Cascadia Report

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  • Seattle growing dense in spite of itself

    One way to make housing more affordable in Seattle is to provide more supply. Unfortunately that’s constrained by NIMBY planning and the third-rail of local politics: changing zoning that prefers for single-family homes.

    So it’s interesting that housing supply is increasing anyway. This is by Eric de Place via the Sightline Institute’s Daily Score blog:

    For the first time (at least in recent history), less than half of all housing units in Seattle are detached single family dwellings. That’s what I found yesterday, squirreled away in the depths of recently-released census data for 2005. Just 49.3 percent of the city’s units are of the traditional house-and-yard variety.

    And as far as I can tell, Seattle is the only city in the U.S. Northwest where this is true. (The census numbers are easily available only in a format that makes it difficult to be certain.) Even in density-friendly Portland, fully 60 percent of the city’s housing units are conventional detached single family houses.

    I should mention, however, that while Seattle has passed the halfway mark, detached single family houses are still easily the most common form of housing in Seattle. But I was equally surprised to find that 34 percent of all units in Seattle are in a building containing at least 10 units.

    It’s interesting, I think, that the city’s image of itself hasn’t necessarily caught up to its new reality (as evidenced by the ritual of sackcloth and ashes still occasionally observed whenever urbanization is the topic). And while Seattle is still far less dense than, say, San Francisco, where only 16 percent of units are detached single family dwellings, I think we in the Emerald City can now officially consider ourselves urban.

  • Better terminal luring flights to Vancouver

    Vancouver is adding a nonstop flight to New Zealand partly because the expanded international terminal at YVR makes the city more attractive to carriers, according to today’s Wall Street Journal ($).

    air new zealand landing in vancouver; virtualtourist.comThe flight used to stop in Los Angeles but that airport is losing international flights because of its old, crowded international terminal. A similar story could be told about the rivalry between SEA and YVR.

    The issue is about more than a handful of flights, as the WSJ puts it:

    The stakes are high for cities. International passengers spend about twice as much as domestic travelers, and international airline service is one important competitive benchmark for cities competing for corporate relocations

    Vancouver, which recently expanded its international terminal, is already wooing travelers from the Seattle area. Since significant improvements at Sea-Tac are years away, it has to rely on cutting fees to lure airlines, which is how it won a nonstop flight to Paris.

  • New B.C. outposts to court more Asia trade

    British Columbia is about to reopen trade offices in Japan and China, a move that could heighten competition for trade with Asia, according to the Vancouver Sun.

    While B.C. currently has zero trade and investment offices in Asia, Alberta has five, Washington State has five, and Queensland, Australia has nine.

    These bare numbers are one thing. Beyond them, the competition to stand out in Asia from this part of the world looks even stiffer next to Alberta’s sexy oil and gas industry and Washington State’s heavyweight Boeing, Weyerhaeuser and Microsoft companies, which have engaged China since the 1970s and 1980s.

    By all accounts, it is high time for B.C. to get beyond the wood demonstration project it cost-shares with the forest industry in Shanghai and its Tourism B.C. office in Tokyo, which has been there since 1992.

    The new offices represent the latest in a string of moves intended to make B.C. the trade gateway to North America, reaching as far as India.

  • Seattle, Vancouver could co-host World Cup

    Seattle and Vancouver may jointly host a major sports event like a World Cup, at least if the cities’ tourism boards can help it.

    The idea of capitalizing on the 2010 Olympics with a major regional event has been around a while. Now the tourism groups are looking at creating an entirely new marqee soccer, cycling or soccer event.

    Of course the groups need to build local support in order to shoulder the financial and political cost of an event. Improving transportation links are essential. One interesting idea: adding seaplane service between downtown Seattle and downtown Vancouver.

  • Last U.S. newspaper reporter leaving Canada

    It may get harder to find media coverage of Canada beginning this summer, when the last U.S. newspaper correspondent leaves the country.

    Of course wire services, freelancers and contract staff will still cover Canada after the Washington Post closes its Toronto bureau. But it’s debatable how much attention stories will command when not being covered by senior journalists. The effect will be magnified since regional news outfits take cues from East Coast papers.

    Coverage of trade and transportation issues involving Canada is especially critical to Cascadia but usually falls short. For example, the dispute over softwood lumber imports was daily news in Vancouver but usually drew a shrug from editors in Seattle. It often takes a Canadian serial killer to get headlines in the U.S.

    The effort to cut costs led The Wall Street Journal to announce the closure of its Canada bureau in December. That makes Canada the only major economy without coverage by the top financial newspaper.

  • More alternatives to owning a car

    Here’s another option for living in Cascadia without owning a car: more car-sharing companies are opening in the region.

    Zipcar launched its service in Vancouver this week, hoping to ape success it has had in New York and other major cities where car ownership is less than convenient. It’s part of a planned expansion along the West Coast, including Seattle and Portland.

    In Seattle, Flexcar remains the main alternative to — gasp — owning your own car.

  • Motivation to fix Seattle’s 520 bridge

    Think there’s no rush to fix Seattle’s fragile bridges? The Washington State Department of Transportation has a scary simulation of a collapsing 520 freeway bridge for you:

  • Plans afoot for major new container port

    Ports in Seattle, Tacoma and Vancouver face increasing competion for the booming business of handling containers from Asia. Now maybe add Coos Bay, Ore. to the list of rivals.

    A proposal would turn the isolated Pacific coast town into a major container port. A Danish shipping company would invest hundreds of millions of dollars to develop the port, which would then need improved rail connections inland.

    There are big port-construction plans all along the West Coast, from a huge project in Prince Rupert to the coast of Mexico. Here’s how a Coos Bay spokesman put it:

    “This is a frog, and we continue to keep kissing this frog in hopes that it’ll be something better than a frog,” says Martin Callery, the Coos Bay port’s director of communications and freight mobility.

  • Missing the cause of high gas prices

    Legislation introduced in Olympia takes aim at Cascadia’s high gas prices but misses a root cause: lack of competition.

    Sen. Joe Zarelli, a Republican from southwest Washington, proposed a study to determine if the single pipeline that serves the area stretching from Vancouver to Eugene is adequate. One potential fixes, of course, is to relax permitting rules or reduce taxes to encourage construction of an additional pipeline.

    It’s no secret that gas costs more in this region than elsewhere in the U.S. and Canada. While supply and demand is part of the equation, close coordination of refining and distribution by oil companies is apparently a bigger factor. There don’t appear to be any attempts to crack that.

    UPDATE:

    The original post above suggested that Sen. Zarelli advocates relaxed rules or reduced taxes to encourage construction of a new pipeline. Catherine Trinh of the Senate Republican Caucus emailed to say that the bill doesn’t specifically mention either.

    The exact language of the bill can be found here.

  • Getting business from border hassles

    Draconian security measures could prevent visitors to the 2010 Olympics from crossing the international border.

    Streamlining security is already a priority for Washington. Meanwhile Idaho figures it can get a boost by attracting Americans who don’t want to deal with the hassles.