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Last time, we reviewed accessory dwelling units’ (ADUs’) paucity and slow pace of development in most of the Northwest outside of Vancouver, BC. This time: the constraints that bind them. Why are accessory apartments and cottages so rare? One reason, no doubt, is that many homeowners do not want to host an ADU. But a more pernicious reason is that winning approval to rent out an ADU in most cities...

In 2002, 26 percent of Norwegian contraceptive users relied on a long acting method that they could simply fit and forget, the IUD. In the United States, that rate was 2 percent. Long acting reversible contraceptives (aka LARCs) such as IUDs and implants are rapidly growing in popularity, but the US and Canada lag behind many other countries in making these top tier methods widely available. Around the world, IUDs...

Last time, we defined accessory dwelling units and told their story — how they spread so far and wide in Vancouver, BC. This time: their near-absence elsewhere in Cascadia. Most other Cascadian cities appear to trail behind Vancouver, BC, in the ADU leagues. In British Columbia, Abbotsford, Kelowna and other cities have embraced ADUs with at least a portion of Vancouver’s conviction. The mid-sized city of New Westminster stands out...

Eric The long arc of human history has yielded such a diversity of cultures that it’s usually impossible to say that any one of them is truly “the most” or “the best” at anything.  Yet it’s clear to me that when Google Glass comes to market, Western civilization will be crowned the most annoying. Matthew Yglesias delivers a well-deserved skewering to the defenders of his city’s parking mandates. Inspired by...

Let’s take a virtual stroll, via Street View: start on West Seventh and Blenheim in Vancouver, BC’s Kitsilano, as quintessential-looking a Cascadian neighborhood as any you can imagine. In the upper pane of the image above (or by following the link to Street View), point your cursor up and down the block and look around. Familiar, right? In Seattle, it might be on Capitol Hill, in Portland, perhaps in Irvington...

The Washington Supreme Court has thrown out as unconstitutional the viciously antidemocratic, reflexively right-wing, school-and-public-services-impoverishing supermajority voting requirement that has tied Washington representatives’ hands, on and off, for the last two decades. This win is so important that Northwesterners, even those in neighboring jurisdictions, should be dancing in the streets. The ruling changes the long-term outlook for everything: state budgets, tax reform, climate policy, tax loopholes for fossil fuel companies,...

Seattle-area parents and other caregivers may now bring open strollers aboard King County Metro buses, something that Sightline suggested in these posts. By allowing wee ones’ wheels on its buses, Metro has shown it wants to be a family-friendly transit agency.  However, to keep up with other Cascadian transit agencies, there’s more work ahead. Metro’s new stroller policy states open strollers are allowed to board buses. The bus driver will...

Eric My top recommendation this week is “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food,” a feature piece by Michael Moss at the New York Times Magazine. I have a pronounced weakness for certain kinds of junk food—chips most of all—so I found it especially alarming to read in some detail about the well-funded research that develops foods specifically targeted to make us eat far more than we should. That the...

Note: I’m going to continue updating this post as I come across new pieces of evidence. At a Seattle Town Hall forum last week, SSA Marine VP Bob Watters’ claimed again—and despite much evidence to the contrary—that it doesn’t matter whether his firm builds a huge coal terminal near Bellingham. According to this theory, if Oregon and Washington communities don’t ship the coal then British Columbia ports will simply export...

Eric Samuel James’ photo essay of makeshift oil refining in the Niger Delta is mandatory viewing. I am seriously re-thinking my longstanding desire to visit Brazil. A small bit of evidence that drunk eyewitnesses may be more reliable than sober ones. (The real lesson, however, is that people in any state are lousy eyewitnesses. We’re also lousy earwitnesses.) Alan I enjoyed this profile of the uber-wonk Ezra Klein in The...