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.
Prepare for light rail, slow down Interbay, and save 15th Avenue
Imagine for a moment taking a pleasant walk from Ballard to Queen Anne. Coming from one of the neighborhood’s fine breweries, you step out onto a tree lined Northwest 14th Avenue, busy with folks walking and rolling. You head...
Middle age, quarterbacks, and "Don’t Look Up"
Here we are at the threshold of the most important celebration of the year: my birthday. As it happens to fall the day after much of the world celebrates a new year, it’s a whole Ray-centric holiday weekend. Fireworks and rampant debauchery? You’re...
New Year! New Horrors! Pay for the whole year, but you’ll only need the edge!
In the spirit of Krampus, the Christmas demon who takes bad children into the woods and eats them, the holidays need some horror. And what’s better to present existential horror than a glimpse into 2022?
So...
Recast Your City is subtitled “How to save your downtown with small-scale manufacturing,” which gives the impression that it’s a one trick book. But its author Ilana Preuss calls it a “community development self help book,” and it actually pulls off this feat. To do so, the book takes...
A short walk through the long history of discriminatory housing ads
It’s interesting to sift through historic print newspaper advertisements and get a glimpse of the city’s history. It’s not always a good history. Questionable phrases pop up associated with names you recognize. Half acre lots in Innis Arden for...
Since the smaller of Seattle’s industrial areas is squeezed between three of the city’s richest neighborhoods, Interbay’s future is deeply uncertain. Development pressures are flipping industrial sites to big box retail. Recent closures cut into the local maritime community. Proposals for changing the local transportation network promise to add...
It's been a year, and we've said some questionable things. As we draw to a close the grand national celebration of colonization and move to the next celebration of frosted capitalism, let’s keep in mind the true meaning of the holidays: movie watching! Seattle’s season of The Dark Wet...
I want to do an even handed and dutiful reporting job about the 2021 Cascadia Innovation Corridor conference. But I’m in an downtown Vancouver hotel with my second negative Covid test of the week and a television talking about catastrophic flooding that's cut the city off from (checks notes)...