Deadly stroad crosswalks are unique to the US. (Safe By Design)
How LA Metro accidentally made itself fare-free. (Alex Davis)
Musical interlude: Walking in LA. I can take a Bus Downtown (You Can Walk Downtown).
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Headline in today’s Seattle Times. “Low birthrates risks creating U.S. housing glut over coming decade.” So, stop worrying about a housing shortage, worry about an oversupply?
In the US as a whole, sounds reasonable? But in highly-desirable metro areas like here, I wouldn’t be looking at nationwide statistics.
Only if Republicans successfully execute their plan to deport 100 million people.
Otherwise immigration is also a driver of population growth.
Brazil has a birth rate significantly less than the USA, but still a significant housing shortage. That’s probably where we’ll actually be in 30 years.
The over/undersupply is not distributed evenly. East Asia is a good example where many young people move to city, without sufficient replacement in rural area.
There’s still a three million unit shortage or so nationally; it will take time to alleviate that. Seattle’s population peaked in the 1960s at 550K and fell to 410K in the 1970s. In the 80s, 90s, and 00s there was still slack in the market, so 2 BRs in the upper U-District were going for $450, and you could look at a place, spend a week deciding, and it would probably still be available. You could find a few roommate bargains at $150, which minimum wage could afford. The population reached its former peak in the early 2000s but some of the slack remained. It was only in 2013 with the Amazon acceleration that the rest of the slack was finally squeezed out of the market, and the remaining bargain 1 BRs at $650 shot up to over $1000 in one step. So there can be a long lag time between population shift and a complete housing shift.
The Sunbelt has the most volatile swings, as more people suddenly decide to move there for mild winters, and then for lower housing costs, but at the same time it’s the most unlivable in terms of being a car-dependent ugly stroad/strip mall/big box hellhole. And some states in the southeast don’t respect your rights, and they’re getting more hurricanes and heat waves. So when some people decide it’s not so great after all or they find some other reason to leave, they vamoose and leave a lot of vacancies.
So when the headline says “glut”, it’s overstating a small excess, one that may gradually become larger. But since there’s a shortage in practically the entire country, reversing that will be a good thing for everybody except speculators and those who view their house as a get-rich-quick scheme. At some point when the shortage is alleviated, then a bigger concern might gradually emerge.
A stable vacancy rate is 5-10%, where rents/prices neither rise nor fall beyond inflation significantly. Some say 5, others 10, but most estimates are in that range. When it goes below 5%, that’s when shortages occur and owners can make price increases stick. When it’s above 10%, it may be hard to rent/sell units for an extended period of time and the market may have depressionary characteristics.
The article says the national or Sunbelt average vacancy rate is 7.3%, so that’s not that bad. It would have been considered normal before the mid 2000s or 2010s. It’s just that with the 2000s real-estate bubble and 2010s insanity, people started making huge windfalls on price appreciation and they’re trying to claim that’s normal and it shouldn’t end. But that’s what’s creating the shortage and affordability crisis, so it has to stop.
In Pugetopolis throughout the 80s, 90s and early 2000s, the average time an apartment was vacant and available was 6 weeks, and the average time-on-market for a house was 6 months. That’s a normal market, with a healthy vacancy rate and a robust number of buyers/renters and sellers/availability.
In the 2008-2012 recession construction halted, demand evaporated, and sellers stopped selling even for the remaining trickle of demand because they were underwater or they couldn’t get another house as good as their existing one for the same price. Availability and sellers never returned to the pre-2008 level. In the post-2013 recovery, the vacancy rate reached a crisis 1-2%, and sellers still didn’t sell because they had refinanced at a historically low rate or they still couldn’t get another house as good as their existing one for the same price. And it has remained this way since. Rents have eased because of the push for new supply, moreso in areas that rose to the highest in the 2010s, but houses are still a tight squeeze.
It will take a major reduction in demand over several years for the market to return to its pre-2008 normalness or go beyond it to a depression condition. I don’t think the current birthrate or lack of immigration is sufficient, but we’ll see in five or ten years. People are still moving to Pugetopolis from other parts of the country for jobs, landscape, culture, social freedom, or climate change. We’d have to see that stop for more than a year or two to consider it a definitive reversal. Some alarmists have predicted a long-term reversal every year for over a decade, and they’ve always been wrong so far.
Regarding watered-down fare enforcement, from the Alex Davis video:
“Here’s the bottom line. LA Metro voluntarily abandoned enforcement and replaced it with visibility-based tools that look tough, but mostly don’t change behavior. This policy change artificially increased crime and disorder, cratered fare revenue, and the people getting hurt are LA’s working-class commuters. And the worst part is that this reckless experiment was never authorized by the board, or even disclosed to the public. But, here’s the thing. LA Metro’s leaders aren’t doing this because they want more crime and less money. They’re just responding to political pressure. Right now, LA Metro’s politics are dominated by three local activist groups who spent over a decade pushing the well-intentioned, but misguided goal of making Metro free, and ramping down security. Even though most riders don’t share this vision, these groups have power, because they’ve done long-term organizing work …”
In a world of declining birth dates, urbanism and transit will be viewed as unnecessary and people will start moving towards a self driving car centric lifestyle. School and work could probably be done from home, providing almost no justification for transit except as a shuttle for crowded gatherings, events, festivals or tourist spots. Or we should keep our population stable. It takes about 2 kids per family, though we can spare a little less with a steady immigration rate.
Tokyo has been having declining birth rates for decades, yet transit is still very important there.
Their population is still high. It wouldn’t be the same once it declines further and their cities start to empty.
It can take a few decades to see any affects I’ve mentioned. Many people don’t live in the city because they want to, except hardcore urbanists.
Ah yes, cities, famously undesirable places to live, populated with only the most hardcore urbanists!
Again, ridiculous.
All 823,000 of Seattle’s population are hardcore urbanists? We’d be lucky if it were 50,000. If there were that many hardcore urbanists, apartments would have been allowed everywhere for decades, buses would already be running every 5-10 minutes, there would be a real war on cars that would put them in their place, and parking lots would be at the back of buildings so that the front door is the closest to the sidewalk.
Some people may choose to live in the city simply for economic gain. In a place like Tokyo that may be continued even with a declining population.
But in the US, you don’t have to live in the big city to be employed. Alternative economic opportunities are available here. I wouldn’t even call it a good thing, a lot of people are making money through questionable ways. Our national debt is out of control.
I thought only “hardcore urbanists” choose to live in cities?
I’ll admit, this is good bait. Well trolled.
“But in the US, you don’t have to live in the big city to be employed.”
Sure, but it is still a lot easier to be employed if you do live in a big city.
You think Japanese cities will start to empty this century?
I think that it’s a bit too broad to attribute a transit decline to a general birth rate and immigration decline. Growth and decline varies widely in different metros and within metros. Here’s a map showing ours between 2020 and 2025:
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/stories/2026/05/major-city-outer-edge-growth/figure-4-major-city-outer-edge-growth.jpg
This map is population growth, not housing unit growth. The decline of persons per household is also a significant factor in housing demand. It keeps dropping. As a higher proportion of people live longer past child bearing age, it will continue to shrink. This statistic is over 2.5% smaller than it was in 2020. In other words, that is a 2.5% increase in needed new units even if growth was flat.
With demand growing on smaller households — particularly single person households — the kinds of housing that get built is relevant. Single person households are more likely to live in higher density situations.
Of course, more retirees and work from home and new modal options (Lyft or Lime or work-from-home or someday self-driving vehicles) even the current housing stock probably wont grow in transit demand.
So housing demand and transit demand are moving at different trajectories. The forces at work are different.
Finally, tripmaking mode is affected by the costs involved. Transit ridership is up across the US since the recent spike in gas prices. That growth is mostly due to economics and not demographics. Transit carries such a small percent of all metro area trips that its demand can change greatly (either way) even if overall regional travel demand is flat.
More people are living with their parents now. Living in the city is a luxury some people are lucky to afford. We shouldn’t have a homeless population if that was the case.
“In a world of declining birth dates, urbanism and transit will be viewed as unnecessary and people will start moving towards a self driving car centric lifestyle.”
Only somebody with the American car-centric mindset would think so. A third of Americans prefer urbanism/transit, but many of them can’t have it because it’s not available in their region or it’s too expensive because the limited number of units are going to the wealthiest. So if the declining population makes those units more available, those who want them but haven’t been able to get them will fill them. Cities will continue building more compactly for climate/resiliency/resource reasons, because they’ve finally realized ultra low density and sprawl and extreme use separation are insane. It will be different in different areas: I don’t expect the Sunbelt to become a walker’s paradise, but it’s happening relatively in each area.
You’re more optimistic about self-driving cars than I am. They’re still not widespread, and still have more safety issues being uncovered. Even if self-driving cars become ubiquidous, they’ll have unintended consequences, such as the risk of exacerbating traffic congestion. And how will people afford them when 60% of Americans are in a financial squeeze? They can’t just go spend $40,000 on a new car when their existing car still works.
In every industrialized country outside the US, the governments are more committed to compact development and comprehensive transit. Large portions of the population support it. Often a majority will say it’s good nationally even if they personally opt out of it. Other industrialized countries have sprawl problems but only a fraction of the US’s. You have to get to ultra-rich developing countries or highly US-influenced countries to find American-like levels of car dependency and sprawl, like Saudi Arabia or the Emirates or Bermuda.
The US went below 2 children per woman sometime in the 1990s or so, and it doesn’t look like it will come back. Other countries like South Korea, Japan, and much of Europe reached that point earlier. Some countries like France have tried paying parents and offering free childcare, but it hasn’t worked to increase the birthrate. So there appears to be no solution. The US population has been propped up since then by immigration, but now that has been decimated. At best we’ll have an inconsistent and exclusionary and cruel immigration policy until November or 2029; at worst it may remain long term. So immigration won’t save the day either, at least not in the medium term, and not when the world population starts shrinking later this century.
My prediction is that self driving cars will become prevalent in Asia, particularly China. One reason is (probably perversely to folks here) the fact that they are highly urbanized, which both makes driving less fun, but also makes the engineering problem easier. Add a dolop of government support and repression of individual lawsuits, and you have a much more ideal environment. Here Google has trouble not directing naive drivers up forest service roads in the dead of winter.
Population trends throughout the devolped world, and even much of the developing world are heading one direction fast. I don’t work for them, but I highly recommend The Economists coverage of this issue (and pretty much everything else if you can afford the subscription).
“Add a dolop of government support”
Why would the Chinese government subsidize SOVs when transit is more efficient and can scale to cities of millions of people? Do you think China wants to blanket its cities with 14-lane highways?
China identifies “strategic industries ” and then pours high levels of state support to them. Right now this includes EVs, self driving, AI, and lithograph. They build a lot of rail lines, but even two decades ago Beijing had not one, but 3 ring roads. They tend to take a “more of everything ” approach and build at a rate that I don’t think the USA has seen since WW2. Or maybe ever. A lot of Asia is like this, state control and centralization is much stronger and individualists frowned upon.
Just like we did not anticipate the popularity of e-scooters and e-bikes on demand, I think a mini version of self-driving e-cars at slower speeds may evolve if NHTSA can allow them on local streets.
It’s admittedly pure speculation but self-driving shuttles already exist and there are multiple companies pursuing it.
That’s an interesting possibility: autocars going max 25 or 30 mph would be easier to accept and would have less potential risk than autocars that are freeway-capable. It would also address the problem of cars speeding on city streets, because they would be able to go 40 or 50.
Two problems with that are many people wouldn’t be willing to buy cars like that, many people live more than a few miles from where they go, and people may be able to find a way to jerry-rig the cars to go faster.
If within a downtown I would ban any car, bike, or scooter outright. They’re a nuisance. I would say bikes can be permitted along their own separated ROW that doesn’t collide or interfere with pedestrian spaces at all.
A dense downtown should be entirely operated with buses, pedestrians, and trains.
My argument is that these downtowns will start emptying out into ghost cities (not now, but maybe 50+ years into the future), and then people will start scattering.
Transit / urban is preferable because you want to live near your employer, or avoid dragging a car into the city.
But if you’re working from home or near your home that requirement drops. Smaller “villages” with a town center and recreation, and self driving cars may become the future. Though some transit (buses) may be used in certain circumstances still.
Most “city” jobs are being turned into work from home. Some companies are pushing back on that because of lower productivity or the fact they don’t want to waste their owned office space, but we’re inevitably heading towards that with this AI future.
I’m not saying I like or want that. I’d prefer strong cities with transit that connects within and places outside into it. But we’re already starting to see the fragmentation where Seattle is turning into its own enclave, office space is closing, and visitors have dropped. That’s the “village” idea I’m getting at.
Transit / urban is preferable because you want to live near your employer, or avoid dragging a car into the city.
It is also preferable because you are in the city.
The main reason people live in the suburbs is because they can’t afford the city. This is the case worldwide. It is why most slums are outside the city. Of course in America we are a little different. Race is a huge part of our history and this is no exception. We created race-based ghettos and this has influenced development. But it is the more urban areas that have been gentrified while new suburban slums have sprung up (Ferguson being one of the more famous ones).
You have it backwards. Why would the suburbs exist if not for the jobs downtown? It is the suburbs that have the most to worry about in the long run. Not all suburbs of course. Some wealthy enclaves have managed to carve out a popular existence. Some have the same charm and character as the big cities (especially in the Northeast). In the West (and especially Seattle) we like views and parks which is why a place like Mercer Island is bound to remain popular. But for the same reason, so will Seattle. This is why there are so many retired people (who bought their house years ago) still living in the city.
Your premise just doesn’t make sense. Why live in a suburb — farther away from medical care and the other benefits of the city — when you can afford to live in the city?
Tourists and hotel stays in downtown Seattle have recovered. It’s only office workers that are still significantly down.
It is why most slums are outside the city.
Huh? This is not true at all. Most slums are within the city around the world. Nairobi, Cape Town, Mumbai, Mexico City…
I live near the airport, near Valley Medical Center, and near an abundance of great shopping accessible by local transit: The Landing and Southcenter Mall. Even within the suburb, plenty of shopping areas, clinics, schools, and recreation for hiking, fishing, etc.
Not all suburbs are that far from civilization. That’s what a suburb is. You’re describing suburbs as if they’re rural areas.
Also there is very little traffic congestion around here. To get around, a car works perfectly fine at all times of the day. The congestion is trying to get into the city for whatever reason it may be… work or university. I don’t work in Seattle anymore, and drive to the Eastside instead of taking the 102 now. Not like I miss sitting on a bus for 2 hours anyways, when I can drive to work in 30 mins now (or 45-60 mins during bad traffic days). If I lived in Ballard, it’d take that long to ride transit to work in downtown even though it is way closer.
Once Stride S1 opens, I might go back to riding the bus though. Depends on if the transfer timing at the new TC is good or not. The 560/566 always made me wait in the rain for 20+ minutes because they always were scheduled to leave a couple mins before my local bus reached the transit center (for whatever odd reason).
“most slums are outside the city.”
“Most slums are within the city around the world.”
They’re outside the city center and inner ring neighborhoods. The well-off live in the center because that’s where the amenities are, as well as the historic architecture, business contacts, and prestige. The poor live in slums around the periphery because that’s where nobody else wants to live.
The US has an inverted system because of the legacy of redlining and segregation in the 20th century. There has always been a stronger anti-city sentiment in the US than in other countries, because the kings and wars in Europe were based in cities, and preachers said cities were concentrations of sin and immorality. Heavy industry started in cities right near downtown, and they were literally polluting and unhealthy, and overcrowded tenements spread diseases.
American cities evolved with industry on one side of downtown. The well-to-do lived uptown in the favored quarter on the other side, or at least another side. In Seattle the industrial quarter is south, and now extends to South King County and Pierce County. The favored quarter is east, and now extends to beyond the idyllic lake to the views of the Cascade foothills. Early it was north, but in the 20th century the richest CEOs moved across the lake and built their high-paying companies there.
After WWII the federal government set up federally-backed mortages for returning GIs. It surveyed every neighborhood in the US. Those where the surveyor saw more than 25% nonwhites became redlined, and were ineligible for federally-backed mortgages. So residents couldn’t get loans to maintain their houses, and had trouble selling them. In Seattle this happened in the Central District and Rainier Valley. The favored quarter was east, but the favored quarter leaped over the CD.
In the 1950s the Democrats got the Civil Rights Act passed, implemented desegregational school busing, and got redlining and housing discrimination declared unconstitutional. Many whites fled to the suburbs, beyond school-district boundaries the desegregational school buses could not cross, and where the feds showered greenfield mortgages and subsidized highways. Cities’ population fell, their demographics became relatively poorer and less white, and the remaining residents elected more liberal politicians who would tax more and invest in cities more. So the stigma attached to redlined areas — neglected, dangerous areas — got attached to the entire city. That’s how the American system got inverted, with city centers and inner-ring neighborhoods seen as has-been undesirable places, and the throw-away culture just built something new on the periphery.
But not everybody thought cities were bad or abandoned them. Some stayed put and continued to accumulate a handsome wealth, or joined the 1960s counterculture in the city, or were early urban pioneers in the redlined areas. In San Francisco middle-class people fled the Haight-Ashbury Victorians when the hippes came, but the banks stayed downtown and kept it the financial hub of the West Coast. So two opposite things were happening at once. In the 1990s the “back to the city” movement grew, and middle-class people moved back into cities and gentrified them. Detroit hollowed out in the 1960s, but in the 2000s the city center revitalized, leaving the outer neighborhoods behind. So Detroit city returned to a normal distribution of wealth, but the Detroit metro as a whole was inverted.
Seattle of course is one of the most successful cities. It retained a larger job share downtown than most metros. We had segregation and redlining, but it wasn’t as extreme as in other large cities, and it was easier for those areas to recover. Many residents are committed to the city and helping it succeed. It was hit harder than most in 2020 with office-commuter loss, and the rise of homelessness and fentanyl addicts. That has exacerbated an inverted pattern on 3rd Avenue and at 12th & Jackson. But that doesn’t mean people and companies are moving out of Seattle en masse, even if a few are. It’s just another challenge we have to address.
Suburbs like Renton, Kent, and Bellevue grew from small agricultural towns. The growth was intentionally car-dependent, because they were for middle-class people who could afford it and wanted to live the future, and the land use would keep out the undesired poor. But in the late 20th century the favored quarter/disfavored quarter factor asserted itself: Microsoft was built in Redmond, and Bellevue Square and Neiman Marcus were in Bellevue. Seattle got more gentrified, and the displaced lower-income people moved to South King County where housing costs were lower. So those car-dependent suburbs like Renton and Kent, that were built for middle-class people with plenty of cash, now had lower-income people living paycheck to paycheck, for whom the cost of a car or the inability to walk to a store within a half mile is a burden.
Crop failure in Central America have been 90% in recent years due to elevated temperatures and drought.
As this moves northward in the coming decades, there will be an increased need for farmland in places with a better supply of water.
So, there will be an increasing need to take flat, reasonably well watered places such as the Kent Valley, demolish everything, and convert it back into farmland.
This shift alone will create a fair amount of housing demand.
As climate change worsens, I can’t help but wonder if the eventual future of farming is going to be indoors, in climate controlled greenhouses. Today, that’s too expensive because the energy cost is too expensive, but if solar panels get cheap enough and ubiquitous enough, that could someday change. Even meat, they’ll eventually figure out how to economically do away with the animals entirely and just grow chicken breast in a lab, without having to deal with the rest of the chicken.
Granted, all of this is probably still far off, likely not in our lifetime, but quite likely in our kids’ lifetimes.
Even meat, they’ll eventually figure out how to economically do away with the animals entirely and just grow chicken breast in a lab, without having to deal with the rest of the chicken.
This would likely be the most important human advancement in this century (so far). Meat is responsible for lots of environmental harm (global warming, deforestation, excessive pesticide use, etc.). It also, paradoxically, contributes to world hunger. I think a lot of people know this but they continue to eat meat. I don’t think you will able to solve the problem by convincing people to eat less meat or providing alternatives “that taste just like meat”. I think the best hope is for lab meat or what they are calling “cultured meat” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat). They can do that right now. The problem is that it is too expensive. But as the cost comes down it is quite possible it will replace regular meat and the world will be much better off. It is impossible to predict these things but I’m fairly optimistic. I give it twenty years.
The Ezra Klein show 7/10 on the accelerating adoption of renewable energy. Capacity is becoming sufficient for widespread vertical farming and desalination that hadn’t been feasible before due to energy intensity. In particular, indoor multistory farming needs a lot of light.
Indoor farming is going to require very large areas indoors, and that means putting them on land that is flat.
Desalination runs about 0.85 kilowatt hours per gallon. To make that work on a scale that would make the water produce affordable food crops would require practically free energy. It’s not impossible, but there’s a reason Saudi Arabia and similar are the only places farming at any sort of scale using desalination.
Desalination is more for water people need than for agricultural use. It’s not desalination FOR vertical farming; it’s desalination AND vertical farming, not necessarily in the same place.
“Indoor farming is going to require very large areas indoors, and that means putting them on land that is flat.”
I don’t know much about indoor farming, but as it was described in the 2010s it could fit into ordinary office-sized or warehouse-sized buildings like downtown or in SODO. It doesn’t have to generate 100% of the city’s food, just enough to make us somewhat less dependent on long-distance food transportation and provide more fresh local vegetables.
Northwest Kent is already zoned for large industrial buildings, so even bigger buildings could be built there. They could probably go up to 4-6 stories with only minor zoning pushback, especially if it’s to address a critical food vulnerability if it emerges in the future, make high-quality food more affordable to lower-income residents, and make the region more resilent so we’re not dependent on statewide or multistate fossil-fuel food transportation and bridges and such.
Google vertical farming.
“Google vertical farming.”
That’s not a very useful suggestion on its own. What would Google say? That it’s more feasible in smaller buildings like I’ve read, or that it needs huge horizontal buildings as large as a Kent warehouse or larger? Somebody might read Google and come to the opposite conclusion as you, and they and we would have no way of knowing it because you haven’t said what you think Google would say. It would be better if you included which way you think the facts are leading and why.
… what? Where does the industry of the Kent Valley get relocated to? The Green River is not the Columbia.
It’s far more important and efficient to prevent further suburban sprawl into active agricultural land than to de-industrialize active working districts of the region.
Where are these anti-urban attitudes coming from?
Some of the best farmland in the country is under suburban sprawl. Kent and the Eastside are two former farmland areas, as recently as the 1950s for Bellevue and the 1970s for Kent. If the industrial long-distance food system becomes untenable we’ll have no choice but to revive large-scale agriculture in cities and metropolitan areas. That may require booting other uses or forcing them to double up with agriculture on the land; e.g., gardens on rooftops. An ideal form of urbanism would reverse suburban sprawl, replacing it with the infill housing and buildings as it should have been built in the first place, and bulldoze the outer areas to return them to farmland or wildlife habitat.
Kent is the sprawl. Residential urban areas could be intensified in and adjacent to downtown Kent, East Hill (104th), and 99. For the industry, some of it could just as easily be in shared multistory buildings like in New York City. Some of it doesn’t need as big asphalt lots or dead open space as it has. Some of the one-story buildings could be two stories to double the space in the same footprint. Any of these approaches could reclaim some farmland or allow some housing and improve walkability, while still accommodating industry.
… what? Where does the industry of the Kent Valley get relocated to? The Green River is not the Columbia.
At 2.5C global warming, there is sufficient farmland to feed around 2 billion people. We have over 7 billion. So, given the choices of moving industries to less valuable non-agricultural land (eg, eastern Washington where there is much less water for crops), mass starvation, or insane food prices, the easiest solution is relocate the low jobs per acre industries off prime agricultural land and convert it back to agriculture,
Industries move regularly anyway.
I don’t see how this would be anti-urban. If anything, it means there will need to be more urbanization so that land use patterns can suit the new reality of significant changes in where crops can be economically grown.
Which is why I am pointing this out in response to someone claiming the economics are against cities existing in the future. The economics will definitely be different in the future but it doesn’t look to me as though that future involves everyone living in 1960s suburbia and cities becoming empty shells, as apparently suggested. To me at least it looks like urbanization will continue due to all the economic drivers.
The Columbia Basin Project has negated this for over half a million acres of farmland since the mid 1900s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_Basin_Project
Meanwhile, the agrarian valleys of the Puget Sound have very little protection from the realities of climate change. This was demonstrated by the Skagit River floods last December. The rivers of western Washington are hydrologically dependent on snowmelt from the Cascades, and the ancient heritage of the region’s native peoples is rightfully motivating removal or expensive retrofitting of existing dams for fish passage.
I didn’t intend to direct that at you, but at the general thread. I have a low tolerance for discussion of deurbanization, with the exception of reclaiming urban sprawl at the urban periphery. The Green River Valley in Kent is a major commercial/industrial district and if anything, I’d like to see a push to see its abundant old freight railways reactivated with electric locomotives to reduce regional truck traffic.
“The Green River Valley in Kent is a major commercial/industrial district”
That was a change in the 1990s. When I took the 150 to Kent in the 80s, there was practically nothing around West Valley Highway and the area around Kent P&R; it was like a rural area. The wave of industrial buildings since the 90s felt unnecessarily sprawling and far apart, the industrial equivalent of a low-density neighborhood or too many highways. It’s worth at least asking whether they should have been located there, how many of them are environmentally sustainable, and whether they could have been built more compactly, and with less of a last-mile walk for workers from the bus stops. I’m not saying we must uproot them now, but it’s worth at least understanding the goods and bads of the situation, and what we could potentially do now, and the tradeoffs of doing or not doing it.
“The Columbia Basin Project has negated this for over half a million acres of farmland since the mid 1900”
A man-made irrigation project that diverted water from where it would naturally be. I don’t know a lot about the environmental impacts of the Columbia Basin Project, but I expect there are some significant ones.
I wish my “ancient heritage” allowed me to extract billions of government spending. I do wonder why existential threat of climate requires the wholesale reordering of the modern economic system around carbon-free energy, and yet we must dismantle the lower Snake River dams because salmon.
Snark aside, Nathan is correct that the agriculture in Central Washington is far more resilient than in Western Washington. If it becomes prohibitively expensive to truck food over Cascade pass, we have bigger problems than recovering farmland in the Kent Valley.
The Green River Valley is a giant flood zone that sits between our two primary north/south freeways (I5 & 167/405) and is adjacent to a global airport hub. It’s a logic place for global logistics and a natural extension of the region’s seaport & airport assets.
There’s another agricultural problem too, and that’s large-scale monoculture. That increases the inputs and soil depletion. Switching to polyculture doesn’t require relocating farms. If vertical farming is implemented in SODO or the Kent Valley or anywhere, I hope it’s more polycultural, and explores ways to invite all the insects and critters into the farm so that the food will be the most full-featured and healthy rather than just hydroponic reductionism. I have a fear it might not be though, that we’d just transport existing big-agribusiness practices to indoor vertical farms.
Rest assured that it already does!
Yes, the Pacific Ocean.
It is easy to criticize past development in areas that have rich top soil. But it is a completely different thing to assume it will be reversed in an area like Kent Valley. As noted elsewhere, agriculture in America is notoriously inefficient. Not only is much of the food going into feeding livestock instead of people but we are growing corn for ethanol for no good reason. The plan was designed to reduce oil consumption but it turns out it actually increases global warming. There are lots of ways to grow more food without resorting to tearing up (a relatively small amount of land) in Kent Valley.
Yeah, once you scrap off the layer of silt to build a warehouse and parking lot there’s no “farmland” to recover. And when this was farmland it was small farms that aren’t economically viable anymore. Indoor farming produces far higher yields because growth cycles are significantly shorter and there is no “season” (i.e. grow year round 24/7). You also don’t need to worry about birds eating the crop and insects can be controlled w/o needing pesticides. We still dump most of the water that could be reused. Brightwater in Woodinville pumps a large portion of it’s treated water up the Slough to water a golf course and soccer fields. That effectively double cleans the “waste” while reducing demand on “drinking” water. There are “demonstration projects” in Seattle that use rainwater and grey water to significantly reduce the amount of “city water” required. But water is so plentiful (read, cheap) in the NW that it won’t be common for a long long time.
“You also don’t need to worry about birds eating the crop and insects can be controlled w/o needing pesticides.”
We ultimately need regenerative farming, so we need those birds and insects. If you build a complete ecosystem, pest control takes care of itself, and there’s enough food for humans to take70% and birds and critters to take 30%. It’s unclear if this can be done indoors or under LED lights, and in any case you’d need the birds and insects and other animals.
“But water is so plentiful (read, cheap) in the NW that it won’t be common for a long long time.”
We’ve been getting droughts the past decade or two with climate change. It may not be enough to affect drinking water critically, but water is no longer “plentiful and cheap”. My Seattle water bill charges 2 1/2 times the water rate for sewer upgrades, so even if the water is inexpensive, you can’t buy a gallon of water without also buying a gallon of sewer service.
“There are “demonstration projects” in Seattle that use rainwater and grey water to significantly reduce the amount of “city water” required.”
Other states like Utah have had graywater systems for decades, so it wouldn’t be difficult to roll it out if necessary. Although our houses don’t have the second plumbing system with gray taps, so it would be limited to large-scale users that can install this.
King County already has a greywater recycling program in place: https://kingcounty.gov/en/dept/dnrp/waste-services/wastewater-treatment/resource-recovery/recycled-water/get-recycled-water
The West Point Plant (responsible for processing all of Seattle’s wastewater and most of its stormwater) does not distribute recycled water, likely because it would be incredibly expensive to build the infrastructure necessary to do so.
This is objectively untrue and frankly ridiculous.
Depends on where you live. In most small towns and rural communities, urbanism and transit are unnecessary. Self driving vehicles mostly solves the problem of paratransit, at which point public transit only exists to serve those unwilling or unable to drive and probably should look more like a public option taxi service for the tiny fraction of trips that are not well served by SOVs.
Remember, most Americans live outside of major metros, where congestion is a brief problem around a narrow commuting window.
According to google:
Interesting graphic in this U. Michigan report showing that all of the 10 largest cities in the US grew in population from 2000 to 2021 except Chicago. I was surprised that 4 out of the 10 cities were in Texas; I guess everything is bigger in Texas. Only 2 are in California.
That 83% is spread across 340 urban areas – I’m having trouble following the citations but I believe that more or less aligns with 387 MSAs per Wikipedia.
The top 25 cities = 143 million people out of 285 million living in “urban areas.” The 26th largest MSA is Portland at 2.5 millions. In other words, a clear majority of Americans living in “urban areas” live in cities smaller than Portland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area
You packed a lot into that paragraph — I’ll give you credit for that. Allow me some unpacking:
In a world of declining birth dates, urbanism and transit will be viewed as unnecessary
That is absurd. Increased birth rates do not lead to urbanism. There is a correlation but you have it backwards. Increased urbanism leads to lower birth rates. As others have noted, Japan has seen lower birth rates at the same time they have seen increased urbanism. Japan’s population has been shrinking at the same time the cities are getting bigger. The same thing is likely to happen across the world (eventually).
and people will start moving towards a self driving car centric lifestyle.
Wait, what? What difference does it make if the car is self-driving? It is still very expensive. It still gets caught in traffic — maybe more. It still takes up too much space. These are fundamental issues that can’t be solved by “smarter” devices (sorry Elon).
School and work could probably be done from home
Yes, poorly. You are describing a class-based dystopia. Only the rich get educated in person. Everyone else watches the video. Holy cow, where were you during the pandemic? Don’t you know any educators or kids? It was a disaster. I took care of my grandkids and can personally attest to how bad it was. The harm due to remote learning is well known and well documented. It also hit poor kids worse than wealthy ones. Of course it did. Duh.
As for working remotely, consider the world you are describing. Much lower birth rates means an aging population. That’s OK because we, as Americans, are in such great physical and mental shape (snark). Seriously though, we will need a lot of in person medical care in the future. Count on it.
It is also not clear what jobs will involve working from home and what jobs won’t. Creativity is still important. In person collaboration is still important. As a retired software engineer — a job that was routinely done remotely well before the pandemic — I know I worked much better in an in-person environment. There were times when I needed to crank out the code and could do that anywhere. But as the tools and my skills progressed, this was a much smaller part of my time. It didn’t take much typing to produce a lot of good, solid code. Now it takes even less. But you still have to analyze the problem and know what the hell you are doing. Ford Motor Company’s recent issues are a good example. My guess is a lot of the engineers they rehired are at the plant.
providing almost no justification for transit except as a shuttle for crowded gatherings, events, festivals or tourist spots.
Or any of the other things you seem to have ignored: In person education. Medical visits. Simply visiting friends or family. It all adds up just like it did before. Why do you think Capitol Hill has such high ridership from the north? It isn’t a big employment center. But it is a very nice place to visit. The other day I watched Norway play England. I could have watched it at home but it was a lot more fun to see it in Ballard. It was a blast. I had a great conversation with someone I’ve never met who grew up in Ballard. I texted my son-in-law and told him things were rocking in Ballard. He texted me a while later and told me he was having a blast downtown (he was rooting for Argentina in a later game). His trip, my trip — it all adds up. That is what a city is all about and why cities have long been attractive, even for people that are retired.
“School and work could probably be done from home”
“Yes, poorly. You are describing a class-based dystopia”
It’s a fantasy. Three-quarters of jobs are not telework-compatable. You can’t do construction remotely, or stock a store shelf, or install electric wiring or an HVAC system or solar panels, or roast coffee, or stop a fire, or do medical work, or run a deli, or make local jams and bring them to the deli. If AI displaces primarily tech workers, well, those are the biggest teleworkers. The non-teleworkers will be left.
We had an experiment in virtual schooling during the pandemic. It proved to be, at best, good for a minority of mostly older students and adults. Bellevue College has an ad on Metro buses for a healthcare administration degree — 100% virtual. I look at that and think, “I wouldn’t want that.” Some virtual may be OK, but not 100%. My roommate is pursuing a 100% virtual degree in education through Western Governors’ University: he thinks it’s fine for him but I’m not sure it’s the best model for everybody or even the majority of students. Children in particular need social interaction opportunities and skills, and adults too benefit from in-person interaction, which can accomplish more than interacting via Zoom.
It’s not a fantasy, however it’s not scalable. There very much are cities that are “Zoom towns” built around high income remote workers. Bend, Oregon and Chelan, WA are good examples that have seen & continue to see robust growth in a high income workforce and therefore growth in the resulting (in person) service economy. Also, driverless cars + hybrid work mean more growth can occur in exurbs, because the “cost” of a large commute has been dramatically reduced, either because it is less frequent or people it’s more pleasant. It should be obvious to transit fans – a long ride on a train is better than a long drive because on the train you can do something other than drive … in a driverless future, on a long commute in car you can work, nap, whatever, just like you can today on a train.
This can still result in good urbanist. Take Stanwood, WA, which has a great little urban core. Stanwood used to be outside of the Seattle job center and therefore wasn’t growing, but in the future it’s possible that most of the people who live in Stanwood might work in metro Seattle
5~10% of the national workforce is still an enormous amount of people. Does that mean large, vibrant cities will shrink? No, of course not, because they will sustain on the 80% or whatever of the workforce that still needs or wants to be in a big city.
Not really. You’re still strapped in with a seatbelt. There’s still a lot more stop/go and less predictability. OTOH, you shrink your wait time to essentially zero and have much less of a “last mile” walk. And you don’t have some yahoo talking so loud on their phone that everyone on the train has to listen to one half of a conversation.
The word urbanism may still have some confusion with different people meaning different things. Urbanism is the principle of of walkability, compact development, mixed use, and human-scaled design. There are several different forms and densities of it. 2-story Paris neighborhoods are as urban as 7-story Dutch new neighborhoods or 25-story highrises. Vancouver missing-middle neighborhoods like Kitsilano are urban. Ballard and the U-District are urban. Wallingford is urban along 45th, if not so much in the single-family areas north and south of it. But even those, since they’re small-lot blocks like the Central District, are somewhat urban like the old streetcar suburbs they originated from; we just need to re-allow the missing middle housing and corner stores that were allowed there until the 1950s and 1970s.
The future of autonomous vehicles isn’t a Tesla in every garage. If you don’t drive it you don’t need to own it. Robo taxis make a lot more sense. Shuttles are the low hanging fruit because they are usually fixed routes, often largely off of public ROW and operating 24/7. On the freeways expect long haul trucking to be virtually 100% autonomous within the next decade. Europe already makes use of self parking trailers. Automated load/unload won’t be far behind. I’m old enough to remember the demise of the milkman. With Amazon everything old is new again. Even living in the ‘burbs the number of trips needed is substantially reduced. Home school isn’t new; it was how the west was won. The lesson from the pandemic is that social interaction is vital but that can be through sports, theater, church, etc. School can become camps where you go and live for period of time for immersive learning.
Robo taxis as they exist now don’t offer a price-competitive product with the gigified cabs of Uber and Lyft. Waymo is more expensive even in cities like SF where they are literally everywhere. The software and data processing costs of self-driving cars is very high still, and while this may go down in the future, the total cost for Waymo to operate may never dip below the cost of a gigified cabbie who is getting squeezed by a tech cab company. If a place doesn’t currently offer a taxi service that is price competitive with public transit, removing the driver won’t make a difference.
Self-driving cars have been a few years away from mass adoption for my entire adult life. Now everyone just says it’s here, but the costs do not correlate with any of the promises. Waymo is a gimmick that will not revolutionize urban transportation to any appreciable degree.
I don’t think Uber/Lyft/Waymo are in competition with transit. They are a substitute for owning a car. The goal is to decrease the car count by one for a household. They may actually increase transit use acting a feeder service which is difficult for most US land use patterns to provide. Self driving cars for years were science fiction. The first real automation was the adaptive cruise control which has been around now for decades. The big break through though was lane assistance and collision avoidance. It’s been progressing quickly as it’s in virtually every new car sold today. The first thing you’ll see is the long haul trucking industry switching to driverless rigs. It’s not so much the cost of the driver as the limitation on how many hours they can drive in a day. That effectively doubles the time in transit. Also since the pandemic there has been a critical shortage of drivers as many retired and not enough people are willing to adopt the lifestyle of a long haul trucker.
Uber and to a lesser extent Lift are betting on autonomous driving and AI. We’ll see if it can squeeze out the gig driver. The bigger barrier might be regulation as it was for years to pumping your own gas in Oregon.
Have at it Ballard horde
https://www.myballard.com/2026/07/14/dan-strauss-pushes-for-more-ballard-bus-service-ahead-of-seattle-transit-measure-vote/