Liberal Talk Radio

The Rainier Cold Storage building, a landmark in Seattle’s Georgetown neighborhood, is set to be demolished. The building is a striking fixture of the neighborhood. Georgetown simply won’t be Georgetown without it. But before we start blaming the developer and clamoring for the torches and pitchforks, let’s first read a bit about [...]

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg almost makes the urban gentrification pro-immigration argument* but doesn’t quite articulate it:
Mayor Bloomberg is taking on presidential hopeful Mitt Romney and others who’ve said the federal government should slash funding for cities that don’t strictly enforce immigration laws.
“Boy, let them come,” Mr. Bloomberg said yesterday when asked about Mr. [...]

This month’s Wired has a great piece on a smart city for 500,000 people (that’s about the size of Seattle proper) being built from scratch:
Arup believes good design can do something about this mess. Dongtan’s master plan — hundreds of pages of maps, schematics, and data — has almost nothing to say about architectural style. [...]

So I’m working from home this morning, trying to get work done, but a late-model Lexus sedan parked just outside my apartment is screaming every five minutes, dutifully letting me know that it thinks it’s being stolen. Do I even need to tell you that I can look out my window and clearly see [...]

Isn’t it a law or something that developers have to provide pedestrian rights-of-way during construction? Walking up through downtown Seattle, I had to switch to the opposite side of the street several times because of signs like this.
These are the downsides of our Mayor’s nefarious pro-growth agenda. I think I can [...]

If you paid a million bucks for a snazzy new downtown condo, you’d be worried if it was built like a cheap Mexican hotel, right? Me too:
O’Leary, who never moved into his condo, says some of the problems include irreparably damaged door and window frames; a poured concrete deck that sloped toward his apartment, [...]

Courtesy of the P-I’s Bill Virgin, we learn that Vancouver is quickly becoming Canada’s answer to Miami Beach, rather than a Canuck San Francisco. Virgin (does he really still look like that headshot?) points us to Vancouver magazine’s recent article on Seattle.
Boddy declares that Seattle’s bastion of new-economy corporate HQs gives it [...]

There’s something that really creeps me out about workforce housing. The term, still only vaguely defined, is an attempt to solve the problem whereby civil servants and other wage earners — teachers, police, janitors — are priced out of the communities in which they serve. In Seattle, we’re slowly becoming aware of the [...]

I don’t by any means intend to trivialize Iraq by continually making these comparisons. It is, after all, a relatively minor domestic infrastructure project versus a trillion-dollar fiasco of a war that has cost tens of thousands of lives. Nonetheless, the comparisons keep inviting themselves:
“It is hard to see any happy ending [...]

It’s been argued — plausibly, I think — that the current sectarian violence plaguing Iraq was not inevitable. There was a leadership vacuum after the invasion, followed by a calculated series of attacks by Al Qaeda in Iraq and other Sunni groups designed to pit various sects against each other. Bush was paralyzed [...]