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Editor’s Note 8/19/2015: We are bringing this popular and relevant post back to explain how parking rules raise your rent. Two years later, Sightline’s executive director Alan Durning is still exposing the hidden reason behind skyrocketing housing costs in this recent Stranger article. Read below to learn how ending parking quotas can bring down rent costs. Have you ever watched the excavation that precedes a tall building? It seems to take forever. Then,...

Maybe the inventors of Monopoly were onto something when they called their second most expensive property Park Place, because car storage is surprisingly costly. We think of it as cheap, because we so rarely pay for parking at the time when we are using it. More than 90 percent of the time, our cars end their trips in spaces for which there is no charge. But just because we’re not...

On the subject of curb parking, everyone seems to have a story—and what the stories reveal is essential to this entire series. I’ve been asking my friends, and I’ve got an earful. Listen. Soon after advertising executive Necia Dallas moved into a house in Portland, Oregon, she found on her door a detailed, hand-drawn map specifying the curb spots where each resident was permitted to park. The map, left by...

Tiny backyard cottages, micro-apartments, the revival of boarding houses and in-law dwellings—Cascadia is on the bleeding edge of these emerging trends, which reintroduce housing forms of a century ago. Today, Sightline is releasing a short book on the gigantic opportunities cities have to make urban living quarters greener, cheaper, and more abundant by eliminating a few municipal rules. Hidden in city regulations are a set of simple but powerful barriers...

Alan Durning takes a hard look at the pinch of expensive urban housing and sees what many others have missed. Hidden in city regulations is a set of simple but powerful barriers to housing for all. These rules criminalize history’s answers to affordable dwellings: the rooming house, the roommate, the in-law apartment, and the backyard cottage. In effect, cities have banned what used to be the bottom end of the...

The recent dust up over troublesome amounts of pollutants leaching out of a Redmond rain garden got me thinking about soil. That’s because the soil in a rain garden has to meet a lot of needs, some of which are in conflict with each other. It needs to soak up potentially large volumes of stormwater quickly, filter and capture pollutants, keep plants alive through sodden winters as well as summer...

I have not owned a car in seven years, but I do own a garage. It’s pictured above. In fact, I am legally required to own an off-street parking space; that’s written in the land-use code for my city, Seattle, as for virtually every city. The driveway that leads to my garage, meanwhile, eliminates almost exactly one parking space from my street. Parking in front of a driveway is illegal,...

Cars that drive themselves seemed like science fiction just a few years ago, but recent demonstration projects have shown that the technology is already here. Self-driving car technology, pioneered by Google, has advanced so quickly that its ubiquitous presence on city streets is now simply a matter of time. Boosters say that mass-market autonomous cars are only 3 to 5 years away; others estimate at least 10 years. No one...

Clark Even after years of staring at it, I never realized until this week that the oh-so-familiar recycling symbol is in the shape of a Möbius strip. Wow: Google’s Earth Engine now displays 28 years of satellite images, pretty much anywhere on the planet. Here’s an aerial time-lapse view of coal mining in Wyoming. Here’s the growth of Las Vegas. I won’t depress you with views of Amazon deforestation, but...

Imagine traveling to an alternate universe, a wacky mirror-world where ostensibly progressive and pro-environment political leaders relentlessly promoted sprawl-inducing highway megaprojects, while offering only a pittance to transit, rail freight, bike paths, sidewalks, or anything else that doesn’t directly support the automobile. Well, stop imagining: that alternate universe is real-life Olympia, Washington. That’s where the Democrats on the House transportation committee recently announced a highway-centric transportation spending package that might have made...