High-cost states across the West should embrace ‘choice’ in housing, Kotek says – oregonlive.com:
Gov. Tina Kotek stumped for one of her signature issues on Wednesday before an audience of housing leaders from across the West as she readies for a similar push in the Oregon statehouse.
Speaking before a meeting of the Western Governors’ Association held this week in Bend, Kotek pressed attendees from New Mexico to California to Colorado to embrace “middle housing” — duplexes, triplexes and other options between single-family houses and apartment buildings.
So the American Dream is now to own a unit in a triplex? That seems unlikely.
More likely is that a vast swath of Americans have been completely priced out of the market and will take any possible version of “home ownership” that’s available to them.
Oregon’s re-definition of residential zoning has allowed duplexes, triplexes, and quadplexes to be built in established single family home neighborhoods. This destroys the character of said neighborhood, and drives people out of communities. In other words, I don’t want to live next to a quadplex. We simply need more single family homes and a lot of them.
I acknowledge that established orthodoxy of density infill has some benefits, and I have no issues with it in, say, downtown cores. But many of us prefer and purchased homes in areas because houses weren’t built almost atop one another.