Once plentiful across the city, small apartment buildings with flats stacked on top of one another are incredibly rare in new construction. The reasons behind that are multifaceted, and stemming the tide will take a push on multiple levels of government.
As Sound Transit builds the largest light rail expansion in the country, splitting the system into urban and suburban lines could unlock its full potential and queue up logical extensions.
Seattle could meet its 30% tree canopy goal much quicker by converting a quarter of its 500,000 on-street parking spaces. The paving to planting conversion would convey many benefits, cooling neighborhoods and absorbing runoff.
Activate underused parks with soccer pitches and courts for basketball, pickleball, and tennis to bring people out and foster social cohesion. RAVE is building 26 community fields around the metro in time for the 2026 World Cup. But we shouldn’t stop there.
Washington State Legislature legalized “missing middle” housing across the state, allowing more homes on a lot in the form of rowhouses, duplexes, triplexes, quadplexes and sixplexes. Seattle will now need to legalize sixplex homes citywide in areas served with frequent transit and fourplexes elsewhere. This restores Seattle to a bygone
Right now, the city of Seattle is at a crossroads. As a robust job market, the city has never had a housing plan that meets the demand. Thankfully, the Washington State Legislature has done a lot of work this spring, legalizing fourplexes everywhere in Seattle, and legalizing sixplexes near frequent
In the spring of 2020, downtown Seattle sat empty. A once bustling and growing core of tower cranes, thriving businesses, and active neighborhoods was now silent. Office workers were gone, and in the interim worked remotely, which soon became long-term preference. During the slow recovery, restaurants, retail, and transit all
An accidental game of musical chairs at a packed community meeting on the Comprehensive Plan provided a microcosm for Seattle’s housing crisis. When you come to a two-hour community event, you expect to have a seat. And when you move to a place like Seattle, you expect there’s
Paint is cheap. Results are bold. Carbon savings are forever. No matter the traffic, drivers stuck on Highway 99 generally cannot use the right lane. That red painted bus lane is reserved for the RapidRide E Line (plus business access related turns). The bus zooms right by those frustrated drivers
Once in a life-time chances are just that, once. New York City planners did the right thing in 1870 debuting the subway system, Barcelona did the right thing when Ildefons Cerdà planned the expansion of the city in 1859, and Sound Transit has a chance to get it right with