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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 » -
Four Ways To Get A Housing Reform That’s More Than Window Dressing
Editor’s note: This post was originally published by Portland for Everyone. True with housing policy as with jam labels: Always read the fine print. Through two years of deliberation, Portland, Oregon’s anti-McMansion residential infill project has been built on a simple compromise for the city’s lower-density residential areas: cap the size of new buildings, but also increase the total number of homes by re-legalizing duplexes and corner triplexes. But as the project nears completion — the city planning commission...Read more » -
Two Cascadian Cities Extend Greater Welcome to ADUs
May has been a big month for small housing in Cascadia. Two cities—Bellingham and Portland—reaffirmed the region’s growing welcome to accessory dwelling units (ADUs), small homes that sit on the same lot as a larger single-family home, commonly referred to as mother-in-law apartments, garden flats, basement suites, and the like. Bellingham’s city council voted on May 7 to expand its existing ADU regulations by permitting detached accessory dwelling units (DADUs)—stand-alone...Read more » -
Are Outdated Notions of “Industrial Areas” Hiding a Giant Housing Opportunity?
Editor’s note: For full disclosure, Jeff Thompson is a contributor to Sightline Institute. (Of course, many people concerned about sustainable cities in the Northwest contribute to Sightline.)That fact did not influence this article. Seattle’s Interbay industrial district is a landscape dominated by warehouses, small manufacturing plants, and parking lots, with hardly a sidewalk to be found. Unlike other former manufacturing districts in Cascadia’s first city, like Amazon-occupied South Lake Union,...Read more » -
Want Less Expensive Housing? Then Make It Less Expensive to Build Housing
Cascadian sister cities Portland and Seattle have achieved the dubious distinction in recent years of consistently ranking at or near the top of major US metros for escalating rents. Over the past year, though, rent growth cooled in both cities, and in recent months median rents have actually declined. Why? The main reason is builders in those cities constructed a lot of new apartments, and that made room for the...Read more » -
Listen In: KUOW’s ‘The Record’ on Living Car-Free in Seattle
On Monday, the Seattle City Council voted to allow more parking-free development in the city. Council members characterized the changes as small steps in the city’s quest to make housing more affordable and to shift people away from their cars. Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkin said she would sign the legislation into law. In the wake of this news, Sightline Executive Director Alan Durning appeared on Tuesday’s episode of KUOW’s The...Read more » -
A Baby Step toward Revamping Single-Family Zoning
Over the past two decades, Cascadia’s biggest city has planned for growth according to the so-called “urban village strategy” that steers new housing, mostly in the form of apartment buildings, to mixed-used commercial centers with good transit. At the same time, the policy conspires to leave untouched Seattle’s neighborhoods of detached houses—“single-family zones,” in planner-speak. When Seattle embarked on the urban village strategy in the mid-1990s, some residents fought the...Read more » -
Weekend Reading 1/19/2018
Keiko Folks are starting to understand—Backyard cottages and mother-in-law units are an underutilized solution to the housing shortage. This week, two articles—one from the Atlantic and the other from Curbed, describe how ADUs are a small but mighty solution to affordability. Many cities (like Portland and Seattle) have legal barriers that prevent ADUs from taking off: restrictions on size, owner occupancy, and parking requirements. Check out Dan’s two articles on...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 » -
Part 1: Your Car of the Future is No Car at All
Editor’s note: This piece marks the Sightline debut of Daniel Malarkey, our newest Sightline fellow. A Seattle native, Daniel will be writing about issues of infrastructure, technology and energy with a view towards sustainability. You can read his full bio here. Additionally, you can view his February appearance on Q13’s newscast here in which he speaks about the future of autonomous electric vehicles. Ford Motor Company recently had news for...Read more »