Completely illegal to build this and qualify it as retail in Seattle. Land use code would say it isn’t wide enough, deep enough or tall enough. Even if it’s retail use. How idiotic is that?

David has the right analysis about Aurora Avenue but if you ask a city planner they’ll light up about this stretch as a place for dense housing because it has a good bus line. When someone like me suggests making my Aurora even better they turn sour and tell me we can’t do that

Really glad electeds like @mayorofseattle.bsky.social are experiencing Aurora outside of the car to see how incredibly unpleasant, loud and dangerous it is. Hope she expresses this to @ricoque-opcd.bsky.social so planners break away from the delusional narrative that housing should cluster here

The tax system in King County is so corrupt and nobody seems to care

What if Dallas-Ft Worth got the Paris regional rail system?

🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️ THE ALTERNATIVE IS THE BUNGALOW IS TORN DOWN AND REPLACED WITH A 2-3 MILLION SINGLE FAMILY HOME (ALSO HOUSING IS THE ONE THING THAT DOES ACTUALLY TRICKLE DOWN)

Tore down the affordable $600,000 bungalow for the unaffordable $700,000 condo. When will the young people learn

This truck is far more useful as a hauler than anything we build in the US but it’s small and short and makes the fragile male drivers feel ashamed if they pull up in it

No wonder car free societies in Europe are much happier than us

What if London and Seattle switched rail transit systems?

When housing as an investment turns out bad outcomes:

Seattle is going to fumble a highly urban accessible, publicly owned 5-acre site that could be 2,000+ homes and instead build a hotel and some retail or entertainment venues. We could have activated this space for the World Cup and chose instead to make it bus and shuttle parking. No vision.

This new high school in suburban Seattle (Issaquah) has taken 10 years to start construction after a decade of land use battles where community sued the district trying to preserve the site because it was used as a college for nuns in the 1960s. Public process is a farce.

Design review is a complete waste of time. It’s not designed for community input, it’s designed to stop or stall development (and it works). It delays housing and gives architects with too much time and ego an outlet to talk down to their competition. It has never improved design. Get rid of it.

Design Review is said to produce a style of architecture known as Ransom Note.

The fact a group like this wants to keep design review should explain why it needs to go away entirely

What if New York City and Seattle traded rail transit systems?

NEW STORY// Ballard Pushes to Save Its Light Rail Station By Doug Trumm via @theurbanist.org

lol NIMBYs are absolutely insane

Flagrant violation of Washington housing law should automatically make cities subject to the Builders’ Remedy, rather than allowing them to continue breaking the law until Commerce maybe takes action years down the road. We need to fix this in the next session of #waleg, @jessdbateman.bsky.social.

Meanwhile Seattle is over a year behind in complying with state law on design review reform and is the only city left out of compliance (and probably won’t bother with resolving it until this fall or winter). Some cities lead. Seattle doesn’t.

Urban transportation systems compared at the same scale

How many of those “smaller communities” of 10,000-100,000 are just jurisdictions within an urban metro area? I like the idea of this graphic but its scale is off. America is a country of cities

Downtown Seattle is still only at 64% of office foot traffic compared to 2019. To make that up with residents we would need to add 49,000 more homes and to grow the downtown population by 75% (from 109k to 190k). www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...

Someone studied 55,000 permits in Seattle and found that single family home additions / remodels get approved quickly and anything else gets stuck in absurd review cycles like 55 days for “drainage” www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/s/...

I’m pretty distracted by it as you should be too

We need more homes. Developers want to make money building the homes we need in the places people want to live. We should let them do so.

These people always want housing on the arterial but would never live on a busy street due to the noise, pollution and danger

Nothing stops displacement and gentrification like using zoning to preserve single family homes that sell to wealthier and wealthier buyers, doubling in value every 5 years.

I am so sick of hearing about birds, trees and parking.

Makes me even prouder that my kid (same age) was part of a class project that designed the Seattle of the Future with an emphasis on more housing and needing to build denser than it is in order to achieve climate goals, support transportation and be a more livable city for everyone.

I’ve never actually heard anyone explain to me why development needs to be checked anyway. Are we afraid they might build too many homes? Isn’t that what we want? Save me the tree bs, we know that’s a ruse

Mercer Island residents claim the light rail is too popular which will decrease the public’s trust to use it because the lot is always full “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded” komonews.com/news/local/m...

NASA and the postal service are great things worth the money. Do we need 13 air craft carriers (and to replace them)? Do we need military bases around the world? How many tanks do we have? Fighter jets?

X (stop calling it Twitter, the owner rebranded it X so accept that) completely sucks and is a rigged website that shovels unpopular right wing attitudes. If you’re still there you are delusional

Way too narrow obviously

In the US: BlueSky: DC X: Austin Facebook: Chicago Instagram: LA Threads: Detroit Mastadon: New Orleans LinkedIn: San Francisco Tik Tok: Seattle

One day Seattle will catch up with Asheville

Cities shooting themselves in the foot for tax fleeing commuters

More quickly? They won’t be finishing it until she’s up for reelection.

I attended a community outreach meeting for the comprehensive plan back in January 2023 and I can’t help but wonder how many people in that packed room giving feedback will have died or moved out by the time this project is completed 6 years later

Sacramento. Ask me anything

That is Pont Street in the Chelsea neighborhood of London. And those are actually street trees.

Tree Action Seattle is against planting more trees.

We must watch out for special interest groups getting their way, says Friends of the Market’s little fiefdom

This is how you know the tree people aren’t serious

We might complete Seattle’s comprehensive plan by 2027, 3-years after it was due, the same year Artemis III will land humans on the moon.

Getting stuff done

lol this means Seattle’s comprehensive plan would have been a SIX YEAR PROCESS for a once every 10 years planning update!