What has 2004 brought to land use in Seattle?  Recognition that it is in shape (if we had to walk up and down hills like theirs, we'd be fit, too)...
Seattle, Washington: August 2005 snapshots of a cool city.  Check out people-power on one island, that might help us plan for other places better?  More on Whidbey Island...
SEATTLE IS ABOUT ANGLES AND GEOMETRY.  And there are houseboats--the one in "Sleepless in Seattle" has been repainted (too many fans making pilgrimages)!  #1 Expensive city in USA, according to Forbes Magazine 2004.  LATEST (2009) from the New York Times...


Seattle 2004 visit below;  click here  for 2005 visit!  LATEST SEATTLE NEWS HERE

WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE...PICTURES FROM ANOTHER SITE...THE REST ARE OUR OWN. WHIDBEY ISLAND PAGE!
Our visit to Seattle, WA, population 563,000, was a long weekend.  From our hotel at Pier 67, it was a vacation to just sit and look out at the mountains seen or not seen over the waters of Elliot Bay.  Big water.  Seattle is a real place, with an active harbor or port.  Ferries to the many islands off Seattle come and go, cruise ships dock.  And the Pike Street Market and all the funky neighborhoods make Seattle mellow.  Or maybe the record high temperatures (in the 90's) just perked things up when we were there...

The water and the city came alive and went from gloomy fog to late afternoon sunlight regularly.  Very moody place.  Mt. Rainier looms over it--but it is a gorgeous spectacle!!!  Other than the mountain, colors are pastel, ALL windows in ALL buildings are LARGE and make for very beautiful architecture no matter what period or century--people really appreciate the sunlight.  This city was walkable in its dense downtown and market area.  Which is, of course, clogged with traffic.  See Pioneer Square below...in the heart of a busy downtown Seattle.

From one green place to another, inbetween are modern high rise office buildings--however many new and old buildings are "mixed use" and so the downtown is alive at night.  Lots of roofgardens and tiered buildings with multiple roofgardens.  At the right, the courthouse from which was rendered a famous decision regarding a Seattle area software maker.

The new Library (named for a famous Seattle area software maker's mother)--notice bars on the windows in photo above.  The old fits in (again note angle of street)--how does Seattle's planning department define "building height?"  At the right, sports stadium built by noted Seattle software maker.  THE BIG THING ABOUT SEATTLE:  it is transportation--more modes of transit than you can imagine BEING USED ON A DAILY BASIS (ferryboat routes, bus, bike, trolley, overhead tramway [leftover from 1962? World's Fair]) and cars, of course.  As well as alleyways in use that permit walkers to avoid always having to go just straight up or down--very tiring.  A planning issue in Seattle--"vacating" alleyways to properties on either side--sort of like abandoning roads--or granting easements on Town property.  Also...parking is lots of fun in Seattle.


A FEW SOURCES:
From the 2009 NYTIMES
From across the pond...http://www.rudi.net/
And on the other side of the world...http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/environ/design/design.shtml
City Design Department: http://www.cityofseattle.net/dclu/CityDesign/default.asp

Seattle's Judge Judy Suspended over Courtroom Insults
YAHOO
By ADAM COHEN
18 August 2010

When a defendant showed up on a traffic charge, Judge Judy delivered a zinger: "If you drive like an idiot 'cause you're late for work, you're gonna have to pay for it." Then she piled on: "You can see your picture on the headlines of the Seattle Times, stupid young man who shouldn't be driving."

Another defendant recalled that the tart-tongue jurist humiliated and bullied her until she broke down in tears. "She frequently interrupted answers with insults," the woman recalled.

This bullying Judge Judy was not Judge Judith Sheindlin, the tough-talking former New York City Family Court judge who has the top-rated judge show on syndicated television. It was Judge Judith Raub Eiler, her real-life doppelgÄnger, who sits at a county court in Seattle. Instead of high ratings and rich syndication fees, this Judge Judy's aggressive demeanor earned her a five-day suspension without pay courtesy of the Washington State Supreme Court. (See "Top 10 Ye Olde British Criminal Trials.")

It is a good and important ruling, but the court did not go far enough. It should have pushed back against our rising smackdown culture by removing this judge running amok from her job.

Judge Eiler first ran into trouble in 2004. The State Commission on Judicial Conduct brought her up on disciplinary charges for her insulting and demeaning judicial style. It pointed to multiple instances showing that she had engaged in "a pattern or practice of rude, impatient and undignified treatment" of the people who appeared before her.

Judge Eiler admitted to her misdeeds. She was required to participate in behavioral therapy and to refrain from similar conduct in the future. She completed the therapy, but soon she went back to her old ways. In 2008, the commission accused her of the same kind of abuse.

Judge Eiler defended herself by saying she was just a "tough, no-nonsense judge" and that the case against her was overblown. She also made the bizarre claim that the court was trying to infringe on her freedom of speech. Judges, after all, do not have a First Amendment right to abuse people just because they use words to do it. By that logic, bank robbers would have a First Amendment right to hand over notes saying "This is a stickup."

The Washington Supreme Court did the right thing, ruling this month that Judge Eiler had violated the state's judicial canons. Unfortunately, the punishment ultimately handed down was much less than initially recommended. The disciplinary counsel who originally brought the case urged the commission to remove Judge Eiler from the bench permanently. The commission instead recommended that she be suspended for 90 days without pay. The Washington Supreme Court knocked it down to five days.

It is hard to believe TV's Judge Judy was not a strong influence on Seattle's Judge Judy. TV's Judge Judy yells at litigants and belittles them, and her specialty is finding innovative new ways of calling people stupid. The woman who wrote a best seller called Beauty Fades, Dumb Is Forever makes no apologies for her courtroom tongue-lashings. "If I call someone an idiot," she told the Daily Beast, "they're an idiot." (See Judge Judy and nine other dubious Walk of Fame stars.)

The two Judge Judys have another thing in common: the targets of their wrath seem to be the most powerless members of society. TV's Judge Judy does not usually go after greedy Wall Street titans or corrupt elected officials. The person she is yelling at is almost always one of life's losers - poor, not very well educated and perhaps not altogether there.

Similarly, Judge Eiler's victims were mainly pro se litigants - people who go to court without a lawyer. Not understanding the law, they are often confused about how things work and, as a result, vulnerable - perfect targets for a bully.

The two Judge Judys say a lot about the sad state of our national discourse. If you turn on cable news, the odds are good that you will get a screaming match. Talk radio is worse. Polls show that workplace bullying is at epidemic levels.

There is clearly an audience for this sort of mean-judge shtick. Judge Judy regularly beats Oprah in the Nielsen ratings, and last year she hauled in a reported $45 million.

There is an important difference, though, between TV and the real world.

Seattle's Judge Judy should have been tossed from the bench. She acted viciously, she was found to have violated the judicial canons and she did it again when she said she would not. It is also clear from the defense that she made in the Supreme Court that she still does not understand why her conduct was so offensive. That means she has no business being a judge.

Still, even with the lenient sentence, the Washington Supreme Court's rebuke sends an unmistakable message: judicial bullies may thrive on television, but they have no place in real courts of law.

Northwest at risk of megaquake like one in Chile
YAHOO
By ALICIA CHANG, AP Science Writer
March 2, 2010

LOS ANGELES – Just 50 miles off the Pacific Northwest coast is an earthquake hotspot that threatens to unleash on Seattle, Portland and Vancouver the kind of damage that has shattered Chile.

The fault has been dormant for more than 300 years, but when it awakens — tomorrow or decades from now — the consequences could be devastating.

Recent computer simulations of a hypothetical magnitude-9 quake found that shaking could last 2 to 5 minutes — strong enough to potentially cause poorly constructed buildings from British Columbia to Northern California to collapse and severely damage highways and bridges.

Such a quake would also send powerful tsunami waves rushing to shore in minutes. While big cities such as Portland and Seattle would be protected from severe flooding, low-lying seaside communities may not be as lucky.

The Pacific Northwest "has a long geological history of doing exactly what happened in Chile," said Brian Atwater, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey and University of Washington. "It's not a matter of if but when the next one will happen."

The last one hit in 1700, a magnitude-9 that sent 30- to 40-foot-tall tsunami waves crashing onto the coast and racing across the Pacific, damaging Japanese coastal villages.

There's an 80 percent chance the southern end of the fault off southern Oregon and Northern California would break in the next 50 years and produce a megaquake, according to Chris Goldfinger, who heads the Active Tectonics and Seafloor Mapping Laboratory at Oregon State University.

Research presented last year at a seismology conference found that Seattle high-rises built before 1994, when stricter building codes took effect, were at high risk of collapse during a superquake.

Disaster managers in Oregon and Washington are aware of the risks, and work is ongoing to shore up schools, hospitals and other buildings to withstand a seismic jolt.

"We're definitely being proactive in trying to get those fixed, but we have a long way to go," said Yumei Wang, geohazards team leader with the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries.

Oregon has 1,300 schools and public safety buildings that are at high risk of collapse during a major quake. The state recently doled out $15 million to two dozen schools and emergency facilities to start the retrofit process. State law requires that all poorly built public safety buildings be upgraded by 2022 and public schools by 2032.

The state is also helping its coastal communities — home to 100,000 residents — plan for vertical evacuation buildings that could withstand giant tsunami waves.

Seattle plans to retrofit its 34 fire stations. The city is also working on a plan to upgrade 600 buildings considered most at risk.

"We have been preparing aggressively," said Barb Graff, who heads the city's Office of Emergency Management.

Chile and the Pacific Northwest are part of several seismic hotspots around the globe where plates of the Earth's crust grind and dive. These so-called subduction zones give rise to mountain ranges, ocean trenches and volcanic arcs, but also spawn the largest quakes on the planet.

The magnitude-8.8 Chile quake occurred in an offshore region that was under increased stress caused by a 1960 magnitude-9.5 quake — the largest recorded in history, according to geologist Jian Lin of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

The temblor destroyed or badly damaged 500,000 homes and killed more than 700 people.

Similar tectonic forces are at play off the Pacific Northwest, where the Juan de Fuca plate is diving beneath North America. At some point, centuries of pent-up stress in the Cascadia subduction zone will cause the plates to slip. Scientists cannot predict when a quake will occur, only that one will happen.

The region is all too familiar with violent earthquakes. In 2001, a 6.8-magnitude quake centered near Olympia, Wash., rattled a swath of the Pacific Northwest, but remarkably caused no deaths. While it was not the type of quake that hit Chile, it was a reminder of how a big disaster could strike at any time.

To better understand megaquakes, a group of scientists planned to travel to Chile in May for a conference on giant earthquakes and their tsunamis. There are field trips planned to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1960 Chile quake.



Op-Ed Columnist - note that Seattle is one of the five most popular metro areas!  Those who live in Seattle drink a lot of coffee (it rains a lot - few truly sunny days, except in July and maybe August)
I Dream of Denver
By DAVID BROOKS
February 17, 2009

You may not know it to look at them, but urban planners are human and have dreams. One dream many share is that Americans will give up their love affair with suburban sprawl and will rediscover denser, more environmentally friendly, less auto-dependent ways of living.

Those dreams have been aroused over the past few months. The economic crisis has devastated the fast-growing developments on the far suburban fringe. Americans now taste the bitter fruit of their overconsumption.

The time has finally come, some writers are predicting, when Americans will finally repent. They’ll move back to the urban core. They will ride more bicycles, have smaller homes and tinier fridges and rediscover the joys of dense community — and maybe even superior beer.

America will, in short, finally begin to look a little more like Amsterdam.

Well, Amsterdam is a wonderful city, but Americans never seem to want to live there. And even now, in this moment of chastening pain, they don’t seem to want the Dutch option.

The Pew Research Center just finished a study about where Americans would like to live and what sort of lifestyle they would like to have. The first thing they found is that even in dark times, Americans are still looking over the next horizon. Nearly half of those surveyed said they would rather live in a different type of community from the one they are living in at present.

Second, Americans still want to move outward. City dwellers are least happy with where they live, and cities are one of the least popular places to live. Only 52 percent of urbanites rate their communities “excellent” or “very good,” compared with 68 percent of suburbanites and 71 percent of the people who live in rural America.

Cities remain attractive to the young. Forty-five percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 would like to live in New York City. But cities are profoundly unattractive to people with families and to the elderly. Only 14 percent of Americans 35 and older are interested in living in New York City. Only 8 percent of people over 65 are drawn to Los Angeles. We’ve all heard stories about retirees who move back into cities once their children are grown, but that is more anecdote than trend.

Third, Americans still want to go west. The researchers at Pew asked Americans what metro areas they would like to live in. Seven of the top 10 were in the West: Denver, San Diego, Seattle, San Francisco, Phoenix, Portland and Sacramento. The other three were in the South: Orlando, Tampa and San Antonio. Eastern cities were down the list and Midwestern cities were at the bottom.

Finally, Americans want to go someplace new. The powerhouse cities of the 20th century — New York, Los Angeles, Chicago — are much less desirable today than the ones that have more recently sprouted up.

In short, Americans may indeed be gloomy and hunkered down. But they’re still Americans. They are still drawn to virgin ground, still restless against limits.

If you jumble together the five most popular American metro areas — Denver, San Diego, Seattle, Orlando and Tampa — you get an image of the American Dream circa 2009. These are places where you can imagine yourself with a stuffed garage — filled with skis, kayaks, soccer equipment, hiking boots and boating equipment. These are places you can imagine yourself leading an active outdoor lifestyle.

These are places (except for Orlando) where spectacular natural scenery is visible from medium-density residential neighborhoods, where the boundary between suburb and city is hard to detect. These are places with loose social structures and relative social equality, without the Ivy League status system of the Northeast or the star structure of L.A. These places are car-dependent and spread out, but they also have strong cultural identities and pedestrian meeting places. They offer at least the promise of friendlier neighborhoods, slower lifestyles and service-sector employment. They are neither traditional urban centers nor atomized suburban sprawl. They are not, except for Seattle, especially ideological, blue or red.

They offer the dream, so characteristic on this continent, of having it all: the machine and the garden. The wide-open space and the casual wardrobes.

The folks at Pew asked one other interesting question: Would you rather live in a community with a McDonald’s or a Starbucks? McDonald’s won, of course, but by a surprisingly small margin: 43 percent to 35 percent. And that, too, captures the incorrigible nature of American culture, a culture slowly refining itself through espresso but still in love with the drive-thru.

The results may not satisfy those who dream of Holland, but there’s one other impressive result from the Pew survey. Americans may be gloomy and afraid, but they still have a clear vision of the good life. That’s one commodity never in short supply.

Study Links Suburban Sprawl to Ailments
Tuesday September 28, 2004 - AP
LOS ANGELES - Warning: Suburban sprawl may be hazardous to your health. A report released Monday found that people who live in sprawling metropolitan areas are more likely to report chronic health problems such as high blood pressure, arthritis, headaches and breathing difficulties than residents of more compact cities.

The difference — which remained even when researchers accounted for factors such as age, economic status and race — may have something to do with the way people get around in more spread-out cities.

"People drive more in these areas; they walk less," said Roland Sturm, co-author of the report by Rand Corp., a nonprofit research group.  The report suggests that an adult who lives in a sprawling city such as Atlanta will have health characteristics similar to someone four years older, but otherwise similar, who lives in a more compact city like Seattle.

The report is not the first to suggest that sprawl cramps a healthy lifestyle. Last year, major studies found that residents of such areas weighed more than their counterparts in walkable cities like New York.  The study was based on information from a telephone survey, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, that questioned adults about their physical and mental health in 1998 and 2001. The study analyzed information from more than 8,600 people in 38 metropolitan areas.

The study found no link between suburban sprawl and a greater incidence of mental health problems.

Regions considered to have the worst suburban sprawl included Atlanta; Riverside-San Bernardino, Calif.; Winston-Salem, N.C.; West Palm Beach, Fla.; and Bridgeport-Danbury-Stamford, Conn., the report said. Regions with the least amount of sprawl included New York City, San Francisco, Boston and Portland, Ore.

The findings appear in the October edition of the journal Public Health.


Thursday, December 30, 2004
A Look Back: Decisions on land use will shape the region
By JENNIFER LANGSTON, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

EDITOR'S NOTE: This week, the P-I looks back on the big news stories and personalities of 2004. Today: land use and the environment.

From rules that dictate how cities grow to the region's biggest forestland protection deal, decisions made this year will shape what kind of place the Puget Sound region will be a decade from now.

A new neighborhood around South Lake Union began to take form. The city of Seattle announced that it wants to reconnect downtown to the waterfront by getting rid of the Alaskan Way Viaduct.

Cities and counties around the Sound updated rules to protect streams, wetlands and sensitive areas, which in King County touched off a rural landowners revolt.

But despite all the painstaking planning and policies to sculpt our region's landscape, events such as the abrupt reawakening of Mount St. Helens reminded us that there will always be curveballs.

"The thing about volcanic eruptions that intrigue us is that nature does work on its own time scale and in its own way -- and it's different every time," said Cynthia Gardner, a geologist at the Cascades Volcano Observatory.

"We often say amongst ourselves that if it was predictable, we wouldn't be here. Because there wouldn't be any fun."

Some surprises were captivating, such as the so-far-benign extrusion of lava in the mountain's crater, which began in October. It has delighted tourists and given scientists a precious chance to investigate how volcanoes work.

Others -- such as the discovery of an oil slick in the middle of the night by a passing tugboat -- caught us unprepared.

The October spill, which fouled 20 miles of beach, primarily along Vashon and Maury islands, was still small compared with previous accidents. But it forced the region to acknowledge that it needs better procedures to avert oil spills or to respond in less-than-ideal conditions.

A task force convened after the spill has recommended buying equipment to detect oil in bad weather and updating plans that protect ecologically sensitive shorelines. It also favored studying how a citizens oil spill advisory council might work here.

"There just seems to be the human foibles factor in preparedness that gets complicated and multiplied by darkness," said Naki Stevens of People for Puget Sound, an environmental watchdog group. "The biggest lesson learned is not a new lesson -- it's that what we really have to be focused on is prevention."

That's a lesson the state took to heart a decade ago, passing landmark legislation to get a handle on suburban sprawl, which was blithely transforming the region's farmland into subdivisions and strip malls.

This year, the Growth Management Act required cities and counties to update their plans to accommodate population growth and protect sensitive areas around streams and wetlands.

In King County, new rules that would require some rural landowners to leave between one-half and two-thirds of their property covered in native trees have sparked an effort to overturn them by referendum.

The county also protected a prized timberland property -- the former Snoqualmie Tree Farm. It pledged $22 million in September to buy the development rights on 90,000 timbered acres along the Cascades, thus preventing that working forest from being converted into home lots.

John Healy, spokesman for the anti-sprawl group 1000 Friends of Washington, said the decisions made across the region during this watershed year will determine what our communities look like far into the future.

"In this day and age, with all the development money that's poised to be deployed, the question of what we build next is really, really important and really, really long-term," he said.

The city of Seattle, which expects to add 47,000 households and 84,000 jobs over the next two decades, has been working to encourage people-friendly neighborhoods and more housing in its urban centers.

The newest planned high-density neighborhood is South Lake Union, which is being developed by Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen's company Vulcan Inc. and others as a biotechnology hub. Apartment buildings, office and research space, a grocery store and hotel are under way.

Debate over how much money the city should invest in transforming the neighborhood with a streetcar line, zoning changes and parks and road improvements will continue next year.

Elsewhere in Seattle, the city was transformed in ways large (a sparkling downtown library) and small (space-age, self-cleaning public potties). But nothing has the potential to change the city's face so much as this month's announcement that the city and state prefer to replace the aging, quake-damaged Alaskan Way Viaduct with a $4.5 billion underground tunnel.

So far, there is no money to do any kind of fix.

But that hasn't stopped architects from envisioning what the city's heart would look like without an elevated freeway separating it from Elliott Bay. In a design free-for-all in February, they envisioned terraces of residential buildings stitching the city to the waterfront, with roofs functioning as garden sanctuaries and a gondola ferrying residents up steep hills.

Others called for transforming the viaduct space into an elevated greenway, creating beaches and providing places for people to watch salmon travel through eelgrass terraces and marshes.

Not since the Denny Regrade project -- which, at the turn of the 20th century, used hoses to blast through hills that blocked development north of downtown -- has the city had such an important land-use opportunity, Mayor Greg Nickels has claimed. "Today, we are making history," he said in announcing the preferred option. "This region is not going to make the mistake of building another viaduct."

P-I reporter Jennifer Langston can be reached at 206-448-8130 or jenniferlangston@seattlepi.com



Magazine Names Seattle Fittest City
By REBECCA COOK
Associated Press Writer
January 6, 2005, 8:24 AM EST

SEATTLE -- Seattle has been named the fittest city in the United States in the February issue of Men's Fitness magazine, leaping past the buff competition from Honolulu, Colorado Springs, San Francisco and Denver.

Exercising faithfully and shunning fast food boosted Seattle to the top from No. 6 last year, Men's Fitness Editor in Chief Neal Boulton said.
 
"Eighty-five percent of Seattle residents get some exercise every month, and that's a really significant thing," Boulton said. The city's jittery love affair with espresso might fuel some of that activity, he noted: "There's not only a lot of it, it's pretty darn strong."

In its nonscientific Seventh Annual Fattest and Fittest Cities Report, the magazine compares 50 cities by weighing 14 factors, including fast food restaurants per capita, TV watching, air quality, and parks. In Seattle, for example, sporting goods stores and gyms outnumber fast food joints -- a key statistic.  Houston was named the fattest city for the fourth time in five years, followed by Philadelphia, Detroit, Memphis and Chicago.

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels praised the city's many walking trails and called the fitness of his fellow residents "inspirational."  Nickels said he made a New Year's resolution to get in better shape by walking with his wife and working out at a gym near City Hall.

"It's pretty hard to go more than a few blocks without seeing a gym," Nickels said.  Seattle's claim to the fitness crown makes sense to Doug Sherry and his Wheaten Terrier, Bing, who walk the three-mile path around Seattle's Green Lake every day, rain or shine.

"Everyone I know does something," explained Sherry, 35, who also hits the gym several times a week. "There's lots of good terrain to walk and bike and hike. You're close to the water, you're close to the mountains."  His advice for those seeking to emulate Seattle's healthy ways?

"Enjoy the outdoors," Sherry said. "And get a dog."