If signed by Gov. Kate Brown in the next month, House Bill 2001 will strike down local bans on duplexes for every low-density residential lot in all cities with more than 10,000 residents and all urban lots in the Portland metro area.
In cities of more than 25,000 and within the Portland metro area, the bill would further legalize triplexes, fourplexes, attached townhomes, and cottage clusters on some lots in all “areas zoned for residential use,” where only single-detached houses are currently allowed.
“There’s a lot of builders out there who want to do good and want to make the sort of houses people need, but you just can’t make a 1,000-square-foot home pencil on a $200,000 piece of property,” Messinetti [CEO of a Portland-area chapter ofHabitat for Humanity] said.
Read about the history of advocacy leading up to these changes at CityLab.
Pedestrian lighting coming soon on 11th St.
The city of Lincoln's Urban Development department's newsletter: I read it so you don't have to. Most exciting to me is that pedestrian lighting on 11th St. from A St. to J St. is expected to be installed by the end of 2019. This completes a project started 5 years ago to improve the design of 11th St. South of downtown. The delay happened because project bids have consistently exceeded the allocated budget for the project, but the city finally got a bid they can afford to pay.
Pedestrian lighting is important because lights from regular street lights often don't reach the sidewalks, due to the tree canopy and street light design. Improving lighting for pedestrians increases perceived and even actual safety, which sounds like a win to me!
Lincoln previously sought a grant to develop a new transit hub downtown, but the grant wasn't funded. Now, it's back to the drawing board to come up with proposals for a new transit transfer hub that provides covered, climate-controlled waiting areas for passengers, as well as bathrooms and connections to other modes of transportation. From the reporting, it's not clear to me why the plan that didn't get grant funding won't be built using some other funding - will a different location or type of hub make the city's grant applications to fund it more competitive? Or have conditions changed such that the previous new transit hub location and design is no longer best for the needs of the city?
Greg Shill writes that though pedestrian deaths are at the highest they've been since 1990, current trends suggest that they may continue to rise. This one's worth a click - there are just a handful of tweets to get the full picture painted by Greg.
Coming Soon
Stay tuned for an upcoming letter, where I'll share some highlights from the Nebraska Investment Finance Authority's "2019 Profile of Nebraska". (What are
you doing over the 4th of July??)
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