Daily Score Blog

In a step forward for bioregional thinking, Washington has agreed to add a new name to the Northwest's official geographic lexicon: the Salish Sea. Following on the heels of British Columbia's endorsement, the term will now be used to refer to the collective inland waters of Puget Sound, Georgia Straight, and the Straight of Juan de Fuca.

It doesn't replace any of those names, but "Salish Sea" does provide an important addition to our understanding of Cascadia. Because the new term is firmly rooted in both history and ecology, it may help direct more attention to protecting the natural heritage of the region.

At Crosscut, Knute Berger has done a bang-up job covering the Salish Sea name-change. See here, here, here, and here.

A few weeks back, I wrote about an article that appeared in The Tyee, arguing that artsy, creative young people are abandoning Vancouver in droves. As evidence, the author mentioned data showing a decline in the number of young people in Metro Vancouver since 1996.

The idea that Vancouver was pushing out young people struck me as sketchy. So I looked at the numbers a bit, and decided that the article had things exactly backward:  Vancouver has actually been a magnet for BC's young people. 

And in response, the author cited this report (pdf link), based on Canadian Census figures showing that the population of 25-34 year olds in Metro Vancouver dropped by 10 percent between 1996 and 2006.

Let me be clear about two things.  First, the Canadian Census really does show a decline in Vancouver's 25-34 year old population from 1996 to 2006.  And second, that decline is absolutely irrelevant: the apparent decline is entirely due to the continent-wide "baby bust" of the early 1970s, which followed close on the heels of the "baby boom" of the 1950s and 1960s.

In fact, if you take the time to parse the numbers more closely, you can see a very clear trend:  young people really do prefer metro Vancouver.

Let's look at those numbers, shall we?

British Columbians have one more thing to be thankful for this holiday. September employment figures for British Columbia are in and the news is good.  BC employment increased in September by 31,000 jobs with the unemployment rate dropping 0.3 percent to 8.4 percent. This is the first monthly decline in unemployment since the collapse of the global economy last fall.

Manufacturing businesses hired 5,900 people and the construction industry, especially hard hit by the recession, created 4,000 new jobs.

My cries have been answered.

In Canada, at least, there is such a thing as a free market think tank with a free market perspective on parking policy. The Winnipeg-based Frontier Centre for Public Policy recently published a concise little position paper, "How Free Is Your Parking?" by Stuart Donovan.

It makes three points, briefly:

As part of the Cascadia Scorecard project, Sightline monitors trends in the Northwest's economy as it affects ordinary families. With the release today of new child poverty figures from the US Census Bureau, Sightline finds that the region's overall economic security declined for the second straight year in 2008. And if more recent trends in unemployment are any indication, conditions have worsened further.

Some key findings:

• New Census figures released today show that nearly 1 in 6 Northwest children lived in poverty in 2008. Oregon reported the region’s highest child poverty rate with more than 18 percent of the state’s children living in households below the poverty line.
• Sightline’s economic security index shows worsening prospects for ordinary families in the Northwest. In 2008, the region’s economic security deteriorated for the second consecutive year. (Sightline’s index is a four-part composite based on unemployment rates, median incomes, poverty rates, and the share of children living below the poverty line.)
• Headlines about GDP dominate the news, but there are few measures of economic well-being for ordinary families. According to Sightline’s index, middle-class and low-income northwesterners have seen virtually no net progress in economic security since 1990. 
• Middle class wages have declined more last year than they have in nearly a decade. As of 2008, middle-income northwesterners earned about $3,000 less, adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1998.
• The share of Northwesterners in poverty remained statistically unchanged between 2007 and 2008, yet in both years the Northwest’s poverty rate remained higher than it was in 1990.
• The most recent federal unemployment figures are a warning sign that conditions may worsen further. Mimicking national trends, each state in the Northwest saw an increase in its monthly unemployment rate – and the unemployment rate in Oregon is now the highest in the state’s history.

Read Sightline's latest analysis: Economic Insecurity. The full report is here (pdf); the press release is here.

I remember the first time I drove into Vancouver in the late 1980s. Interstate 5 melted away into Highway 99 and eventually, I crossed over the Oak Street Bridge into a four lane city street with no turn lanes. How odd that the freeway didn’t just plow through the city with convenient exits at strategic points. What were they thinking?

Instead, it was a game of trying to pick the right lane and making the lights until we finally arrived in downtown Vancouver. Well, this was no oversight, as former Vancouver City councilmember and Sightline board member Gordon Price outlined in the Great Debate over the summer. Vancouver shunned freeways and, according to Price and others, that resistance to the freeway slicing through the heart of the city forms a core of the Vancouver’s well deserved reputation for being sustainable.

I had not realized, until reading Sara Mirk’s brilliant history of Portland’s dead freeways, that Portland can boast a similar history of resisting freeways. In her Portland Mercury article, Mirk highlights Portland’s Dead Freeway Society, a bike group that rides and remembers this chapter in the city’s formation.

Size is one of those things that can be measured but is still very subjective. A child might think their teacher is tall, even though he’s only 5 feet 6 inches, while Manute Bol might think someone who stands 6’6: is short. The size of back yard cottages or laneway housing can determine their acceptance or rejection in single family neighborhoods—but, again, size is in the eye of the beholder.

Height, bulk, and scale of buildings can make or break a project or proposal. But, when does a building get too tall or too bulky? When does a house become a McMansion? What factor decides whether my neighbor and I can agree on a house that’s just right? What size is right depends on who you talk to.

So, to help us decide the right size for new housing options, the most important questions to ask focus on the outcomes we want—for families, neighborhoods, the environment.

A report released last year from the Livable Seattle Movement declared that Seattle’s existing zoning is more than enough—three times more—than we need to accommodate expected growth. Phew! What a relief. And here we thought the Seattle region would have to undergo some painful, politically-rending rezones in order to sop up all the new people—as many as 106,000 households—arriving in the next decade. And, by extension, it would also mean we don’t need the backyard cottages being proposed by the City of Seattle.

But does this conclusion pass the “red face” test? Nope—faces are red. Or at least they should be. Why? Because their data is suspect and it doesn’t take into account any kind of community objections or other unforeseen obstacles even when the existing code allows development.

There are many reasons to love Vancouver, BC. It is a great international city with tremendous cultural diversity. Some of us truly see Vancouver as a bold leader in accommodating growth in sustainable compact communities. Personally, I like the fact that the Queen is on their money and they call the Mayor, “Your Worship.”

Now there is one more reason to admire Vancouver—especially all you density devotees out there: secondary suites in apartments. Here is how a backgrounder on  recent legislation passed by the Vancouver City Council in July describes them: 

Similar to secondary suites in single-family homes, the secondary suite in apartment buildings is a self-contained dwelling unit (with a kitchenette, bathroom, and living room/bedroom area) designed within a larger primary suite. The secondary suite is able to be ‘locked-off’ from the primary suite and a separate door is provided for the secondary suite to either a corridor or to the outside. Together the secondary suite and the primary unit would be approximately equal in size to a two-bedroom/two-bathroom apartment.

Conservative Northwest think tanks, I am calling you out.

I want you guys to talk about parking policy. Yeah, you heard me: parking policy.

By my count, there are 5 prominent right-leaning, market-oriented think tanks in the Northwest: Discovery Institute and Washington Policy Center in Seattle; Evergreen Freedom Foundation in Olympia; Cascade Policy Institute in Portland; and Fraser Institute in Vancouver, BC. Each of them prominently features a devotion to free markets in their self-descriptions. Each of them is located in a place where urban land-use issues are hot topics. And some of them produce a prodigious number of documents.

But with a quick Google search I found virtually no parking policy analysis on any of their websites. What gives?

Why don't free marketeers get engaged in parking policy? You bump into them in debates about land use, property rights, transit development, and so on. But when it comes to parking -- where there is obvious market distortion, excessive government regulation, and steep costs to the economy -- you rarely hear a peep.

It seems to me that if I were a free marketeer-type, I'd be incensed that the government mandates parking minimums, often set far in excess of actual demand. Parking minimums, which stipulate how much parking a new (or existing) development must provide, are a headache for developers and property owners -- and they create serious, if indirect, costs.

I might want to run the government out of the parking business because I wouldn't want public resources to distort prices and compete with private vendors. So at minimum, I don't think I'd like public subsidies going to construct parking garages or other parking areas, even near transit centers.

And in that vein, my free marketeer alter ego would evaluate the extent to which curbside parking spaces obstruct market competition. I'd probably want all curbside parking to be metered at whatever rate reflects demand for those spaces. (Better still, would be zero pubic parking with private sellers providing parking at market prices.) Or, if drivers won't pay, then perhaps that public space might be better devoted to other types of "freebies": congestion-easing traffic lanes, HOV lanes, bike lanes, expanded sidewalks, or what have you.  

Chuck Wolfe over at Crosscut posted a really useful rundown of planning ideas for Seattle’s next mayor. Among other things, Wolfe urges Seattle’s next leader to consider bigger and bolder ideas when considering land use. The biggest and boldest idea is scrapping traditional zoning in favor of innovation and flexibility.

Growth can bring advantages with it—walkable neighborhoods, aggregated demand for transit, less impact on the climate and environment. So, some of us might be saying “amen” to many of the ideas Wolfe puts forward, including the idea touted by Dan Bertolet: to create an  Office of Sustainable Urbanism. An OSU could be the place where the big ideas and reality meet.

Which is the better place to live, Portland, OR, or Vancouver, BC?

Well, Vancouver keeps getting high marks in international surveys of urban livablity.  Yet a few weeks back, the BC-based online magazine The Tyee ran a series of lively and well-written articles by Christine McLaren arguing Portland bests Vancouver on some key measures of quality of life. 

Since I live in Seattle, I don't really have a dog in this fight.  And  in principle I love this sort of inter-city cage match, since it focuses people's attentions on what other cities are doing right, and how we can improve livability in our own backyard.

Still, after diving numbers a bit (I admit it, I can't help myself) I feel like I just had to add my two cents to this debate -- and point out a few places where I feel like those articles are off base.

You can review some of the design contest entries here. For the most part these ideas are at the edge of feasibility, but that’s the point of design competitions: to push the limits of what conventional wisdom says is possible.

Last week I heaped praise on Portland’s plans to revise their city building codes to encourage family-friendly courtyard housing.

This week, I am feeling the same way about another set of changes being considered that would make it easier to generate clean energy and reduce runoff in urban neighborhoods. A package of changes called the “Green Bundle” is being reviewed this summer by the City of Portland. The Planning Commission will have a hearing on the proposed changes on August 25. 

Among many other nifty urban clean energy ideas like solar panels and green roofs, the Bundle would “allow small-scale wind energy systems to exceed Zoning Code height limits, either as stand-alone towers or when incorporated into building architecture.”

The most common sense of the word “density” in land-use terms is simple: more people in a smaller area. Frequently the only way to accomplish this is to build taller, multi-unit buildings. High rises.

But in areas with low concentrations of people, increasing density can mean something different than building up to the sky. There are ways to create more diversity and choice in single-family neighborhoods—accessory dwelling units (ADUs) can mean mother-in-law apartments, garages converted into detached housing, or rooms for rent. All of these are good growth strategies for cities, providing families and property owners with more options, and maintaining the character of some single family neighborhoods. 

There is a lot going on in the region when it comes to increasing choices in single-family neighborhoods. Vancouver, Portland and Seattle are all looking at ways to accommodate more people, while keeping established neighborhoods intact. Each city has a different name and a different game plan to legalize ADU options that have been shut out by city codes, but in all, density is on the rise—and not the high rise.