Search Results
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Zoning: Inclusionary v. Exclusionary
At last count, Seattle ranked as the fastest growing major city in America. The city’s growth has easily outpaced the projections of its decade-old Comprehensive Plan, which foresaw 47,000 new households (as well as 84,000 new jobs) between 2004 and 2024. Between 2005 and 2012 the city added 29,330 net new housing units—roughly 62 percent of its 2024 target in just 7 years. This rapid growth has stemmed in large part from...Read more » -
Courting Families in Portland
When we moved into our house 10 years ago, no one on our street had kids. Now, there are eight on our side alone. My daughter lurks at the bottom of our neighbors’ front stairs, hoping she can round up a gaggle of kids. But figuring out where they can physically play outside can be awkward. Some of us have small decks and front yards, but they’re high off the...Read more » -
How State Public Money Pays for Coal Exports and Oil Trains
Communities across Oregon and Washington are growing increasingly agitated about the risks of fossil fuel export. Proposed coal terminals generated unprecedented opposition from local residents and, more recently, dramatic increases in oil train traffic have many questioning the grave safety risks associated with a cargo so prone to explode. Yet at the very same time, the state governments of both Oregon and Washington are bankrolling coal, oil, and gas infrastructure....Read more » -
Is a Land-Value Tax Illegal in Seattle?
As we’ve discussed before, land-value taxation is a smart tool for revitalizing cities. By raising the cost of land speculation, a land-value tax (LVT) would create clear financial incentives to develop underutilized properties near the urban core—helping to create new homes and businesses in the very places where demand is greatest. The basic idea of LVT is to tax land at a higher rate than buildings. But there’s a significant...Read more » -
The Holy Grail of Parenting
On a recent vacation, I had a perfect moment, one that so rarely occurs since I had a kid nearly six years ago. I was sitting on a deck, drinking a gin and tonic, and having civilized conversations with my husband’s oldest friends. Almost entirely uninterrupted. That’s because sandwiched between our restaurant and another across the way was a grassy field full of roving kid gangs. They were far enough...Read more » -
A Rx for Family-Sized Housing in Seattle
Most Northwest parents trying to raise kids—in an urban setting or no—can appreciate the importance of space. There’s the avalanche of stuff that modern babies seem to require, from diapers to strollers to whatever jiggly thing puts them to sleep. Until parents of young children make a secret pact to stop handing out birthday goody bags, there will be rivers of useless stuff coming into our houses. Urban families are...Read more » -
To Revitalize Downtowns, Tax Land Speculation
Downtown Seattle holds some of the most valuable real estate west of Minneapolis and north of San Francisco. Yet a stroll through Seattle’s urban core reveals unwelcome surprises: rundown, decrepit buildings; empty land parcels; and surface parking lots on prime real estate, like the one below, just blocks away from high rises worth tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. Is an underused (at midday), 63-spot parking lot the new...Read more » -
Weekend Reading 4/4/14
Jennifer The adaptation of Michael Lewis’ new book Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt in the New York Times Magazine this week bodes well for the entire book. Here’s just one observation, about a Canadian’s first experience working on Wall Street: “Everything was to excess…. I met more offensive people in a year than I had in my whole life.” To put that in perspective, scroll through these pictures from...Read more » -
Weekend Reading 12/6/13
Alan Just in time for the Arctic Blast, here is a group of Siberian percussionists playing blocks of ice and making jaw-droppingly beautiful music. #BlackFridayParking was the crowd-sourced social-media highlight of the week. A project of our friends at Strong Towns, it set out to vividly illustrate just how preposterously excessive parking quotas are—by photographing empty parking lots at shopping areas on Black Friday. The theory of parking quotas is that they’re set...Read more » -
Curb Appeal
Imagine if you could put a meter in front of your house and charge every driver who parks in “your” space. It’d be like having a cash register at the curb. Free money! How much would you collect? Hundreds of dollars a year? Thousands? How might all that lucre shift your perspective on local parking rules? The idea of a private meter (already available on eBay)—or a variant of it...Read more »