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Converting offices to housing is hard. These changes could make it easier.
Read more Stateline coverage of how communities across the country are trying to create more affordable housing. PORTLAND, Ore. — Stroll around America’s vacant downtowns, and a seemingly obvious solution emerges to the housing shortages and homelessness problems in many states: Why not turn all those unoccupied offices into living spaces? Especially in cities such as Portland, […]
Some States Want to Give You a Constitutional Right to a Clean Environment
Editor’s note: This story was updated to identify the harmful algal bloom as a brown tide. New Mexico’s budget relies heavily on oil and gas revenue, but the state also bears the scars of generations of mining and drilling. So when Antoinette Sedillo Lopez, a former law professor and current Democratic state senator, heard about […]
Governors Push Faster Construction to Meet Housing Needs
Read more Stateline coverage of how communities across the country are trying to create more affordable housing. PORTLAND, Ore. — Dick Anderson, a Republican state senator from coastal Oregon, has a chart and a readymade joke to illustrate the housing crisis facing his state. Up until 2006, his figures show, home building was on an upward trajectory […]
States Consider Ending Right on Red to Address Rising Pedestrian Deaths
SEATTLE — For nearly five decades, drivers in much of the United States have taken for granted a privilege unknown in much of the rest of the world: Arrive at a red light, stop, and if the intersection is clear, turn right even if the signal isn’t green. But as states have seen traffic fatalities […]
As Pandemic Rent Relief Ends, States Struggle to Prevent Homelessness
Read more Stateline coverage of how communities across the country are trying to create more affordable housing. PORTLAND, Ore. — For almost three years since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, states have had an unwelcome but ideal laboratory to test potential solutions to slow eviction, one of the most persistent challenges in preventing homelessness. Turns out, […]
States Return Indigenous Oral Histories to Tribal Control
There are more than 600 oral history recordings housed where Lina Ortega is an associate curator for the Western History Collections at the University of Oklahoma Libraries. Ortega speaks limited Seminole, one of the languages heard on the recordings. But while reviewing an ordinary tribal government meeting from 1969, she kept hearing a name she […]
That Hoppy IPA Might Have a Terroir, Just Like Wine
ST. PAUL, Oregon — The first hint of harvest time in one of the nation’s major hop-growing regions is obvious: All along the backroads of Oregon’s Willamette Valley are trucks overflowing with ropes of bouncy, freshly cut hops dropping their distinctive bright green cones on blacktop warmed by the early September sun. Then there’s the […]
Wildfire Maps Underscore Risks — and Costs — of Climate Change
PORTLAND, Ore. — Jennie Peters vividly remembers what it was like to evacuate with three children from a wildfire as fierce winds blew embers through the river canyon near her home two years ago. “When we left, I could see the burning embers coming over the trees, landing in the backyard,” she said. “I called […]
Scorching Summer Tests States’ Workplace Heat Rules
PORTLAND, Ore. — When a record-breaking heat wave settled over the Pacific Northwest in late July, it didn’t take long for high temperatures to test the effectiveness of new state safety rules aimed at addressing the effects of climate change on both indoor and outdoor workers. As temperatures exceeded 95 degrees Fahrenheit for more than […]
Factory-Built Homes Could Help Solve Housing Crisis
Read more Stateline coverage of how communities across the country are trying to create more affordable housing. EUGENE, Ore. — As a boy in the late 1950s, Terry McDonald watched as workers built an 80,000 square-foot manufacturing plant in an industrial neighborhood on the west side of Eugene. Long after childhood, McDonald felt an affinity for the […]
‘Let’s Try Something New’ Meets the National Housing Squeeze
Read more Stateline coverage of how communities across the country are trying to create more affordable housing. BOISE, Idaho — Riley Romazko and her fiancé Julien Rivera were among the first to buy a shipping container home at Caritas Commons, a cluster of single-family houses built for limited-income residents on a quiet street in an older Boise […]
Without Housing, Communities Struggle to Attract Summer Workers
MEDORA, N.D. – Sam Walsh discovered seasonal work via an ad on TikTok, as a new high school graduate eager to experience life beyond his hometown of San Antonio. He landed his first job as a cashier at a gift shop at Zion National Park last spring, and soon got hooked on the lifestyle. This […]