Posted on 07/17/2003 6:25:40 PM PDT by NMC EXP
I told him it was We're Cops And You're Not.
City councils and county commissioners are not here to serve the citizen, but rather their own [communist] agenda or their cronies' [commercial] interest.
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
Thursday, July 17, 2003
By DWIGHT PELZ
GUEST COLUMNIST
Recently I had a disagreement with an old friend. I'm on the Sound Transit Board and am a big supporter of light rail. My friend lives near the planned light rail station at Columbia City. He and some of his neighbors are upset that light rail is coming and that it is tied to the proposals to increase housing density near the station.
That day he was particularly focused on one vacant property near the station that was zoned for multifamily (apartment or condominium) housing. "The city should buy that as a park or as a P-patch. We don't have enough open space in this part of the city," he said.
I was shocked because this friend considers himself a radical environmentalist. He recently had been involved in the planning of several very intense protests in the woods against logging and other objectionable forest practices. Yet here he was arguing a position that I believe to be fundamentally anti-environment. I have come to believe there is a deep confusion in Seattle about what it means to be an environmentalist within a city -- to be an urban environmentalist.
The greatest challenge facing urban environmentalists in Seattle and King County is how to build a community that does not sprawl into the hills, that reduces the use of the private automobile while increasing the use of mass transit, that reduces air pollution and gasoline consumption, that provides a high quality of life in livable communities with ready access to parks and open space.
We need to do this over the next 10 years while absorbing an estimated additional 120,000 people in King County and maintaining the current urban/rural boundary under the Growth Management Act. We need to build high-quality-of-life urban neighborhoods where people can choose to live in higher density, multistory, multifamily apartments and condominiums and where they can walk or bike to work, schools, stores and mass transit stations. All this must be done while preserving the many single-family home neighborhoods in Seattle, Kent, Redmond and throughout the county.
In this country there are basically three kinds of urban/suburban communities:
Our challenge as urban environmentalists is how to build more urban neighborhoods while preserving mature neighborhoods and serving suburban neighborhoods with more mass transit options.
It is commonly understood that Vancouver, B.C., has built a very large urban core near its downtown; some 72,900 residents of apartments and condominiums are served by a network of parks, open spaces and walking/biking trails. More relevant to Seattle is Portland's success in building downtown residential neighborhoods clustered around light rail and streetcar stops.
There is good news. We have built an urban neighborhood in the Denny Regrade. Since the late '80s, more than 2,000 apartments and condominium units have been built in high-rise buildings. Twenty years ago, the only restaurant open at 11 p.m. was the McDonald's across from the Bon Marche. Today there are some 50 restaurants, bistros and pubs in the Denny Regrade and you can't get a parking space at 11 p.m. on a weekday night because the night life is alive.
Residents in this new Denny Regrade love living there. They don't miss the lawn or the dreadful commute on the Evergreen Point Bridge. They walk or take the bus to work, to Benaroya Hall, to Safeco Field or to the Pike Place Market.
There are other successes. Downtown Bellevue rapidly is becoming an urban neighborhood. Redmond, Renton and Tukwila are planning and building innovative residential projects near shopping and transit. Auburn and Kent are seeing downtown revitalization centered around their Sound Transit commuter rail stations.
Where should the next urban neighborhoods grow in Seattle? I agree with Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels that we can and should build livable urban environmental neighborhoods in South Lake Union, Pioneer Square and Northgate. Mature neighborhoods adjacent to light rail and monorail stops such as Columbia City, Ballard and West Seattle should welcome some new density and some new neighbors, as together we build a city that reflects our values as urban environmentalists.
Dwight Pelz is a member of the King County Council.
Well, for one thing, factory owners like to have their factories placed as close as possible to freeways and railway lines. Most homes are built some distance away from such pieces of infrastructure.
I'm at a loss to explain the widespread perception that there are loads of evil nasty people just waiting to build factories in the centers of neighborhoods of twisty little roads(*) so as to give their suppliers and delivery truckers some fun maneuvering their trucks.
(*) Or twisty big roads. For some reason some residential neighborhoods have roads which are wider than the 3x2 lane arterials connecting them. Can anybody explain this?
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