How Portland Learned Housing Mistakes From San Francisco

Portland achieved something San Francisco has spent years promising and failing to do: It delivered a significant amount of “missing middle” housing.

Portland permitted about 2,200 townhomes, duplexes and similar small-scale multifamily units from 2021 through 2024, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. San Francisco approved roughly one-sixth as many in that time, despite comparable scarcity of these types of homes and increasing housing prices pushing out residents.

In Portland, this missing middle housing has created a tier of for-sale product priced hundreds of thousands of dollars below the market rate for detached single-family houses.

In San Francisco, starter homes and condos surge further and further out of reach, weighed down by high land costs, ballooning homeowners’ association fees and a permitting process that can drag on for years.

Both cities pursued similar zoning reforms meant to break the single-family mold. Oregon effectively ended single-family zoning in 2019, and Portland implemented it in 2021 as the Residential Infill Project. That law, like California’s Senate Bill 9, passed in 2021, allows owners to split lots and build duplexes on single-family parcels. Portland expanded the law in 2022 to allow for even more housing types.

Unlike the Oregon law, California requires anyone dividing a lot to live there for at least three years. These owner-occupancy requirements scared off developers in San Francisco and proved too complex for most homeowners, the outlet said.

San Francisco added more hurdles, including a holding period before approvals, which invites appeals and neighborhood pushback. Even projects theoretically eligible for streamlined review can get snagged by the city’s dense web of building codes, fees and design requirements.

City leaders in Portland, meanwhile, resisted homeowner pressure to water down the rules and instead leaned into density, tying allowable building size to the number of units produced.

Smaller units led to lower prices, and by-right approvals guaranteed speed and certainty that the projects will actually get built.

Portland also simplified its code and temporarily suspended some fees, making construction more feasible for builders. The result has been a surge in townhomes and cottage clusters in Portland. Developers can now move from permit to sale in a matter of months, according to the outlet.

“In Portland, we’re just trying not to become San Francisco,” Tina Kotek, then-speaker for the Oregon House of Representatives, told the Los Angeles Times in 2019. Kotek was elected governor of Oregon in 2022.

— Chris Malone Méndez