July 6th, 2012
Somehow we got into July and I’m not sure how that happened. At the top of this year the Council went through our annual agenda priorities exercise which yielded this 2012 Action Agenda and I thought, “Great. We finished this relatively quickly at the start of the year. Now we have the
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March 14th, 2011
Seattle Magazine earned the scorn of Beacon Hill residents with a recent mock love letter from a frenemy. The writer feigns disappointment in Beacon Hill, but in an oddly condescending way. “And we had such high hopes for a special friendship… You have your very own superslick Link light rail station and
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Posted: March 14th, 2011 under
Neighborhoods.
January 19th, 2010
Councilmember Mike O’Brien and I are attending the final meeting tonight of the Neighborhood Planning Advisory Committee. This has been a hard-working, sometimes stressed out, outspoken group of neighborhood and community representatives committed to making neighborhood plan update work successful. They’ve met monthly (plus sub-committee meetings) for a year and produced an
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November 19th, 2009
Is there a worse blow to your karma than robbing a food bank the week before Thanksgiving? I guess it could be worse if you rob a food bank in the part of Seattle with the lowest incomes. I guess that would be a worse blow to your karma. The Rainier Valley
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August 12th, 2009
The waiting is over - backyard cottages legislation has arrived and is in play. In a nutshell, the proposal delivered to Council would take the rules in place in Southeast Seattle since 2006 and expand them out to the whole city. You would be eligible to build a backyard cottage if: You're
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Posted: August 12th, 2009 under
Neighborhoods,
Planning and Land Use.
June 16th, 2009
Over the past few days I've driven 23rd crossing Union a few times and noticed beautiful poster-size portraits of people in house-like wooden frames on the vacant corner kitty-corner from the old cheese steak place. The southwest corner of 23rd and Union used to be the old Colman Building. The Nisqually earthquake
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Posted: June 16th, 2009 under
Neighborhoods.
May 11th, 2009
This past weekend's neighborhood plan update town meeting in the Othello/New Holly neighborhood illustrated that neighborhood planning can be difficult, uncomfortable work. Several participants had pointed questions about who was running the show, where the process was headed and whether the day was really a cover for a city rezone agenda. The
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April 30th, 2009
Russ Zabel, the great reporter for the Queen Anne/Magnolia News, passed away April 12. In these days when major print media is "contracting" (that's what the economists call it, but most of it just call it going bankrupt), I've found the smaller neighborhood newspapers in Seattle to be more important than ever.
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Posted: April 30th, 2009 under
Memorials,
Neighborhoods.
April 27th, 2009
Hello from the American Planning Association conference in Minneapolis! I'm here as a presenter with the Seattle Planning Commission, Puget Sound Regional Council and Port of Seattle to talk about Seattle-area efforts to save blue collar jobs. The panel discussion was this morning. I think it went well. No one walked out
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February 22nd, 2009
In talking on the the Sunday editorial page about the federal stimulus package and the Obama Administration's willingness to focus on cities starved in the Bush era, Jim Vesely writes: "At the end of the day, cities are whole and not accumulations of individual neighborhoods." This may be the toughest concept to
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Posted: February 22nd, 2009 under
Neighborhoods.
Tags:
Neighborhoods
