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Apparently, the U.S. is shrinking. Well, not really. But excluding migration, if recent patterns of birth and death were to hold constant over the long term, population trends in the U.S. would be on the decline. What’s more, this isn’t a recent trend. In fact, it’s been true for much of the past 2 decades: intrinsic population growth rates were strongly negative in 1980, slightly negative in 1990, and moderately...

The US Food and Drug Administration has rejected emergency contraceptives as over-the-counter medication, at least for now. That’s a big but temporary setback for one of the best public policy options for preventing unintended pregnancies (and the abortions and births that result). Each day, more than half a million Northwest couples have sex; most of them do not aim to conceive a child. In the heat of passion, perhaps 40,000...

An important step forward in the salmon fishery comes today, as anticipated a month ago: the BC and Canadian governments have embraced the recommendations in a new expert report suggesting individual fishing quotas. Why it’s important is here. The report is here. Listen to an 11-minute-long CBC interview with Peter Pearse, one of the authors, here. This is important news, with high stakes, so expect a vituperative debate to ensue....

BC baby boomers are proportionately an even larger group than their age-mates south of the 49th parallel. And the oldest of them, born in 1946, are just two years away from their 60th birthdays. Look at this fascinating graphic from Statistics Canada: it’s a century-long animation of the province’s population by year of age. (See other provinces here.) In the image below, you can see the 2001 age structure of...

Christopher Arkills, a key aide to King County Councilman Dwight Pelz wrote a rejoinder to my post on rail. His critique and my full response are here. But here’s the crux: Christopher: You build mass transit, not to get folks out of their cars today, but to influence land use patterns over the next 20, 30, 50 years. . . . You tout BRT [bus-rapid transit], HOV, vanpools, and carpools...

Further to yesterday’s post: To understand how much Vancouver’s downtown has grown as a residential neighborhood, look at the before-and-after panoramas on this page. Anyone know of similar photos of other Cascadian cities and towns? 5/3 Update: Rachel Severson sent in this link for a downtown Seattle comparison. It shows 1907 (!) and 2002.

In the bid to create walkable, exciting, live-work-play downtowns, Vancouver’s enormous lead over Seattle and Portland just keeps growing. New developments in the heart of Vancouver – which already has four times as many residents as the geographically larger downtown of Seattle – continue to sprout at a phenomenal rate. The city core has added between 1,500 and 2,500 new housing units each year for the last decade, with 3,000...

 (This post is part of a series.) It appears that a growing number of Seattle residents are questioning whether the Alaskan Way Viaduct—the elevated highway that hugs the Seattle waterfront through downtown—ought to be torn down and replaced with…well…nothing at all. There has been a lot written about this in the past few years—especially recently. This is not nearly as radical an idea as it might seem. Portland removed a...

The governments in and around Boise, Idaho, are finally making some progress on planning for smart growth. They’ve agreed to a process to create a single growth blueprint. It’s a welcome step for the metropolitan area that has earned the dubious distinction of most sprawling in Cascadia.

Concerning Dalton Conley’s book The Pecking Order, on which I commented on March 30: I’ve read the whole thing now. In the book, he makes no arguments at all concerning tax policy. He does demonstrate that large families are bad for middle children, all else being equal. And that’s important information that is little known. Most parents seem to think singletons are at risk of unhappy childhoods, when they actually...