Dan Bertolet
Sightline Institute
Seattle, WA, United States
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Past articles by Dan:
A Federal One-Two Punch to Protect Renters---Pandemic and Beyond
Two moves to aid renters now and keep housing prices down for the long haul. → Read More
Fifteen Thoughts on the Coronavirus and Cities
Social distancing has turned urban life upside down, but what changes will persist? → Read More
How Seattle Can Reduce Demolitions and Invite Affordable Home Choices
Visualizing Seattle’s plan to tip the scales from McMansions to backyard cottages and mother-in-law suites, which would create more housing. → Read More
No, Seattle’s Growth Boom Is Not a Tree Apocalypse
Seattle doesn’t have anything like a tree crisis, and concern over trees is no excuse to squeeze much-needed housing options. → Read More
Seattle’s New Environmental Study on Accessory Dwellings Obliterates Obstructionists’ Claims
In the summer of 2016, anti-housing activists from a wealthy Seattle neighborhood appealed proposed liberalization of rules governing accessory dwellings---commonly known as mother-in-law apartments and backyard cottages. Six months later a city hearing examiner upheld... → Read More
A Baby Step toward Revamping Single-Family Zoning
Over the past two decades, Cascadia’s biggest city has planned for growth according to the so-called “urban village strategy” that steers new housing, mostly in the form of apartment buildings, to mixed-used commercial centers with... → Read More
When Historic Preservation Clashes with Housing Affordability
Every city wrestles with the tension between preservation and evolution, the tricky balance between saving great old buildings and not freezing neighborhoods in amber. The tension is especially acute in any metro area that lacks... → Read More
Granny Flats and the Great Affordability Debate
Does adding more new homes to a prospering city help or hurt affordability? Few housing policy debates are as tangled or enduring. Good people with aligned affordability goals disagree. There are those who think the... → Read More
Washington’s State Environmental Policy Act Has Become A Bane To Sustainable Urban Development
Designed to meet the rigorous Living Building Challenge, Seattle’s Bullitt Center is one of the greenest office buildings on the planet. But that didn’t stop antagonists from hijacking Washington’s State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA) to... → Read More
Video: Cruel Musical Chairs (or Why Is Rent So High?)
How does a growing, prospering city stay affordable for all kinds of people? At the most basic level, when there aren’t enough homes, prices will keep rising. And when there are plenty of homes, it... → Read More
Video: Cruel Musical Chairs (or Why Is Rent So High?)
A simple reason is: we don’t have enough places to live. → Read More
Build Less, Share More: An Urban Mantra for Taming Parking
If I were Emperor of Cascadia, I would ban all rules that require new buildings to provide off-street parking spaces. The case against mandating parking couldn’t be stronger: parking makes housing more expensive; it reinforces... → Read More
Impact Fees: An Urban Planning Zombie in Need of Slaying
When people make a mess we expect them to clean it up. If a private business harms others, we demand it pay the damages. These norms stoke the allure of impact fees---charges levied on homebuilders... → Read More
How Seattle’s Design Review Sabotages Housing Affordability
Since 1994, Cascadia’s largest city, Seattle, has subjected most of its new apartment construction to “design review,” in which building proposals must win approval from a volunteer citizen board. But if there’s no accounting for... → Read More
Housing Delayed Is Housing Denied
In March 2015, local housing builder Johnson Carr submitted preliminary plans to Seattle’s Department of Construction and Inspections, seeking permission to erect a four-story, 57-unit apartment structure in the city’s Phinney Ridge neighborhood. The proposed... → Read More
Yes, Red Tape and Fees Do Raise the Price of Housing
Few public policy issues can match urban housing politics for its incendiary combination of passion and misconception. To wit: the confounding idea that relaxing regulations and fees to decrease the cost of homebuilding won’t make... → Read More
Stop Blaming Foreign Home Buyers
Cascadia’s northernmost major city, Vancouver, BC, has emerged as an international poster child for home prices driven sky-high by affluent foreign buyers. Today in Seattle many fear the same scenario. Yet a review of the... → Read More
Displacement Dilemma
Cascadia’s largest city, Seattle, just released its draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on the proposed Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) program, a core part of the city’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda. (I’ve written about MHA here,... → Read More
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"I am your neighbor. Why do you not want me, and people like me, to be welcome in your community?" Those are the words of YIMBY Action executive director Laura Foote Clarke as she testified at a San... → Read More
Some Neighborhoods Losing Population, Despite the Boom
Denny-Blaine, Madrona, and Leschi are among Seattle’s most coveted neighborhoods. Laced with lush parks and beautiful houses commanding magnificent views of Lake Washington and the Cascades, they are closer to downtown than any other lakefront... → Read More