Someone once told me the term “bureaucracy” is intentionally hard to spell. When I first tried to spell it without Googling it, I butchered it so badly that my spell check couldn’t recommend a revision at all. After frustratingly trying to get it closer so my phone would auto-correct, I…

Sometimes life delivers an irony that even the writers of SNL couldn’t deliver. Earlier this week I attended a community planning event to talk about how many homes Seattle needs to plan for by 2045. After everyone showed up at Seattle’s “Community Conversations” series, where the city planning staff outlines…

Throughout the history of our nation, cities have spawned out of sheer desire to live where opportunity exists. Manhattan took 50 years to go from sleepy suburbanized neighborhoods to towering stacked homes and businesses. Cities around the country sparked up economic booms, luring people and jobs to city centers as…

There is no such thing as “trickle down housing”. You may have heard this misunderstood economic analysis at a community meeting or in the Seattle Times. The problem with fighting for housing in this era of “Not In My Back Yard” activism is people are not making arguments in good…

My neighbor Ted Geisel is fuming once again about the debate regarding more homes. This time it involved not just NIMBYs who don’t want to lose the tree (because it provides shade) and don’t want the tall building (because it provides shade), but it also included a useless City Councilmember…

Nobody likes it when someone looks a gift horse in the mouth. That’s exactly what is happening in West Seattle. In 2016, West Seattle was given a multi billion dollar gift — a light rail expansion line. Most people would be gushing over the opportunity of connectivity, to buzz into…

Recently I was asked to present an article written for The Urbanist titled “Seattle has the Space” for the Surrey Board of Trade (SBOT). SBOT was interested in the problems of Seattle (which they share) and how modest changes to zoning allowances can grow a city. Now, Surrey is already…

In 1961 locals watched the Seattle Hotel get torn down for a parking garage. The loss of this iconic building tugged at the emotions of seeing rich architecture exchanged for drab concrete structures used to store cars. Today, that parking garage is known as the “sinking ship”, and media outlets…

My neighbor Ted Giesel is up to his old tricks again. This time he took a swipe at the Design Review board chair in the Capitol Hill neighborhood who has been on his soap box adding hundreds of thousands of dollars to apartment projects to make housing even more unaffordable…