Cascadia Report

Category: Cascadia not cities

  • U.S.-Canada deal not a fix

    The U.S. and Canada signed an agreement to finally cool the long-running dispute over the trade of lumber. But the landmark deal likely isn’t the end of the story.

    Negotiators in Geneva signed the pact late Saturday — Canada Day. The main feature seems to be that both sides agree to drop existing lawsuits and agree to abide by the terms of the new agreement for three years.

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    Canadian lumber producers will get a partial refund of the billions of dollars paid to the U.S. in the form of tariffs on shipments over the last several years. But otherwise the deal seems similar to the status quo. It calls for a new surcharge on Canadian wood shipped into the U.S. if the price falls much below the current level, which is in a historically high range. And Canada gets to keep its current 34 percent share of the U.S. wood market.

    Eliminating lawsuits is an accomplishment. But unfortunately the deal doesn’t solve the market imbalances that cause the trade friction in the first place. The dispute will return as long as Canada has a massive supply of government-owned trees and U.S. consumers demand cheap wood.

    The biggest reason that the deal isn’t a fix? The Canadians didn’t get all they wanted and will finger the U.S. every time a Canadian mill closes and puts workers out of jobs.

    Canada’s parliament still has to okay the deal. You can be sure that the proposal will get lots of scrutiny, at least in Canada. On Sunday the deal was front-page news for the Victoria Times-Colonist. The Seattle Times put a wire story on A6.

  • Remember the ties that bind

    Most of Alaska isn’t part of Cascadia but the huge state still affects this region. Alaskans have a love-hate relationship with Seattle. That’s why it’s good to see a column in a Seattle paper celebrating the connection between the U.S. Northwest and the 49th state.

    The columnist visits the Chamber-of-Commerce types in Anchorage with a delegation from Seattle and reaches some obvious, yet useful, conclusions:

    For many people in Anchorage, Seattle is so familiar it blends into a single business card. Seattle’s strength and size influence Alaska every day. Without Alaska, the Puget Sound region would not be the megalopolis it has become.

    Our history is intertwined and we remain connected by business and politics. We can agree on that and still vehemently oppose logging in Alaska’s national forests and oil drilling in the Arctic wildlife refuge.

  • Cascadia gains a few hundred thousand

    The increasing traffic around Cascadia isn’t an illusion. The region added a few hundred thousand people in the last year, bringing the total to nearly 14 million.

    Washington added 120,000 people, the largest gain since the early 1990s, thanks to rapid job growth. The total was about 6,375,600 on April 1, according to the state. About one-third of the influx came from California.

    British Columbia jumped by 53,807 to 4,292,166. International immigration accounted for 80% of the province’s gain, according to Statistics Canada. The province has added 265,536 since the beginning of 2000.

    The latest figures for Oregon put the state’s population at 3.6 million as of July 2005.

  • How to transform a historic area?

    PioneersquareseattleA walk through Seattle’s Pioneer Square on a warm weekend afternoon reveals at least as many boarded up buildings, vacant store fronts and homeless people as ever. Seattle’s current development boom seems to be leaving the historic core behind. Will it catch up?

    There are plans to fill the stadium’s huge parking lot with new housing and other deals would provide a counterbalance to the area’s street population. But the going is slow.

    This week a deal to finally put retail/housing on the eyesore parking lot on Main and Occidental fell through this week. Developer Greg Smith wanted to build a taller building in exchange for hosting a maintenance shed for the waterfront streetcar. Since the zoning change didn’t come through the developer said he may pull out of the deal.

    Meanwhile the Seattle Weekly chimed in with an analysis of the Pioneer Square area. Basic gist: the balance of historical/funky atmosphere in the area will be tough to maintain if a couple thousand new residents move into the area as planned.

    What about examples around the region, like Vancouver’s Gaslamp?

  • Development costing lives in Cascadia?

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    Sprawling car-centered development is shortening the lives of people throughout Cascadia, according to a new report by a Seattle-based think tank.

    Partly because of its compact urban development, British Columbia has a car-crash fatality rate that’s one-third lower than the U.S. Northwest and an obesity rate that’s nearly one-half lower, according to the Cascadia Scorecard, published by the Sightline Institute. “If we designed our roads and neighborhoods with health in mind, we might make very different choices,” said Clark Williams-Derry, the group’s research director, in a statement.

    The conclusions aren’t especially surprising since Sightline, which was formerly known as Northwest Environment Watch, advocates sustainable development. Yet the group is one of the first to consider Cascadia as a single region.

    The data could help influence public policy. Already, a Seattle P-I editorial has used the report’s conclusions in its call for more transit-oriented development in the Seattle area.

    The report says that development of compact, walkable communities in Vancouver and Victoria has helped improved health there. Among the findings: 62 percent of Vancouver residents lived in compact communities in 2000, compared to 24 percent in the Seattle area. Twelve percent of BC residents are obese, compared to 22 percent in Washington.

    The report also tracks population growth, energy use, pollution, economic growth and wildlife populations across Cascadia.

  • Pathbreaking ex-UW dean dies in suicide

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    The pathbreaking former head of the University of Washington’s College of Engineering died Saturday in an apparent suicide in San Francisco.

    Obituaries today focus on the possible reasons behind the suicide. In Seattle she was remembered for her role in developing the region’s top engineering program.

    Denise Dee Denton, who had been the first woman to head an engineering school at a major research university, was named chancellor of the University of California’s Santa Cruz campus in 2004. She was well-known for encouraging women to study math and science and gained notoriety for challenging former Harvard president Larry Summers’ comments that women may be less suited than men for those fields.

    At the UW, she worked to improve teaching and restructure the engineering program. Professors at UW remembered her for mentoring women and minorities, improving morale and for shepherding a $70 million donation from the Gates Foundation for a new building. She was honored by the White House in 2004 for her role in promoting education, according to her UC biography.

    In California she was involved in a UC scandal that included her housing perks and the hiring of her partner for a UC management job. Sadly, many comments posted about her online focused on that scandal and her sexual orientation. It would be nice if we could keep perspective and celebrate the contributions of an influential educator.

  • United by a common threat

    If a distant rogue country possessed weapons of mass destruction that were possibly poised to attack us, wouldn’t that merit media attention?

    Seattle and Vancouver are the only major population centers in North America that are reachable by North Korea’s longest-range missles. This threat unites Cascadia and provides a scary reminder of how our concerns differ from those of eastern power centers like New York, Washington or Toronto.

    But you’d hardly know it living here and following the local media.

    North Korea said last week that it had a weapon and planned a missle test. Yet the major Puget Sound and Vancouver newspapers haven’t devoted front-page real estate to the issue. It’s nowhere on local TV and radio, even as media report daily on the carnage in Iraq and paranoia over terrorism continues. In Seattle, a neighborhood library was evacuated Tuesday when a librarian reported a “white substance” in the book drop. An Seattle alternative paper even pokes fun at the Korean threat on its blog.

  • More cross-border meetings?

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    Washington Governor Chris Gregoire was scheduled to meet Tuesday in British Columbia with Premier Gordon Campbell. It’s a big symbolic step toward deepening Cascadia ties.

    Gregoire plans to hold frequent cross-border meetings and wants to broaden links between the government agencies of the state and province, she said at a press conference Monday. The announcement was broadcast on TVW but it barely merited a sidenote in this AP story in the Seattle Times.

    Meetings between the leaders of Washington and British Columbia have been rare. During the 1990s the most prominent visits by Washington’s governor were for the annual Puget Sound business leaders’ retreat in Vancouver.

    Gregoire said she plans to focus on border security, economic development, capitalizing on the 2010 Olympics, and measures to deal with a pandemic. She said Washington and B.C. need to convince the federal government to make sensible improvements to border security. Recent talk about requiring passports to cross the border already have scared off tourism though there’s no immminent change in the rules, she said.

  • More Cascadia train links

    Zg_talgo_092699_richmondbchTrain ties between Seattle and Portland will grow July 1 with the addition of a fifth daily Amtrak round-trip between the cities.

    The additional train helps integrate Cascadia by making connections easier along the corridor from Bellingham to Portland. Here’s the info from Amtrak.

    This is a case of supply trailing demand. Highways along the Cascadia corridor are increasingly clogged. The latest train is the first new service in the corridor since 1999. Even without additional service, passenger traffic from Seattle-Portland rose 6 percent from 2004 to 2005, according to a Seattle Times report.

    The new train is funded by a multi-billion-dollar transportation package approved last year by Washington, whose taxpayers fund three current round-trips using new train equipment. The trains make the trip in about 3:30. A daily Amtrak on its way to L.A. and back also serves the route more slowly.

    Cascadia travelers are waiting for British Columbia’s government to step up with funding to fix the weakest link in the Cascadia corridor: between the U.S. border and downtown Vancouver.

  • Seattle needs a mid-income housing policy

    Downtown seattleLuxury condos are popping up around downtown and the city is trying to ensure housing for low-income residents by charging developers and funding new units. So far, so good. The problem is that the added fees, on top of rising construction costs, make building mid-priced rentals uneconomical.

    City councilmembers who enjoy challenging the mayor for his development-friendly agenda push for higher fees on developers as an expedient way to fund more infrastructure. But even they admit they didn’t see this unintended consequence on mid-income housing.

    Why not come up with a new system that looks at development wholistically instead of parcel by parcel? What if the city created a system that levied development fees based on the amenities they plan and the market they plan to serve? Either way, it’s clear that Seattle needs flexibility in its housing market if it is going to grow into a diverse community like its Cascadia neighbors Vancouver and Portland.