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Most Northwest parents trying to raise kids—in an urban setting or no—can appreciate the importance of space. There’s the avalanche of stuff that modern babies seem to require, from diapers to strollers to whatever jiggly thing puts them to sleep. Until parents of young children make a secret pact to stop handing out birthday goody bags, there will be rivers of useless stuff coming into our houses. Urban families are...

Downtown Seattle holds some of the most valuable real estate west of Minneapolis and north of San Francisco. Yet a stroll through Seattle’s urban core reveals unwelcome surprises: rundown, decrepit buildings; empty land parcels; and surface parking lots on prime real estate, like the one below, just blocks away from high rises worth tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. Is an underused (at midday), 63-spot parking lot the new...

Jennifer The adaptation of Michael Lewis’ new book Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt in the New York Times Magazine this week bodes well for the entire book. Here’s just one observation, about a Canadian’s first experience working on Wall Street: “Everything was to excess…. I met more offensive people in a year than I had in my whole life.” To put that in perspective, scroll through these pictures from...

Alan Just in time for the Arctic Blast, here is a group of Siberian percussionists playing blocks of ice and making jaw-droppingly beautiful music. #BlackFridayParking was the crowd-sourced social-media highlight of the week. A project of our friends at Strong Towns, it set out to vividly illustrate just how preposterously excessive parking quotas are—by photographing empty parking lots at shopping areas on Black Friday. The theory of parking quotas is that they’re set...

Imagine if you could put a meter in front of your house and charge every driver who parks in “your” space. It’d be like having a cash register at the curb. Free money! How much would you collect? Hundreds of dollars a year? Thousands? How might all that lucre shift your perspective on local parking rules? The idea of a private meter (already available on eBay)—or a variant of it...

There are places in this world the savvy traveler would never drive with any hope of finding street parking: Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, for example, or just about anywhere in downtown Los Angeles. That’s what you might think, anyway. If you actually drive to Fisherman’s Wharf today, though, you will have no problem finding a curb spot. A space will offer itself on each nearby block, if you’re willing...

Editor’s Note 8/19/2015: We are bringing this popular and relevant post back to explain how parking rules raise your rent. Two years later, Sightline’s executive director Alan Durning is still exposing the hidden reason behind skyrocketing housing costs in this recent Stranger article. Read below to learn how ending parking quotas can bring down rent costs. Have you ever watched the excavation that precedes a tall building? It seems to take forever. Then,...

Maybe the inventors of Monopoly were onto something when they called their second most expensive property Park Place, because car storage is surprisingly costly. We think of it as cheap, because we so rarely pay for parking at the time when we are using it. More than 90 percent of the time, our cars end their trips in spaces for which there is no charge. But just because we’re not...

My younger son, almost 19, and my daughter, 20, are learning to drive this summer. (Car-less folks like us are sometimes late to the car-head rites of passage.) So I’m temporarily appreciating the wide open spaces of empty pavement at regional malls and big-box stores. Some of these parking lots are so big they generate their own mirages, and they’re vacant enough that my kids can’t do much damage. Such...

On the subject of curb parking, everyone seems to have a story—and what the stories reveal is essential to this entire series. I’ve been asking my friends, and I’ve got an earful. Listen. Soon after advertising executive Necia Dallas moved into a house in Portland, Oregon, she found on her door a detailed, hand-drawn map specifying the curb spots where each resident was permitted to park. The map, left by...