Shared Roof features a range of incomes, built-in community, and hip cafes spilling onto a public courtyard. About 10 years ago, developer Chad Dale knew many friends who were leaving Seattle because “they wanted to have a lot of fun amenities but they couldn’t afford to do so.” After working together to buy a communal farm on Whidbey Island as a shared vacation home, Dale and a group of friends wondered if they could use the same cooperative model to build a cooperative apartment complex in Seattle. “We created this idea of a more community-focused living space where we could essentially have ..read more

Reflecting on The Urbanist’s 10th anniversary leads me back to the very beginning. The Urbanist founding coincided with a Seattle boom cycle. Enthusiasm for urbanism was broad and deep. During The Urbanist’s infancy, business associations supported taxes for public transit. Council unanimously passed an ambitious bike plan. We achieved the biggest upzones in generations, directly resulting in record housing production and affordability investments. The region passed one of the highest per capita, voter-approved taxes for rail in the country’s history. Among this broad and deep support for urba ..read more

On Thursday, the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections (SDCI) issued draft legislation to exempt qualifying new residential, hotel, and laboratory construction projects from design review in most of the greater downtown core. This proposal constituted another element of Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell’s Downtown Activation Plan (DAP) and yet another under the land use reform category. The legislation would apply for three years and provide design review exemptions in the Downtown, Uptown, South Lake Union, and First Hill Urban Centers for the following types of projects: Mixed-use pr ..read more

The City of Redmond, Microsoft, and Sound Transit cut the ribbon Monday on a highway-straddling pedestrian and bike bridge connecting the new Redmond Technology light rail station directly across both State Route 520 and local streets in Redmond. The bridge, funded entirely by Microsoft by way of a public-private partnership authorized under state law, has been in the works for more than 10 years. With the start of service on Sound Transit’s 2 Line this Saturday, the bridge provides a multimodal connection at the line’s northern terminus until service is extended into Downtown Redmond in 2025 ..read more

As Sound Transit prepares to launch the East Link Starter Line on April 27, The Urbanist will go station-by-station to look at how the neighborhoods have been changing and preparing for light rail’s arrival with transit-oriented development (TOD) via our “East Link TOD” series. Back in 2022, we warned that some neighborhoods along East Link were squandering their TOD opportunities, but there are a few success stories, too. Let’s start our journey along the 2 Line (as East Link will be called) in Downtown Bellevue, which certainly has the most highrise development of the bunch. When we last che ..read more

The draft eight-year, $1.35 billion transportation levy proposed by Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell early this month doesn’t propose to dramatically change the pace of new sidewalk construction in Seattle, instead promising a continuation of the current goal of around 30 city blocks per year, or 250 by the end of the 2032. That announcement has disappointed mobility advocates who have been pushing the city to ramp up its efforts to complete the missing sidewalk network, with 27% of Seattle’s blocks today lacking the basic pedestrian infrastructure that a sidewalk represents. At the current pace, S ..read more

American transit agencies often limit themselves in the types of buses that they use, but when is it right to have three-/four-/five-door buses, double decker buses, and single and double articulate buses? Reece Martin at RM Transit dives into the topic. The post Sunday Video: The Right Bus In The Right Place first appeared on The Urbanist ..read more

With the six-month anniversary of the Hilltop extension of Tacoma’s T Line streetcar, there is much to reflect on in the few months since the opening. The T Line (then known as Tacoma Link) began service 20 years ago. With the addition of seven new stops, the T Line has seen a jump in ridership since its opening in September of last year, with ridership hitting new highs based on Sound Transit’s ridership dashboard.  Monthly ridership is up significantly since the Hilltop Extension opened. (Sound Transit) With Sound Transit planning on continuing the extension westward toward Tacoma Commu ..read more

On Wednesday, Seattle City Councilmember Tammy Morales again tried to get her “Connected Communities” bill through the council’s land use committee, which she chairs, but again was denied. Instead the bill will head to a vote of the full council an extra week later on April 30 without a committee recommendation, under council rules. Morales needs to sway a majority of the councilmembers not on land use committee in order to save her bill, but most of her colleagues seem opposed to the idea of moving forward with an equitable development pilot program. Morales was the only councilmember on the ..read more

The fast-growing West Puget Sound city is considering ditching parking mandates and an upzone that could make room to add over 20,000 residents by 2044. In its proposed 2024 Comprehensive Plan update, the City of Bremerton will determine exactly how the fast growing city can meet its ambitious housing and land use goals. The plan’s goals include creation of “compact, mixed-use development focused within [Bremerton’s] designated centers, through increased density that provides additional housing capacity,” and “supporting infill development and increased densities.” Current city housing and lan ..read more