Search Results
-
When Historic Preservation Clashes with Housing Affordability
Every city wrestles with the tension between preservation and evolution, the tricky balance between saving great old buildings and not freezing neighborhoods in amber. The tension is especially acute in any metro area that lacks enough homes for all the people who want to live there. Historic preservation, when it interferes with homebuilding, can worsen a city’s shortage of homes, driving up rents and pushing out low-income residents. Case in...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 » -
Housing + Cities
-
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 » -
How Seattle’s Design Review Sabotages Housing Affordability
Since 1994, Cascadia’s largest city, Seattle, has subjected most of its new apartment construction to “design review,” in which building proposals must win approval from a volunteer citizen board. But if there’s no accounting for taste, is it realistic to think a city can enforce good design through a process reliant on a consensus of subjective opinions? How new buildings look is one thing, but what are possible unseen drawbacks...Read more » -
Housing Delayed Is Housing Denied
In March 2015, local housing builder Johnson Carr submitted preliminary plans to Seattle’s Department of Construction and Inspections, seeking permission to erect a four-story, 57-unit apartment structure in the city’s Phinney Ridge neighborhood. The proposed building would conform with existing zoning: it would sit in a designated neighborhood center, on a commercial street of shops and small businesses, close to a bus stop. Indeed, mid-sized apartment buildings are exactly what...Read more » -
Weekend Reading 7/21/17
Aven This isn’t something to read, but if anyone has been curious about what really went on at Standing Rock and what it was like there, a documentary produced by a group of Washington veterans is premiering this Sunday at the Seattle Transmedia and Independent Film Festival. Tickets available here. (Full disclosure: my husband is one of those veterans, and he contributed both some footage and an interview to the...Read more » -
Going to Court for Housing Choices?
Might a handful of lawsuits in the Northwest states open existing bedrooms to roommates, houses to in-law apartments, and neighborhoods to new rooming houses? It’s a question Sightline has long pondered. Today, we have part of the answer, in a legal analysis of occupancy limits’ susceptibility to judicial review. First, a review of the backstory. Skip ahead, if you’re already in the know. In late 2012 and early 2013, one...Read more » -
Of Cascadia’s Big Cities, Who’s Tops in Bikeways?
It only takes a few minutes talking to transport honchos in Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, BC, to get a sense of the intense, if friendly, competition among their cities to be king of the cycling hill. But in many ways the three largest urban centers of Cascadia form one big, soggy petri dish of experimentation in bike infrastructure. All three are North American leaders in prioritizing complete streets and bicycle...Read more » -
Weekend Reading 4/28/17
Margaret There is nothing that will make you care about something as much as a little personal investment. I recently came across this amazing list titled 101 small ways you can improve your city. Reading through it, it’s more like 101 ways you can love your city. My goals: set up a little free library and install a homemade bench near my bus stop. Next year I am building a...Read more »