Believer, skeptic, humanist, typist & dad. Trying to make places fairer as director of cities + towns for @Sightline. Views here: mine, all mine.
Portland, OR
Joined September 2008
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Also, at least where I was spending time the high-rises were mostly commercial, which probably makes more economic sense than residential in extremely high density nodes & corridors
Tokyo seems to me like the single best argument against fighting for high-rises rather than for whatever the fuck people want on those first three stories
Michael Andersen retweeted
A good YIMBY trend is cities reducing the number of zoning districts in their code
Redmond, WA reduced to 20 zones. Vancouver, WA reduced to just 10 zones. Meanwhile Seattle has 285.
Difficult to analyze feasibility when zones are so arbitrarily dispersed like this
Michael Andersen retweeted
Amazon asked Portland for a Preapplication Meeting for a proposed delivery drone facility.
City staff chose to classify drones as "helicopters" by interpreting rules as strictly as possible, making permitting more difficult.
Now the plan is withdrawn.
portland.gov/ppd/zoning-land…
This job is sort of a big deal
We’re hiring a principal director of program development! Build our next research program (and then the next). sightline.org/principal-dire…
Michael Andersen retweeted
We’re hiring a messaging strategy manager!
Research, test, and refine pro-housing, democracy, and clean energy messages as part of Sightline’s communications team: sightline.org/manager-messag…
it's the boomingest part of the Portland metro right now, that's why prices had been spiking and the city decided to do this
Michael Andersen retweeted
My YIMBY group began 100% volunteer, like Canada's YIMBYs now, but Open NY transformed when we got a grant for our 1st employee
If US YIMBY charities tested grants in Canada, would it be welcomed as a kind of trade war reparation, or lambasted as meddling in Canadian affairs?
🏠We've added new attributes to our Affordable Housing Dataset🏠
You can now identify how many supportive units are in each record, and whether they are part of the Toronto Builds Portfolio
Here's the data: open.toronto.ca/dataset/upco…
Michael Andersen retweeted
Totally insane levels of corruption and abuse of power are swirling all around us and my sense is that as angry as voters are about the cost of living they mostly are so awash in cynicism about politics that they don’t understand how egregious Trump is.
Billions of dollars’ worth of contracts predicting oil would fall and the S&P 500 would rise were placed about 15 minutes before Trump announced a U-turn on Iran in a post on Truth Social. CFTC staff began to investigate-- then were told to lay off. bloomberg.com/news/features/…
‘Fields in 2022 floated development of a high-rise in the Pearl District, near the Broadway Corridor. But that project did not move forward.
“The one in Portland I walked away from,” he said Wednesday, citing what he called the “obvious reasons.”’
A 677-bed, 13-story glass high-rise is coming to notoriously NIMBY Corvallis, replacing the defunct muffler shop and car wash.
The building has already been approved by the city council, and has received its construction loan.
Corvallis is changing!
djcoregon.com/news/2026/10/0…
