The Urbanist hosted a “Future of Seattle Housing” panel discussion on April 23rd, alongside Seattle YIMBY, at El Centro de la Raza in Beacon Hill. The panel was moderated by Doug Trumm, The Urbanist’s publisher, and our panelists are housing leaders in the private, non-profit, and public sectors: Patrick Cobb, developer, architect, and a founding partner of Stack, a firm specializing in urban infill development.Naishin Fu, Co-Executive Director at House Our Neighbors, a nonprofit focused on e...
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The Urbanist hosted a “Future of Seattle Housing” panel discussion on April 23rd, alongside Seattle YIMBY, at El Centro de la Raza in Beacon Hill. The panel was moderated by Doug Trumm, The Urbanist’s publisher, and our panelists are housing leaders in the private, non-profit, and public sectors: Patrick Cobb, developer, architect, and a founding partner of Stack, a firm specializing in urban infill development.Naishin Fu, Co-Executive Director at House Our Neighbors, a nonprofit focused on e...
The Urbanist hosted a “Future of Seattle Housing” panel discussion on April 23rd, alongside Seattle YIMBY, at El Centro de la Raza in Beacon Hill. The panel was moderated by Doug Trumm, The Urbanist’s publisher, and our panelists are housing leaders in the private, non-profit, and public sectors: Patrick Cobb, developer, architect, and a founding partner of Stack, a firm specializing in urban infill development.Naishin Fu, Co-Executive Director at House Our Neighbors, a nonprofit focused on e...
It's time to vote for Seattle City Council, a housing levy, and elected positions all over King County. The Urbanist has published its general election endorsements. Get out your ballots, use the endorsements to pick the best candidates, and make sure they're returned by November 7. In this episode, co-hosts Natalie Argerious and Ray Dubicki break down the issues facing Seattle in this election and then review the endorsements. Gotta say that the Election Committee did a good job on some, bu...
Primary election ballots are arriving in the mail and due by August 1st. In the run up The Urbanist Elections Committee has been hard at work prepping endorsements for what is shaping to be an exciting (and consequential) primary election. In this podcast episode, host and reporter Ray Dubicki chats with Election Committee members Rian Watt, Urbanist executive director, and Maya Ramakrishnan, eviction attorney, about the committee's endorsements. Want to know more about their process fo...
Summer is (finally) here for families with kids in Seattle Public Schools! In this mini episode, hosts Ray Dubicki and Natalie Argerious reflect on how we got to this late start to summer and look forward to what's ahead. A great companion piece to this episode is Ray's recent op-ed on Mayor Harrell's vision for Downtown Seattle. Be sure to check it out. This is the last episode of our third podcast season. Although we are taking a break from recording, we will be checking our email th...
Summertime gets us thinking about whole bunch of stuff, including grass. In cities across North America, grass yards are often a symbol of wealth and success and in many areas have a cult status. But what are some of the pros and cons of covering land in a plant monoculture? What happens when deadly grasses like foxtail invade? And is it true that in the right conditions synthetic turf can melt? We discuss all of these questions and more in this episode. While look forward to you listening, ...
Cascadia is uniquely set up as a region that would support high-speed rail. Between the linear arrangement of Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, BC, and the just-over-100 mile distance between each one, the super region could be tied together by a fast. It's an idea being pushed by a number of actors, including the Cascadia Innovation Corridor, Microsoft, and anyone who REALLY needs to get back north for the Michelin starred roast duck at iDen & Quanjude Beijing Duck House. In this episode...
The Urbanist recently reported on Seattle snagging the 8th slot in the Trust for Public Land's 2023 national ParkScore index. In this episode, Natalie Argerious speaks with the Trust for Public Land's (TPL) Linda Hwang, Senior Director, Strategy and Innovation of the Land and People Lab, and Ronda Lee Chapman, Equity Director, about their organization's work to create more quality public parks throughout the US. Whether its research, advocacy, or community outreach, TPL is involved in a l...
Last week, we published an oral history of Washington State's missing middle housing bill. Creating this episode involved interviewing several of the lawmakers and advocates, like Representative Jessica Bateman (D- Olympia) and Bryce Yadon, lobbyist for Futurewise, who were involved in the legislation's path to success. There were so many good insights in the interviews that we decided to revisit a few more things we learned from these important conversations before shifting our focus t...
In this year’s legislative session, the Washington State Legislature passed extensive housing reform. House Bill 1110 compelled many cities in Washington to open up single-housing residential zones to long-banned duplexes, cottage courts, and small apartments. Such middle housing has been missing from the calculation for years, and it’s no wonder that housing has become unaffordable in that time. It took a lot to pass that legislation. In this episode, Doug Trumm and Ray Dubicki bring togethe...
In this episode, civil engineer and Urbanist contributing writer Donna Breske discusses her experience with the frustrating hurdles posed by the permitting process in Seattle with podcast host Ray Dubicki. Breske works on the kind of urban infill projects that the City of Seattle purports to want to see built, but in her experience, impediments in permit process, particularly for utilities, end up crushing development plans. Breske has shared some of these case studies in articles for The Ur...
Sound Transit CEO Julie Timm was our guest for The Urbanist's monthly talk series. Timm took the reins in September after coming out on top in a national CEO search to replace Peter Rogoff. She left her post as CEO of Greater Richmond Transit Company in Virginia to take the top job at Sound Transit. The discussion features a wide range of topics facing Seattle's light rail, from the issues with escalators to the order of stations opening. Timm provides a very frank observation many of the hi...
We get a lot of news-ish emails about ranking cities in lists. Whether it's the best cities for strange hats or the metros one can find the most left handed plumbers, there's a list for everything. The proliferation of lists begs the question of their quality. Who is making them, are they trustworthy, and are the lists even useful at all? In this episode, Natalie and Ray look at what makes a city ranking list good and how much entertainment can we draw out of the bad ones. Check out th...
This week Ray Dubicki and I chat about the policy changes that have been proposed for Seattle's industrial zones. These policies have been in the works for a long time and are finally coming up for consideration by the Seattle City Council in May and June. While we may associate industrial lands with factories, these days in Seattle they are more likely to be the location of big box stores or storage rental facilities. This is problematic since, at their core, industrial zones are suppo...
In this week's episode, podcast host Ray Dubicki discusses the Heroes and Zeroes of the recent state legislative session with Urbanist Executive Director Doug Trumm. Heroes and Zeroes is a standing tradition at The Urbanist, and this year's session concluded on some high notes as missing middle housing and climate action achieved victories. But there were some disappointments along the way too. This episode will cover the legislators who hustled bills past the finish line, as well as those w...
Sometimes we feel a modicum of shame that we're not reading enough books. As the pile on the nightstand gets taller, the guilt grows. There's absolutely no reason for that to be the case. Many of us spend all day, every day reading something. Literally, you're reading this right now. Good job. In this episode, Ray and Natalie talk about the varied things we're reading. And it's not just books, we cover some of the articles, children's books, and tingling romance novellas that have been in ou...
Every one knows there are two things you can't escape in life, death and taxes. While I'd add a few more items to that list, it seems that with Washington State having such an, ahem, unique tax system, the time had come for us to tackle the topic of taxes on The Urbanist podcast. So in this episode, Ray and I talk about Washington State's tax system -- the agrarian origins of how we became one of a select few U.S. states without an income tax, what it means to be one of these states, and wha...
Thank you for contacting The Urbanist Podcast. It is Spring Break, so co-hosts Ray Dubicki and Natalie Argerious are out of the office this week. So please enjoy a couple of unaired clips and updates from earlier stores we covered. We assure you that tiki shirts are being worn. As always, we love to hear from you. Tell us anything you've heard from the podcast that you'd like an update about, or any of the weird into-the-ether conversations Ray has with his computer while clicking on t...
In this episode, co-hosts Natalie Argerious and Ray Dubicki welcome Ron Davis to talk about a proposed Jump Start Tax Holiday in the city of Seattle. Ron last joined the pod to talk about how the city's comprehensive planning was lacking a level of seriousness. This tax holiday idea is not all that different. The Jump Start tax was passed by Seattle's City Council in 2020 after years of attempting to find a progressive revenue stream tapping into the biggest earners and businesses in the cit...
It is simultaneously exciting and trying times for transit in Seattle. Over the next few years, dozens of new stops will open in Bellevue, Lynnwood, and Federal Way. At the same time, future extensions are facing dual headwinds of being overly complex and lightly understood, even by elected officials tasked with deciding their locations. On Thursday, the Sound Transit executive board heard testimony from the community about where to identify as preferred station locations in the Chinatown Int...
It is spring of 8th Grade in the Dubicki household, so we have been investigating options on where to attend high schools. Seattle Public Schools offers schools in a home attendance area as well as option schools, allowing families to choose whether a school outside the neighborhood is a better fit. We looked at a few. Host Natalie Argerious questions co-host Ray Dubicki about whether the choices made about school were bad or worse for living and raising kids in an urban place, and Ray's ove...
The Urbanist hosted a “Future of Seattle Housing” panel discussion on April 23rd, alongside Seattle YIMBY, at El Centro de la Raza in Beacon Hill. The panel was moderated by Doug Trumm, The Urbanist’s publisher, and our panelists are housing leaders in the private, non-profit, and public sectors: Patrick Cobb, developer, architect, and a founding partner of Stack, a firm specializing in urban infill development.Naishin Fu, Co-Executive Director at House Our Neighbors, a nonprofit focused on e...
