Sightline Institute Research

AI doesn't know how many parking spaces a coffee shop in Tumwater will need in 2040. Nobody else does, either. Artificial intelligence is coming to write your city's zoning codes. Or is it? Most people assume their town's zoning rules are carefully tailored by educated planners to meet today's best practices while also ensuring future buildings integrate well with the existing community. Unfortuna...

More evidence that parking flexibility is key to housing abundance. Making parking fully flexible could unlock more new homes than other land use reforms combined, according to new research out of Colorado that modeled how multiple policies would impact economic feasibility for new housing projects. The findings add to a growing body of evidence that making off-street parking optional is a small p...

Despite intending to choose a voting day that's best for voters, timing could still be easier - and legislators can fix that. For the past 50 years, Washington has held municipal elections in November of odd-numbered years, separate from other federal, state, and county elections. Most voters are too young to remember when the state's municipal elections happened on different dates, but the timing...

Seattle's 2024 special city council election showed just how easily local voter participation could skyrocket. First-time candidate for Seattle City Council Alexis Mercedes Rinck just got more votes in her 2024 race than the city's mayor, Bruce Harrell, when he won in 2021. In fact, she got more votes than any elected official in all elections that Seattle city government has ever recorded. But it...

A Q&A with author and advocate Shamichael Hallman on how public libraries can help us rebuild civic trust and connection - if we redefine our relationship with them. "A community is not a machine. It is not a cogs-and-gears device or an elegant algorithm designed by an engineer to maximize efficiency. A community is a garden: a complex adaptive ecosystem in which all kinds of life is striving to t...

What to learn - and what to leave behind - from the 2024 ballot measure losses in Cascadia. Sooner or later, bad things happen to everyone. That's inevitable. The problem is that people often learn the wrong lessons from their misfortunes. Across Cascadia and beyond, proponents of unified primaries and ranked choice voting just had bad things happen to them. They lost four out of five statewide ba...

In a state home to five oil refineries, a forthcoming, taxpayer-funded study can answer some central questions. Yet another US oil refinery will soon shut its doors. Phillips 66 announced in October 2024 that it will close its Los Angeles refinery by the end of 2025, due to factors that include declining oil demand and slim refining margins. An estimated 900 people are likely to lose their jobs wh...

The ordinances under consideration offer commonsense solutions to address the city's longstanding housing shortage. $524,000. That's the average price of a home built for one family in Anchorage today. The average cost of new single-detached house is even steeper: $683,000. These prices, astronomical for Anchorage, have risen by 23 percent since 2020. In that same period, the city took steps to ma...

The open primaries and ranked choice voting that have delivered more representation for independents and moderate Republicans survived a repeal effort. Alaska voters narrowly decided to retain their groundbreaking election system. By a margin of just 664 votes, a ballot initiative to roll back open, top-four primaries and ranked choice general elections failed. The Alaska Division of Elections ann...

Proportional ranked choice voting lived up to the promises of the voter-approved charter reform. Well, it's working! Portlanders just used proportional ranked choice voting to elect their most representative city government in more than a century. Voters chose leaders who form a portrait of the city in miniature. The dozen councilors include three renters, five people of color, six women, eight mi...