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.
The distance to carry a bag of food is only argued against cities, never getting them to your car in the first place.
Enter any discussion about slightly altering the number of cars in the city, and the first, often loudest, argument is “how will I get my groceries from...
American architect and urban designer Daniel Burnham’s famous "make no small plans" imperative is destroying your city and your life.
You should get a bingo card when attending a city planning conference. Instead of numbers, the squares should have pop-planning phrases to be crossed off as you hear them in...
Place looks to be important in these flicks
Yes, it's that time of year when the sun actually graces the Seattle sky. (Don't tell anyone, it'll ruin our image.) It's also the time when we get the flood of popcorn movies swarming the local multiplex theaters. This is not the...
It's always interesting when one of the architecture channels has an opening drone shot that makes you go, "Wait, I know that leafy hill in front of towers in front of a sound." Welcome to a lovely residence in the Leschi neighborhood (or just slightly south). The rest of...
In this year’s legislative session, the Washington State Legislature passed extensive housing reform. House Bill 1110 compelled many cities in Washington to open up single-housing residential zones to long-banned duplexes, cottage courts, and small apartments. Such middle housing has been missing from the calculation for years, and it’s no...
Planners have a lot to wrestle with as ChatGPT comes to code drafting.
“In the era of rapid urbanization and evolving urban landscapes, the development of effective zoning ordinances has become an essential aspect of urban planning. These regulations shape the future of cities, determining land use, building codes, and...
The Urbanist does a lot of work with the data of cities. From tunnel budgets to climate impacts to new developments, there's numbers all over Seattle. Unfortunately, we rarely get to calculate the productivity of a piece of land, figuring how much the development of a parcel brings in...
The counterintuitive, inadvisable, and absolutely inevitable collision between rain and desert.
Once it was announced that Seattle would be awarded the NHL’s 32nd hockey team, the comparisons began between the Kraken and their immediate predecessor expansion team, the Las Vegas Golden Knights. Besides being Western Division rivals, Vegas had a...