YIMBY News for 12/3

[Eric Budd]

Katie Wilson’s Path to Election Victory, Precinct by Precinct

The Urbanist

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KEYWORD SCORE: 37.28. apartment, density, downtown, gentrification, housing, rent, single family, transportation, urban, zone, zoning

Seattle Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson just won a very close election, and new precinct-level final data shows just how that battle played out on a block by block level. Long story short: an old geographic pattern in Seattle politics played out on steroids. Centrist incumbent Bruce Harrell dominated the wealthy coastal areas and ridgeline view corridors where the typical housing type is single family homes. And the progressive challenger dominated in apartment-heavy urbanized areas where younger Seattleites live, especially her home neighborhood of Capitol Hill. The split was so pronounced that Wils

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First Look at South King County’s Three New Light Rail Stations

The Urbanist

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KEYWORD SCORE: 35.80. affordable, affordable housing, bus stop, development, downtown, housing, parking, parking lot, project, rent, transit-oriented, urban, walk

Sound Transit gave reporters a sneak peek at its next system expansion project Tuesday, ahead of the official ribbon-cutting on Federal Way Link light rail extension on Saturday. The three new stations at Kent Des Moines, Star Lake, and Downtown Federal Way will bring light rail access to residents and visitors across a large swath of South King County. Voters greenlit the project in 2008 as part of the ST2 ballot measure, but it was not fully funded until eight years later with the approval of Sound Transit 3. Federal Way Link will extend the 1 Line to 41 miles in length, making it the second

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Can Opportunity Zones Ever Meet Their Poverty-Fighting Promise?

Governing

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KEYWORD SCORE: 34.42. affordable, apartment, construction, development, house, housing, income, project, real estate, rent, renter, supply, urban, zone

Douglas MacArthur famously told us that “old soldiers never die, they just fade away.” When it comes to urban reform schemes, that adage is about half right. They don’t die, but they don’t fade away either. They just change their names. Well, maybe not all of them, but it’s certainly the case with opportunity zones (OZs), the urban improvement program that Congress this summer made into a permanent policy fixture. Opportunity zones are a repackaged successor to “empowerment zones,” a program from the Clinton years. Empowerment zones were themselves a refurbishing of “enterprise zones,” an urba

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Black Dispossession Was Designed Systemically. Rebuilding Civic Power Must Be, Too.

Next City

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KEYWORD SCORE: 27.77. construction, house, housing, income, project, rent, segregation, urban, zoning

(Photo by 7500 RPM / Unsplash) *This story is part of a series of essays by members of the Black to the Future Public Policy Institute network. Read more.* Since emancipation, the United States and its cities and states have engineered systems of white racial control that meet the legal definition of genocide – not through explicit mass killings but instead a slow-motion destruction of Black communities achieved by voting restrictions, economic sabotage and the weaponization of addiction. The betrayal of Reconstruction established the blueprint. Less than a year after the promise of 40 acres t

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