funding for another ten years. This renewal means the city can continue to lead the way in the share of its population who contribute to city campaigns. C...