About us

The reason this site exists is because regardless of whether you live in South, West, Central, Downtown, or North Seattle, we’re all in this together. We’ve got to figure out how to make living in this city affordable, make transit work for everyone, and to create the best kind of development we can.

Sorry about the schmaltzy intro, but you gotta have hope that we can do better with Seattle’s land use planning. My name is Greg Raece and I am a trustee on the Wedgwood Community Council. I chair the council’s land use committee and decided to get involved with neighborhood planning when my neighbors and I started responding to a proposed large retail/condo development going up in Wedgwood. We started the Wedgwood Action Group web site when we realized there really wasn’t a plan for development in our neighborhood and we needed to get the word out about the project.

Anyway, this blog was created as a way to track the different land use issues that are facing all of us in the city, and trying to come up with a more balanced (instead of piecemeal) approach to accomplishing:

* Making sure that density planning also comes with infrastructure investment.
* Coming up with a real plan for widescale affordable housing in Seattle.
* Moving Seattle’s development and land use thinking from an ‘all or nothing’ standpoint, and think about the best solution for everyone.

This blog’s goal is to reach out beyond Wedgwood and look at similiar land use issues within the city, along with looking at solutions to some of our city’s challenges.

If you have any comments or story ideas, please feel free to contact me via email at greg(at)smarterneighbors.com. The (at) is really an @ sign which I changed to keep spambots from scraping the site.