Last year, California and Washington passed laws to make it easier to allow midrise buildings to be built near transit stations throughout the state. Oregon did not.
According to Fischer Jemison, who runs urbanpdx.blog, transit-oriented upzoning in Portland could help answer the ridership recovery issues that TriMet is having.
He joins us to share more on the benefits and challenges of transit upzoning.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed using AI and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle studio at OPB this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Last year, California and Washington passed laws to allow mid-rise buildings near transit stations statewide. Oregon did not. My next guest says that was a missed opportunity, but one that lawmakers in Salem should address in the coming session. Fischer Jemison runs urbanpdx.blog. He says that upzoning near transit hubs could boost housing production and the use of public transit, and he joins us now. Fischer Jemison, welcome to Think Out Loud.
Fischer Jemison: Thanks, Dave. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Miller: As I mentioned, your new blog post is all about transit-oriented development, and we’re gonna dig into a lot of the details in just a second, but I want to start with a bigger picture question. What is the overall problem that you want to solve?
Jemison: Yeah, absolutely. I think people come to this issue from two different directions. I know a lot of folks in the housing and land use advocacy space who are really interested in the question of, we have a housing shortage, we know that we need to build more housing in our cities, and we know that we need to do it in a way that creates homes that folks can actually afford in those cities. And so where is the right place to put those homes?
And you know, if you spend enough time in the space, I think the obvious answer that starts to jump out is, let’s put more of them near our transit stops, because we know that we actually have the transportation infrastructure there to get those folks moving around the city without creating new traffic and congestion and those kind of issues.
And this has a really nice intersection as well with a second issue, and this is where I come to this from, which is, TriMet is in a budget crisis right now. We are, hopefully next year, going to pass a bill in the state legislature that’s going to appropriate new funding for TriMet and solve that budget crisis. But in the long term, we want to be asking, how can TriMet run really high levels of service with high ridership and less subsidy, so that those services can be more stable over time and so that we’re not coming back in the next once-in-a-decade transportation bill and doing a second bailout of TriMet?
And it turns out that this question of land use around transit stations is really critical for that as well, because that’s the big input that determines transit ridership is, how dense are the areas around your stations and how many people live within walking distance to them?
Miller: Walking distance as opposed to, say, park and ride.Your real focus is being, like what’s the radius that is the magic radius? How close does it have to be for you to consider a housing development to be a transit-oriented development?
Jemison: About a half mile is the sweet spot that we’re seeing in a lot of places. This is what transit planners call the “catchment area” of a station. And the idea is, that’s around the right distance where most people feel like they can walk to a train station, take a train to their job, and have a reasonable travel time.
Miller: OK, like something like a 10,12-minute walk within that, at a comfortable walking pace, a half mile?
Jemison: Yes, exactly.
Miller: What did Washington and California lawmakers do last year?
Jemison: Washington and California both passed bills that required individual cities to change their zoning laws to legalize what you would broadly call mid-rise housing near transit. Both of them recognize that they have different types of transit systems in the state, and different types of transit can support higher levels of density.
As an example, California is requiring cities to allow nine-story buildings close to BART stops – BART being the heavy rail system in the Bay Area – but only six-story buildings near high frequency bus service, and Washington is similar, but they’ve used a slightly different metric. So in both of these states over the next couple of years, as cities are redoing their zoning plans to comply with state law, they’ll have to update their zoning maps to allow those higher levels of density.
Miller: So when you are talking about transit-oriented development in, let’s just say in the Portland area to start with, are you focused only on MAX trains, on commuter or light rail? What about express bus lines or just every other bus line?
Jemison: I’d kind of like us to take an all of the above approach, and I think we should borrow the approach from California, where we are looking at different transit systems saying, “Yeah, how much density can they support?” and metering out how much density we require cities to build.
What I would really like to see is requiring true mid-rise housing to be allowed near our MAX system, and requiring smaller scale apartments near our frequent buses and our FX bus service, so that would be the difference between something like the HollywoodHUB development in Hollywood right now, is a 12-story building, that’s probably a little bit larger than we’d want the state to compel near Max stations; whereas by contrast – a lot of lots near the FX2 is the bus rapid transit line that I live near – a lot of those lots, you can’t even build a small three story apartment building with six units in it.
Miller: That’s in Southeast Portland on Division.
Jemison: Yes, that’s correct.
Miller: We’re getting into the details here that are important, because I think that’s where a lot of Portlanders are going to really start to be able to understand the potential ramifications of what you’re calling for. But just to stick with the big picture for a second, obviously, for MAX lines, the only commuter light rail system that we have in the state is in the Portland metro area. If, to a large extent, you’re focused on Portland, why would the state legislature have to weigh in?
Jemison: I think there’s two reasons that we’d really benefit from state action. One is that the local governments here actually have a lot of constraints on their ability to do this kind of upzoning. You would think of Portland Metro as the government body that would normally coordinate a large-scale upzoning around the MAX. But Metro is actually restricted in its charter from compelling upzoning in single family neighborhoods, which, it turns out, is actually where we get a lot of the benefit from this kind of upzoning. The fact that many of our single family neighborhoods end right next to MAX stops. So by contrast, the state sets all of the rules around zoning and doesn’t have those kinds of legal restrictions.
The other thing that I think is helpful to think about is that this kind of transit-oriented upzoning is really a long term policy investment. We’re talking about, not the next five years, not even necessarily the next 10 years, but really, what does the next 20 years of housing development look like around our transit systems? And so this is a law that would help guide land use rules if we were to build light rail in other cities in Oregon in the future.
I know that’s been a discussion in Salem at times. It would also potentially help us have more sustainable land uses around bus rapid transit systems like Eugene has, and there’s also been some discussion about expansion of inner-city rail, maybe along the Amtrak Cascades, maybe establishing new routes. So doing this statewide would really ensure that those expansions outside of Portland metro would benefit as well.
Miller: You created a tool that lets people explore the potential effects of different kinds of upzoning changes. Can you describe what you created, and what you yourself have learned from it?
Jemison: Yeah, absolutely. The tool is called “Bring Your Own Transit Oriented Development,” or BYOTOD. And the idea is that, when you see different transit-oriented development proposals in different states, they often have variation in how much density they require, what kind of transit modes they apply to. And people who are talking about this love to debate the outcomes of, how much does it matter if we upzone around bus stations? How much does it matter if we’re talking about four stories versus six stories for upzoning?
And I’d already done some work to put together maps for this, and realized that a web tool that’s interactive is just the right way to do it. And when you’re looking at those visuals, I think a couple things start to become really obvious. One is that a lot of our MAX stations in the city of Portland, where I’ve been focused the most, do have some apartments allowed near transit stops, but what they’re missing is that catchment area approach. So you’ll see a couple of blocks around the station upzoned, but a big part of that half-mile radius neglected.
Miller: So this gets us to your proposal, which would be that the state requires cities to allow slightly higher apartment buildings, say three-story ones, in some neighborhoods, and then four or five-story ones near rapid bus lines and eight-story ones near MAX stops.
Just to put this in perspective, if your proposal were to go through, three-story apartment buildings would be allowed in Irvington and Woodstock, four-story ones in South Tabor and plenty of other neighborhoods in Portland, and eight-story ones in parts of Ladds Addition and Laurelhurst. It’s not hard to imagine the enormous pushback you or lawmakers would get from very wealthy and potentially politically powerful Portlanders. How would you sell this politically?
Jemison: A big thing that I like to emphasize in communicating about this to folks is that a thing we’ve seen in upzoning in Portland in the past couple of years is that we do very small upzonings, and that leads to very intensive redevelopments of those areas, Kind of bringing it back to Southeast Division, this is a thing that a lot of people remember about this neighborhood is that, I think around 2015, the city changed the rules to allow mixed use buildings in like a one or two-mile strip along Division. And those immediately all got redeveloped.
What I think is worth emphasizing when we’re talking about these much larger scale upzonings is that there actually isn’t an unlimited amount of demand for new housing in the city of Portland, in Portland metro, in the United States. And we definitely shouldn’t look at smaller scale upzonings that lead to very intensive redevelopment and assume that’s going to work the same way for a larger scale upzoning. In reality, what this would cause is a very gentle incremental redevelopment over the course of potentially many decades.
Miller: But then is that, I mean, is the way you’re trying to assuage people’s potential concerns, does it undercut your argument that this could have a major positive effect on transit use? If it could take decades for some of these larger apartments to go in, then how would TriMet benefit from more riders close to some of their stops?
Jemison: That’s a great question. I think that we would still see an increase in density in these neighborhoods and we’d still see development. It’s just that, because it’s not concentrated in one specific place, it would feel less like a big bang overhaul of the neighborhood all at once.
Miller: Are you assuming that some of this new capacity would come from single family homes, or maybe, say, two of them, if a developer is able to buy a couple next to each other, or three next to each other? That they’d be torn down and replaced with a six-story building surrounded by single-family four squares?
Jemison: That is correct, and I do think that’s the direction the city is going with some other policy proposals they’ve looked at as well, which is recognizing that we need to start making that transition to a more denser urban form, particularly in the inner neighborhoods and the transit accessible neighborhoods where it’s appropriate.
Miller: How do you explain the fact that these bills passed our neighbors to the south and to the north, but not here? I guess I’m just wondering if you see champions for a policy change like this in Oregon right now?
Jemison: There are definitely some champions for this kind of policy in the state. I know that Senator Khanh Pham is someone who is always looking for more ways to support our transit systems. And I also know that our governor has been a huge ally of housing reform in the past, and I think her approach in the past couple of years has been really to get the middle housing reforms right.
Miller: Middle housing being, an example of the sort of lower level upzoning, instead of having a single family, you could have a quad-cluster or you could have a duplex or a triplex. So upzoning, but not on the same scale that you’re calling for now near transit?
Jemison: Yes, exactly. Although there’s a little bit of overlap on the smaller end when you talk about a three-story apartment near a bus stop, I would arguably call that a middle housing home, but that’s kind of a technical distinction. My hope would be that now that we feel that middle housing rules are in pretty good shape, that we start asking, what’s the next big thing that’s missing in Oregon housing policy?
Miller: Fischer Jemison, thanks so much for your time. I appreciate it.
Jemison: Thanks so much. It’s been a pleasure.
Miller: Fischer Jemison runs the urbanpdx blog. There’s a link to his recent post on our website, opb.org/thinkoutloud.
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