Search Results
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2019: The Year Abundant Housing Turned the Corner
Housing solutions had a good year. With some noticeable shifts in attitudes and conversations, 2019 marked a turning point. Even if the sun has yet to rise on a newly abundant urban housing market, the future looks bright. As Sightline research associate Nisma Gabobe wrote recently, abundant housing successes, especially those relegalizing granny flats, “in California, Oregon, Seattle, and many other Cascadian cities is part of a groundswell across North...Read more » -
Where Do You Go to Find Community?
Why do we love cities? For all their stresses and shortcomings, cities hold unfathomable promise for intersecting lives and friendships, experiences and cultures. In cities—big and small—we find our communities! At their best, cities are beacons of innovation and progress. But even our most prosperous cities are far from urban utopias. Economic inequality and residential segregation run rampant, excluding poor people and communities of color from sharing in the prosperity...Read more » -
California Homeowners Have 20 Uninhabited Bedrooms for Every Homeless Person
As the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment wrote in a powerful report Thursday, Californians suffer from an unprecedented housing crisis. California’s colossal housing shortage is made worse, ACCE said, by the fact that several hundred thousand units are empty and currently unavailable for sale or rental. In at least some cases, that’s probably because their owners plan to ride the wave of rising prices that the state’s long-term shortage...Read more » -
California Looks to a Future beyond Single-Detached House Zoning
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It Shouldn’t Take a Decade to Re-legalize Duplexes
This month, Seattle city council will take a vote that illustrates how ludicrously difficult it is for cities to change their own rules to welcome more new neighbors. The vote is one tiny but important step in the dragged-out bureaucratic grind Seattle will have to go through to loosen the stranglehold of zoning that locks up three quarters of the city’s residential land for expensive stand-alone houses with big yards. ...Read more » -
RCV in NYC! Better Voting Systems Are Gaining Favor in United States
Editor’s note: Nearly a year ago, we wrote this article about thinkers and journalists paying more attention to voting system reforms that give people more choices and more voice in elections. It felt like the first bubbling of what we hoped would become a wave of momentum. A couple recent victories for democracy reform show that little wave building to a sizeable force. This week, voters in New York City...Read more » -
The Boeing 737 MAX Fiasco and the Future of Autonomous Vehicles
On the one-year anniversary of the first 737 MAX crash, senators and representatives grilled CEO Dennis Muilenburg for nine hours at public hearings on Capitol Hill about how Boeing’s mistakes contributed to 346 deaths. As they forced Muilenburg to concede to design and management errors, policymakers built a case for more regulation of Boeing’s advanced airplanes, not less. Yet in the same month that Muilenburg appeared before Congress, Waymo began...Read more » -
The Colville Tribes Combat Climate Change with Their Forests
Space mirrors. Artificial blizzards. Extraterrestrial dust. Underground carbon storage tanks. Ocean fertilization. The ideas sound like they’re straight out of science fiction novels but many people consider them our last-ditch hopes for averting climate disaster. But there is a more road-tested tool for slowing climate change, one far less fantastic and vastly cheaper: trees. Trees gather carbon from the air to fuel their growth, storing it within their roots, trunks,...Read more » -
Seattle’s Latest Housing Reform Shows How Environmentalists Are Rethinking Cities
A who’s-who of Seattle environmental non-profits—350 Seattle, Sierra Club, Climate Solutions, Futurewise, Transportation Choices Coalition, and Sightline—all backed the city council’s recent 8-0 vote to limit environmental review of homebuilding and the rules that govern it. Why would groups with the mission of creating a sustainable future want to rein in environmental oversight? Call it: environmentalists against environmental regulations that can hurt the environment. On paper, the policy tweaks Seattle...Read more » -
Climate Activist Faces Jail Time After Failed Necessity Defense
Update: Mr. Zepeda was sentenced to 60 days in jail but the Skagit County Superior Court Judge gave him credit for time served before he posted bail. He served five days. On Friday, October 4, Donald Jose David Zepeda was convicted by a jury on charges related to his 2017 attempt to shut off Kinder Morgan’s tar sands pipeline that delivers oil into Washington. I don’t have much additional information...Read more »