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 impressive amount of […]

This piece on Pioneer Square from Knute Berger last week in Crosscut may not have received many hits because we’re in the twilight of the year when many people are tuning out for a while, but it’s worth revisiting. I’ll be working a bit in 2010 on how to raise Pioneer Square’s stock as a […]

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 good news is […]

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 mid-way. Now I’m […]

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 drive home during […]

One of the things I sometimes have trouble with is giving short answers. Another reason the Land Use Committee is great for me. There are no short answers when it comes to land use. People have been asking me if I support HB 1490 and I do my usual, “Well, I like many parts of […]

William Yardley writes for The New York Times and had a piece from Seattle in last Sunday’s edition that captured the striving ambivalence of Seattle’s growth boom. The article was about Edith Macefield, the recently deceased woman who held out against the forces of redevelopment in Ballard by refusing to sell when all around her […]

With last Monday’s 6-3 vote to spread “incentive zoning” beyond the downtown area we wrapped up a year of work and came to the end of a long ride. The program, which allows the city to trade new development area (usually height) for a little bit of moderately affordable housing, asks way too little in […]

The most important first step in updating Seattle’s Neighborhood Plans took place last night at Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center. It was the inaugural meeting of the Neighborhood Planning Advisory Committee, the citizens group tasked with keeping the process true, transparent and on track. I was excited and told attendees I wished there was a […]

This has been a tough year for random and not-so-random acts of violence in our city. Too many young Black men killed with a not-so-mysterious lack of cooperative witnesses. The Rainier Beach man who was punched and later died over an argument about traffic cones. The Philadelphia Cheese Steak shop owner at 23rd and Union. […]