Fourplexes

I grew up in Springfield, Oregon, not Portland (though I was born there). One thing that has happened here (I am here now) is that as housing prices have skyrocketed, even in this working class town, is that the large backyards created when this area was developed shortly after World War II are increasingly being divided up and turned into multi-plex housing, especially when the original house was falling apart and needed to be torn down (quite common around where I grew up). So I think this is an important story, focusing on Portland in this context:

Not so long ago, the house that Laurel Moffat owns in Portland, Oregon, would have been illegal.

Moffat’s 900-square-foot space is part of a duplex, sharing a wall with another home. And the two homes are both in the backyard of an older house.

“I’d been looking on and off for three years. I was frustrated. Homes in Portland are really expensive,” said Moffat, 30, a health policy analyst for the state of Oregon.

She could afford a house above $400,000, around her county’s median home price. But in that price range, she mostly found fixer-uppers and condos with high fees, until she discovered her duplex. “I could afford a much higher-quality house as a first-time home buyer. … For a new build, that wasn’t possible except for these infill homes.”

As the housing cost crunch has spread from coastal cities to nearly every town in America, and consensus has coalesced around the idea that an undersupply of housing is to blame, many communities have changed their laws to allow more “middle” or “infill” housing in existing neighborhoods. This makes for denser living than a single-family house on a lot, but far less dense than a big apartment building.

Portland now has duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes and six-plexes. Townhouses that stack one behind another, going deep into a lot, rather than all facing the street. Houses in backyards and on wheels. “Cottage clusters” of tiny homes.

While other cities, counties and states have allowed these housing options, Portland has done more than most to create incentives for their construction.

“You can legalize any kind of housing that you want in your city. But whether or not it gets built depends on if it’s a financeable and sellable product,” said Francis Torres, a housing expert at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Portland determined that the key factor was square footage, specifically a measure known as “floor-area ratio.”

In most of the city, the updated regulations limit thesize of a single-family house to half the square footage of its lot — so on a typical 5,000-square-foot lot, the house can be a maximum of 2,500 square feet.

But if developers build something with multiple housing units, they are allowed to go bigger. On that same lot, a duplex could be 3,000 square feet, or a triplex could be 3,500 square feet, or a fourplex could be 4,000 square feet. And developers can count on making more money from those multiple units collectively than from a single-family home.

It seems to have worked: In the first year after the rules went into effect in 2021, 88 percent of new building permits were for middle housing and accessory dwelling units, far outpacing single-family homes. And fourplexes were three times as popular as duplexes and triplexes. The city said last year that it had permitted 1,400 of the denser homes in three years.

Anyone who opposes this is just flat out wrong. No one needs gigantic back yards. Build the housing!