News Roundup: Natal Creeks

• Portland for Everyone has an in-depth piece on an "anti-McMansion compromise" rezoning currently before their city council. It's thoughtful and well written, and it makes me sad that our political leaders ran headlong away from a much more timid duplex proposal, at the first sign of NIMBY homeowner backlash.
• Portland sets priorities for how to spend $258 million affordable housing bond.
• Architects Newspaper discusses the history and context of proposed improvements to Freeway Park.
• Concerns over 14-story development project in the International District erupt at community meeting.
• PSRC is updating their regional growth center strategy and the Urbanist goes deep.
• Yes, SDOT is still working on 35th Ave SW.
• Auburn deciding where they should ask ST to build their next parking monstrosity.
• Cubed Seattle compares what you can get for $1,300 in this town. I like the LQA studio.
• San Diego's regional transit agency gets vote-weighting reform that should shift the balance of power to urban areas.
• The Times wants to know ($) where you'd put more all-way walk intersections.
• Spokane Valley is no Seattle, but it's maturing away from its surburban roots. Maybe they'll stop reelecting Matt Shea? We can only hope.
• Spokane considering a historic-preservation ordinance; it is to be hoped it won't take away from housing capacity.
• Seattle's Office of Sustainability & Environment is running an interesting survey on disaster resilience; transit and transportation are explicitly things you can flag as a concern.
• Nashville contemplating a downtown tunnel for their light rail line.
• Drivers exhibit racial bias in obeying marked crosswalks, and rampantly ignore unmarked crosswalks.
• Some guy in a pickup truck almost ran over STB contributor David Seater.
• Meanwhile, autonomous cars are getting hit by human drivers because they actually obey traffic rules and drive defensively.
• The next mayor will need to be a traffic cop. Classic Doug MacDonald: articulate, exasperated, and generally right.
• The Atlantic asks three Seattle folks how to get more people to ride transit.
• SDOT pushes back on the #GivePedsTheGreen campaign with the a pair of disheartening, condescending blog posts that conflate and confuse the campaign's primary demand.
• Citylab has a pair of great pieces: Obesity Thrives in the Suburbs and How Transit Use Could Rise in Rural America.
• Michael Goldman at the Urbanist has a four point plan for making Seattle housing affordable. I'd rate the ideas, respectively, as: great; great; meh; and right in principle, but not yet politically plausible.
• WSDOT considers closing a dangerous I-90 on-ramp in Spokane. Good job, WSDOT.
• The Spokane Regional Transportation Council is performing an update to their Horizon 2040 plan, and taking public comments. Reading the current draft, it appears to be the usual schizophrenic mix: pages of prose extolling the importance of demand management, cost-effective multi-modal investments, transit, biking and walking; coupled with a long list of planned highway and arterial capacity projects which will accomplish exactly the opposite of what the Council claims to want.
• Road runoff kills Coho as they return to spawn in their natal creeks; die-off rates are proportional to traffic volume, "tire dust" is one possible culprit.
• The North Broadway streetcar extension seems close to dead.
• Seattle Weekly tries to tease out the underlying difference between Grant and Mosqueda on housing policy.
• "Cities like San Francisco and Seattle " should pay more attention to who can afford to work in their schools."
• Ex-Metro GM Desmond is leading TransLink onwards and upwards.
• Downtown Tacoma is blowin' up.
• Light-rail over I-90 bridge wins Popular Science award.

This is an open thread.