• A Self-Driving Future

    Cars that drive themselves seemed like science fiction just a few years ago, but recent demonstration projects have shown that the technology is already here. Self-driving car technology, pioneered by Google, has advanced so quickly that its ubiquitous presence on city streets is now simply a matter of time. Boosters say that mass-market autonomous cars are only 3 to 5 years away; others estimate at least 10 years. No one...
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  • Redmond’s Rain Garden Challenge

    In the stormwater world, if a rain garden is releasing more pollution into the environment than it’s capturing, word gets around. So when the city of Redmond crunched its first flush of data from a new roadside rain garden and discovered the water coming out of it was tainted with alarming levels of phosphorus, nitrates, and copper, the stormwater community took notice. Washington State regulators went on the record to...
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  • ADUs and Don’ts

    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...
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  • In-law—and Out-law—Apartments

    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...
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  • Are Rain Gardens Mini Toxic Cleanup Sites?

    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...
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  • Servants Welcome, Roommates Barred

    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...
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  • The Roommate Gap: Your City’s Occupancy Limit

    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...
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  • Emancipating the Rooming House

    They may not be for you, but rooming houses and other small, basic dwellings should not be against the law. Some people want them — need them, in fact — and they provide housing affordably, with a tiny ecological footprint, and in walkable neighborhoods. Yet across most of the metropolitan Northwest, these basic homes are currently forbidden or rendered unprofitable by local codes. My last article recounted how we arrived...
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  • Belly-Up Fish and Other Stormwater Mayhem

    It’s a challenge to drive home the importance of controlling polluted runoff. After all, what is stormwater but rain that’s hit the ground? The trouble is, the ground isn’t always such a clean place, particularly in urban areas with lots of roads, rooftops, and parking lots that repel the rain and send it gushing through gutters, picking up pollutants and trash along the way. Still, it’s tough to imagine how...
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  • Proof That Car-Sharing is Cheaper Than Free

    When you say “greenhouse gas marginal abatement cost curve” I say “where do I sign up?” I guess that’s why I was interested in Oregon’s look at the cost-effectiveness of various carbon reduction strategies. Despite the fact that the new analysis weighs in at over 400 pages and is tangled up with altogether too much econowonk-speak, there are a few pretty interesting findings. Chief among them: car sharing ranks as the...
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