Michael Andersen writes about housing and transportation policy as a senior researcher for Sightline Institute, the Pacific Northwest's sustainability think tank. He lives with his family in Portland, Oregon, where he’s also active as a volunteer and co-founder of the grassroots advocacy group Portland: Neighbors Welcome. From 2016 to 2020 his family lived in an 800-square-foot ADU; where he now lives in a 1,000-square-foot triplex unit in a 23-home co-housing community.
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 think
Kol 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)