Doug Trumm
Doug Trumm is The Urbanist's Executive Director. An Urbanist writer since 2015, he dreams of pedestrianizing streets, blanketing the city in bus lanes, and unleashing a mass timber building spree to end the affordable housing shortage and avert our coming climate catastrophe. He graduated from the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington. He lives in East Fremont and loves to explore the city on his bike.
With several HALA provisions still up in the air and rents still spiking, the battle for affordable housing is urgent as ever. Mandatory inclusionary zoning (MIZ) is expected to go online next year and together with the commercial linkage fee create 6,000 rent-restricted units in a decade's time. Some...
Commuters in Seattle's suburbs should like what they see in the Sound Transit 3 Draft Plan that the Sound Transit Executive Board unveiled on Thursday. Seattle urbanists are left wondering what they get out of the ambitious but suburban-focused 25-year $50 billion plan to bring Sound Transit's total to...
Seattle's first light rail stations to open since Sea-Tac Station in 2009 open this Saturday March 19th, at 10 a.m. Capitol Hill Station and the University of Washington Station at Husky Stadium are at this point opening 6 months ahead of schedule and $200 million under budget.
The Urbanist was invited to...
Update: Pronto is saved! The bill allocating $1.4 million to buy out Pronto passed 7 - 2 , with Councilmembers Tim Burgess and Lisa Herbold being the only votes against. Notably, the bill was amended to prevent the expansion of the bike share network until certain protected bike lanes...
Janette Sadik-Khan is coming to town to plug her new book, Street-Fight: Handbook for a Urban Revolution, and interview Mayor Ed Murray at an event at Townhall 7:30 p.m. Monday March 21st. Sadik-Khan became a hero to the multi-modal activist community after she shepherded through unprecedented bicycle and pedestrian...
Update: At the March 1 transportation meeting, Lisa Herbold's anti-Pronto amendment was defeated in a 1-5 vote, but Mike O'Brien's amendment to buy out Pronto ended in a 3-3 tie with Debora Juarez and Tim Burgess joining Herbold in opposition. This means that the bill will go to the...
This is the second in a two-part series on cross-laminated timber; read the first here.
I've proposed creating a cross-laminated timber (CLT) bonus by adding 35 feet to allowable height and 1.0 to FAR. The goal of this bonus is to speed the adoption of CLT as a building technique and...
The Urbanist has covered how 85- and 125-foot zones are not very effective. Since 65 feet is the sweet spot for Type V construction (also known as 5-over-1) which is up to five light wood-framed floors over a one or two story concrete podium. Adding just 20 feet in height...