Culture
Extreme Seattle
New demographic figures make clear what a statistical outlier Seattle is, with few families, few kids, high education, and rapid gentrification. Only San Francisco can compare.
Richard Morrill
Latest work
Politics
Vision 2040 for Pugetopolis
An urban geographer uses un-rose-tinted glasses in peering into the crystal ball. He finds that we will not be able to do much about growing income segregation, congestion, gentrification in Seattle, and leapfrog development. Nor will rail transit help make things better.
Culture
New figures confirm Seattle's housing affordability woes
The pattern is very strong: In Seattle you have affluent, largely single people chasing a small supply of urban housing. The result is small household size, an exodus of families to the suburbs, and very high housing prices in the city.
Politics
Transportation: Can't we all just get along?
An opponent of Proposition 1 opens the bidding, in hopes of finding a middle ground in the transportation wars. The peace treaty: a little more rail, no new highways, some highway fixes, unclogging arterials, tolls, and no more cute trolleys.
Politics
You can't grow branch campuses by starving them
Let's review some of the bidding in the controversy over building a new University of Washington branch campus at Everett. I and a colleague in the UW Geography Department, William Beyers, performed original analyses for possible branch campuses for the University of Washington.