Search Results
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If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home by Now: How Neighborhoods Can Kick Car Habits
This is part two in a three part mini-series about how accessory dwelling units—in-law apartments and backyard cottages—change the urban carbon footprint. You can read part one here. Zoning in most Cascadian cities is anti-climate. Single-family zoning—the most sprawling residential zoning type—plasters swaths of the region’s urban areas. Seattle is prime offender: over half of its land is covered by single-family zoning. Bellevue, Bellingham, Eugene, Portland, Salem, and Spokane...Read more » -
This Is How You Slow-Walk into a Housing Shortage
This article is Part 1 in my two-part series about Seattle’s zoning history and its impact on the city’s housing shortage today. Picture yourself, nearly one hundred years ago, on a street in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood, years before Harland Bartholomew’s zoning ordinances began to change the landscape. Looking around and strolling through the area, you might see an abundant mix of residential building types within steps of each other: small...Read more » -
How the Fracked Gas Industry Plays Politics in Washington
The gas industry has big designs on the Northwest. In Washington alone, its agents are busy in practically every corner of the state: backing a pipeline expansion in north Seattle, a controversial LNG facility in Tacoma, an ammonia fertilizer production site in Longview, a giant petrochemical export project on the Columbia River, and amping up gas-fired electricity production everywhere. Meanwhile, the industry is also playing defense: trying to burnish its...Read more » -
Weekend Reading 4/20/2018
Kristin NPR podcast Invisibilia had a powerful recent episode called “The Callout” about how oppressed groups have used callouts as a tool to take back power, but how it might sometimes go too far. This long but fascinating article in the Guardian makes the case that our economy and media are operating at a global level while our governance struggles to operate at a national level. The result is dangerous...Read more » -
Part 2: Your Car of the Future is No Car at All
In part 1, I laid out the immense potential for good that Transportation as a Service (TaaS) offers. A future where most private cars give way to taxi rides provided by fleets of smart, autonomous, electric vehicles would be good for our health and safety, our pocketbooks, our economic competitiveness, our climate, and our local environment. But this promise comes with certain risks. They’re avoidable, but not without effort. Today:...Read more » -
FAQ About I-5 Rose Quarter Expansion and Congestion Pricing in Portland
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Granny Flats and the Great Affordability Debate
Does adding more new homes to a prospering city help or hurt affordability? Few housing policy debates are as tangled or enduring. Good people with aligned affordability goals disagree. There are those who think the answer is obvious because most new homes are fancy and expensive. And those who think the answer is obvious because prices always go up when there aren’t enough homes for everyone who wants one. Evidence...Read more » -
Washington’s State Environmental Policy Act Has Become A Bane To Sustainable Urban Development
Designed to meet the rigorous Living Building Challenge, Seattle’s Bullitt Center is one of the greenest office buildings on the planet. But that didn’t stop antagonists from hijacking Washington’s State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA) to stall its construction. Why? Because they didn’t like that it would provide no off-street parking and that its rooftop solar panels would block views and cast shadows. Washington enacted SEPA—a sweeping package of environmental rules—in...Read more » -
Impact Fees On Urban Housing Punish Renters And First-Time Buyers
When people make a mess we expect them to clean it up. If a private business harms others, we demand it pay the damages. These norms stoke the allure of impact fees—charges levied on homebuilders to compensate for the presumed burden on public services caused by the homes they construct. But in the case of cities, there are two big problems with that impulse. First, adding new homes to urban...Read more » -
Yes, You Can Build Your Way to Affordable Housing
“You can’t build your way out of a housing affordability problem.” That’s conventional wisdom. I hear it all the time: Prosperous, growing, tech-rich cities from Seattle to the Bay Area and from Austin to Boston are all gripped by soaring rents and home prices. But what if you can build your way to affordable housing? What if, in fact, building is the only path to affordable housing? What if cities...Read more »