Search Results
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Cascadia Midterm Election Results 2018: Ballot Measure Edition
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Could State-Led Upzones Happen Here? 7 Lessons from Modern Cascadia
For housing advocates, could there be a better way? As urban housing shortages drive poor people out of job-rich cities, as middle-class families risk their life savings on exurban tract housing because it’s what they can afford, and as the planet keeps ticking toward deeper climate-driven disasters, is there some path to fair, abundant, transit-friendly housing that doesn’t require battling the forces of stasis up an endless staircase of 2...Read more » -
What Could I-1631 Do for Washington’s Suburbs and Cities?
When a ballot initiative touts raising a whopping $1 billion per year for the foreseeable future, voters understandably want to know how the money will be spent. In a previous article, we showed what Initiative 1631 could provide for rural areas of Washington. But what about cities and suburbs? In the coming decade, I-1631 could direct billions of dollars into building energy efficiency retrofits, solar rooftop installations, electric vehicles and...Read more » -
Trouble in Paradise: BC’s Local Elections Shake Up Housing Policy
To paraphrase Calvin Coolidge: The chief business of British Columbia is British Columbia. Construction and real estate add up to a hugely disproportionate share of the Cascadian province’s economy, Bloomberg Businessweek noted Saturday, as BC voters went to the polls in dozens of municipal elections whose overriding issue was housing. Those elections indicated that BC’s housing policy may be brewing another big shift. There’s no mystery why the business of...Read more » -
No, Seattle’s Growth Boom Is Not a Tree Apocalypse
Since the end of the last recession, Seattle has consistently ranked among the fastest growing major US cities. Is all that growth leaving the Emerald City less emerald? Not really. Seattle’s best new data on the change in tree canopy over time does show a 6 percent decline between 2007 and 2015. Here’s the catch, though: most of the confirmed tree loss happened on land reserved for detached houses, the...Read more » -
Washington Voters Could Make History in 2018–and Keep Billions in Revenue in-State
People in Washington spend billions of dollars each year on dirty fuels. A big chunk of that money goes to out-of-state oil companies instead of staying in Washington to help create local jobs or improve quality of life. Initiative 1631, a citizen-backed measure to pass a Washington carbon fee, could change that by shifting the transportation sector away from fossil fuels and toward walking, biking, transit, cleaner fuels, and electric...Read more » -
What Makes Portland’s New Apartments So Expensive?
An earlier version of this project was published in March by the Portland Tribune and KGW as part of the Open:Housing journalism collaborative. Everybody in the real estate business wants a piece of Robert Cheney. The recent Portland State University master’s grad and his girlfriend are fairly typical of the Pacific Northwest’s 2.2 million tenant households, looking for a fair deal in their price range. But Cheney and his girlfriend...Read more » -
Portland’s Street Design Experimentation Creates a Redrawn Paradigm
Editor’s note: This is Part 3 in a four-part series on how trees and plants help to slow traffic, ameliorate climate change impacts and make growing cities more livable. Read Part 1, which lays out the overall case for better street design, here. Read Part 2, which focuses on Vancouver and its green efforts in busier and denser areas, here. Time travel with me to 1973 Portland. The state legislature has just...Read more » -
Modular Construction: A Housing Affordability Game-Changer?
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Portland’s Scooter Tax Is Super High, and That’s Fine
If car-dependent cities are bad, and they are, then shared e-scooters are good. You may have heard that private shared e-scooters—parked alongside the sidewalk by each successive user, waiting to be located and rented with the smartphone of the next—are the new hotness in the rapidly expanding universe of battery-powered “micromobility.” In the last 14 days, shared scooter fleets have launched in Dallas, Baltimore, Salt Lake City, Oakland, Milwaukee and...Read more »