YIMBY News for 2/12

[Eric Budd]

The Seattle Example for Unlocking More Housing, One Stairway at a Time

Next City

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KEYWORD SCORE: 56.48. affordable, affordable housing, apartment, condo, construction, density, development, height limit, house, housing, housing crisis, income, infill, land-use, mixed-use, mobility, parking, project, rent, single-family, urban, walk, yimby, zone

[image: Backyard] BB House (left), part of a mixed-use renovation, and Capitol View (right), affordable condos developed by Habitat for Humanity. Both are single-staircase apartment buildings in Seattle. (Photos by Christine Ro) Fire officials and pro-density urbanists are often at loggerheads. This is especially evident in notoriously car-centric Los Angeles, where a firefighters’ union spent six figures opposing active mobility measures. The two camps can have different ideas of acceptable risks and priorities. But Matthew Flaherty, a firefighter who has lived in L.A. his whole life, bridges

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Issaquah Pitches Case for Keeping Its Light Rail Line on Track

The Urbanist

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KEYWORD SCORE: 32.31. bus rapid transit, construction, development, downtown, growth, housing, parking, parking garage, parking lot, project, rent, urban, walk

The City of Issaquah fought hard to get a light rail station on the Sound Transit 3 (ST3) map, and they’d like to keep it. That’s the position of newly elected Issaquah Mayor Mark Mullet, who is ramping up a campaign to sway board members not to delay or cancel the Eastside’s next planned light rail line. The planned South Kirkland-to-Issaquah Link line would terminate in Issaquah’s underutilized central core, which remains dominated by big box stores and parking lots despite longstanding plans to spur housing growth. The project would connect to the 2 Line in Bellevue via I-90, with two addit

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Rural Decline Isn’t a Given. Redesigned Policies Can Help.

Governing

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KEYWORD SCORE: 27.72. construction, development, house, housing, housing cost, project, rent, supply, urban

Economists say that rural America enjoyed a brief, pandemic-era revival that is now over. Manufacturing has slowed, immigration has stalled, remote work is being rolled back and rural hospitals face closure. The conclusion is fatalistic: that rural prosperity was a one-time anomaly and decline will inevitably resume. That diagnosis misinterprets the evidence. During the pandemic, rural America was temporarily released from systems that have constrained it for decades. When a handful of structural barriers loosened at once, rural communities demonstrated capacity that had long been suppressed.

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Why Several Dallas Suburbs Might Ditch the Regional Transit Agency

Governing

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KEYWORD SCORE: 25.45. development, growth, project, rent, transportation, urban

In Brief: Five cities near Dallas are preparing to vote on whether to leave the DART transit service. Leaders say they haven’t gotten the kind of service they want. Many are hoping to save more sales tax revenue to shore up municipal finances. John Muns is the mayor of Plano, Texas, a city of about 300,000 people in the northern suburbs of the Dallas-Fort Worth region. Plano voted to join Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART), the regional transit agency, in 1983. At that time the city had around 70,000 people, but it was poised for growth, and, Muns says, its residents wanted to be part of the met

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A new nonprofit grocery chain is coming to three Denver neighborhoods

Denverite

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KEYWORD SCORE: 22.45. construction, development, housing, housing authority, income, mixed-use, project, rent

Donna Garnett isn’t waiting for a corporate savior to fix Denver’s food deserts. That’s why she is leading a plan to open three locations of a new nonprofit grocery chain called FreshLo Market. Garnett is the longtime leader of Montbello Organizing Committee, the community group that has been working for years to help address various issues in northeast Denver. “It is a well-established fact that in Denver and across the country that large grocery chains are not willing or interested in coming into low-income communities, and they can’t make the profit margin that they need,” Garnett said. Don

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The Denver mayoral candidate who wants to make 16th Street like downtown Las Vegas, zipline included

Denverite

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KEYWORD SCORE: 18.86. development, downtown, housing, project, rent, walk

Dek: “Tell me that’s not going to bring people downtown,” said Aurelio Martinez. Lifelong Curtis Park resident and retired IT professional Aurelio Martinez entered the Denver mayor’s race back in 2024, around three years ahead of the upcoming election. In a recent interview, Martinez said Mayor Mike Johnston is a flop, and the city needs fresh leadership. “There’s so much wrong with Denver right now that every time I talk to people about the election and why I’m running, the basic answer is because Denver’s broken,” he said. “And it’s been broken for a long time, and there was a lot of folks t

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All of the reasons Colorado’s horrible snowpack is so problematic

Colorado Sun

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KEYWORD SCORE: 18.75. growth, occupancy, project, rent, supply

Biologist David Inouye spent part of his Tuesday afternoon harvesting artichokes from his garden in the 1,400-person town of Paonia in western Colorado. “It’s been so warm and dry here that my garden’s ready to plant,” Inouye said. “I was actually thinking about maybe planting some spinach or peas this week.” Even with current snowstorms, Colorado’s snowpack this year is, frankly, horrible. The entire state has been in a snow drought with a record-low snowpack. The signs are everywhere: Skiers see it when they hit the slopes. Water providers keep an eye on their reservoir levels and talk about

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Denver’s Skyline Park starts its $30M renovation, and that’s just the beginning

Denverite

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KEYWORD SCORE: 18.22. bike lane, construction, development, downtown, project, public space, rent, urban

Nearly 100 people gathered on Wednesday morning to watch another groundbreaking ceremony for Skyline Park — the celebrated and controversial public space that is being rebuilt for the second time in its half-century history. Construction crews are once again remodeling Skyline Park, the three-block stretch of downtown Denver that was built as an “urban oasis” in the 1970s before becoming a symbol of downtown decay. On Wednesday, Mayor Mike Johnston linked the new project to that original vision. [image: A man speaks at a podium in front of a crowd. A large clocktower rises far above them.]Denv

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