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.
My copy of Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities is dog eared and marked up. There are little arrows on the spine pointing me back to important quotes because the original tabs I stuck there are long gone. It’s lived in as many cities as...
This week's financial news has been grim. With markets getting fleeced by the spreading impacts of COVID-19 and a weak response from federal officials, the likelihood of a recession is looming. Locally, the major employers around Seattle are having their staff work from home, impacting everyone from baristas to...
Interbay is a collision of changing urban landscapes, expensive deteriorating infrastructure, and confused layers of authority. As the smaller of Seattle’s two industrial centers, Interbay is ground zero for the conflicts of a city that is changing from the great Yukon supply hub to the digital service economy. For...
This article is adapted from testimony for HB 2882 prepared by the author and presented to the Washington House of Representatives Committee on Housing, Community Development and Veterans. The written testimony was much more concise and interesting than Ray’s rambling three minutes of oral testimony, so you’re getting the...
Snohomish County is weighing a 15-square mile expansion of its urban growth boundary in an area called the Clearview Cluster. Even now, suburban sprawl is already leaking in, which invites the question: Is the Growth Management Act working as intended?
Exiting northbound SR-522 in Maltby, you drop from the highway...
"Missing middle" housing types weren't a focus of a recent report on middle-income housing.
On January 22, 2020, Mayor Jenny Durkan took receipt of the final report from the Affordable Middle-Income Advisory Council. According to the press release, the report is a series of “suggested tools to help create more...
With the start of the annual Washington State Legislature session comes the annual parade of stunt legislation. Like the return of swallows to Capistrano or the hope that the Mariners will make a deep run into the playoffs, springtime brings a handful of bills that are introduced just to...
The interstate is dead. Long live the spurs.
As we work towards resolving the fate of highways in Seattle, there is some administrative closet cleaning to be done. We cannot break Interstate 5. As the primary thoroughfare for the West Coast, I-5 must be continuous from Canada to Mexico. It’s...