Cascadia Report

Category: Cascadia not cities

  • Vancouver skycraper latest in regional boom

    Plans for one of Vancouver’s tallest skyscrapers recently passed a design-review hurdle, the latest sign of a tall-building boom sweeping Cascadia’s biggest cities.

    The new 59-story hotel-office-residential combination would rival a new Shangri-La Hotel slated for completion by 2008. The projects will dramatically alter the modest Vancouver skyline that has preserved views of the mountains. They could even begin to shift the feel of the city — if you buy the idea, quoted in the latest issue of Dwell magazine, that the focus on the outdoors has kept Vancouver’s urban culture restrained.

    Meanwhile Seattle recently approved taller towers, a step that had been verboten since the building boom of the 1980s. Even Portland, with its small blocks and human-scale buildings, may grow taller as it fills underused land near downtown.

    The difference from earlier building booms is that channeling growth appears to be a larger part of the calculations, in addition to the vanity of building taller towers. Vancouver, where the first building above 37 stories opened in 2001, needs more office space in the center city to counter sprawl. Seattle’s traffic is bad enough to stoke demand for more close-in housing. Concentrating building along Portland’s existing transit corridors would maximize return on the investment.

  • Why Cascadia needs more diverse media

    Conservative Seattle-area radio talker John Carlson this week said the federal government should act to prevent further media-industry consolidation. Meanwhile, regardless of owner, the real need is for diversity of content.

    seattle newspapers; photo courtesy of seattle.govConsolidation is a critical issue because snuffing out local voices could make Seattle more like British Columbia, where a single company controls most of print and broadcast media. In B.C., CanWest’s ownership of both Vancouver daily newspapers has led to fawning coverage of the ruling party and a pro-business slant on issues such as the 2010 Olympics.

    In Seattle, variety of coverage is what’s missing. The Seattle Times sponsored preliminary FCC hearings last month where speakers of all political stripes spoke against allowing more consolidation. But how often have Seattle’s daily papers reported virtually identical information on their pages, despite different ownership?

    It’s true that almost all Seattle broadcast outlets are owned by out-of-town chains, including some that have cut local investment. This year McClatchy took over several Washington newspapers, ownership of Seattle Weekly changed again and Victoria’s Black Press bought the King County Journal. Against this backdrop, remaining local media need to stand up and show why they matter.

  • New flights from Cascadia

    A couple of new air connections from Cascadia stand out:

    — Nonstops between Seattle and Austin daily on American Airlines, beginning in April. The first such connection between the cities is driven by business demand, the airline said.

    — Nonstops between Vancouver and Manchester, Glasgow and Gatwick at least once per week during ski season on Zoom Airlines, a Canadian low-fare carrier. During the summer the airline offered tourism-focused nonstops from Vancouver to Belfast and Cardiff.

  • Toxic shipments seized at Vancouver port

    Officials in Vancouver seized 50 containers of hazardous garbage bound for China, a portion a what they called a “very large” toxic industry doing business through the port.

    The waste from 27 companies across Canada reportedly includes computer monitors containing lead, lead-acid batteries, fluorescent lamps with PCBs and toxic scrap metal. An international treaty bans shipment of toxics to developing countries, which can be cheaper than recycling in Canada.

    A Seattle-based activist trying to curb toxic exports told the CBC that Canadians could still ship the materials through ports in the U.S. because it hasn’t signed the treaty. A new American law requires exporters to notify the government before shipping hazardous materials but there is little enforcement, according to this recent report.

  • Another verdict on the Christmas tree fiasco

    From the better-late-than-never category: one of the the sharpest summaries of what went wrong at the Port of Seattle this Christmas season.

    Peter Callaghan of the News Tribune says the port commissioners “received bad staff work, got bad legal advice and used a bad process” to deal with questions over Christmas trees in the Sea-Tac terminal. “The number of unintended — and bad — consequences just might set a record for a single public-policy decision by an elected body in the state of Washington,” he writes.

    The uproar distracted attention from questions of whether the port is effectively doing its job with Sea-Tac.

  • Environmental review delays Puget Sound port

    In a setback for expansion of port capacity in Puget Sound, an environmental review has temporarily blocked Weyerhaeuser’s plans to export logs from the Port of Olympia.

    The small port signed a five-year lease with the timber company last year and was expecting $1.5 million in new revenue and 36 new jobs. The operation is delayed until late 2007 the delays have cost $750,000 in missed revenue.

    The delay has an impact on shipping capacity in Puget Sound overall. Shifting from the log business would allow more space for containerships in Tacoma and would boost the growing port business in Olympia. Critics say the project is unnecessary since the area has few industrial producers, fault the port’s decision-making and opposed plans to dredge the inlet.

  • Border hassles help cut Canada visits to new low

    Travel from the U.S. to Canada slumped in October to the lowest level since records have been kept, likely thanks to border hassles, confusion about passport requirements and a stronger Canadian dollar.

    According to Statistics Canada, there were 2.3 million trips from the U.S. in October, down 12.1 percent from a year earlier. That’s the least travel since 1972. The number of same-day car trips fell 18 percent while the number of overnight trips fell 2.1 percent.

    The dropoff hurts tourism and trade across Cascadia and could hinder attempts by Washington to take advantage of the surge in visitors around the 2010 Olympics. Delays at the border highlight the need for Washington and B.C. to convince the federal governments to fund better infrastructure and use much clearer standards to screen travelers.

    Strength in the Canadian currency also discouraged travel in October, as the dollar rose to 88 cents against the U.S. dollar. Still, travel from seven of Canada’s top 12 overseas markets was up, though the total number of visits from countries other than the U.S. was off 1.9 percent to about 370,000.

  • “Husband of the Year” represents King County

    King County Executive Ron Sims was named “husband of the year” by Seattle Magazine and apparently is proud enough of the distinction to post it on his official Web site. The Seattle area’s top elected official drew attention by skipping a dinner with the president of China at Bill Gates’ home:

    ron sims and wife; photo courtesy of seattlepi.com

    Was his absence caused by some sort of county-wide emergency or pressing issue? Well, if you consider “date night” a pressing isue, as Sims does, yes. Instead of eating halibut with the richest man in the universe and the president of the most populated country on earth, the King County executve enjoyed the evening with his wife of 19 years, Cayan.

    The approach is a contrast to Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan, who reportedly has made hospitality toward official Chinese visitors a priority. The city appointed a person to handle protocol because such niceties can influence the direction of any future business relationship.

  • First glimpse of Seattle light rail trains

    Ten years after Seattle-area voters agreed to fund light rail, the first trains appeared in public this week.

    The train cars are supposed to begin running in 2009 on a 16-mile line from downtown Seattle to Sea-Tac airport. Further extensions of the system aren’t scheduled to go into service until at least 2016.

    Also on Seattle’s long list of transit projects is a network of streetcars. Need an example? Paris inaugurated a streetcar line this week, beginning service amid the protest over its cost. Several French cities have larger streetcar systems.

  • Holidays reveal hidden forestry business

    The business of supplying wreaths and garlands is one of Cascadia’s largest underground industries, a capitalistic frenzy complete with undocumented workers and violence.

    That’s the picture, according to Marketplace, of the wholesale market for wild forest greens, a business about a fourth the size of Washington’s apple industry. A Washington State University professor says it’s like a gold rush, with 175 different forest materials that can be sold, from yew bark for the cancer drug Taxol to decorative moss.

    Unlike with apples, labor practices and environmental impacts in the woods go largely unchecked. To curb violations of forest permits and abuses of workers, the Washington department of labor wants to regulate the supply chain. Warehouse owners who would have to pay more predictably say that would crush their industry.