FoS.blog: The Friends of Seattle blog

Windy Seattle: Micro Wind Power May Not Be Economically or Environmentally Beneficial---Yet

It is likely that personal wind farms, rooftop solar panels, and the like will not save the planet, but we have a hunch that they might be one of the many little things that we can do to achieve one big thing---reduce the environmental effects of generating electricity. The Nickels administration seems to understand this, so its proposals (PDF) for revising the multifamily-housing zoning code would allow for small wind turbines and solar panels lower than 10 feet in height to be installed on the top of multifamily housing without violating the zoning code. We like this innovation. Make renewable energy lawful, as opposed to illegal.

[Photo by Glogger from the Wikimedia Commons, published under a GNU Free Documentation License]

But in the Business section of this morning's New York Times we see an article questioning the economic efficiency and the environmental benefits  of the kind of small wind turbines that would be installed on multifamily housing buildings in Seattle.

If You Zone for It, They Will Build It

Mathew Yglesias has it right when he observes that our built environment---which is dominated by single-family homes spaced far-apart on large lots---is not the result of some natural phenomenon or some inherent American preference for suburbia:

[T]o make a long story short, we have the built environment we have because of policy. The past half century or so has been dominated by rules about maximum lot occupancy and minimum lot size, parking requirements, and floor area ratio caps that were designed to produce something like the suburbs as we know them. Insofar as we keep those rules, the future will resemble the present. Insofar as we change them, things will change.

We think we should change our policies.

Because of High Gas Prices, Ex-Suburbanites Might Flock to Cities

From today's Seattle Times.

A Portland economist predicts that buyers soon will choose where to live based on what they would spend for gasoline.

That, eventually, will devalue suburban housing while strengthening in-city home prices, says Joe Cortright, whose Portland consulting firm, Impresa, recently released a report saying as much to U.S. mayors.

"The new calculus of higher gas prices may have permanently reshaped urban housing markets," said Cortright, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit Washington, D.C., think tank. "What this really means is that as people move, they're going to look for places that enable them to drive shorter distances and avoid places where they have to drive a lot.

One little problem: Seattle isn't prepared. Whether it's our inadequate alternative-transportation infrastructure or our ugly multifamily housing neighborhoods, Seattle can and should do better. That's why Sound Transit expansion, streetcar network expansion, and the multifamily housing zoning code are issues we're closely tracking.