A century ago Seattle was barely a frontier town, but it still had the foresight to sponsor the Olmstead Brothers to design a plan for parks. Today the plans that set aside well-used green space from Lake Washington to the Arboretum to Ravenna are a key part of the city.
Now Seattle needs to plan for new open spaces to support a city that may have, by 2100, twice its current population. This article by a designer and a professor tries to get the ball rolling.
Restraining Cascadia’s nanny tendencies seems about as easy as eliminating salal from one of the region’s fields.
Just as Seattle seems to grow up and enjoy itself, opposition fights to keep it quiet. The number of licenses to sell liquor, for example, has risen almost 60 percent since 1997 as new clubs and bars have opened.
But Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels is harassing bar and club owners into signing agreements with a long list of operating limitations designed to make them “good neighbors” by keeping the area around their businesses quiet after hours. The city has obsessed for years over how to handle benign strip clubs and police regularly crack down with excessive force on club-going crowds downtown.
Now this week city police handed out a record number of tickets for “boating while intoxicated” during the annual Seafair hydroplane races. Editorialists applauded the crackdown.
There are similarities in Vancouver, where at least some residents have been trying to shake the city’s “no-fun” image with a campaign and a web site, funcouver.com. Why become just another picturesque town filled with restaurants and shopping but scant nightlife?
The city is considering if it could loosen its drinking laws. Drinking at the summer fireworks show should lead to less enforcement in general, according to the argument.
Clearly the rules are local land-use issues that need to take into account the wishes of all the residents. But they should consider that having places to party, let off steam and celebrate is part of what makes Cascadia’s unique quality of life.
The Puget Sound-area economy has long been red-hot thanks to the technology industry. Two reports suggest some of the growth is spilling over the mountains to eastern Washington.
Suncadia, a 6,300-acre resort project 80 miles east of Seattle, announced multi-year plans to add more condos, golf courses and a major retail community. The project targets urban residents who otherwise would have driven to British Columbia for a resort. The article quotes a Bellevure resident who just bought:
“We always wanted to get some place that we could get to from Seattle,” she said. “We were looking at Whistler, and it was just too far.”
Meanwhile another kind of growth is coming from tech firms planning to use cheap power in eastern Washington for data centers. Investments by Microsoft and Google have been well reported. Now a Seattle developer plans a facility for smaller tech companies looking for similar services.
Though neither promises massive job gains, diversificatin is good for the agriculture-dominated economy. “It is really a shift and a change into a whole labor market that we have never had before,” an official with the Port of Douglas County told the P-I. “We are quite excited about it.”
Ports in Seattle, Tacoma and Vancouver are Cascadia’s shipping gateways. Now an American man is investing up to $500 million to build a container-port operation in Prince Rupert, a town on the British Columbia coast about 500 miles north of Vancouver.
A story in the Wall Street Journal Tuesday explains that the new operation through tiny Prince Rupert could shave two days’ transit for goods from China bound to Chicago. Ships would arrive in the town’s naturally deep harbor and travel across Canada on a train line that has excess capacity (instead of on congested routes through the U.S.).
The project still faces many obstacles. But it underscores how much competition Cascadia’s major ports face.
A couple of years ago Vancouver benefited while Seattle, Portland and California’s ports suffered through a strike. Each port has since expanded to meet demand from the booming trade with Asia, providing more business for everyone.
Yet when an inevitable downturn in business comes, the key question will return: who can do the business fastest and at the lowest cost?
Sunday’s Olympian has a thorough, easy-to-navigate report on the health of Puget Sound. The occasion is the state’s attempt to kickstart a new group of government and private organizations to do what previous government-only efforts have failed at: save the Sound.
Details so far are few. The plan was announced in July and reported here.
But the latest Olympian report offers a trove of data and an excellent multimedia show demonstrating the link between population growth, pollution and the region’s economy. There’s less contamination of soil and heavy metals, and herring populations have grown, for example, but the polluted runoff from roads has increased, more areas are closed for shellfish harvest and some populations of birds are in freefall.
Vancouver isn’t doing enough to woo Chinese business, according to a Vancouver Sun article explaining how the city is trying to catch up.
“We didn’t even have a protocol person until last year,” said Mayor Sam Sullivan. The city created a position in October just to handle foreign visits. Fourteen official Chinese delegations have visited since January and one or two unofficial ones visit each week, the paper said.
Contrast that focus on building business ties to Seattle, where Mayor Greg Nickels is mired in debate over $3,400 the city spent on a video about replacing the waterfront viaduct. Meanwhile Governor Chris Gregoire gets criticized for not addressing “the potential downsides of globalization.”
One result of the attention: Vancouver has 52 nonstop flights a week to China, promoting economic and cultural ties. Seattle has none.
Seattle needs to squeeze more people inside its borders, but how? Take a look at two pieces on the subject in Tuesday’s Seattle P-I.
A Wallingford resident rails here against city plans to allow backyard housing units. Already 70 percent of the city is zoned for single-family homes so the only nod to extra units in most of the city is allowing about 1,500 mother-in-law apartments, according to this report.
Critics say allowing more units threatens Seattle’s still-suburban character. It’s a scheme by the “young and restless at City Hall” to get rid of cars, which would ruin gardens and cut down trees, increase risk of fire and put kids at risk, the Wallingford resident says.
The fact is we need to add more density, both in central core neighborhoods and in areas of single-family homes. Housing more people in less overall space conserves resources, makes transit investment more efficient and lowers the cost of housing. The only question is how to do it well.
That’s where a review of small urban housing projects comes in. There are several examples of homes built close together on small lots but with plenty of personal space and landscaping so residents can live together comfortably. It’s more Vancouver or Portland than Seattle.
The trouble is that the homes are listing for north of $600,000, which prices out most of the city. The article says that affordable projects may not be possible inside the Seattle city limits. Why not? The city should be streamlining the permit process and accelerating community design reviews to keep costs down. This is a case where developers are the city’s friends.
Too-pricey design and angst over density are linked. Seattle needs to solve the first problem in order to ease the second.
Preserving the 100-year-old Methodist Church building in downtown Seattle from yet another skyscraper project is key to protecting the physical fabric of the city. Thankfully, a group of concerned citizens is struggling to put together a deal to save the building and move the church to a less costly location downtown where it can continue its social outreach.
So why is the Seattle Times prepared to give up on a deal?
The paper’s take:
If the path is demolition, a towering skyscraper and construction of a new church on another downtown site, the city will have to live with that decision.
First United Methodist Church does not carry the burden of stewardship of Seattle’s heritage, especially in a community that has discarded and abandoned buildings — sacred and secular — as so many disposable tissues.
No, Seattle doesn’t have to live with a hypothetical decision to destroy the building. We shouldn’t stand by and lose another piece of history.
It shouldn’t be allowed to get that far, of course. We should exhaust every possible avenue to protect the building, precisely because our history of tearing down important structures leaves us with so few still standing. A group including King County Councilman Dow Constantine coordinated a package with developer Nitze-Stagen that would preserve the sanctuary and relocate the church’s operations.
Short-sighted, defeatist logic has already cost Seattle much of its heritage. Remember when the Music Hall was destroyed by wrecking balls in 1992? At the time, the need for an ornate building in what was then still a wasteland downtown wasn’t obvious. Now, with the Paramount, Fifth Avenue, Cinerama and Coliseum all restored in some form, that beautiful building remains a terrible loss.
No one disputes that the church needs to continue to do good works. But Seattle should demand a solution that also preserves the city’s urban fabric for the future. Don’t just give up.
This may someday be remembered as the week that the train left the station. Sound Transit’s board on Thursday decided that rail should be extended from Seattle across Lake Washington to Bellevue and Redmond.
The vote comes after the cities of Bellevue, Redmond, Kirkland and Issaquah decided to support rail over bus rapid-transit, monorail or other modes. It’s the first time that the pluses of eventually knitting together the Seattle area together with transit won.
The decision to go with a permanent transit system is huge because the city is likely to grow around the stations — just look at Vancouver and Portland as examples. It could eventually lead to more affordable housing and a better sense of community, this editorial notes.
Of course it could be remembered as yet another false start in the region’s sad transport history. Building the lines depends on voters okaying a tax increase in fall 2007 and withstanding years of potential lawsuits and the politics of delay. Already some people claim their neighborhoods would be ruined by a train line. Remember that the current downtown-to-SeaTac line, which is supposed to open in 2009, was approved by voters in 1996.
Complaints about traffic in the Seattle area are so common that it’s easy to believe it’s actually as bad as it seems. But maybe we’re exaggerating? Maybe we should simply adjust our expectations?
I remember finishing a meeting in downtown Vancouver and needing to make another an hour later at Delta Port past Surrey. My hosts downtown said I should just forget it — there’s no way to get there through the traffic. Of course Vancouver lacks freeways so you crawl through city streets. But I ventured out anyway.
Consider this opinion piece from Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. We suffer from “a deflation of greatly raised expectations,” the writer argues, because we actually expect to travel across vast metropolitan areas at high speeds. I think nothing of going from Redmond to Ballard to South Seattle and back in a single evening. But fewer people would do the equivalent in Vancouver.
