New Oregon Rules Will Re-Legalize Neighborhood Apartments

UPDATE, Dec. 4, 2025: The proposed rules discussed in this article were unanimously approved. This article was edited to reflect minor amendments and describe the rules as approved.
Two-and-a-half years after a bipartisan bill promised "transformational" changes to Oregon's housing policy, Gov. Tina Kotek's administration has completed the blueprint of that transformation.
As approved by a state commission on Thursday, the new housing production rules make Oregon the first US state or Canadian province to create a model statewide zoning code and then apply that statewide code to cities underperforming their peers.
Most notably, the state zoning code would much more broadly legalize three- to four-story apartment buildings, especially on smaller parcels in neighborhoods already served by roads and pipes. The system will steer all of Oregon's 58 largest cities, plus those in tourism-heavy Tillamook County, to gradually make their local zoning codes no more restrictive than the state's. But the state standards will essentially become mandatory for cities flagged by the state for permitting fewer total homes, and/or fewer affordable homes, relative to their economic and/or geographic peer cities.
Because Oregon has now pre-defined many of the zoning standards it will impose on underperforming cities, various cities may opt to meet those standards sooner as part of their local efforts to accelerate housing production.
Known as the "Oregon Housing Needs Analysis," these new rules to accelerate home construction were ordered up by a series of laws in 2019 and 2023, inspired by a similar system in California. And in crafting the OHNA rules, Oregon's state land-use and housing agencies have been aiming to avoid some of the California's model's perceived pitfalls while creating a system that Oregon's many small, cash-strapped cities can readily use.
Chris Elmendorf, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, who specializes in state-level zoning and housing statutes, tracked OHNA's administrative rules as they were being written. In an interview Monday, he called them "the next step in the evolution" of laws known as "builder's remedies." Such laws use state power to remove local housing barriers when a city has a local housing shortage.
Oregon's new rules follow a national trend toward pre-defining a set of state zoning standards. Oregon pre-defines them more specifically than other states have so far.
According to Elmendorf,
"Because the rules are known, people can make reasonable decisions about how to plan these projects."
Another unique thing about Oregon's approach: It evaluates cities based on actual homebuiliding performance relative to similar jurisdictions.
Oregon, Elmendorf said, is
"not saying you're subject to this remedial requirement because you didn't write a really pretty plan. You're subject to it because of outcomes. That's conceptually a big step forward."
Mary Kyle McCurdy, associate director of the advocacy group 1000 Friends of Oregon, told Sightline,
"The OHNA program is the most significant update to Oregon's housing rules since Oregon created its land use goals in 1974. The potential of OHNA is to actually live up to the promise of Goal 10, 'housing,' which is housing for all in every community, at the price point folks need, at the location they need, and the type of housing they need."
Among the things OHNA and the associated model zoning code do:
In Oregon today, the most common way to ban apartments from apartment zones is by limiting the number of homes a building can include.
Take Tualatin, in Portland's southwest suburbs. The city has designated 18 acres near Hedges Creek for "high density apartment or condominium towers."
But look in Tualatin's actual code for that zone, and you'll see that although a building on a 10,000-square-foot lot in this area is allowed up to six or seven stories, it could only have a maximum of two homes on it. A lot twice that size can host, at most, ten homes....