Doug Trumm
Doug Trumm is publisher of The Urbanist. An Urbanist writer since 2015, he dreams of pedestrian streets, bus lanes, and a mass-timber building spree to end our housing crisis. He graduated from the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington in 2019. He lives in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood and loves to explore the city by foot and by bike.
Last week Amazon announced progress on locating its second headquarters: 238 applicants have been whittled down to 20 finalists. The top 20 offer some hints at what factors matter most to Amazon. A third of the finalists are in the Acela corridor from Washington DC to Boston. The Washington...
Seattle has ambitious plans for 2018.
Taking MHA Citywide... Can We Expand It to Single Family?
The Seattle City Council plans to expand the Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) program taking inclusionary zoning citywide, at least in land zoned multifamily and commercial. That the MHA program wouldn't apply to single-family zones is...
2017 was a banner year for Seattle. We led the country in construction cranes, in population growth rate, in transit ridership growth, and--much to the chagrin of tenants--in rent hikes. Seattle's rapid population growth came with the milestone of crossing the 700,000 population mark early in the year and...
The saga of Civic Square will take a step closer to a conclusion at a second Early Design Guidance meeting with the Downtown Design Review Board tomorrow. James K.M. Cheng's curvy design rises 57 stories and provides a public plaza at ground level, as the Seattle City Council stipulated...
The Amtrak Cascades tragedy provided an opening for a certain troll-in-chief to promote his infrastructure plan. If the Republican infrastructure plan--which at one point proposed eliminating Amtrak service to 220 cities--was worth the paper it was written on, this could have been excused. It's not though, and urbanists should...
As 2017 draws to a close, we're reviewing our top ten most read articles of the year. Looking back, themes emerge, such as the fact that readers of The Urbanist really like rail maps. So, cartographers, get working on new material for 2018. Other popular topics were eliminating single-family...
Responding to criticism about a lack of late night transit service on New Year's Eve, King County is not only extending service to 4am this New Year, but also making transit free all day New Year's Eve. King County Councilmember Dave Upthegrove proposed the idea and fought to get...
The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) released a few bikeshare data morsels to the Pedestrian Advisory Board last week. Seatte's system of privately-operated free-floating bikeshare continued to post solid numbers in the "Mid-Pilot Check-in." Buoyed by free ride promotions, the five-month-long pilot program has surpassed the million mile mark...