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Clark: From Oregon Public Broadcasting, news of a new trend in Portland: housing without parking.  It’s a major boon for affordability: according to one developer, the cost of providing parking makes “the difference between a $750 apartment and a $1,200 apartment. Or, the difference between apartments and condos.” And in more awesome news from the Rose City, the Oregon legislature has moved to allow Portland to create a network of...

Editor’s note: This post is also available as a pdf. Permeable pavement is one of the most promising green solutions that can help reduce and clean up polluted stormwater runoff. Like conventional pavement, it can be made of asphalt or concrete that’s either poured in place or sold as pavers, and it can be used in a variety of settings, including on parking lots, low-traffic roadways, driveways, and sidewalks. Permeable...

Eric dP: I’ve got a pair of good suggestions this week. In the Vancouver Observer, Barry Saxifrage looks at national emissions trends and reveals that the world leader is—it’s hard to believe it, but it’s true—the United States. And as he points out, US reductions are no small potatoes: How big is a cut of 430 million tonnes of CO2? It’s equal to all CO2 from all Canadians outside Alberta....

Seattle is a city paved with good intentions. Take a look at our plans and our resolutions and you’ll find three values common to just about everybody here, political leaders and residents alike: economic opportunity, environmental leadership, and social justice. That’s what we say, and I think we mean it. It’s just that we don’t always do such a good job of living up to our aspirations. For years—for decades,...

Why don’t women bike to work more often? You hear many theories: we’re less willing to ride in traffic, we can’t arrive at a showerless office all sweaty, we never bothered to learn how to fix a flat, our schedules are over-extended, we work longer hours to make the same money as men, those of us with kids spend twice as much time on average caring for them, and many...

Here’s a good reason to build rain gardens and green roofs, and to plant and protect trees: It’ll save you money. That’s the conclusion of a new report from the American Association of Landscape Architects called “Banking on Green.” The study surveyed green stormwater projects from across the US, plus a handful from Canada, and determined that in 41 percent of the cases, the environmentally friendly approach was cheaper than...

Rain gardens are suffering from an identity crisis. On one hand, there are homeowners who love rain gardens composed of feathery grasses and bushy native shrubs. They even hire landscapers to install them and post signs to let others know that their yard is helping solve the problem of polluted runoff. There are Puget Sound databases and maps packed with examples of the water-sponging plantings. Walking tours in Portland and...

Editor’s note: Eric posted Seattle and Vancouver follow ups to this piece. Whatever you’re craving, you can probably find it on sale at a parking lot in Portland. Barbecue jackfruit fried pie? Try Whiffies on Hawthorne. Foie gras over potato chips? Eurotrash on Belmont. Kimchi quesadilla? Koi Fusion on Mississippi. It’s no wonder Portland has been heralded as a world-class purveyor of street food. But North American attention to the Rose City’s...

Water is the enemy of pavement. It gets into cracks, freezes, expands, and makes bigger cracks. It makes the ground beneath roads soggy and soft. Drive some heavy trucks over those roads and they can give way, forming potholes and ruts. Even when it’s not destroying the road, water pools on the surface, turning cars into dangerous hydroplanes and splashing buckets of filthy water onto windshields and pedestrians. Water is...

Municipal engineers don’t exactly have reputations for being devil-may-care, live-on-the-edge risk takers. Speaking generally, they work hard, take their jobs seriously, and really really want their projects to work. Collapsed bridges and over-flowing sewers don’t look so hot on the resume. But stormwater engineers in Gresham, a neighbor to Portland, and Issaquah, located in the foothills of the Cascades outside Seattle, have built some interesting — even a touch experimental...