Portland didn't just say yes to more duplexes—it quietly rewrote the math that decides what actually gets built. And the approach appears to be working, reports the Washington Post. Instead of simply lifting bans on multi-unit homes, the city tied its 2020 "middle housing" overhaul to a key number: floor-area ratio. On a typical lot, a standalone house is capped at half the lot's size, making for a 2,500-square-foot home on a 5,000-square-foot lot. But add more units, and the allowed square footage jumps, to, say, 3,000 square feet for a duplex or 4,000 square feet for a fourplex. That gives developers a financial reason to build duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes—even sixplexes—instead of one large home.
The result: In the first year after the rules took effect in 2021, nearly 9 in 10 new permits were for "middle housing and accessory dwelling units," easily outstripping single-family homes. Portland has since greenlit about 1,400 such homes, with fourplexes dominating. These units often list for hundreds of thousands less than nearby single-family houses, and average prices for this "starter" stock have dropped from more than $800,000 in 2018 to roughly $615,000 in 2024. Oregon's 2019 ban on single-family-only zoning helped enable the shift, and advocates say the approach is now being exported—sometimes in contrast to places like Minneapolis, where similar zoning changes didn't come with the same incentives and have produced fewer homes. Read the full story.
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