Ray Dubicki
Ray Dubicki is a stay-at-home dad and parent-on-call for taking care of general school and neighborhood tasks around Ballard. This lets him see how urbanism works (or doesn’t) during the hours most people are locked in their office. He is an attorney and urbanist by training, with soup-to-nuts planning experience from code enforcement to university development to writing zoning ordinances. He enjoys using PowerPoint, but only because it’s no longer a weekly obligation.
Widely regarded as the biggest weekend in sports, the Superb Owl fills the February niche in the United States' unofficial gluttonous holidays calendar. Between the estimated $16 billion in wagering on the game (including goofy prop bets) to the 18.8 million people expected to call in to work on...
Vote For Social Housing on February 14.
In an effort to compete with the Super Bowl and Valentines Day, Seattle has decided to have an election. On the ballot is social housing, specifically creating a new housing authority that will develop and own green, public, and perpetually affordable homes and...
In this WALeg report, an introduction to the loud voices yelling for municipal home rule.
Also in this digest:
Important Bills at a Glance
This Week's Focus: What Is a Substitute Bill?
Who is the Association of Washington Cities?
The Association of Washington Cities (AWC) is a 90-year-old nonprofit that represents Washington’s cities and...
The future of wildly popular streateries now rests in a narrow view of the street's past.
It’s 9am on a Thursday morning in the multipurpose room of the Ballard Service Center. Six of the seven members of the Ballard Avenue Landmark District Board sit around a conference table with a...
The Oscar nominations are out. Most of the attention is on the Best Picture nominees, but who really has time for that? Those ten movies clock in at a combined 23.8 hours of film, or average 2:10 each. The plodding, bloated elephant in the room may be Avatar II:...
In this WALeg report, predictable opposition arises against missing middle housing bills.
Also in this digest:
Important Bills at a Glance.
The Week’s Focus: Condominium Act reforms.
The legislature’s housing bills faced a small tempest of push back this weekend. Former chair of the House housing committee and legislative zero Gerry Pollet showed...
"Summit of Our Noble Efforts" - Jay Inslee
The Washington State Convention Center's new Summit Building opened to the public on Friday, January 27. As part of a ribbon cutting ceremony, the fools let The Urbanist's Ryan Packer and Ray Dubicki in for speechification and press tours. We took advantage...
Though it has miles of roads, thousands of homes, an airport, and plenty of shopping, the City of Greenfield does not actually exist. It has been constructed in the computer game Minecraft by hundreds of people who have painstakingly laid millions of individual cubes to construct each of thousands...