Chautauqua

The nighborhood where I live with my dad is one of a handfull of grided neighborhoods on the island. Being generous, one could say it is about 4x3 blocks rising on a bluff over Point Heyer and Tramp harbor. This neighborhood was laid down around a Chautauqua retreat center around the turn of the century. Many of the houses here are original cabins from the retreat. The foundation of this place, as a communal area for shared educational and cultural experiences can be felt in the closely knit character of the small lots and blocks. It is a uniquely walkable neighborhood for the island, and continues to benefit from what was surely the original attraction for the retreat goers, the lovely beach at Point Heyer which is today known as KVI beach.

It is a sweet neighborhood with solid bones. Over the last few months I have been working on creating something of a public art project at the corner of our property at the four-way intersection. This is the key intersection of the neighborhood for both cars and people, as it is where the two roads leading other places intersect and become the two roads the lead to the beach. Out there I've build a small bench, a directional sign-post, and a chalkboard. Periodically I update the chalkboard with tide-charts for the week, or some Walk Whitman poetry, or an announcement, or an open-ended question. I've got a cup with chalk out there now so that people can write their responses.

I sit out at the bench sometimes. It is a good place in some ways... Many people pass it walking dogs, or riding bikes. However by far most of the traffic is cars. It is awkward sitting out by the road watching people come up in noisy steel boxes and then speed away. You can't see their faces very well, you can't talk to them, they usually are headed off somewhere else in a hurry. Few people walk by, because there is no where to walk to, besides the beach.

In Paraguay, I would sit in front of my house in the evening and dar saludos to everyone who would walk by. Neighbors would be out visiting their friends, they would be buying last-minute groceries at any of the several neighborhood stores, or headed to a volleyball court for a game in the cooling evening air. I am very lucky to have friends that live at the top of the hill, three small blocks away. I walk there to visit them. There are no stores in my neighborhood today, of course. People conduct their business and friendships by car and email with people miles and miles away.

Asphalt

I spent the day driving around south King county. I had two interviews, one in the morning with the city of Burien for a cool community engagement position, and one in the afternoon for an ESL instructor position at Highline Community College. Both jobs are part time, and since they aren't close to anything, both would require a lot of driving. The Burien one is also shorter-term than I realized.

After spending the day in the boredom and mild-to-moderate frustration that accompanies operating a car in the city, coming home to Vashon is an incredible contrast. The almost absurd lushness of the vegetation on the island this time of year, the idiosyncratic layout of the homes and roads. It is not perfect, but it is better than a lot of what else is out there. Perhaps Vashon is really just a driver's paradise.

I'm finding that I'm increasingly beginning to think like a driver. This is something that I was intentionally trying to avoid. Today I made a left turn as someone was entering the crosswalk. She didn't have to jump out of the way or anything, but if I was her I would have been annoyed. Drivers have an obligation to be extra sure they have a clear path of travel, by virtue of their using huge, deadly machines to get around. When people spend too much time behind the wheel they start to see the world as just a complex gameboard of roads and other cars. The people, the life, the fabric of the city around them is forgotten. Before too long people forget that those things even matter. This is how places like Federal Way get built.

I found out this evening that I did not get in to UW's Master of Urban Planning Program this fall. I should have applied to more than one school, and I shouldn't have assumed I would get in. It wasn't much of a surprise at this point, halfway through May, but it was a disappointment. This was what I was going to be doing. This is what I told myself and anyone who would listen what I'd be doing.

I hate that I've been back a year and have almost nothing to show for myself. I hate how well my friends from peace corps, college, high school are doing. (yes, I'm also glad for them). I hate how I can't give someone any kind of an answer when they ask what I'm doing these days. I had continuing to be a financial drag on my parents this late into my adulthood.
I guess the idea now is to find some kind of full-time work and keep living with the parents and save up enough to be able to go somewhere. Maybe Colombia. Maybe China. Maybe Portland.

Making use of an empty space

It was a fascinating, raucous Vashon community meeting last night about changing the semi-legally-binding "town plan" to allow marijuana production in the central business districts of Vashon and the proposed marjiuana edibles plant in the K2 building. Many, many perspectives were expressed. 
It was very frustrating to me that, even though the distillery's violation of the current town plan was discussed at length, no one made the connection between what the distillery does and what Edipure would do. The disterillery makes intoxicating drinks, Edipure will make intoxicating foods. They are the same under the law now, except that marijuana products have much more stringent security and retail regulation. If you are opposed to marijuana processing in the K2 plant because it is so close to the schools and will send a message to kids, the distillery already does essentially the same thing. The overwhelming sentiment last night was to allow the distillery to continue operations at their current location.
As it currently stands, nobody has applied for a retail marijuana permit on the island. Therefore it won't even be possible to purchase Edipure's products here. How they could somehow increase access to marijuana for youth on the island when they will be in secure facilities or in sealed containers on trucks at all times is very hard to comprehend. If and when there is a marijuana retail location, they may choose to retail Edipure's products. They will assuredly sell sweet marijuana infused treats regardless, whether they be Edipure's products or products from off-island producers, because that is a huge part of the market for legal marijuana (see Colorado).
The degree of industrial-scale production will be less than K2 at its heyday. It will be no less aesthetically appealing than the ski-factory was. The aging K2 site is currently producing no economic activity for the island. For those with comfortable white-collar jobs on or off island, the economic life of Vashon seems secure and comfortable, but those without that security longingly look back to the days when there were jobs on Vashon actually producing things to sell elsewhere. Edipure has projected that they would employ approximately 45 people at the plant in the first stage of operations, and that up to 3 million dollars in renovation work would be available to island contractors. It seem extremely unlikely that another industry is going to come along and want to set up production on the island given the high costs of using ferries.
All the arguments raised in opposition to this project have been quite narrow and break down in the light of the larger context.
It's going to be very interesting to see what happens next.

stupid idea

You get this stupid idea that just because you've trained school teachers in a second language, just because you worked with the mayor, school district administrators, and community committee to open the first ever library in a town of 20,000 people, just because you learned an indigenous South American language to improve the outcomes of your work with the teachers and library, just because you scored in the 97th percentile on the GRE, just because you've never been arrested, used any hard drug, or been fired from a job, just because you graduated and from a good college, just because you have recommendations from successful, well-regarded, influential people, that someone would want to pay you more than minimum wage or give you a job that took advantage of more than the fact that you have a human body and are conscious.

the Federation for sprawl

From the Publicola blog:
"the Seattle Community Council Federation—an umbrella group for anti-growth neighborhood organizations—is mobilizing in advance of Mayor Ed Murray's April "neighborhood summit" for a February 25 summit of their own at the Central Area Senior Center.

The group is planning to come up with a unified agenda to check what they see as a city plagued by "runaway development, upzones, gentrification, small lot development, skinny houses, high-rise development, loss of tree canopy, lack of adequate services/infrastructure etc."

The group, which includes the Seattle Displacement Coalition, Livable Ballard, Reasonable Density Seattle (a Capitol Hill group), and Seattle Speaks Up (a new group from Phinney Ridge), is planning to hold a press conference a week before Murray's summit to frame the city's agenda with its own "tough growth controls" agenda."

There is palpable opposition to development and increasing density in Seattle. It's not hard to understand this reaction to seeing South Lake Union transform before our eyes in the last few years. On top of that rent prices are rising very rapidly in neighborhoods around the city, leading to many people feeling that they are being forced out of their communities.
These two occurrences are linked, but it is not the case that the first is driving the second. Rather both phenomena are caused by the same thing: the desirability of urban living in the post-millennium in general and of Seattle in particular. And rather than high rents being the result of increasing development, it is the lack of development that drives up rents. The alternative to greater density in the city is sprawl in the suburbs, and it is the rightful disdain for suburban sprawl that is leading people to want to living in the city.

What these neighborhood groups are fighting for is increased suburban sprawl. They are rightly happy to have had the luck to have a place in the city and now they don't want everyone else coming in and ruining it for them. They like things how they are thank-you-very-much, and everyone else who wants to be able to live a low-car life in a vibrant, walkable, diverse community can go screw themselves.

Puget Sound

In the rain, in the night, across the water are the orange lights of the airport and Burien. The sky is orange too from their glow, or rather it's that color-wheel defying purple-orange. It is raining in the light northwestern way. I am high up on a balcony, on a hill, over the beach and the waves. It is windy tonight and you can hear the rushing of the water on the shore.
The spirit and vigor of the ocean is in the Puget sound expressed subtler tones. The plants and animals are the same, but gone are the massive rocks and the unending crash of the breakers. The weather is bleak, but less so. The waters of the sound calmer, navigable and in fact pacific.
The sound is so much more amenable to human settlement that it feels almost that man must have made it so. If the ocean is wild and untamed, the sound appears to be its domesticated form, shaped by thousands of years of careful human cultivation and selection for its most fruitful and benign traits.
It's not hard to imagine that the Salish people who lived in the inland waters of the northwest might have conceived of their home in the same way that other cultures regarded domesticated crops like wheat or corn, as a gift from the gods that elevates man above the rank of animals.

Population Growth Raters of American Cities

This is a chart I made recently, actually an update of a chart I made several years ago, but which was really ugly in my 2003 version of excell. I think it would be great to use buildings instead of the filled area. I'll get to that one day. It works to have so many data sets on top of each other because for the most part they follow the same path, enormous early growth followed by much more moderate growth, and in some cases, shrinkage.
We know that these days metropolitan area population numbers are more important that city numbers themselves. What I'm really going for here is an illustration of American history as told by the establishment of our major cities. In the chart you can see the old eastern seaboard cities, the rise of the mid-west, then the west, and then the sun-belt, as well as the hollowing out of rust-belt cities.
City selection is non-scientific, but I've tried to select cities that clearly represent different epochs, regions, or growth patterns.
I hope you enjoy.