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Alan Charles C. Mann’s “What if We Never Run Out of Oil?” in the May Atlantic Monthly seems likely to become instant conventional wisdom. It’s a wide-ranging, artful, and contrarian look at the way fracking and newer techniques for collecting unconventional oil and gas (which are preposterously abundant on Earth and ever-more-practical to extract) are displacing coal, changing the clean-energy outlook, and even shifting global power. It’s worth reading, if...

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...

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...

Serena I’m a sucker for slick, solidly messaged environmental ads. (Surprised? Me neither.) That’s why Waterkeeper Alliance’s new ads, short and long versions, had me hooked. And if the message alone isn’t enough to get you, perhaps you’d geek out for the messenger? It’s Edward James Olmos, of “Battlestar Galactica.” Speaking of water, I’m joining the Taking on Water Challenge for the month of February. Each week features a postcard...

If you’re concerned about water pollution, you’ve likely heard this message: The water that gushes off our roofs, driveways, streets, and landscaped yards is to blame for the bulk of the pollution that dirties Puget Sound and other Northwest waterbodies. You probably also know about the most popular stormwater solutions, including rain gardens and other green infrastructure that soak up the filthy water, cleaning it before it reaches sensitive waterways...

Scraped clean of rationalizations, roommate caps are simple. They are tools that privileged people use to exclude from their neighborhoods people without much money, such as immigrants and students. To reveal this elitist reality fully will require this full article, but one example shines a bright light on part of it: how land-use codes treat servants. At least six Cascadian cities specifically exempt live-in servants from the residential caps they...

Eric: In the wake of the fiscal cliff debate, Public Policy Polling released (apparently serious?) survey results that are, hands down, the funniest opinion research I’ve ever seen. To wit: When asked if they have a higher opinion of either Congress or a series of unpleasant or disliked things, voters said they had a higher opinion of root canals (32 for Congress and 56 for the dental procedure), NFL replacement...

When The Real World filmed its 2013 season near downtown Portland recently, it did so in apparent violation of city law, which forbids more than six unrelated people from sharing a dwelling. The Real World puts seven young adults with outsized personalities together in a house and films the resulting train wrecks for television. It’s not just Portland. In fact, Seattle and Spokane are the only big Cascadian cities where...

Working on long term policy change doesn’t always yield immediate results. So here at Sightline we find it especially satisfying when our ideas take physical form, as they are in a new building in Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood. Longtime Sightline supporter Matt Griffin’s Pine Street Group is finishing up work on Via6, a 654-unit apartment building that includes features directly inspired by Sightline. The project has already gotten well-deserved press for...