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When a developer builds a family apartment in Vancouver BC’s downtown peninsula, the dining room comes with easy-to-clean floors that can handle spilled yogurt or spaghetti. Condo and rowhouse projects must have accessible stroller storage and outdoor play spaces, ideally where parents can look out a kitchen window and keep an eye on their kids. As of Canada’s 2011 Census, downtown Vancouver’s urban neighborhoods were home to nearly five times...

Eric At the Daily Beast, a look at Uber’s political war machine as the ride-sharing company begins hiring top-shelf campaign operatives to help them dismantle local cab regulations. Although I’m certainly no fan of the ossified legacy taxi industry, the article touches on a few things that give me pause about the emerging “sharing economy.” The slimmed-down regulatory regimes that allow firms like Uber and Airbnb to flourish can come...

The US Department of Energy just released new figures in its quarterly coal export report. Here’s what happened up through the first quarter of 2014: Nationally, coal exports were down slightly in the first quarter of 2014. The US exported almost 27.7 million tons of coal in the first three months of the year, which is a lot by historical standards. Yet even so it represented a nearly 13 percent...

Jennifer For anyone who’s been following debates on the sharing economy, I encourage you to check out this deep data dive from the San Francisco Chronicle into how Airbnb may be affecting housing availability in the city. It’s not a perfect analysis, since they had to rely on online listings rather than actual data from Airbnb (which many of the big sharing companies do not disclose). But it goes part...

Gina McCarthy, that is. Yesterday I reported that a new poll by the Wall Street Journal and NBC found strong support among Americans for new Environmental Protection Agency standards proposed for coal-fired power plants to cut carbon pollution—The Clean Power Plan. A promising part of the story is that Americans increasingly embrace the reasons EPA chief Gina McCarty and others (including President Obama) give in support of those rules, and...

Results hot off the presses from a Wall Street Journal / NBC poll show promising climate attitudes among American voters, most notably, solid support for the new Environmental Protection Agency proposal to limit carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants. At a moment when President Obama’s approval numbers continue to “tank,” the WSJ called his climate and energy policy “a rare bright spot.” Indeed! Here are some top takeaways: More than...

Bakken crude oil production has many of the classic characteristics of an economic bubble. It looks likely that, as with every bubble before, it will end. Whether it ends catastrophically or just badly depends on how regulators act. Some of the primary features of a bubble include a very rapid market expansion based on an unrealistic assessment of underlying risk, lax regulation, and an overly optimistic belief in continued rapid...

Once they have kids, families move out of the city and opt for the big house, picket fence, and longer commute. That’s the story we’ve all heard. But the reality is that—at least over the last 12 years—the Northwest’s biggest cities have done a much better job of attracting and retaining kids than their suburban and rural counterparts. Yes, it remains true that, like most other big cities, Seattle and...

Have you heard the urban legend that keeps making the rounds—that exporting massive amounts of coal to Asia could actually be good for the climate? Well, when I was a kid, I was convinced that eating Pop Rocks and Coke could kill you. Someone had told me that Mikey, the kid from the Life cereal ad, died that way. And while the story seemed preposterous, it seemed too wacky for someone to have just...

Sightline Institute fellow and stand-up economist Yoram Bauman will introduce his new book, The Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change, at a talk at Town Hall Seattle on Monday, June 9. The author of the popular two–volume Cartoon Introduction to Economics is back with what Kirkus Reviews found “an often amusing graphic primer about an issue the authors recognize as apocalyptically serious,” and Oregon State University professor Jane Lubchenco declared, “Fresh!...