Category: legislature

legislature, Urbanism

Ron Davis, Running for the State House on an Urbanist Platform, Says North Seattle Is Ready for a Change

By Erica C. Barnett

At least two Seattle candidates are betting that this is the year voters will decide to replace longstanding Democratic state legislators with progressive newcomers who want to move forward quickly with pro-housing, pro-worker agendas. If either succeeds, it will be a repudiation of the received wisdom that entrenched incumbents have an unshakeable advantage.

The first candidate, Ron Davis, will be familiar to PubliCola readers—he ran for City Council in northeast Seattle’s District 4 in the 2023 election, losing narrowly to Maritza Rivera in a year when moderates swept the council elections. Davis is running against 46th District Rep. Gerry Pollet. Pollet, appointed in 2011, leads an environmental group that advocates for cleaning up the Hanford nuclear site; as a legislator, he has worked to defeat or water down bills that would allow more housing in single-family neighborhoods.

In 2022, the state House Democratic Caucus voted to remove housing issues from Pollet’s committee—a decision that was quickly followed by several years of pro-housing legislation that forced cities dominated by suburban-style housing to allow apartments in neighborhoods, not just on busy streets.

Davis is hoping his North Seattle neighbors will get behind his explicitly urbanist agenda—and reject what he calls Pollet’s anti-growth approach.

“He’s been sort of the chief NIMBY in the Democratic caucus,” Davis said. “He does not want anything that involves changing the landscape in any way.” For instance, Davis points out Pollet’s opposite to accessory dwelling units, his support for adding additional environmental review to the long-delayed completion of the Burke-Gilman Trail through Ballard, and opposition to the low-density multifamily buildings known as “missing middle” housing.

“I think there is a set of people whose idea of being an environmentalist, like his, remains sort of stuck in the 1970s Malthusian, Thanos kind of worldview—like, ‘There should be less people in the world,'” Davis said. “I really don’t think that’s going to be most voters.'”

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(After we published this story, Pollet’s team contacted us to say that Pollet co-sponsored HB 1110, which required cities to allow up to six apartments per lot; that he co-sponsored a transit-oriented development bill we covered last year; and that he voted for a middle-housing bill, HB 1782, that included a huge number of loopholes and exemptions.

He also sponsored his own middle-housing bill,  HB 1981, which included poison-pill elements such as concurrency requirements—a common preemptive tactic for preventing new housing—and protections for historic buildings, trees, and “access to sunlight” in residential areas, among other provisions that would restrict new housing. Pollet sponsored amendments to water down both 1110 and 1782), for instance, and attempting to make it harder to build in areas at “high risk of displacement” where urbanists would argue more housing is also necessary.

Pollet has championed the inclusion of more affordable housing in new developments, backed rent stabilization bills, and supported adding back neighborhood centers that former mayor Bruce Harrell removed from Seattle’s comprehensive plan. However, he also argued the city should require private developers to ensure that up to 25 percent of all new units near transit are affordable to people making as little as 0 percent of median income (and up to 80 percent), an idea that seems designed to kill rather than encourage housing even without the bill’s language about protecting trees, historic structures, and access to sunlight.)

On the surface, there seem to be plenty of voters in North Seattle who agree, at least nominally, with Pollet’s slow-growth agenda; in 2024, running essentially unopposed (the other candidate was a Republican), Pollet got more than 83 percent of the vote.

But Davis thinks North Seattle voters will support his ambitious vision, which also includes universal child care; removing police accountability from the list of conditions police unions can negotiate as part of their contracts; replacing endless highway megaprojects with state investments in local transit; and using creative tools like revolving loan funds and state-funded Section 8-style vouchers to expand access to affordable housing and backfill federal funding cuts. All of this would probably require more funding than the state will take in from the “millionaire’s” income tax, which still has to withstand a court challenge after passing this year; Davis says that even with that tax in place, Washington’s tax system will still be more regressive than most other states.

Davis also said he wants to see stronger sanctions against ICE than Democrats in the legislature managed to muster so faåår.” I see our Democrats in Olympia saying, ‘Oh my God, there’s a fascist takeover of the federal government. It’s a threat to our basic freedoms,'” Davis said when we spoke late last month. “And then they’re like, ‘We have a mask ban that says maybe you could sue, but only if they violate your constitutional rights.’ I mean, God, are you fucking kidding?”

Davis said he’d support creating a state-funded “civilian response team” to serve as “the vanguard of resistance” if and when ICE descends on Washington state en masse. He’d also support legislation to “punish Vichy collaborators,” like a proposal last session that would have barred law enforcement agencies from hiring people who worked for ICE during the second Trump Administration.

In fact, Davis says he’d support going even further, by keeping them from taking “any state- or locally funded job, or contracting job, ever again.” Asked whether this kind of mass punishment paints every ICE employee with too broad a brush, Davis said, “I’m talking about who’s participating in this process [of targeting and abducting people perceived as immigrants] now. So you time bound it, and give people notice that they have six weeks or two weeks to quit or whatever.”

When Davis ran for council in 2023, he had a hyperlocal pitch: Elect me, and I’ll work to establish 15-minute neighborhoods and build “intermediate” housing solutions for people experiencing homelessness, including tiny house villages. Three years later, it’s clear that most of Seattle’s new urbanist policies were the result of action by the stateles  legislature, including Sens. Jessica Bateman (D-22, Olympia) and Emily Alvarado (D-34, Seattle), which forced cities to allow denser housing near transit stops and in traditional single-family neighborhoods, to widespread NIMBY chagrin.

Davis said his own experience “putting together the coalition that passed the parking reform bill”—a Bateman bill that placed limits on how much parking cities can require in new developments—made him realize “I could get more done in just a few months” in Olympia than the council, with its Seattle Process, often gets done in years. Not only that, he said, the state has the power and funding potential to pull off bigger things—like universal child care, housing, and supplementary funding for local buses.

When I mentioned the conventional wisdom that legislators don’t have much power until they’ve been around a while, Davis pointed to examples like Bateman (elected in 2020) and Alvarado (elected to the House in 2022). “It’s not as if they showed up and the skies parted,” Davis said, “but I do feel like they’ve moved much more quickly, and they haven’t listened the conventional wisdom, which is that you have to put your head down for many, many years” before getting anything done.

Next up: Progressive renter Hannah Sabio-Howell challenges Sen. Jamie Pedersen, a member of the state legislature for 20 years.

legislature, Mayor Wilson, Media, Police

SPD Claims “300% Increase In Justice” Due to Surveillance Camera HQ; Judge Rules Against Activists in Press Pass Case

1.  The Seattle Police Department announced earlier this month that its Real Time Crime Center, which receives live feeds from dozens of police surveillance cameras trained on neighborhoods across Seattle, “Triples the Odds That a Victim Receives Justice.” That’s a bold claim for an operation that just got access to live surveillance footage late last summer, when the City Council approved the controversial cameras.

SPD, which is pushing Mayor Katie Wilson to expand police cameras into more Seattle neighborhoods, is using stats like this to convince Wilson that the benefits of surveilling Seattle residents outweigh privacy and overpolicing concerns. (And it appears to be working).

But what does a “300 percent increase in victims receiving justice” mean? SPD canceled a scheduled interview with PubliCola seven minutes before it was supposed to happen—according to Mayor Wilson’s office, SPD put out their press release before the mayor’s office had a chance to look at the report—so all we can go on is the scanty data they provided us prior to our scheduled interview.

That data shows that the 300 percent increase represents an uptick in how often a dispatch (such as a 911 call) resulted in an arrest, broken down further into arrests that included violent crimes and those that were primarily property crimes. Overall, 11.7 percent of dispatches that “involved” the RTCC in some way resulted in an arrests, while just 2 percent of dispatches where the center was not involved resulted in an arrest. The data does not show whether arrests resulted in prosecutions, the percentage of arrested people who went to jail, the demographics of arrestees, or how the RTCC was “involved” in the arrests.

Even with the lack of information beyond arrests, it’s important to note that SPD is describing arrests in themselves as a form of justice, when they could just as easily represent the kind of over-policing that often results when police concentrate their energy on specific neighborhoods and communities. As SPD’s blog post noted (in order to make the opposite point), the new cameras are not located randomly; they’re trained on “high-crime” neighborhoods, including Aurora Ave. N and downtown; if the planned expansion moves forward, SPD cameras are also coming to the Central District and Capitol Hill.

SPD’s blog post goes so far as to describe every arrested person as an “offender,” regardless of whether they were ever prosecuted or found guilty of a crime.

Unsurprisingly, the data showed that in general, SPD was more likely to arrest a person for calls that involved a violent rather than a property crime.

2. Yesterday, a US federal district judge ruled that three right-wing activists—Brandi Kruse, Jonathan Choe, and Ari Hoffman—were not entitled to press passes allowing them into the non-public press areas inside the state house and senate. The three had requested day passes from the Washington State Capitol Correspondents’ Association (CC, saying that they were journalists and should be allowed the same access as the rest of the press.

*Except when requesting special access to legislators, apparently

Kruse, a former FOX 13 reporter, has posted over and over (and over) on X, “I am not a journalist.” She frequently speaks at right-wing rallies, including a rally against trans children held at City Hall last year. Choe, a former KOMO reporter, works for Turning Point Media, the campus activism group founded by Charlie Kirk, and the Discovery Institute, the local right-wing think tank that spawned influential MAGA activist Chris Rufo. Hoffman is a onetime City Council candidate who has a talk show on KVI Radio; he also plagiarized PubliCola on at least one occasion, directly stealing quotes and reporting and representing our work as his own.

Both Choe and Kruse recently took part in a cringe-inducing praise circle at the White House, at which Kruse told Trump that supporting him had made her “more attractive.”

The CCA guidelines for press access say, “It is important that a line be established between professional journalism and political or policy work. This is the spirit in which the Legislature has offered access: The press should act as an independent observer and monitor of the proceedings, not an involved party. This means that we cannot endorse offering credentials to one who is part of, or may become involved with, a party, campaign or lobbying organization,” even if that person worked as a journalist in the past.

The judge in the case, David Estudillo, wrote in his ruling that the CCA rules require media to work for an organization “whose principal business is news dissemination” rather than political activities. Although the three activists accused the organization that issues press passes of being biased against them because of their political views, Judge Castillo noted that the legislature has issued badges to media across the political spectrum; the difference in this case, he wrote, was that all three activists’ main job is advocating and speaking on behalf of political campaigns and causes.

As an example, Estudillo noted that Kruse was a listed speaker at a recent rally outside the state Capitol advocating for two anti-trans initiatives targeting children. The first would overturn state legislation designed to protect LGBTQ+ kids from being outed to their parents if they confide in a trusted adult at school; the second would bar trans girls from participating in school sports. Kruse and the other activists were arguing, in essence, that they should be allowed to headline a rally calling for the repeal of state legislation on the Capitol Steps, walk inside, and demand special access to the state legislators they were just rallying against by claiming to be “media.”

Density, housing, legislature, Maybe Metropolis

An Alternative Approach to Creating Affordable Housing: Inside-Out Urbanism
Image of a four-unit apartment building
Sneaky urbanism adds housing inside the existing buildable footprint—and can be a way to expand the footprint in advance of major zoning changes.

By Josh Feit

The city of Seattle was supposed to be done with its 10-year comprehensive plan update more than a year ago, in December 2024. The comp plan is the document that governs local land use and zoning, which means it’s also about where the city will (and won’t) allow more density. As you know, it’s now 2026.

This should give you an idea of how many deadlines we’ve missed. Here we are, 14 months on, and pro-housing advocates are still waiting as the city braces for yet more debates over the specifics of the Neighborhood Center and Urban Center strategy that, sigh, continues to cordon density into tightly constricted areas.

We don’t have the luxury of waiting for the city to take action. It’s time to take matters into our own hands—at least as we wait for the new pro-density council members like Eddie Lin and Dionne Foster to join forces with Alexis Mercedes Rinck and new self-avowed urbanist Mayor Katie Wilson to get the zoning right. In the meantime, I’m hopeful about an emerging method to usher in the dense housing we need citywide to address the affordability and climate crises: Instead of fixating on wholesale land use changes, focus on discrete housing regulations with piecemeal reforms. Devious density.

I’m not advocating for timid tinkering around the edges. I’m thinking of ingenious hacks that are possible within the restrictive height limits, contorted floor area ratio guidelines, and setback requirements that currently define and limit the number of units you can fit into an apartment building. Like rearranging how you pack your suitcase rather than buying a bigger suitcase, affordable housing advocates should change the construction equation inside apartment buildings themselves.

Pro-density progressives in Washington state have already had success with this sneaky inside-out approach. In 2025, they won parking reform, which maximizes the square footage available for housing by lowering building costs and forgoing the need for carports and underground garages. Similarly, in 2023, advocates succeeded in passing the nation’s first-ever single-staircase bill, a reform that frees up space for more units in the same building footprint by getting rid of unnecessary two-staircase mandates.

Another recent bit of tactical urbanism, passed last year, made an exception to mandatory setbacks (the distance a building must be from the street and other lot boundaries) for smart construction methods like mass timber, passive house, and modular construction, as well as for affordable housing units.

In the current legislative session, pro-housing advocates are now on their way to passing elevator reform, which will lower costs for developers, hopefully hastening construction of more units.

As I reported last week: While the elevator industry stripped out a push for universal reform, urbanists are still set to pass a deceptively specific change at the ground level. The legislation will change elevator size guidelines for apartment buildings up to six stories tall, lowering costs and allowing more units. This detail-oriented code change will open the doors to multifamily housing in neighborhoods where the the overall zoning remains antagonistic to this type of renter-friendly development.

Consider this “within-the-envelope”-approach a pro-housing hack against the classic anti-density refrain about “neighborhood character.” (The housing “envelope” is the planning term for the ultimate size allowed for a development after all the setback, density, height, and other parameter guidelines are taken into account.) By adding the potential for more units within buildings that are visually in sync with the surrounding area, pro-housing advocates may reveal what intransigent NIMBYs actually mean when they say “character.”

housing, legislature

Elevator Followup: Reform Bill Watered Down
Dinkun Chen, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By Josh Feit

The state legislature got stuck on the second provision of the elevator reform bill we reported on earlier this month. The evidently controversial section would have directed the state’s Department of Labor and Industries to support harmonization between national and international elevator standards

Currently, elevators cost three times as much in the US and Canada as they do in the rest of the world, thanks to inflexible standards that limit elevator production, installation, and repair to a handful of companies. Among other issues, elevators have to be much larger here than in other countries, where builders can choose from a much longer roster of safe, reliable elevator companies.

The legislation, which passed the senate early this month before getting amended in the house this week, would still shrink elevator size requirements in smaller apartment buildings; that provision was a YIMBY goal to help lower costs for missing-middle housing. But the harmonization standard was meant to elevate Washington as a national example and lead other states to follow suit in a challenge to the elevator industry’s monopolistic hold over the US. That larger goal could have helped bring down elevator costs across the board.

As they say: follow the money.  While several groups testified in  favor of the original bill, including both the commercial real estate association and  housing density environmentalists from Futurewise and Sightline, there was only one opponent: The National Elevator Industry, Inc. Their lobbying firm? McBride Public Affairs.

It’s not so much that the elevator industry is writing gargantuan checks to McBride ($9,000 in total from the NEII and elevator company TK Elevator combined this month.) It’s that McBride’s list of clients—AMGEN, Boeing, Honda, McDonald’s, Uber, Molson Coors, and it goes on—means McBride has a hold over legislators. McBride’s client list is so all-encompassing, they also represent NAIOP WA, the real estate advocates who testified in favor of the legislation.

One of the main proponents of the bill is elevator reform advocate Stephen Smith; he wrote an influential in-depth study of the elevator industry oligopoly and its inflationary hold on the North American market. Smith wouldn’t speak to the behind scenes efforts of his foes to sway votes. But he quipped: “I hope it isn’t an anticompetitive effort to keep barriers to entry in the market and stop smaller manufacturers from entering.”

legislature, Women

Bill Targeting Sex Buyers Would No Longer Result in Immediate Felony Charges

But an attempt to decriminalize sex work—another component of the “Nordic model”—failed.

By Erica C. Barnett

State legislation that would have made it a first-strike felony, rather than a misdemeanor, to pay another person for sex or “sexual contact” has gone through several revisions since late January, when King County prosecutors gave a lurid, exploitative presentation to the Seattle City Council in an effort to drum up support for the bill. Last week, the proposal passed out of a House committee on a contentious 5-4 vote; from there, it faces an uphill battle in its current form.

In its original iteration, the legislation—sponsored by Democrats Chris Stearns (D-47, Auburn) and Lauren Davis (D-32, North Seattle)—would have made it a Class C felony, punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000, to pay another person for sex. The bill would have also changed the term “patronizing a prostitute” to “commercial sexual exploitation”—the same term used, incidentally, in Seattle’s anti-prostitution laws.

However, after blowback from the county prosecutors’ presentation drew new attention to the bill, the proposal underwent a transformation, including a proposal from Rep. Tarra Simmons (D-23, Bremerton) that would have decriminalized sex work statewide.

Simmons called decriminalization a necessary component of the so-called “Nordic model,” a widely adopted approach that criminalizes sex buyers in an attempt to eliminate demand.

“I was trafficked as a young girl,” Simmons said. “If you want to get to exploitation and get to trafficking and to solve the issue and to protect the victims, you have to do both—not just increase penalties, but allow the victims to be victims and not be criminalized.”

Decriminalization went a step too far for other House Democrats, but the version that passed out of the House Community Safety Committee last week does include some significant changes from the original proposal.

First, it raises the crime of patronizing a sex worker to a gross misdemeanor for the first two offenses, rather than a felony; the third time, it becomes a felony, as in the original version. The amended bill also replaces the phrase “commercial sexual exploitation” with the more neutral term “patronizing a person for prostitution.”

Under the bill, sex work would remain illegal, but sex workers would get two shots at “services”—which Simmons said might include job training, treatment, and counseling—before they’re prosecuted for prostitution, a misdemeanor.

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During last week’s committee meeting, Rep. Davis argued that by not raising the crime of paying for sex to a first-strike felony (that is, by increasing it from a misdemeanor to a gross misdemeanor for the first two offenses) will only result in more women being exploited and trafficked.

“These women are not entrepreneurs. The term ‘sex work’ implies volition,” Davis said.

“Representing North Aurora. I’ve learned some things,” Davis continued. “There’s a kind of pimp called a gorilla pimp. Gorilla pimps dominate their victims by force and violence. I know of a gorilla pimp who took razor blades to his victim’s back, and another who had his victim mauled by dogs.” In her district, which includes Shoreline, street sex work starts at the Seattle city line, she said, because “there’s no enforcement” of anti-prostitution laws in Seattle. (Other theories include a relative lack of cheap motels and significantly better street design north of 145th.)

Charging sex buyers with a gross misdemeanor, rather than a felony, would “also make it easier for pimps to recruit, because there’s no legal liability, there’s no downside,” Davis said. This is a confusing claim: Promoting prostitution—being a pimp—is a Class B felony, punishable by up to ten years in prison, which seems like a pretty big potential downside. Building a case against a trafficker or pimp is harder and more time-consuming than doing the kind of quick-hit sting operations favored by police departments, however.

Davis pointed out that there’s actually a third part of the Nordic model—ample, freely available services, including treatment and housing, none of which are funded through the amended bill. Simmons agreed that the state should fund more services for trafficking victims, and said she’d like to start with more funding for peer support—people with direct experience in the sex trade who can talk to people who are being exploited and “hold their hand and take them to safety” away from their traffickers and pimps.

“I’ve never seen problems solved through increasing penalties,” Simmons said. “I don’t think johns are going to stop and think, ‘This is gonna be two days in jail [versus] a month in jail.’ They’re not thinking about that.”

Rep. Brian Burnett (R-12, Wenatchee) said his own daughter was trafficked and “raped literally thousands of times over the course of eight or nine years.” As the only trafficking survivor on the panel, though, Simmons said she “felt invisible a lot of times.”

“I also felt like they were missing the point of helping the victims and survivors,” Simmons said. “They’re not going to accept help from law enforcement, because they’re going to run.”

This story originally misattributed Rep. Burnett’s comment to Rep. Stearns. We regret the error.

 

Affordability, housing, legislature, Maybe Metropolis

Elevating the Affordable Housing Issue

By Josh Feit

How can we increase affordable housing production? According to Senate Bill 5156, one button we can press is elevator reform. Sponsored by State Sen. Jesse Salomon (D-32, Shoreline), the legislation would allow the state to change current elevator rules that—practically speaking—force builders to buy from an elevator manufacturing oligopoly. His idea: Allow smaller elevators as a way to bring down the cost of housing.

In 2024, a 100-page white paper from the Center for Building in North America outlined how a clutch of firms, including Otis and Kone, have signed onto a binding labor agreement  mandating a set of inflexible elevator specifications that define and limit elevator production in the US and Canada. These specifications, including exclusive propriety installation and repair standards, cut out a bevy of reputable and safe elevator makers that serve the rest of the world.

Prompted by the 2024 report, pro-housing advocates nationwide have been making elevators a YIMBY agenda item. As part of this lift, Sen. Salomon’s aspirational bill would allow changes to Washington state’s building code that could, according the urbanist nonprofit Sightline, increase the production of affordable, smaller-scale multifamily housing: “Apartment buildings with at most six stories and at most 24 units,” specifically, per Salomon’s bill.

The logic goes like this: State-by-state elevator regulations mandate unnecessarily oversized elevators.  As a result, according to the CBNA report,  elevators in North America are more expensive than elevators in the rest of the world. The report found that elevators cost around $50,000 to install in Europe while in the US and Canada, “these installations start at around $150,000.”

As the summary report on Salomon’s bill notes, this means that “currently, buildings either must have large elevators or [developers] are likely not to build them at all.” This second point gets at a cruel irony about opposition to the legislation.

One rationale for the current size standards is to ensure that elevators accommodate disabled tenants who rely on wheelchairs and make it possible for medics to fit stretchers onto elevators in emergencies. And it’s true that the elevator downsize recommended for smaller buildings in Salomon’s bill—they could take up about 17 percent less floor space—could mean elevators wouldn’t be able to accommodate a fully extended gurney. Citing emergency response concerns, the Washington Fire Chiefs and the Washington State Council of Firefighters testified against the bill last year, when it ultimately failed.

However, under Salomon’s recommended changes, elevators would still be ADA-compliant (current state law requires elevators to be much larger than ADA requirements). And, as Sightline notes: The new guidelines would still have enough room to spin a wheelchair around, plus another person, as well as a slightly tilted gurney. More importantly, they say, having a slightly smaller elevator is better than having no elevator at all.

“Perversely,” as the proponents of elevator reform at California YIMBY put it, North American rules actually make buildings less safe for people who need to be transported by gurney and less accessible for those who rely on wheelchairs.

“While larger elevator cabins make it easier to transport patients,” a California YIMBY blog post on the former issue argues, “the high costs the requirement imposes also increases the likelihood that buildings will not have any elevators at all, and that emergency responders will have to carry the patient down multiple flights of stairs.”

The CBNA report made a similar point about wheelchairs. “The United States and Canada now require the largest elevator cars in the world … a perverse disincentive that some developers respond to by simply building walk-ups.” In these buildings, people who are unable to navigate the stairs are restricted to living on the first floor.

Stephen Smith, the author of the elevator-reform report, acknowledges that he doesn’t know how many elevators aren’t getting built that otherwise would if the bespoke regulations didn’t govern the US market. But he stands by his report’s conclusion that “walk-up complexes are … being built, at a scale and to heights that are unique in the developed world.”

He explains: “I spent a lot of time poring over new apartment listings in Germany, Italy, France, and Spain and noticed that virtually all new four-story apartment buildings had elevators, and most new three-story buildings did too. In the US, virtually no new three-story apartment buildings have elevators.”

Smith says that when it comes to four-story apartments, his best guess is that it’s about “50/50” split on new apartments having elevators or not. As for the extremes,” Smith adds: “I have found examples in LA of five-story buildings without elevators, and six-story walk-ups in NYC and Seattle.”

Smith’s report does have telling data comparing elevators per capita in European and Asian countries versus in the U.S. and Canada. The difference is dramatic. Canada and the US come in last with four and three elevator cars per capita, respectively. In comparison, Switzerland, Spain, and South Korea come in at 27, 23, and 15. (Greece tops the list at 41.)

Elevator-free apartments also make housing inhospitable to the broader universe of people who can’t navigate stairs easily or at all and who are looking for affordable housing. Conversely, as I noted, if developers do include the pricey, larger elevators in their projects, it raises building costs. And this too undermines the broader universe of people seeking affordable housing by making the housing too expensive.

Certainly, developers aren’t loopy enough to skimp on elevators in tall buildings. That’s why Salomon’s bill puts the focus on allowing smaller elevators in smaller buildings; changing state guidelines per Salomon’s bill wouldn’t violate any federal rules. (Salomon’s bill doesn’t recommend any changes to bigger buildings; it simply directs the state to “support” efforts to harmonize national and international standards in the hope of beginning a multi-state effort to make North American elevator guidelines line up with the rest of the world’s.)

Fortunately, small-scale multi-family housing such as stacked flats, condos, and small apartments are exactly the kind of housing that urbanists believe will have the biggest impact on supply: Four-and six-story developments are examples of “missing-middle housing” that would fit seamlessly into traditional low-density single-family zones; these are neighborhoods that largely exclude lower-income families, renters in particular.

As Uytae Lee, a pro-city videographer who worked with Sightline to promote elevator reforms, says in his elevator-reform agitprop video: By making more neighborhoods accessible, elevators are “an essential part of our transportation network … a core part of a city’s infrastructure.”