Category — Odds and Ends

You’d be surprised how cool an older adobe in New Mexico can be. Nice thick walls, verandas and shady courtyards help keep you cool in summer…

(photos from ohjoy.org)

Or I could see myself in this pool…

Kudos to the Save the Trees team, you’ve done a great job of working the system to make sure things are done according to the system.

Next step - August 25th for a temporary injunction.

You can get the entire update over at Save the Trees about Seattle School District’s decision to cut down Ingraham High trees, and the temporary restraining order Save the Trees filed that will be heard at 3pm today.

Breaking News – Press Advisory

The Seattle School District has just informed Keith Scully, the attorney for Save the Trees, that they will not halt their decision to cut down the trees at Ingraham High School while the environmental issues are being reviewed by the King County Superior Court. A hearing has been set for Sept 2, 2008 but the Seattle School District intends to ignore it and proceed with cutting down the trees this Friday, August 15, 2008.

Keith Scully will be filing a request for a temporary restraining order before the King County Superior Court at 516 Third Ave in Seattle before the Ex Parte division at 11:30 this morning

You can check at the front desk for the location of the hearing.

The Seattle School Board obviously decided last night in their special executive session to ignore the unresolved legal issues and also the position of Mayor Nickels, the Seattle City Council, many Seattle citizens and neighbors opposing cutting down the trees at Ingraham. The School District is opposing letting this issue be resolved on its merits through a court of law and has decided instead to use the chain saw to just get its way.

A friend gave me a heads up about ‘The Blog Readability Test’, a site that analyzes your blog and then grades it according to what level of education is required to understand your blog.

Here’s what the site had to say about Smarter Neighbors - ‘Oy! perhaps I need to start putting that grammar checking option to use more often.’ 

But let’s see - how did some other local blogs around the area do?

WestSeattleBlog.com

MyBallard.com

Rainier Valley Post

CHS Capitol Hill

The Southlake

HugeAssCity

And last but not least, the smartest neighborhood blogs in town.
Pinehurst Community Seattle

Blogging Georgetown

Movie Reviews

Here it is, your visual guide to bagging your own groceries. 

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels Bagging Groceries

I always thought this would be a funny way to tackle taggers.

Kind of cool photos from MOHAI, makes you think what would Seattle be like now without I-5. Or if the I-5 had instead been a rail corridor.

These freeway opponents lost their fight - but you’ve got to give them points for protesting stylishly.

I moved into the city of Seattle back in 1994 - and was paying $400 a month (but it was alot for me at first because I was making about $18k-$20k a year when I moved in) for a first floor studio+ unit up on Queen Anne. Features included:

• Heat, but no air conditioning
• Sink, but no dishwasher
• Laundry room downstairs
• It did have a real refrigerator
• Limited underground garage parking - but it was an extra cost
• Easy access to Seattle Center and bus routes 
• Electricity not included - but sewer/water/heat were

What were you paying when you moved to Seattle? 

(Here’s a photo of my old apartment building).  

Do you think the city will hold a competition soliciting designs for the reusable city-issued bags they’ll be handing out at the end of the year? I really hope so, because here’s my submission.

(Wanna have fun and design your own bag - you can make your own over at CafePress).

Dan’s tour of Medfield, MA is over, welcome back to Seatown! 

And just in time too, we need Hugeasscity to keep protecting us from architectural critiques like this one that The Stranger keeps publishing.

It’s always good to see a developer follow-up with a public response to questions and make themselves available to meet with anyone who has questions. (FYI - I’m not commenting on this particular topic - just how it’s being handled). And it’s great for folks in West Seattle that they have a publication which encourages neighborhood discussion.

Hey, I just want to say I’m chill with the car free Sundays. Streets are closed in cities all over the world for events, markets, etc… - when I lived in Tokyo my favorite memories are from those days when the city closed down blocks of roads to traffic and merchants set up shop all over the place.  (Note to readers - $4 polo shirts that you buy on the street don’t hold up so well to washing, drying, and even just wearing for an entire day)  

I don’t even think of this as some kind of heavy handed decision by the city (because it seems like they are trying to create something fun), it just seemed like…well…a surprise.

And I think that some of the outcry you see is a response to the city’s somewhat preachy way of announcing new things - where it’s hard to tell the difference between when they’re really trying to do something fun, or if they’re just being patronizing. 

So, since I don’t live near any of these car free Sundays, and it’d be kind of weird to drive there, the only way this impacts me is that I’ve got a few questions. 

• None of the car free Sundays are in North Seattle? Could this be because the mayor doesn’t really know that there is a good chunk of Seattle that actually exists north of the UW, or is this because North Seattle might have fought this tooth and nail?
• With the cars gone, will Critical Mass show up to chase off the pedestrians?
• If the car free neighborhoods had known about this sooner, could have planned for some kind of cool block parties those days - and applied for Neighborhood Matching Funds to help pay for it?
• And what if it rains?

Hopefully notes are being taken here, so that if it works it can be extended out further next year (Maybe even shutting down I5? We could party on the ship canal express lanes!)

I think that if you experience any of the following - you’re probably a neighborhood activist.

• A week never goes by where you’re not at some kind of city, neighborhood, sustainability meeting.
• You don’t need to look up directions to the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall, the Bertha Knight Landes room, University Heights Center, Queen Anne Community Center, or the HighPoint Community Center.
• At least one city councilmember knows your name (and is still willing to talk to you).
• You don’t like being called a ‘NIMBY’, but you still think it’d be funny to wear a t-shirt with ’NIMBY’ printed on it to a city meeting.
• Your name has appeared in either the Stranger, Seattle PI, Seattle Times, or Seattle Weekly. Bonus points if you’ve been called a ‘NIMBY’ by any of their readers.
• You run a neighborhood web site or blog.
• You don’t get paid for any of your community work.
• You’ve made a developer and/or architect shift uncomfortably while you speak up at meetings.
• And finally - you actually have read and can kind of understand city code!

There’s an interesting David Brewster article over at Crosscut about how Chicago has managed to keep housing affordable. Brewster says that Chicago has been able to succeed where Seattle hasn’t because it’s way more pro-growth than we are. Having lived in Illinois, I’m going to suggest that ‘pro-growth’ means something different in the Windy City.

In Chicago it means redeveloping existing industrial land and areas of urban blight. And the areas that are being rebuilt are ones where you really need the city to get behind developers and home owners to accept investing in a challenging neighborhood.

But Seattle is not Chicago (in good ways - lower crime and in bad ways - no real pizza or Italian beef sandwiches here), and there’s not alot of land in Seattle that’s crying out for redevelopment. And the reason for this is that we’re already a bunch of health neighborhoods. And that’s what people here are trying to protect, the health of their neighborhood.

What’s unfortunate for Seattle is that we have a bunch of zoning laws on the books that don’t support a pro-neighborhood type of pro-growth. We don’t encourage cottage housing, and we don’t look for creative ways of bringing appropriate development into single family neighborhoods.

But what is telling about this article is that Brewster points out that Chicago is where Mayor Nickels got his ideas. His heavy-handed approach to opposition is pretty much textbook Chicago politics.

Okay, and finally since Brewster asked for them, and sinc I just can’t turn down a challenge - here are some other ideas to make housing more affordable in Seattle (not saying there good ideas - just ‘technically’ answering his question):

• Destroy the economy - housing prices tend to go down when the jobs go away. For more info, check out Detroit.
• Reduce services and taxes - hey, it results in cheaper housing.
• Expand the types of housing in Seattle - maybe mother-in-law apartments and cottage housing?
• Put a new jail in an existing neighborhood - a surefire way to lower prices.
• Create some new flight paths where planes fly really low around the city. Have you seen the prices of those homes located just south of the Seatac runway?!?

In Kent on Friday night, the 5-0 busted 80 street racers and attendees. While earlier that night in Seattle, a Critical Mass ride-along(?) turned a bit ugly. It would be interesting to see what would happen if these two groups ever crossed paths.