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5 Pictures to Explain the Voter Referendum in British Columbia
In October, British Columbian voters will receive ballots asking them two questions. First, should BC use First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) voting or proportional representation (ProRep)? Second, if the province chooses ProRep, which of three systems do voters prefer: Dual Member Proportional, Mixed Member Proportional, or Rural-Urban PR? All three ProRep options follow a few ground rules: each would fairly reflect the will of voters, give voters a local representative, and keep the...Read more » -
Weekend Reading 9/21/2018
Kelsey H. Spent some time reading a pretty lengthy NYT article on sustainable farming and possibly using the natural processes of carbon, compost, and farming to get carbon out of the air and into the ground. Sounds ridiculous, I know. But there’s so much good stuff in there — just when you think it might be time to click away, you find new information and keep going. Plus I know...Read more » -
Duplexes Are Now Legal on 99% of Vancouver’s Low-Density Lots
Three years after Seattle became one of the first modern cities to float a proposal to re-legalize duplexes citywide, its northern neighbor Vancouver has actually implemented that change. On Wednesday night, Vancouver’s council voted 7-4 to allow buildings that include two full-size homes instead of just one in virtually all of its single-family neighborhoods. As reported by the Vancouver Sun, this change to the low-density lots that cover half the...Read more » -
Weekend Reading 9/14/2018
Image by By User:FriedC - from File:FoodMeat.jpg, [1], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6729716
Kelsey H. A really interesting lawsuit between an Oregon police officer and her department recently ended. The department asked the officer to effectively sign an NDA stating she “shall not publicly criticize or ridicule” the department, its policies or its members, or the city. If she didn’t sign, she was told, she would be fired. Talk about First Amendment rights. This, of course, was the week of 9/11. I have...Read more » -
No, Seattle’s Growth Boom Is Not a Tree Apocalypse
Since the end of the last recession, Seattle has consistently ranked among the fastest growing major US cities. Is all that growth leaving the Emerald City less emerald? Not really. Seattle’s best new data on the change in tree canopy over time does show a 6 percent decline between 2007 and 2015. Here’s the catch, though: most of the confirmed tree loss happened on land reserved for detached houses, the...Read more » -
Coal Industry’s Slow-Motion Collapse Continues
Just over a year ago, President Donald Trump announced the end of the United States’ war against “beautiful, clean coal.” Yet the nation’s appetite for coal-fired power keeps falling, as shown by data from the US Energy Information Administration. As of inauguration day in January 2017, the nation’s coal-fired power fleet averaged 103 gigawatt-hours of output per month. But by mid-2018, that had fallen to 98 gigawatt-hours. As a result, the coal...Read more » -
What Makes Portland’s New Apartments So Expensive?
An earlier version of this project was published in March by the Portland Tribune and KGW as part of the Open:Housing journalism collaborative. Everybody in the real estate business wants a piece of Robert Cheney. The recent Portland State University master’s grad and his girlfriend are fairly typical of the Pacific Northwest’s 2.2 million tenant households, looking for a fair deal in their price range. But Cheney and his girlfriend...Read more » -
Weekend Reading 8/24/2018
Eric New research findings say all the things we don’t want to believe. You’re uglier than you think: The evidence from psychological research suggests instead that we tend to think of our appearance in ways that are more flattering than are warranted… Most of us think that we are better than we actually are — not just physically, but in every way. Chores make children happier: Children who help more at...Read more » -
Vancouver’s New Plan to Allow More Homes of All Shapes and Sizes
Cascadia’s three biggest cities—Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, BC—have all flirted in recent years with loosening the stranglehold of single-family zoning, rules that ban anything but detached houses on large lots from vast swaths of city land, creating virtual walls that exclude anyone who can’t afford inherently pricey homes. As the lack of affordable housing reaches crisis levels in all three cities, officials recognize the need to allow more options in...Read more » -
‘A Virtuous Cycle of Green’: How Street Design Can Be Calmed by Nature