Cascadia Report

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  • How do we make more room?

    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.

    Fremont Lofts by Johnston Architects

    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.

  • Oregon law a bad model for Washington

    Oregon’s new “property rights” law, which spawned copycat Initiative 933 in Washington this fall, got more national attention today.

    A New York Times story highlights the case of a man who wants to build a power plant on land he owns inside a national monument near Bend. According the law, which was passed as a ballot measure in 2004, government either waives land-use rules to let him do it or pays him $203 million. Guess which is more likely?

    Being compensated for the loss of ability to profit from your own property sounds great. But the consequences are dire.

    Oregon property owners have filed 2,755 claims covering 150,455 acres, according to a Portland State University institute that’s tracking the measure’s impact, the article says. The claims could amount to more than $3 billion in compensation if they were paid. Instead Oregonians are getting ready for houses and strip-malls as landowners subdivide their lots.

    “Measure 37 has disabled the tools used over four decades to prevent sprawl and preserve agriculture and forest land in Oregon,” wrote Sheila A. Martin, a professor of urban planning at the university, in the article.

    The story makes the case that mainstream Oregonians are flummoxed to see their model land-use laws dismantled by an end-run around growth-management laws passed by the people’s representatives. Hopefully Washington voters realize that harmless-sounding ballot measures can have painful consequences.

    In Washington, the fledgling campaign against Initiative 933 is here.

  • Now B.C. cracks down on boaters

    Hot on the heels of its decision to staunch Victoria’s raw sewage outfall into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, British Columbia said that boaters can no longer dump into the water.

    Dumpers face fines of up to C$1 million after the new rules go into affect in September, according to an announcement Monday. Detractors say there aren’t enough places to dump sewage along the coast and, anyway, the amount of pollution from boaters is negligible.

  • Seattle needs to save downtown landmark

    Methodist Church SeattlePreserving 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.

  • Cantwell’s ground campaign still lags

    TV spots for Senator Maria Cantwell are blanketing the cable channels, a sign that her high-priced reelection campaign is finally underway. But what about the ground campaign?

    A 500-mile roadtrip around southwestern Washington this weekend found a single Cantwell sign (just outside South Bend, in Pacific county). That puts the ratio of her signs to challenger Mike McGavick’s at roughly 1 to 500+, at least in the state’s southwest.

    This week’s edition of the Pacific County Press, the local weekly, has a photo and small story of McGavick’s visit with loggers in the area in early July. His campaign Web site has detail on the visit and the how to get involved. Cantwell’s new site shows no sign of any organization in the area.

    Clearly Cantwell doesn’t expect to win rural counties, instead planning to use advertising to win big in the Seattle area. But with McGavick making a challenge in King County, will that hands-off approach be enough?

  • Victoria told to clean up its act

    20040429_outfallvictoriaVictoria was ordered to stop dumping raw sewage into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, a major step toward plugging one of Cascadia’s most egregious pollution sources.

    The British Columbia capital and its suburbs pipe 34 million gallons of untreated sewage into the Strait each day, relying on the cold water and swift currents to handle the refuse. The practice has been a major irritant to communities like Port Angeles and Sequim, which lie just across the Strait and have invested in costly sewage-treatment facilities.

    Whether to treat the outflow or not has been debated in B.C. for years. But a recent study concluded that the status quo wasn’t a long-term option, especially with international attention related to the 2010 Olympics. The provincial government gave Victoria until next June to come up with a better plan.

  • Cantwell campaign begins

    Senator Maria Cantwell’s reelection campaign has officially begun, with the first commercials on TV and a new Web site online. And it’s not a minute too soon.

    Last Saturday there were several Cantwell signs in the lawn of the middle school in West Seattle where an energy forum put together by 34th district Democrats was held. Inside, an unstaffed campaign table had dozens of extra signs and stickers, and a volunteer sign up sheet with no names on it.

    After the forum, I drove 200 miles to south-central Washington and didn’t notice a single sign of the campaign — but plenty for challenger Mike McGavick. The Goldendale Sentinel had a half-page ad for McGavick’s “Open Mike!” tour, which had been, of course, well received there.

    In the last week Cantwell has made strides sowing up support from the left by hiring one of her former challengers. The governor of New Mexico stumped for her during the weekend and Bill Clinton is due later this month. Yet she still faces a primary election challenge and there will be a Green and Libertarian on the November ballot.

    The question is will Cantwell hold enough of rural Washington AND energize her urban base enough to hold on. Or is it already too late?

  • the week the train left the station

    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.

  • Puget sound isn’t as healthy as it looks

    sunset on Puget SoundBeautiful scenery, easy access and abundant sea life mask the fragile health of Puget Sound, according to an exhaustive report released this week.

    We already knew that the Sound is one of Cascadia’s key features yet is threatened by habitat loss, pollution runoff and contaminated sediment. The governor created the Puget Sound Partnership in 2005 to come up with ways to stem the deterioration.

    “If leaders aren’t able to persuade and inspire the public to get involved in improving the sound’s health, “I’m not sure we can win,” said Brad Ack, director of Gregoire’s Puget Sound Action Team, according to the AP.

    “There’s this disconnect between what the actual state of the sound is and what people’s impression is, because it looks beautiful – the water sparkles, the mountains glisten,” he said.

    The report identifies problems and calls for a coordinated clean-up made of local efforts overseen by a regional body. It doesn’t say who should lead it or how much it should cost. Those issues are supposed to be attacked in another report late this year.

    Here’s a readable summary of the interim report, from Tuesday’s Olympian.

  • is gridlock just a myth?

    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.