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Housing + Cities
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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 » -
In Hurricane Harvey’s Path, How to Talk about Climate and Weather
Editor’s note December 2017: Are you following the unfolding and devastating wildfires in California and wondering how to talk about the link between extreme weather events and global warming? Our talking points and Flashcard below can help you make the connection. If you’re like us, you’ve been following the unfolding catastrophe in Houston, Texas, and along the Gulf Coast and wondering whether climate change had any influence on Hurricane Harvey. The short...Read more » -
Weekend Reading 8/11/17
Aven This week, I found this story about a community successfully living without fossil fuels to be both heartening and inspiring, especially as my own family embarks on the process of acquiring our own little plot to try our hand at urban homesteading. Also inspiring but less heartening is this story about the large carnivore researcher at WSU who has been silenced and punished by school administrators and state lawmakers...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 » -
Slaying the Gerrymander, Part 2: Make More Votes Matter
When you take the trouble to vote, you want it to matter that you did. You want your vote to make a difference in who gets elected. You want your vote to elect someone you like, so that for the next few years you can know that person is in office, shaping policy on issues that are important to you. But single-winner districts and the gerrymander sap voters’ power by...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 » -
Weekend Reading 7/7/17
Eric British Columbia’s new government explained with toddlers. Scientific American maps economic damage from climate change by county, and the Sun Belt gets hammered. New research from scientists at Carnegie Mellon University shows that coal transport and stockpiling are harmful to public health. From the abstract: We first demonstrate that a 10% increase in coal stockpiles (number of deliveries) results in a 0.07% (0.16%) increase in the average concentration of...Read more » -
Stop Blaming Foreign Home Buyers
Cascadia’s northernmost major city, Vancouver, BC, has emerged as an international poster child for home prices driven sky-high by affluent foreign buyers. Today in Seattle many fear the same scenario. Yet a review of the evidence reveals the poster version of Vancouver’s housing story is too simple, and it hardly applies at all to Seattle. And unfortunately, hyping the myth of foreign speculators distracts public debate from the more fundamental...Read more »