Claim OwnershipThe Urbanist
Subscribed: 16Played: 244
Subscribe
© 2023 The Urbanist
Description
Ray Dubicki and Natalie Argerious of The Urbanist (www.theurbanist.org) discuss news, information, and ideas related to improving cities and quality of life with a special focus on Seattle and the Puget Sound region.
60 Episodes
Reverse
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, but ...
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 this...
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 lot o...
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 together...
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 Urba...
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 the ...
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 suppos...
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 who...
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 our ...
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 what ...
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 city....
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...
In this week's episode, co-hosts Natalie Argerious and Ray Dubicki are joined by conservation educators Hanae Bettencourt, Josh Morris, and Kate Lanier from Seattle Audubon. We get to talk about birds! The good news: it's fun to get into birding and Seattle's a great place to do it. Unfortunately, there is some bad news too. The region's birds face a number of threats, including window strikes and our resident "adorable murder machines" -- cats.Come to find out that, due to its location betwe...
This week we had the opportunity to host Governor Jay Inslee on The Urbanist podcast. It was good timing as we reached the midpoint of the state's 100-day legislative session. Several of the bills the governor has championed, such as legalizing missing middle housing statewide and adding a climate element for cities planning under the Growth Management Act, are still in play. Gov. Inslee was bullish about the prospect of ushering legislative priorities and getting a $4 billion housing bo...
Nathan Vass has been sharing his observations as a bus driver with The Urbanist for nine years. From the first conversation chronicles and desaturated photos, he has been building an honest and nuanced portrait of a living Seattle. There’s no Instagram filters here, and that’s fine. Not because the city’s bumps and bruises are beautiful, but because they’re evidence of human lives and interactions.And that’s the quiet part of what makes Nathan’s columns and artwork so touching. We come to hea...
In an effort to compete with the Super Bowl and Valentines Day, Seattle. has decided to have an election. On the ballot is social housing, specifically creating a new housing authority that will develop and own green, public, and perpetually affordable homes and use the money raised from rent to build even more. The Urbanist Elections Committee has supported the initiative.In this episode, co-hosts Natalie Argerious and Ray Dubicki break down the point of the social housing plans, talk about ...
When Ray pitched the idea to me of doing an episode on automation, the first thing I thought was, of course. Automation, in no small part because of the meteoric rise of the chatbot Chat GPT by OpenAI, is being discussed in every news outlet I follow these days. Is it because us writers and podcasters finally have technology coming for our jobs? While most research studies place writer as low on the list of professions at risk of being replaced by automation, I'm not convinced, as you'll disc...
We are wrapping up the year, and our second podcast season, with an episode devoted to hygge and the holidays. Yes, we did have to look up the pronunciation of hygge -- and practice it -- to get it right on the air. For those of you who are not Danish speakers, the Internet told us the correct pronunciation is "hyoo-guh" and we hope that we didn't butcher it too much in this episode. From Christmas markets, to holiday lights, to holiday feasting that results in the creation of a "ch...
Download from Google Play
Download from App Store
United States
The intake/reviewer can not lead you. what if he suggests something and it turns out wrong you come back and say well it's what the reviewer told me to do. Who is liable for that? Everyone wants to blame the city when the job goes sideways. I have been in construction for 13 years. If I had a dollar for every story I heard about SDIC screwing up someone's job, I would have a thousand dollars. If you don't know what you're doing, hire an architect. If it was easy, we would not have a homeless problem. Every meth attic would be a GC building their tiny home. But alas, it is complicated. She says she has been doing for 25 years, and she has never had that happen. she assumed there was water there. who's fault is that?? Sounds like she made a mistake and wants to blame it on the city. She advised him to move forward under the "assumption" that water was in the street. pretty clear to me, she gave him negligent advice. Is this the city fault? Why should the city subsidize his deve