Special Series
Word on the Street
In a Series
Got Lemons? EPA Has Recipe for Lemonade
From the Cool Maps Department. And just a really cool idea that I just ran across at The Apollo Daily Digest. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is encouraging the development of renewable energy by identifying currently and formerly contaminated lands and mining sites that present opportunities for renewable energy development in all 50 states. It's the ultimate lemons to lemonade plan: taking the country's most wasted,ugly and contaminated sites and building facilities that will bring jobs to local communities and boost a more stable, prosperous clean energy economy.
(If you don't already have it, you must install Google Earth on your computer first to access the map, then follow the links here.)
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Affordable Growth Management
Earlier this year, UW researcher Theo Eicher dropped a bombshell study purporting to show that regulation was responsible for adding $200,000 to the price of an average Seattle house. It was shocking. It landed on the front page of the Seattle Times.
At the time, I believed the study couldn't possible be right. And I wrote three blog posts about it: here, here, and here. Among other things, I worried that it's too easy to conflate "regulation" with "the growth management act." In fact, that sort of conflation happened in the press coverage, and it's been happening since in political circles.
But now, riding to the rescue, the Washington chapter of the American Planning Association has a paper out refuting the study -- "Observations On the Costs of Land Use Regulations and Growth Management" (pdf). For anyone interested in housing affordability or growth management, the paper is definitely worth a look.
Washington's Growth Management Act (GMA) was passed in 1990, but it didn't become operational until the mid-1990s. And it's fascinating to take a hard look at the empirical evidence about what's happened -- and what hasn't happened -- since the GMAs been with us. Or if you don't want to read the paper, I've got a full summary below the jump...
