In Seattle, policy victories tend to be long-fought and hard-won. What will it take to achieve a city that can flex, evolve, and meet its residents’ needs in a more organic way, without every change becoming an arduous political battle?
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My bedroom community’s streets are aging, and we recently learned that we need to double our pavement preservation spending to keep them from declining further. Here’s what we’re doing about it—and why the Strong Towns philosophy is instrumental for us.
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A remarkably diverse coalition of activists is moving the needle in Seattle on the question of who—and what—belongs in the city’s neighborhoods. And they’ve scored two big policy victories in 2019. Is it enough?
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How modifications to one city’s development codes are making it possible to add wealth and vibrancy to its struggling neighborhoods… without taking on huge future liabilities.
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Two very different buildings in Spokane illustrate the unfulfilled promises of the post-war suburban experiment and the potential for new life in even the unlikeliest of neighborhoods.
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The growing movement to end exclusive single-family zoning—as Oregon just did in its cities—is not a radical or untested experiment: it’s a return to a historical norm. The actual radical experiment is the strange notion that a neighborhood should be required to contain only one type of home.
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Why are we still surprised when a highway closes and fears of traffic pandemonium don’t come to pass?
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Incremental development doesn’t mean slow development. Here’s how big places that need housing fast can get there using the Strong Towns approach.
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Doing the math on a routine, uncontroversial street paving project reveals an investment that will never pay for itself, in a city that has thousands of such investments. That we do it anyway reflects the cultural consensus at the root of our towns’ financial problems.
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We don’t form our opinions about beauty, the value of a dollar, or the value of a house or neighborhood, in a vacuum—we come up with those beliefs based on a long chain of assumptions about what we think other people think.
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Spokane is an excellent illustration of a “soft default”. Like virtually every other city in the US, it is functionally insolvent, but functional insolvency rarely results in legal bankruptcy—just diminished services and deferred maintenance.
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A proposed bill in Washington State would require cities to allow a minimum housing density near transit stations. It is a well-intentioned response to a very real problem, but its one-size-fits-all nature risks unintended consequences.
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The history of Spokane, Washington is a microcosm of what American cities as a whole have experienced. Spokane has lessons to teach us, including the power of incremental (but rapid) growth.
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Seattle, WA may be the first city in the US to create a formal “renters’ commission” to advise the local government.
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The Cato Institute recently published an article claiming that cash-strapped millennials in Seattle should look instead to Houston for affordable homes. There's a lot wrong with that argument.
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Former Mayor of Seattle, Michael McGinn, discusses the tunneling project currently underway in Seattle, the discussions that led to the decision to proceed with a tunnel and subsequent actions by the governor, legislature and city to deal with the aftermath.
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Washington state's new transportation bill allocates $1.4 billion to road maintenance and $10 billion to expansion projects, using highway spending to chase speculative economic development in a plan that's sure to fail.
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Strong Towns shares an exclusive interview with @StuckBertha, the tunnel boring machine that is stuck beneath Seattle.
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How we choose to spend our money is a reflection of who we are. not just as individuals but as states. When Washington spends billions to build new roads and a pittance to create safe, accessible streets, that says something about the state's priorities.
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Washington state, known for having one of the “greenest” administrations, just passed the largest transportation spending bill in the state’s history. Here are 5 ways that WSDOT and other DOTs are keeping us stuck squarely in the 1960s.
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