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Are Outdated Notions of “Industrial Areas” Hiding a Giant Housing Opportunity?
Editor’s note: For full disclosure, Jeff Thompson is a contributor to Sightline Institute. (Of course, many people concerned about sustainable cities in the Northwest contribute to Sightline.)That fact did not influence this article. Seattle’s Interbay industrial district is a landscape dominated by warehouses, small manufacturing plants, and parking lots, with hardly a sidewalk to be found. Unlike other former manufacturing districts in Cascadia’s first city, like Amazon-occupied South Lake Union,...Read more » -
Want Less Expensive Housing? Then Make It Less Expensive to Build Housing
Cascadian sister cities Portland and Seattle have achieved the dubious distinction in recent years of consistently ranking at or near the top of major US metros for escalating rents. Over the past year, though, rent growth cooled in both cities, and in recent months median rents have actually declined. Why? The main reason is builders in those cities constructed a lot of new apartments, and that made room for the...Read more » -
Weekend Reading 1/19/2018
Keiko Folks are starting to understand—Backyard cottages and mother-in-law units are an underutilized solution to the housing shortage. This week, two articles—one from the Atlantic and the other from Curbed, describe how ADUs are a small but mighty solution to affordability. Many cities (like Portland and Seattle) have legal barriers that prevent ADUs from taking off: restrictions on size, owner occupancy, and parking requirements. Check out Dan’s two articles on...Read more » -
When Historic Preservation Clashes with Housing Affordability
Every city wrestles with the tension between preservation and evolution, the tricky balance between saving great old buildings and not freezing neighborhoods in amber. The tension is especially acute in any metro area that lacks enough homes for all the people who want to live there. Historic preservation, when it interferes with homebuilding, can worsen a city’s shortage of homes, driving up rents and pushing out low-income residents. Case in...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 » -
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 » -
Going to Court for Housing Choices?
Might a handful of lawsuits in the Northwest states open existing bedrooms to roommates, houses to in-law apartments, and neighborhoods to new rooming houses? It’s a question Sightline has long pondered. Today, we have part of the answer, in a legal analysis of occupancy limits’ susceptibility to judicial review. First, a review of the backstory. Skip ahead, if you’re already in the know. In late 2012 and early 2013, one...Read more » -
Of Cascadia’s Big Cities, Who’s Tops in Bikeways?
It only takes a few minutes talking to transport honchos in Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, BC, to get a sense of the intense, if friendly, competition among their cities to be king of the cycling hill. But in many ways the three largest urban centers of Cascadia form one big, soggy petri dish of experimentation in bike infrastructure. All three are North American leaders in prioritizing complete streets and bicycle...Read more » -
Weekend Reading 4/7/17
Alan Dave Roberts’ long article about the rise of what he calls “tribal epistemology” is my lead pick for what you should read. In tribal epistemology, Information is evaluated based not on conformity to common standards of evidence or correspondence to a common understanding of the world, but on whether it supports the tribe’s values and goals and is vouchsafed by tribal leaders. “Good for our side” and “true” begin...Read more » -
Checking Seattle’s MHA Math
Since the release of Seattle’s Housing Affordability and Livability (HALA) plan in July 2015, city policymakers have been plugging away at defining its most ambitious policy, a type of inclusionary zoning called “Mandatory Housing Affordability” (MHA). MHA couples zoning changes that allow larger buildings—“upzones”—with mandates on developers to provide affordable homes or pay into the city’s affordable housing fund. With MHA, Seattle has an opportunity to become a model for...Read more »