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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 » -
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 8/17/2018
Alyse Highlighting 5 Dutch cities, and numerous North American cities following their example, Melissa and Chris Bruntlett’s Building the Cycling City (coming out August 28) is an informative and enjoyable read that will inspire anyone interested in learning more about Dutch transportation planning and policies. What I found most compelling was how the stories in each city are a reminder cycling hasn’t always been a “given” in the Netherlands. The...Read more » -
How Backyard Cottages Could Help Close the Affordable Housing Gap
Kay is a mom and fifth-grade teacher, raising her family in a home she owns on a quiet Seattle street. In her backyard she’s built a small cottage for her brother Doug, who is not able to live independently. Kay can check on her brother when the need arises, but he also has some independence. Kay’s cottage lets Doug enjoy his own space with a mix of autonomy and support from those who know and love him best---his family. Photo by Seattle Neighbors, available under our free use policy.
In Cascadia, a typical accessory dwelling unit (ADU) rents for about $1,300, affordable to a low- or middle-income household earning between 60 and 80 percent of the area median income (AMI). That makes ADUs, including granny flats, mother-in-law apartments, backyard cottages, and carriage houses, a form of low-cost market-rate housing. What’s more, over 10 percent of ADUs provide free housing to friends and family members of the ADU owner; many...Read more » -
E-scooters Could Be One Way to Fund Better Protected Bike Lanes
Last month, I argued that the answer to problems of the e-scooter revolution will be bike lane infrastructure. And it makes sense for cities to charge hefty scooter fees—shared e-scooters seem to be extremely profitable due to indefinite public storage space—as long as the money gets reinvested in protected bike lanes. Last week, North America’s largest e-scooter startup, Bird, announced a voluntary plan to donate $1 per scooter, per day...Read more » -
Portland’s Street Design Experimentation Creates a Redrawn Paradigm
Editor’s note: This is Part 3 in a four-part series on how trees and plants help to slow traffic, ameliorate climate change impacts and make growing cities more livable. Read Part 1, which lays out the overall case for better street design, here. Read Part 2, which focuses on Vancouver and its green efforts in busier and denser areas, here. Time travel with me to 1973 Portland. The state legislature has just...Read more » -
Portland’s Scooter Tax Is Super High, and That’s Fine
If car-dependent cities are bad, and they are, then shared e-scooters are good. You may have heard that private shared e-scooters—parked alongside the sidewalk by each successive user, waiting to be located and rented with the smartphone of the next—are the new hotness in the rapidly expanding universe of battery-powered “micromobility.” In the last 14 days, shared scooter fleets have launched in Dallas, Baltimore, Salt Lake City, Oakland, Milwaukee and...Read more » -
If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home by Now: How Neighborhoods Can Kick Car Habits
This is part two in a three part mini-series about how accessory dwelling units—in-law apartments and backyard cottages—change the urban carbon footprint. You can read part one here. Zoning in most Cascadian cities is anti-climate. Single-family zoning—the most sprawling residential zoning type—plasters swaths of the region’s urban areas. Seattle is prime offender: over half of its land is covered by single-family zoning. Bellevue, Bellingham, Eugene, Portland, Salem, and Spokane...Read more » -
The Forgotten Green Housing Option: Accessory Dwelling Units
Accessory dwelling units (ADUs) are a tool in the fight against climate change. Garden suites, mother-in-law apartments, and backyard cottages—the compact size of these unassuming homes makes them remarkably energy efficient, cutting lifetime CO2 emissions by as much as 40 percent as compared with medium sized single-family homes. Yet many of Cascadia’s cities maintain policies that pose major barriers to ADU construction, keeping this green housing option scarce. In Seattle,...Read more » -
Four Ways To Get A Housing Reform That’s More Than Window Dressing
Editor’s note: This post was originally published by Portland for Everyone. True with housing policy as with jam labels: Always read the fine print. Through two years of deliberation, Portland, Oregon’s anti-McMansion residential infill project has been built on a simple compromise for the city’s lower-density residential areas: cap the size of new buildings, but also increase the total number of homes by re-legalizing duplexes and corner triplexes. But as the project nears completion — the city planning commission...Read more »