• Seattle Considers Lower Car Subsidies

    The City of Seattle is proposing another positive step: lowering requirements for off-street parking that drive up the cost of housing in close-in neighborhoods. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has the story. Unfortunately, reporter Vanessa Ho seems intent on fomenting controversy. She writes: As bad as it is now, parking on Capitol Hill—Seattle’s densest neighborhood—may get even worse under a proposal by Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels. The mayor wants to reduce the...
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  • Ecotopia Endangered?

    In honor of the thirtieth anniversary of the novel Ecotopia, this week’s Seattle Weekly includes a piece by Oregonian writer Randy Gragg that provides some instructive historical background on Oregon’s own Ecotopian experiment. Gragg writes elegiacally of the two legislative landmarks from the 1970’s that steered Oregon’s unique development over the next 30 years: a state land-use planning law and a plan for downtown Portland that, together, managed to both...
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  • Information Superhighway Meets Real Superhighway

    Microsoft is planning to expand its Redmond, Washington headquarters, adding between 10,000 and 20,000 new employees—plus the parking garages that will be needed to accomodate their cars. And the company is offering to pay $30 million for transportation and infrastructure improvements, including $15 million for a bridge construction project, to help compensate for the increased traffic the expansion will generate. The $30 million offer may seem like a generous gesture,...
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  • States of Grace, States of Confusion

    Which states use the least gasoline?  Which ones have the best gas-conservation trends? Probably not who you’d think, at least for the latter question. Based on Federal Highway Administration data covering 2001 through 2003, residents of New York State use the least gasoline, person for person, of any U.S. state:  about 0.8 gallons per person per day, vs. the national average of 1.2 gallons per person.  That’s to be expected:...
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  • A Truly Green House

    Credit: Mithun We’re a little late on this one, but it’s still worth noting: Last month, a team of designers from Seattle architecture/design firm Mithun won first place in an international sustainable housing competition in Roanoke, Virginia, with their design for a house powered by—of all things—spinach. The house (the design is pictured at left) will be built this summer in Roanoke, along with other contest winners. The C2C Home...
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  • 37 Strikes

    I missed this Oregonian article when it first ran, but it gives a good rundown on the chaos that the passage of Measure 37—the voter-approved initiative in Oregon that forces the government either to pay landowners or issue waivers when land-use rules reduce property values—is creating, not just for state and county officials, but even for the landowners who were the measure’s intended beneficiaries. What’s particularly interesting, at least to...
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  • Streetcar Smarts

    Was the electric streetcar the Northwest’s first sprawl machine? That’s a topic that Price Tags (large-ish pdf), Gordon Price’s Vancouver-based urban design newsletter, looks at this week. He takes readers on a street-by-street tour of the remnants of streetcar villages in two cities that boomed during that era—Vancouver, BC, and Perth, Australia; looks at how "urban form responded to the opportunity" of the streetcar; and what automobiles brought to the...
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  • Measure What Matters

    What gets measured gets fixed. Better indicators of progress focus attention on the neglected, slow-changing trends that are shaping our future: the health and well-being of our families, the strength of our communities, and the integrity of nature.
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  • Urban Planning and Smart Growth: Building Complete, Compact Communities

    Building complete, compact communities—the opposite of poorly planned sprawl—yields an impressive array of benefits including: reduced reliance on imported fuel, less need for expensive road infrastructure, fosters closer relationships among neighbors, and saves people time.
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  • Measure: What Matters

    There’s a great article in today’s Washington Post on Oregon’s Measure 37, the voter-approved initiative that is threatening to unravel the state’s anti-sprawl laws. To recap, Measure 37 requires the government to compensate anyone whose land value has been reduced by Oregon’s successful growth management programs—making those programs vastly more expensive and complicated to implement. To me, the most interesting point made by the article is that Measure 37 claims...
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