Credit: Cheryl Juetten
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Portland’s housing crunch has many roots, from multi-decade population growth to the broader affordability crisis sweeping the nation. But one factor stands out: Most of the city’s residential neighborhoods had been zoned exclusively for single-family homes since the late 1950s. That is, in most neighborhoods, new duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes (let alone apartment buildings) have not been allowed.
But in 2020, all that changed when Portland’s city council tossed out 60-plus years of low-density mandates by voting in favor of housing reform that ended single-family zoning. The new rules were game-changing: a package of zoning shifts known as the Residential Infill Project (RIP for short) laid the groundwork for more residential density than in most American cities. RIP made new single-family homes of over 2,500 square feet illegal. It erased bans on “middle housing” — a term describing duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes and townhomes — across the city. And it allowed for two accessory dwelling units (ADUs) on any lot, removed residential parking mandates, and permitted three-story apartment buildings of up to six homes on any lot as long as they met deep affordability standards. It amounted to a transformation in Portland’s approach to urban density, and is, to this day, one of the most pro-housing reforms that any US city has passed.
“This reform ultimately became the most permissive update to low-density single-dwelling zones in the country,” urban planning consultant Neil Heller, who helped do some of the financial modeling for RIP, writes in the latest issue of Southern Urbanism Quarterly.
Explicitly racial zoning has been illegal since 1917, but racial covenants — clauses written into deeds that bar the (white) owner from selling to non-whites — existed for decades beyond that. In 1948 the Supreme Court ruled that racial covenants couldn’t be enforced, and in 1968, the Fair Housing Act made them illegal.
But that didn’t stop racist zoning practices — cities that couldn’t ban non-white homeowners instead started banning the types of housing they believed non-white homeowners would buy. In some cities, duplex bans and even apartment bans became popular in wealthier neighborhoods. In 1959, Portland went even further, banning construction of duplexes and other attached housing in almost every neighborhood. (Portland’s loophole to this was that duplexes were allowed on corners.) “One effect, in many cities a primary goal, was to segregate people by class, race, age and income,” writes Michael Andersen, a senior housing researcher with the Sightline Institute, a progressive Seattle-based think tank. These bans on so-called “middle housing” remain in force in many cities to this day.
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