Weekly Digest: April 4th - April 11th, 2022
Here's a selection of The Urbanist's most compelling articles from the past week. You can catch up on other recent articles directly on our online magazine or never miss a story by adding us to your RSS feeds.
Featured Articles
Tell WSDOT What the Future of the State Highway System Should Look Like
When it comes to highway projects in Washington, the legislature holds all of the authority to decide how to allocate transportation funding. But while the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) designs, builds, and maintains projects but doesn’t technically select them, there are a lot of ways that WSDOT sets up the decisions that get made by the legislature. One of these is the Highway System Plan. Read
Rainier Beach Strives for Growth Without Displacement
Rainier Beach has long been one of Seattle’s most diverse and affordable neighborhoods. But as the city’s housing costs continue to climb and a large share of new developments are skewed toward higher-income renters, residents of Rainier Beach are understandably anxious about displacement. And although the neighborhood is designated as an urban village and was part of the 2019 citywide Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) zoning increase legislation, it hasn’t seen its housing supply increase nearly as rapidly as other South End neighborhoods with closer proximity to a light rail station — such as Columbia City or Othello to the north. Read
Seattle City Light Plans More Surface EV Charging Lots in Dense Neighborhoods
Last year, The Urbanist reported on Seattle City Light’s plans to create a surface parking lot to charge electric vehicles (EVs) on the 9,000+ square foot site of a former substation on NW Market Street in Ballard. This proposal represented a new phase of the publicly-owned utility’s rollout of EV infrastructure: creating new surface lots in high-demand areas for vehicle owners to charge. Read
Harrell Administration Not Ready to Issue Bonds for Bridges, Council Pushes Back
During last fall’s budget deliberations, the Seattle City Council approved the issuance of $100 million in bonds intended to be used to fund a number of bridge projects around the city. The primary proponent of the bond issue, Transportation Committee Chair Alex Pedersen (District 4), has been pushing to expand the amount of money spent on bridge maintenance, pointing to an audit conducted in 2020 that concluded the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) needed to take steps to improve how it manages bridge maintenance. Read
We Need to Try Everything But Build a New Airport
If you sit on the Seattle waterfront on a sunny spring day you can hear a rumble in the distance. No, it’s not the new waterfront highway built where the old highway Viaduct used to be — and on top of the old-new highway buried deep underground in a tunnel. Let’s imagine you took the Elliott Bay Trail a little farther than that and found a nice quiet place to enjoy the sun in peace and quiet. But there is that rumbling, a predictable beating of the drums for a new transportation megaproject. Read
Home in Tacoma Plan to Revamp Neighborhoods Moves into Implementation
With the official passage of Home in Tacoma in December 2021, the City of Tacoma is finally making moves towards Phase Two: implementation. This phase of the initiative aims to engage the communities of the city more to move off paper and figure out exactly how this plan to increase housing should play out in all of our neighborhoods. Read
Latest IPCC Climate Report Underscores Need for Collaborative Action Among Urbanists
The latest reports from the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment are out and their findings on cities are simply grim. Roughly a billion people residing in coastal areas are threatened by sea level rise and an increase in rainfall and cyclone storm surges. Already-warm urban centers are experiencing more severe heat waves. We’re rapidly heading towards 2 degrees of warming, a scenario where 410 million additional people will be exposed to water scarcity. Read
Bellevue Council Postpones Retreat Delaying Valuable Planning Work
At the end of last Monday’s Bellevue City Council meeting, Mayor Lynne Robinson announced the cancellation of the following week’s regularly-scheduled meeting. This was intended to give councilmembers a much-needed break after their annual retreat, a three-day affair originally scheduled for March 31st through April 2nd at the Cedarbrook Lodge in SeaTac. However, this event was also cancelled late Wednesday afternoon, leaving key policy and planning work undone. Read
The Urbanist Podcast: Trees, Density, and Cities
In this podcast, Ray and I tackle a subject that is much more controversial than it initially appears: trees in cities. The City of Seattle recently passed legislation requiring that tree professionals working in Seattle be licensed. It’s a small move, but one that did not go unnoticed, mostly because Seattle has struggled with passing a tree protection ordinance since an interim policy was put into place in 2009. Read
U.S. Voting Systems Should - And Can - Better Reflect Diversity in Representation
In 1776, John Adams wrote that a “representative assembly… should be in miniature an exact portrait of the people at large. It should think, feel, reason and act like them.” However, under winner take all, single member district plurality voting systems like those used in the United States, political minorities are excluded from representation. Read
Pay Up Legislation Aims to Ensure Seattle App-Based Workers Earn Minimum Wage Among Other Protections
Councilmembers Lisa Herbold (District 1) and Andrew Lewis (District 7) have unveiled Pay Up, a proposed bill intended to improve compensation and working conditions for app-based workers in Seattle. Under the legislation, app-based workers would be assured to earn at least the minimum wage. Additionally, both workers and customers would receive more transparent information about charges and payments, and the right for workers to select jobs and hours would be protected. Read
Industrial [Parks]: Seattle's Green Edges
For most folks, their mental image of a city park is somewhat focused, and kinda Victorian. It’s an Olmsted designed rolling green of trees and meadows and trails cloistered apart from the hustle. It’s a place to jog or dog walk or watch the clouds go by. There may be parasols. But the city has industrial land too. And there are parks with trees and trails and playfields in those areas. Not enough, but they’re there. The limited number of green spaces among the city’s working manufacturers is just one of the constraints on these places. Read
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